Exhibit of the week: Inventing the Modern World: Decorative Arts at the World’s Fairs, 1851–1939

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Mo.

Through Aug. 19

“Long before the wonders of the world and distant lands were but a click away,” a world’s fair was the Google of luxury-goods ogling, said Andrea Valluzzo in AntiquesAndTheArts.com. Once every few years or so, wares from around the globe were viewable under one roof, and beginning with London’s Great Exhibit of 1851, visitors flocked to see them. Focusing on this one aspect of the fairs, “Inventing the Modern World” offers a “breathtaking survey of about 200 best-of-the-best decorative objects” that were shown at these events. The show re-creates some of the fairs’ excitement and becomes a history lesson in changing consumer tastes, said Alice Rawsthorn in The New York Times. After the London expo, a fascination with Indian craftsmanship swept Britain. Japanese ornamentation was in after Paris 1867, only to be bumped aside by China’s good showing in 1873 Vienna. Alas, the audience’s “zest” for gimmickry didn’t always serve design well.

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Still, these were “the glory years for design,” said Judith H. Dobrzynski in ArtsJournal.com. Aiming to outdo each other in artistic and technological ingenuity, many artisans and manufacturers made or solidified their reputations at the expos. Some of their works would fit right into a home today. In fact, both Michael Thonet’s bentwood rocking chair, from the 1860s, and Alvar Aalto’s amoeba-like 1930s Savoy vase are still in production. But there’s also “a lot of eye candy” that shows designers pushing their industries to unrepeatable extremes. In 1851, a British firm created a Moorish-style piano in papier-mâché. In the 1920s, a Viennese glassware-maker produced a series of bowls that owed their deep, glowing colors to the use of uranium.

The exhibit can cause “the onset of ornament fatigue,” said Alice Thorson in The Kansas City Star. “Ornate is an understatement for the objects” in the early sections, such as an 1858 British writing desk that’s designed to look like a 13th-century church and was painted by the pre-Raphaelite artist Edward John Poynter. But the objects become more familiarly streamlined as the decades pass, and the curators have succeeded in giving this paean to past world’s fairs a bit of a “‘you-are-there’ feeling.” Outside the museum, a temporary pavilion has been erected, constructed largely of solar panels that supply the structure’s power. Inside the galleries, visitors are greeted by film footage taken at the fairs and are invited to zoom in on 3-D images of certain objects at an “augmented reality station.” Wherever one looks, the objects on display here “tell a story of cultural globalization.” Like the millions who experienced the wonders of the fairs in their heyday, expect to have your horizons broadened.