Art Institute of Chicago
Through Oct. 9
With the right teacup design, you can change the world, said Rachel Wolff in The Wall Street Journal. Or so thought Europe’s 1920s avant-garde, many of whom felt that the best way to get people thinking modern was to fill their homes with stylish, affordable objects that embodied the movement’s progressive principles. The Art Institute is offering a fascinating look at this innocent “moment of optimism and artistic innovation,” with some 300 art objects—including home goods, political posters, and book covers—made by six of the movement’s leading lights. Some of the “sleek though largely unadorned” dinnerware on display may look a little plain today, but at the time it was revolutionary. Clean-lined and thoroughly 20th-century, it represented a dramatic break from the froufrou Victorian look that had been in vogue until that moment.
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In short, these designers were more interested in form than in decoration, said Janina Ciezadlo in Newcity Art. With his popular line of china, Czech designer Ladislav Sutnar enacted a “restrained play of spherical volumes,” while Piet Zwart pared his teacups down to squat apple-green cylinders sitting in hexagonal saucers. A similar repudiation of tradition drove the graphic design of the period, as artists bandied about bold fonts and striking imagery that looked as radical as the messages being conveyed. “The exhibition is more than worth the trip if only to see John Heartfield’s photomontage posters and covers for the anti-fascist Workers’ Illustrated Magazine.” Also fabulous: Gustav Klutsis’s postcards for the 1928 Spartakiad, which “evoke the dynamism and heroics of sport.” Each of Klutsis’s images is a controlled collision of strong diagonals, and that energy is amplified by the artist’s use of photographic images of athletes in action, many of them shown pressing right up against the edges of the paper.
What’s most striking is how modern these works still look today, said Terry Loncaric in the Gary, Ind., Post-Tribune. There is, throughout the show, “an undercurrent of bold experimentation” that feels contemporary and fresh. Yet there’s also something strangely familiar in the way these artists cavalierly cut and pasted various elements of graphic design—including words and photos—to produce what they hoped would be “compelling cultural and political statements.” Although the artists couldn’t have known it at the time, this fast-and-loose approach to content foreshadowed the free-for-all creative spirit of the Internet. For a group of future-minded pioneers hoping to reshape the world, that’s not too shabby a legacy.
