Trends of the Twenties

By ROBERT HUGHES

A totalitarianism of structure

Largely ignored by critics outside Europe, the most important cluster of modern art exhibitions the world has seen this year is running (until Oct 16) in Berlin. "Trends of the Twenties," set up by the Council of Europe, contains four exhibitions: some 3,000 paintings, drawings, sculptures, photos, models' posters, documents and every imaginable sort of artifact, from a suprematist teacup by the pioneer Russian abstractionist Kasimir Malevich to a Bauhaus gramophone. The exhibition catalogue is as thick as a brick; one needs persistence, but is richly rewarded. For "Trends of the Twenties" offers a vast and unique panorama of the European avant-garde in its most exacerbated sense of crisis, despair and hope--the years between Sarajevo and the Wall Street crash, the time of the Great War, the Russian Revolution and the Weimar Republic. This was the last period in which the dream of the engaged avant-garde seemed credible: that corrupt societies could be toppled and Utopias created with the aid of art. How Dada, surrealism, constructivism and the Bauhaus articulated this dream--and witnessed its failure--is the broad subject of these shows.

The most comprehensive of them, from constructivism to concrete art, is housed in Berlin's New National Gallery --the austere and nearly functionless square of glass and black steel that was Mies van der Rohe's chief legacy to Germany. This Prussian pantheon, overlooking the bombed-out paddocks where Hitler's chancellery once stood, is as perfectly suited to a constructivist show as St. Peter's is to Bernini's papal tombs; box and contents are one. The idealism, the formal absolutism and the faith in a new social order, coupled with the abstracted indifference to verifiable human needs that lay at the core of the constructivist enterprise, are all written large on its grid.

The constructivist impulse to pure didactic form began before World War I.

But the ground on which it flourished was a traumatized Europe whose ruins and shaken regimes offered a kind of blank tablet: any design for Utopia, once drawn there, might stick. At one end of Europe, constructivism was apolitical; its center was the De Stijl group in Holland, led by Mondrian and Van Doesburg. The bright shuttles of color--red, blue, yellow, white and black, without tints or complementaries or tones--in works like Mondrian's Color Composition A, 1917, or Van Does-burg's majestic but unbuilt design of 1923 for a university hall--refer to no ideology of the state. The aim of such work is to clean the mind and purge emotion; to construct a paradise of fundamental shape. Instead of the "handwriting" of brush marks, the clear flat surface; instead rf the knotted shadows of expressionism, the sunny rectangle--color as disembodied energy. Hygiene is an obsessive theme of constructivism: a design like J J Pieter Oud's Cafe Restaurant De Unie, 1925, is not to be imagined with a scintilla of city grime on it. Steel, chrome, tile, gloss paint were the rudiments of utopia, but, above all, glass. Paeans were written to the constructivist cathedral, the transparent tower. "Life is a burden without a glass palace," rhapsodized the poet and designer Paul Scheerbart in 1920:

Greater than a diamond Is the double glass wall.

Light permeates the universe And is caught alive in crystal. Glass brings all clarity: Build it here, on the spot. Glass brings us the new age: Brick culture fills us with pity.

The essential desire of constructivism --from De Stijl to the Bauhaus in Germany, and particularly with the Russian avant-garde in its flowering through the early years of the revolution--was to construct a beauty that could not be found in nature. Only one metaphor was allowed to intrude into the garden of absolute form: that of the machine. The dynamics of manufacture supplied, for Russian constructivism, the prototype of revolution This permitted Tallin, Rodchenko, El Lissitzky and others to create, during the first years after the Soviet Revolution, the only radical art of the 20th century that meshed with radical politics. Tallin's unbuilt tower, the monument to the Third International, was greeted as transcending more bourgeois spectacles like the Eiffel Tower. It was the incarnation of struggle: "For the first time," a critic exclaimed, "iron rebels and wants to acquire its own artistic form!" El Lissitzky's marvelous series of Proun paintings, with their intersecting planes and crystalline forms, were like Utopian landscapes, referring to Russia's industrial future and dismissing its agricultural present.

Thus, in its different ways, constructivism aspired to become the last universal style. Its victory would bring the history of art to an end and accomplish the millennium. The constructivist vision was art's analogue to the reigning fantasy of Marxism: the dictatorship of the proletariat. Its ideal order would wipe out nostalgia for older styles and set up a "permanent revolution" of design. Alas for the designers, this did not happen. Most of the triumphs of constructivism survived in the fictional space of painting or sculpture, theater or typography. As soon as ideal form moved into the real world of design or architecture and became the functionalist esthetic, it was hobbled by the resistance of society and by the lofty monasticism of the designers themselves.

By the end of the '20s Stalin had crushed the last flickers of modernism in Russia.

Bauhaus furniture had to wait for decades before going into production--and then those uncomfortable "functionalist" chairs, designed to mortify the flesh of worshipers in the church of absolute form suffered the bizarre irony of becoming expensive status symbols for corporate lobbies. No worker's bottom would ever touch them.

Constructivist architecture principally survives on paper. In the inflated, crisis-ridden economy of post-World War I Europe, no financier intended to go broke building glass towers and ideal suburbs that nobody wanted to live in. And quite right too: for little in the history of architecture since the pharaohs quite equals the lofty disregard of human needs--the ordinary instinctive behavior of imperfect people wanting comfort--implicit in so many constructivist/Bauhaus designs.

The unbuilt showpieces, like Hilbersei-mer's high-rise city or Le Corbusier's ville mdieuse, are detached and scary: vast tower blocks, broad relentless avenues, a crushing regimentation. The idealism of the functionalist heroes (Mies especially) has the perfect internal unity of farce. It belonged to the same order of ideas as Albert Speer's designs for Hitler--a totalitarianism of structure. But they linger on paper as the dream architecture of the 20th century. Because these termitaries were never built, they could not be destroyed _ Robert Hughes

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