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Overshadowed era comes into its own
by Alice Rawsthorn
Ask a design buff to name the most influential designers of the early 20th century,
and they will probably rattle off a list of modernist pioneers such as
Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand, Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe and Lilly Reich,
Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, Alvar Aalto or Marcel Breuer, whose elegant chairs still
grace homes and offices today.
Yet in the very early 1900s, before the modernists had begun their experiments
with leather and chrome, the most sought-after designers were highly
skilled artisans who made exquisitely finished furniture, glassware, metalwork
and ceramics mostly by hand. It is this movement that preoccupies A
Century of Design, Part 1, the first of four exhibitions for which the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York has raided its archives to present an
overview of design in the 20th century.
The first exhibition - which, like the other three, is
curated by J. Stewart Johnson, design and architecture consultant in the museum's
modern art department - covers the period from 1900 to 1925. It opens
with Autumn Crocus, a gorgeous glass vase designed in 1900 in the
spindly Art Nouveau style by Emile Galle, one of the great French glassmakers
from the School of Nancy; and ends with a lacquered wood panel and a stunning
lacquered metal vase speckled with eggshell, both made in the mid-1920s by
another of France's gifted artisans, Jean Dunand.
Like Galle and Dunand, other designers in the show - from
Josef Hoffmann and Hector Guimard, to Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Rene Jules
Lalique - are eminent figures whose contribution to 20th-century design
has often been overshadowed by that of the modernist movement, and the
exhibition provides a timely reminder of their achievements.
Although many of the designers in the first part of A
Century of Design - which covers the Arts and Crafts Movement, Art Deco and the
Wiener Werkstatte (or Viennese Workshops) as well as Art Nouveau -
saw themselves as opponents of modernism, they contributed to its
development by breaking away from the heavy machine-made furniture decorated with
historical motifs so popular in the 19th century. As well as rebelling against
that aesthetic, they were inspired by the graceful simplicity of traditional
Japanese artand craftwork.
In the US and UK, these influences culminated in the Arts
and Crafts Movement which, inspired by William Morris and John Ruskin,
championed a return to traditional handwork and the "honesty"
of plain, unadorned designs. An oak and leather chair designed by Frank Lloyd
Wright in 1904 for the staff canteen in the Larkin Building at Buffalo, New
York is one of the Met's prize Arts and Crafts exhibits, as is an oak and
ceramic washstand made in the same year by Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh,
for the "blue bedroom" of Miss Cranston, whose
Glaswegian tearooms he had also designed.
Mackintosh's work also has shades of Art Nouveau, the French
and Belgian design movement which parallelled the Arts and Crafts. As
well as Galle's Autumn Crocus, the movement is represented by Hector
Guimard's silk 1900 dress panel and an ornate 1899 cabinet-vitrine by the
Belgian craftsman Gustav Serrurier-Bovy. The Art Deco section of the
exhibition includes an opulent suite of amboyana and ivory office furniture by
Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann and Paul Poiret's textiles.
Among the most intriguing pieces are the Wiener Werkstatte
exhibits, including an eerily contemporary geometric 1904 lamp by
Josef Hoffmann and Otto Prutscher's 1903 black and white checked lampstand
which, together with his crisply patterned glass tableware, could belong to
Memphis, the newly fashionable Italian design movement of the early 1980s.
These exhibits, alongside an exquisite pewter mirror by Peter Behrens (a
mentor of Mies Van Der Rohe, as well as Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus founder)
point clearly to the modernist work, which will feature in the
second of the shows.
With only 53 exhibits, the first part of the Met's
celebration of its own 20th-century design collection is more modest in scale than
the blockbuster art retrospectives at other New York museums such as the
Whitney's The American Century and Modern Starts at the Museum of Modern
Art. Yet it is an engaging exhibition, which quietly paints a vivid picture of
an invigorating, but often neglected, period of design. The
quality of the work, coupled with the clever mix of acknowledged
masterpieces and occasional surprises, makes the 20th century section of the
Victoria & Albert Museum's recent A Grand Design exhibition seem flimsy
in comparison. Roll on the second part.
A Century of Design, Part I 1900-1925, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
'Overshadowed era comes into its own', FT 27th Jan 2000
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