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Man as machine

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 24th September 2008

Cold War Modern: Design 1945–1970
V&A, until 11 January 2009

Function replaced any pretence to beauty in architecture and seemed to demand a society in which every housewife was a heroine provided she bought all the most up-to-date gadgets and didn’t stay at home to use them. Of course, this was all part of the attempt to replace God with machines, but there was a huge emptiness at the heart of the operation. No one cares to explain why the passionate search for ‘a better life’ seemed to necessitate a blitzkrieg of moral values and a wholesale renunciation of the past. What of continuity? Cannot the present be built on the past, the future on the present? The modern denial of history, which leads inexorably (in the art world at least) to endless repetition of what has already been done, sometimes only a few years ago, suggests that fashion is more important than development, and that culture is seasonal and cyclical. What a nightmare.

The cult of the modern demands a clean break with the past, a tabula rasa on which to build, as if nothing has gone before. This is, thankfully, only theory, and impossible to implement, but the wish is persistently there, as can be seen in the three main rooms of this large exhibition. There are more than 300 objects laid out in seven doom-laden sections: Anxiety and Hope in the Aftermath of War, Conscription of the Arts, The Competition of the Modern, Crisis and Fear, Space Odysseys, Revolution, The Last Utopians. What a list! Relinquish the will to live a rich and useful life, all you who enter here.

Well, it’s not entirely bad. Despite what you might expect, the exhibition does not single-mindedly foster the pursuit of ugliness. There are in fact plenty of examples of inventive and even satisfying design, though not much beauty to be found. It’s always a relief to come across a decent painting in these themed shows, and although these are few and far between in Cold War Modern, they nevertheless exist like oases of refreshment for the spirit. Even those provoked by the most reprehensible and ghastly of acts. Such as Constant’s 1951 painting ‘Scorched Earth’, which is oddly contemporary in its organic and painterly confusion, and Enrico Baj’s Atomic Bomb sculpture and paintings. How do these intensely human statements look against the impersonal lines of an Olivetti typewriter, a Gio Ponti coffee machine, a Vespa or a Messerschmidt cabin scooter? Judge for yourselves.