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For a real exhibition of modernism, skip the V&A and go to Manchester
The human misery of crumbling estates is the malign legacy of these aesthetic authoritarians and their machine fetish
Simon Jenkins
Friday April 7, 2006
The Guardian
Go at once. Take a young person to see the Modernism show at the V&A and feel fear. It is the most terrifying exhibition I have seen, because it is politics disguised as art. It opens with a word that says it all - utopia - and ends with an unspoken lie, that this nihilist ideology became merely a style and is no longer a threat. If only.
The modernists were the neocons of 20th-century art. They took a sound methodology - the questioning of conventional wisdom - and made it a dogma that brooked no opposition, even from reality. They turned a fad into a political programme, asserting "we" as sovereign over "them". Though Hitler closed the Bauhaus and Stalin loved Corinthian columns, the modernist utopia fuelled fascism and communism and bred a tradition of stylistic authority still alive today.
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The V&A show is dazzling, a rare example of pictures, objects, film and photography all feeding on each other to drive home an effect. Its utopia is that of the Victorian past replaced by the clean and healthy community of the machine. People paint as machines (Léger and Mondrian), dance as machines (Moscow ballet), work as machines (in mass-production factories) and parade as machines (in Riefenstahl's Olympia and Nuremberg). Modernists approached the past not as an aesthete does, respectfully building on it, but as an autocrat, destroying it and substituting his own values and rules.
The worst offenders, because they became the most powerful, were architects. When Gropius said a modern artist lived "in an era of dissolution without guidance", he was declaring not a truth but a narrowness of mind. Architecture was a machine clothed in aphorism: "less is more", "form follows function". It relied on iconic names such as constructivism and suprematism. Houses should have flat roofs and chairs should be spare and uncomfortable. Everything and everyone should be at right angles.
Only now do I realise that the tawdriness of so much modernist architecture was deliberate. The constructivists sacrificed art as they rejected history, as bourgeois: "Necessity would have to defeat beauty." Harsh manufactured materials such as glass and steel were "appropriate to achieve the communist expression of structure". Hence the bleak minimalism of Mies van der Rohe and the cruel brutalism of Le Corbusier, whose creations must have inspired more human misery than any in history.
The creator of the V&A show, Christopher Wilk, half acknowledges the moral dubiety of his topic. The modernist cult took hold most firmly in countries that capitulated easily to dictatorship: Russia, Germany, Italy and France. It was resisted in more resolutely democratic Britain and America. Wilk refers patronisingly to British critics who favoured an art that "gave pleasure, physical and intellectual comfort and a sense of place" as somehow missing the point, if not off the planet.
Yet the modernist coterie was tiny and peripheral. By far the most popular manifestation of interwar culture, the cinema, preferred either art deco or revivalist fantasy. When film addressed modernism it savaged it, in the work of Fritz Lang and Chaplin. As for the public, they couldn't care less. The Ideal Home Exhibition of 1934 was the only one at which Bauhaus, or moderne, was strongly pushed. A handful of show houses were erected in Metroland, and a few survive on the road to Heathrow. But the style died the death. In Britain modernism was, and is, a leaking roof.
British modernists, many of them refugees from the continent, gained a foothold only when they won the ear of government after the second world war, claiming that they could build a socialist utopia cheaper and faster than the free market. Wilk buys the old line that high-rise system building was "urgently needed to rehouse the population". The truth was that private builders could erect and sell high-density semis for £400-£500. The cheapest modernist industrial housing, the two-bedroom "pre-fab", cost £1,300 ex factory. The Ministry of Works was so proud of the design that it put one in the Tate. Today the system-built estates are crumbling, their concrete stained and rotting, while the despised "historicist" suburbs seem ready to last for ever.
Modernism was never a style. It was a rejection of style, because style required hard work and talent. It ignored the human craving for ornament and aesthetic reference, instead idolising the machine. Its apologists were reduced to seeing beauty in straight lines and ball bearings, an insult to both culture and engineering. The most attractive objects at the V&A show, for instance the pottery, utensils and cars, are not "modernist" but art deco derivatives.
The V&A does not ask why modernism so failed to capture the public imagination. I am sure part of the reason is that it offered politics after the great war a notional replacement for what had failed in the Flanders mud. But winning such patronage turned its head. It fell in love with a different "ism": social authoritarianism. Wherever modernists could find a sympathetic regime - be it Moscow, Berlin, Paris or Manchester city council - they mimicked Albert Speer.
In the early 1970s I witnessed the clearance of Manchester's Hulme district to make way for Lewis Womersley's "Corbusian" slabs and crescents. Thousands who had survived Hitler's bombs now saw their homes destroyed by their home-grown gauleiters. They were herded into community centres for transportation to Skelmersdale and elsewhere. It was like a wartime displaced-persons camp, awash with tears. The resulting slabs have since been demolished as uninhabitable. Small wonder the British are none too keen on modernism. For most the word meant a very different experience from that of a South Kensington glamour exhibition.
Yet such Olympian attitudes live on in the giant glass erections planned for central London and in Yvette Cooper's proposal to demolish 150,000 Midlands and north country terrace houses. Even today, British architecture and its cheerleaders are stuck in the modernist time-warp, unable to handle historic reference in a building. Virtually every non-residential block that comes forward for planning permission is in glass and steel, a Miesian pastiche shaped as a box, shard or vegetable, devoid of adornment or charm.
British architecture cannot design streets or roofs or doors because its colleges, still ruled by nervous modernists, dare not teach their pupils how. In this the Prince of Wales was right. As a result, the present explosion of private estates across the south-east of England has, as in the 1930s, tragically turned its back on formal architecture. It has responded to the market's craving for neo-Tudor and neo-Georgian, for the architecture of Bilbo Baggins and Thomas Kinkade. This is modernism's nemesis.
The happiest valediction on the V&A show is that at least peoples across Europe rejected all it celebrates. They denied modernism's odious utopianism. They refused to live as they were ordered. They hated glass buildings. They did not buy abstract art or listen to musique concrète. They refused to do mass callisthenics. They turned their back on "less is more" in favour of a humane environment and courtesy towards the past. They are doing so to this day. But think of the damage that was done.
