Art: At the Meeting of the Planes

The Guggenheim Museum's landmark sculpture show

The older modern art gets, the further it slides away, the clearer it becomes that the difference between us and the early moderns was not just one of talent. They were obsessed and inspired, as we no longer are, by the promise of the 20th century and a world made new. Because of the general faith in development, the four decades between 1890 and 1930 make up one of the supreme periods in the cultural history of the West—riven, tragic, dissonant, yet as vigorous as the Italian...