Big, narrative, tie-it-all-together museum exhibitions remain irresistible, but they are rarely as well done as "The 1920s: Age of the Metropolis," which has been packing the public into the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts through the summer and will continue until Nov. 10. How do you put a zeitgeist in a box, albeit a box the size of a museum? Led by Jean Clair, the director of the Musee Picasso in Paris, six curators have set out to raise and question the ghosts of the queen cities of Modernism: Paris, Berlin and New York -- with detours to London, Weimar (for the Bauhaus), Cologne (for Dada) and Moscow (for Constructivism) -- in the decade between the end of World War I and the arrival of the 1929 Depression.
There are 688 works, ranging from Deco vases to documentary photos, from tiny collages to a reconstruction of Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau, from architectural drawings to a De Havilland biplane and a huge, sleek Type 41 Bugatti Royale, the ultimate dream machine of the 1920s, with sharkskin-inlaid running boards and a 12.7-liter engine, one of only six that were built before the Depression put an end to such automotive fantasies. Even the school kids, who race through the rooms of painting and sculpture, fall into an awed hush in front of this one, as their ancestors were once supposed to shut up before a Rembrandt.
The catalog is massive, with 23 essays by various hands -- a long symposium. The '20s, Clair points out, were the first "name" decade in cultural history. In an older and slower-changing Europe, cultural periods were identified with long reigns -- the age of Pericles, Louis XIV. But now, in a time of fantastically accelerated communications and stylistic shifts, what Clair calls "the tyranny of the short term" begins: rapid identifiable packaging in culture.
The show steers a didactic course through the recurrent images of jazz-age dreaming. Maria, the famous she-robot in Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis, mother of a whole brood of automatons down to George Lucas' See Threepio, was not alone: her brothers were the machine men of Dadaism, whose poetic meaning (like hers) was anguish in the face of inhuman technology. No phase of modern art showed such profound doubts about the present, or threw off such febrile dreams about new social orders. The millenarian hope that eventually spawned the totalitarianism of the '30s was felt by artists, architects and designers, and was released as an obsession with social protest in the here- and-now as well as in vast Laputan schemes for the future.
The city was seen as the mill of oppression, grinding women down into whoredom and men into anonymity. German artists like George Grosz, Karl Hubbuch and the remarkable and still underknown Hannah Hoch imagined it as a grotesque theater, full of libido and irony -- the stage of a morality play, updated to reflect the postwar sense of despair. From Grosz in Berlin to Frans Masereel in Antwerp, an enormous iconography of city life -- its edginess, speed, compression, perversion, fixation on style -- developed in the '20s. The idea that the city is constructed of signs, of media and information overload as much as of concrete and steel, was the essence of vision for Dada ) collagists like Raoul Hausmann.