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Allied to this was the city as tomb, both futuristic and archaic, a kind of Mayan ruin referring only to itself, incomprehensible to its antlike inhabitants. This left its most startling images in the expressionist cinema and in the sublime renderings of the American architect Hugh Ferriss, the Piranesi of the skyscraper age. But it also turns up in projects that were, however nominally, designed for the real world, like the huge pink mastabas of the "Metropolis" that Henri Sauvage hoped to raise beside the Seine in 1928.
Then there is the international preoccupation with a benign Utopia -- Europe's reaction against the horror of war -- whose "spiritual" symbol was glass architecture. Besides the familiar Constructivist icons, such as the sculptor Vladimir Tatlin's wooden model for a giant tower that was to commemorate the Third Communist International, there are fantasies by much- lesser-known artists -- the outstanding one being a German, Wenzel Hablik, whose radiant glass towers and many-colored domes resemble designs for the New Jerusalem.
In the '20s, Modernism was not only a vehicle for political protest or idealist reverie. It also became, for the first time, chic: it entered the salons and diffused through the decorative arts, especially in France. And it turned pompier, as in the morbid and overblown paintings of society artist Tamara de Lempicka. The birth of Art Deco is one of the themes of this show -- designers' homages to larger avant-garde ideas: a Cubist table lamp, for instance, or "skyscraper" furniture.
"Age of the Metropolis" does not pretend to cover every kind of image made by artists and craftsmen in the '20s. Its focus is the city, and that alone -- so that although it includes Fernand Leger's The Mechanic, 1920, the arcadian strains in '20s French painting, Matisse and Derain, for example, find no place in it. And quite a lot of lesser art does because -- derivative or coarse though it sometimes is -- it has something to say about the pervasiveness of imagery. Much of Weimar-period German art is a crude mix of De Chirico and cartooning, but one doesn't object to seeing it here, although it quickly stales.
"Metropolis" represents the populist side of the "new" art history, which looks at works of art mainly in their relation to ideology, social events and the culture at large, without drawing strict hierarchical distinctions between "high" and "low" art. The advantage of this stance is . that it enables you to create more compelling narratives about art than more traditional connoisseurship could. You can reach out and argue about what things say in concert -- novels, propaganda, music, film, advertising, magazines, TV, as well as painting, sculpture and architecture. The disadvantage is that it tends to ignore the exceptions -- outstanding works of art that don't necessarily fit the period they belong to. It also fosters a mood of political overgeneralization, as though the history of images were nothing other than that of ideological agendas.