Putting A Zeitgeist in a Box

By ROBERT HUGHES

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.

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.

This illusion, largely abandoned by European intellectuals, remains dogma in American academe, and one quails to think what torrents of Marxist catalog cant might have drowned this exhibition if it had been done in the U.S. But there is little jargon in the catalog of "Age of the Metropolis" and none in the show itself; it is an intelligent wide-screen movie, generous in spirit, provocative and full of good things.