Cold War Modern: Art & Design in a Divided World 1945-70

A major exhibition on the theme of Cold War Modern: Art and Design in a Divided World, 1945-1970 was mounted at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2008 and jointly curated by Jane Pavitt, the University of Brighton Research Fellow at the V&A, and David Crowley of the Royal College of Art (a former graduate and academic member of staff at the University of Brighton).

The exhibition was the first to explore the extraordinary international developments in modern art, design, architecture and film on both sides of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. Concentrating on the highly volatile years from 1945 to 1970, it examined the key themes of the period: the physical, social and cultural reconstruction of Europe and other parts of the world after war; the ‘victory’ of modernism in the arts at a time when an ideological conflict was being fought to demonstrate the superior modernity of socialism over capitalism and vice versa against the backdrop of the space race; and the rise of consumerism and its corresponding critique.

Over 300 objects from around the world were displayed, from a Sputnik and an Apollo Mission space suit to films by Stanley Kubrick, paintings by Robert Rauschenberg and Gerhard Richter, fashion by Paco Rabanne, designs by Charles and Ray Eames and Dieter Rams, architecture by Le Corbusier, Richard Buckminster Fuller and Archigram and vehicles, including a Messerschmidt microcar.

Back in 2004 during the early stages of conception, the curators anticipated mounting the exhibition in three key sections: Anxiety and Hope in the Aftermath of War; Cold War Modern and Vision and Critique - a number of potential themes having been proposed for each section. In Section One these comprised Memorialising Conflict: Conflicts over Memorials; Existential Anxieties; The Legacy of the Modern Movement; The Socialist Agenda for the Arts; and Rebuilding and Reconstruction. In Section Two the themes under consideration were Domesticity and the Modern Home; Thaw Modern: art and the applied arts in Eastern Europe after 1956; and The Third Way: Scandinavia, Harnessing the Future and Corporate Modernism. Section Three comprised of New Fronts on the Cold War; Technocracy and its Discontents; Living the Revolution; The Last Visionaries; and Osaka Expo '70.

The first of a series of round table discussions was then mounted in mid-October at the V&A, with 18 invited participants whose research interests relate in some way to the envisaged exhibition themes, including researchers from a range of leading institutions in the fields of art and design history and related fields (the Universities of Brighton, Kingston, Middlesex, Sheffield, Sussex and Warwick, as well as Birkbeck College, the Courtauld Institute, the London College of Fashion, Manchester Metropolitan University, Oxford Brookes University, the Royal College of Art and the Victoria & Albert Museum). Participants made brief presentations as a means of stimulating discussion about the possible scope and content of the exhibition. This was intended to be the first of a number of planning/discussion meetings leading on to a series of closed symposia and international seminars in the run-up to the exhibition.

The Cold War era was one of high tensions but also one of exceptional creativity and unprecedented technological development which touched every aspect of life from everyday goods to the highest arenas of human achievement in science and culture. The exhibition is based on the view that one compelling way of understanding the Cold War is as a conflict between different conceptions of modern life. Art and design were not therefore peripheral symptoms of politics; they played a central role in representing and, sometimes challenging, the dominant political and social ideas of the age. Whilst the exhibition will represent the high political drama of the age, it will not form a chronicle of political events: it is the curators’ view that works of art and design can chart the ideological ambitions and paradoxes of this fascinating era.

Highlights included:

• classic Eames designs made of ‘modern’ materials such as fibreglass
• furniture inspired by space such as Eero Aarnio’s Globe Chair and the Garden Egg Chair by Peter Ghyczy
• Dieter Ram’s designs for Braun including his T1000 Radio world receiver
• previously unseen Eastern bloc architecture, furniture, textiles, graphics and glass
• futuristic fashion by designers including Paco Rabanne and Pierre Cardin
• new post-war forms of transport including the P70 Coupé (an early version of the plastic Trabant), the micro car Messerschmitt Kabinenroller and the Vespa
• motorscooter
• films which shaped the popular imagination such as Goldfinger, The Ipcress File, Dr. Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey as well as original set design drawings by Kenneth Adam
• works by Pablo Picasso, Richard Hamilton, Gerhard Richter, Lucio Fontana and Robert Rauschenberg, illustrating the way artists responded to the dominant political and social ideas of the time
• propaganda and anti-nuclear posters, photography and sculpture from both East and West
• imagined futuristic architecture schemes for cities and dwellings by Hans Hollein, Archigram and Superstudio
• experimental designs for inflatable buildings, including a full-scale reconstruction of a key work by Haus-Rucker-Co.

The exhibition started in the immediate post-war period showing differing visions for rebuilding devastated cities and competing ideas of modern life. It looked at new industrial products and building methods from the West as well as socialist realist art and architecture from the USSR. It focused on rival architectural visions in East and West Berlin: the monumental ‘Stalinallee’ in the Eastern sector and the Modernist housing schemes of ‘Interbau’ in the West designed by architects including Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Oskar Niemeyer.

Cold War Modern examined how the competition to be modern entered the domestic sphere, exemplified by the famous 1959 ‘Kitchen Debate’ between Nixon and Khrushchev which took place at the American National Exhibition staged in Moscow amid displays of the latest American household goods. During this period images of destruction haunted the collective imagination. The nuclear threat, and the response to it, are seen through graphics, art, film and imaginary schemes such as Buckminster Fuller’s 1962 geodesic Dome over Manhattan.

A section on the space race and hi-tech triumphs highlighted the first space mission by Yuri Gagarin aboard a Vostok space capsule. On display were designs of interiors for NASA spacecraft by Raymond Loewy, experimental spacesuits, as well as many examples of furniture, architecture, art and fashion inspired by the space race. Among the many technological achievements of the period, a new and distinctive form of architecture emerged: the telecommunications tower, including the Post Office Tower in London and Moscow’s Ostankino Tower.

Under the theme of ‘Revolution,’ the exhibition considered forms of protest and rebellion, including the tumultuous events of 1968 in Paris and Prague, looking at them through posters, film, photography and art.

The final section looked at how Cold War technologies were used by architects and designers to create imagined utopias, a world of inflatable, mobile and expendable habitats by groups such as Superstudio and Archigram. There was a full scale reconstruction of Oasis No. 7, a giant inflatable environment containing a small ‘beach’ with palm tree, designed by Viennese architects Haus-Rucker-Co. Other critical views of the future such as Arata Isozaki’s photomontage Re-Ruined Hiroshima were also on display.

The exhibition ended with the first photograph of Earth taken from space, which inspired artists and designers in their utopian imaginings and acted as a catalyst to a new environmental awareness of the fragility of the planet.

After the V&A, Cold War Modern: Design 1945-70 toured to MART, Rovereto, Italy (28 March to 26 July 2009) and then to the National Gallery of Art, Vilnius, Lithuania (October to December 2009).