Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914-1939

Gustavs Klucis... Postcard design for the Moscow Spartakiada (1928, Colour paper and photo collage and gouache on paper, on card board, The State Museum of Art, Riga, Latvia). From Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914-1939 at the Victoria and Albert Museum. "...Modernism was not conceived as a style but a loose collection of ideas. It was a term which covered a range of movements and styles that largely rejected history and applied ornament, and which embraced abstraction. Born of great cosmopolitan centres, it flourished in Germany and Holland, as well as in Moscow, Paris, Prague and New York. Modernists had a utopian desire to create a better world. They believed in technology as the key means to achieve social improvement and in the machine as a symbol of that aspiration. All of these principles were frequently combined with social and political beliefs (largely left-leaning) which held that design and art could, and should, transform society."