Modernism: Designing a New World

This major exhibition at the V&A is the first to explore Modernism in the designed world from a truly international perspective and in terms of all the arts. The exhibition concentrates on the years 1914-39. Europe and, to a lesser extent, America are the focus but the reach of Modernism is demonstrated by selected exhibits or projects from different parts of the world. 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.