by Jon Lackman | 23 May 2006 | Modern, Museums
The V&A’s summer show of modernism in design, organized by Christopher Wilk (PDF bio), looks back at the “new world” of 1914-1939. Dominic Bradbury credits the show with integrating such things as Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet costume designs, but finds that modernist architecture has been “treated rather shabbily.” Deyan Sudjic notes that Wilk unashamedly puts history before nationalist sentiment: “the realisation dawns that you have been taken back to a time when Britain was culturally irrelevant… Wilk refuses to be deflected by Anglo-Saxon anomalies. They are irrelevant to his story. Instead he celebrates high modernity.”
