Modernism

"This is a huge book. It’s wonderful. I think it’s one of the best exhibition catalogues I’ve ever seen. What I like so much is that it’s a very generous and wide interpretation of modernism and you can enjoy it without ever having seen the exhibition. It looks at modernism in all its forms of design – from furniture to clothes, but above all in architecture . I think that it’s architecture that so expresses the thirties. It’s the dominant artistic vernacular of the period. It’s largely influenced by the Bauhaus. Architectural modernism came to Britain with refugees from Nazi Germany, like Gropius and Mendelsohn. That’s what a large part of this book is about. It’s a section called “Building Utopia”. It’s absolutely about trying to create a better future, but in all forms – whether it’s architecture or psychoanalysis . It’s taking a moral stand. It’s the idea that the designer had a moral duty to create a better world. Many creative and scientific people felt that they had the tools to create a better world and a moral responsibility to do so and I think that modernism is a lot to do with that. It’s a rejection of the hypocrisy, the fussiness and the fustiness of Victorianism in Britain, and all the things that were perceived to have led to World War I. It was a rejection of the complacent world that drifted into war."