I was star-struck the first time I saw The German Pavilion, the model house designed in 1929 by Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich at the foot of Montjuic in Barcelona. This low-slung, elegant landmark of clean lines and reflections remains in my mind for its conjuring spirit –carefully crafted artwork that produces a series of perceptions both stable and evanescent. It hovers, a seeming experiment in timelessness, though its stripped down modernism certainly broke norms nearly100 years ago. Its magic struck me last week, mesmerized again after thirty years by the gorgeous “dawn” sculpture by Georg Kolbe, reflections that bind inside and out, elegance, wordlessness. But words written in the brochure gave it a whole new meaning.
Quoting the brochure: The 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition “coincided with one of the most turbulent periods in the history of the continent: Europe between the wars. A period marked politically by the breakdown of liberal democracies, the spread of fascism…” As if the tongue of a bell was swinging and banging against my insides, setting off reverberations – all relevant, this is now. Breakdown of democracies, turmoil, fascism.
It didn’t stay on that note – the clapper swung in another direction, to possibilities found in art: “Every period of crisis also brings renewal – and the art scene of the time perfectly encapsulated this spirit, which gave rise to the emergence of the avant-garde.” Modernism pushed back against obfuscation, fussiness, lies with an idealism that “understood beauty as the manifestation of truth.” Ninety-five years later, we have exhausted much of that same idealism. But why not, even in our jaundiced era, in this do-or-die moment, see chaos as an opportunity to reassert all that matters, in language both new and essential?