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"Graphic Modernism' at N.Y. Public Library
Robert Zaller
When men still hoped
ROBERT ZALLER
The small show of “Graphic Modernism in Eastern Europe, 1910-1935” shows the effect that a coherent theme in a beautifully designed setting can produce. There’s nothing here to match the splendors of two current shows at the Morgan Library: mostly illustrations, magazine covers, and other ephemera, all lying under the shadow of Russian Constructivism and its utopian politics.
The new nations that emerged from the Great War in Eastern Europe were peasant-based and conservative. But their art, far more cosmopolitan and radical, combined an appeal to national pride with the heady aspirations of the Socialist International. As both a comment on the latter’s sources and a reflection of its doomed hopes, it casts an oblique and penetrating light of its own on the last generation when men still hoped. There isn’t a more beautiful and heartbreaking room in New York.
ROBERT ZALLER
The small show of “Graphic Modernism in Eastern Europe, 1910-1935” shows the effect that a coherent theme in a beautifully designed setting can produce. There’s nothing here to match the splendors of two current shows at the Morgan Library: mostly illustrations, magazine covers, and other ephemera, all lying under the shadow of Russian Constructivism and its utopian politics.
The new nations that emerged from the Great War in Eastern Europe were peasant-based and conservative. But their art, far more cosmopolitan and radical, combined an appeal to national pride with the heady aspirations of the Socialist International. As both a comment on the latter’s sources and a reflection of its doomed hopes, it casts an oblique and penetrating light of its own on the last generation when men still hoped. There isn’t a more beautiful and heartbreaking room in New York.
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