David Crowley

Travelling exhibition Cold War Modern | Design 1945-1970 is the first to examine contemporary design, architecture, film and popular culture on both sides of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War era.

The exhibitions goes from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London to MART in Rovereta, Italy and to the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius, Lithuania.

While political tension defined one front of the Cold War, a creative conflict was waged on another. The first book to offer an international perspective on the Cold War across the arts, this groundbreaking study examines how art and design played a central role in representing and sometimes challenging the dominant political and social ideas of the age. From everyday products to the highest arenas of human achievement in science and culture, this period of exceptional creativity resonated in every corner of the globe. This ambitious book--published to accompany a major exhibition--includes work from the Socialist Bloc and Western Europe, the United States, Cuba, and Japan. Featuring remarkable images by artists and designers from Picasso to Kubrick, Cold War Modern also offers a landmark collection of fascinating essays on subjects as diverse as political strategy, domesticity, and high-tech design developments.

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Curated by David Crowley and Jane Pavitt for the V&A, and arriving in Vilnius from MART, Roverretto, the exhibition contains a startling range of art, architecture, design, and fashion objects, and films, that represent the material apotheosis of the Cold War years from the cessation of the Second World War in 1945 until the turn in the Vietnam War in 1970. The period also encapsulates the high years of the ‘space race’ at a moment when the moon landing (1969) is also marking a decadal anniversary (the spacesuit first worn by Neil Armstrong is in the exhibition as is the Sputnik model). And it is the spirit of competition between geo-political blocs – of political/territorial influence, in space, in war memorial architecture, in lifestyle, in consumer goods design, at world fairs – that embodies the exhibition.

The results of that competition seemed clear-cut for the last 20 years as capitalism appeared to trounce communism for good… until the financial crisis, that is, when the specter of ‘possible and better futures’ began to be discussed again. Some of those futures can be found in the stellar array of objects included in Cold War Modern, including: furniture by Eames and Pichler; city plans by Buckminster Fuller; living environments designed by Archigram and Superstudio; in artworks by Fontana and Picasso; and fashion by Pierre Cardin and Paco Rabanne. For the outer limits of the future and fantasy there are the James Bond movies and the science-fiction films of Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky.… (mais)