1930-1944
New World Orders
The free-spirited character of innovation and experimentation
that flourished during the 1920s underwent a sea change in
the next decade. Whereas the machine aesthetic of the '20s
was realized through a prevailing tendency toward abstraction,
based on a reductive, geometric vocabulary and a utopian political
agenda, the ethos of machine culture in the 1930s assumed
an altogether different scale and demeanor.
Ushered in by a wave of conservative, even totalitarian,
political ideology that overswept Europe, the cultural landscape
shifted toward social realism, a state-controlled ideology
of popular, classically inspired art and architecture that
celebrated national identity through grandiose themes in works
on a commensurate scale.
Ironically, social realism incarnated many of the principles
and ideals of the prior decade: a belief in technology's potential
to transform society and a desire to communicate through a
universal form of visual expression. In Germany, the Weimar
Republic's short-lived experiment in parliamentary democracy
was buried under the weight of high inflation and unemployment.
Demoralized by the loss of World War I, Germany had been further
humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles, which exacted a high
price from the country in the form of reparations, demobilization
of its armed forces, and concessions on territorial claims.
Thus, by the time Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933,
Germany was ripe for transformation.
The irony of this era is that communism, the archenemy of
fascism, embraced many of its ideals. Steeped in the same
cults of personality and celebrations of national identity,
Stalin launched Soviet Russia into a new era of bold industrialization
that was to be achieved through a series of harshly ambitious
Five Year Plans. As in Italy and Germany, the ideology of
modernization was propagated through large-scale planning
and classical ideals of physical strength, continuity, order,
and stability. Monuments were an inevitable outgrowth of these
ideologies, and they were constructed with fervor.
The legacy of these ideological dictatorships is now a matter
of history. Having placed their own houses in order, or in
some cases due to an inability to do so, they set out to change
the rest of the world, each seeking to establish a new paradigm
based on its own political philosophy. Technologies developed
for social transformation became weapons of destruction. Indian,
Zuendapp and Harley-Davidson were amongst the many motorcycle
manufacturers that saw service during the war; and many more,
particularly British manufacturers, fell victim to the postwar
financial crisis in Europe, with its reverberations reaching
into the 1950s.
Fuente: Museo Guggenheim
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