1900 a la Mode

Art in America, Sept, 2000 by Marcia E. Vetrocq

To be sure, this is not entirely the result of curatorial cleansing; any show dedicated to art and high-end design during the Belle Epoque will have to reach out to incorporate works that evince a straightforward social awareness, though perhaps no further than a painting or two by Childe Hassam and John Sloan. Nevertheless, the curators' exclusions did skew the story. You would not have known from this exhibition that Camillo Sitte, Ebenezer

Howard, Otto Wagner and Tony Garnier each had produced, within the exhibition's time frame, important projects or theoretical works on urban and suburban planning. The only "city" plan in "1900" was Paul Hankar's design for the Cite des Artistes (1896), a cooperative with residences and studios for artist-members proposed for the Flemish resort town of Westende. The birth of industrial design during these years, like modern city planning, was overlooked. Of the pioneering work by Wright for the Larkin Company of Buffalo and by Behrens for Germany's AEG Turbine Company, there was no trace.

Also to be attributed to the organizers' intentions is the mood of attenuated melancholy that prevailed at the end of "1900." The show's principal divisions ran parallel in time, not sequentially. Yet the physical ordering of themes within the Grand Palais had the effect of suggesting that a raft of new and dynamic ideas ultimately expired in a shudder of bittersweet retrospection. The later galleries dwelled on the Symbolist anxiety of Munch and Hodler and the femme fatales of Mucha and Khnopff. Hunger, misery, degeneracy and the ravages of age were personified, and estheticized, in sculptures of anguished, contorted figures. The mannered ephebes in Max Beckmann's Young Men by the Sea (1905) embodied a lassitude overtaking life just as youth's full vitality should be poised to explode.

Situated in this company, the section on children's books seemed to mourn the brevity of childhood fantasy. Here, too, the 20th century's crown princes of avant-garde painting appeared, but with a decidedly retro bent. In the exhibition's final section, "The Myth of the Age of Gold and the Return to Nature," there was a trio of languidly classicizing Matisses--Luxe, calme et volupte (1904), a sketch for Le Bonheur de vivre (1905-06), and La Pastorale (nymphs and faun), 1906--and one Picasso, The Harem (1906), whose proto-Cubist liberties with form and color are couched in the reassuring terms of 19th-century Orientalist subject matter.

Had the works been arranged otherwise, with the period's more adventurous and progressive objects at the show's end, visitors might have departed "1900" and headed for the Champs-Elysees metro station with some sense of how the metropolis before them grew with the century. On the other hand, if it is true that the 20th century did not really begin until World War I, then visitors had a very good idea of how the Western world indulged, vamped and brooded its way to catastrophe.

"1900" was on view at the Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris [Mar. 14-June 26]. It was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.