The exhibition in the Guggenheim museum in New York interweaves the key movements that proclaimed visual and thematic clarity, Purism, Novecento Italiano, and Neue Sachlichkeit, through several closely related but distinct themes. This vast transformation of interwar aesthetics in Western Europe encompasses painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, film, fashion, and the decorative arts. Following the (moral, psychological and political) damage and chaos of World War I, a move emerged toward figuration, clean lines, and modeled form and away from the two-dimensional abstracted spaces, fragmented compositions, and splintered bodies of Cubism, Fururism and Expressionism and other avant-garde styles of the opening of the 20th century. In response to the horrors initiated by the new machine-age warfare, artists sought to recuperate and represent the body, whole and intact. For the next decade and a half, classicism—a return to order, synthesis, organization, and enduring values, rather than the prewar emphasis on innovation at all costs—dominated the discourse of contemporary art. Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–1936 traces this interwar trend as it worked its way from a poetic, mythic idea in the Parisian avant-garde; to a political, historical idea of a revived Roman Empire, under Benito Mussolini; to a neo-Platonic High Modernism at the Bauhaus, and finally to the chilling aesthetic of nascent Nazi and Communist culture. The show presents works by Balthus, Giorgio de Chirico, Jean Cocteau, Otto Dix, Pablo Gargallo, Hannah Höch, Matisse, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Picasso, August Sander and many others.
