The new life of iron and the machine, the roar of automobiles, the glitter of electric lights, the whirring of propellers, have awoken the soul.

Kazimir Malevich , 1916

The Machine
and Mass Production

No idea was more central to the creation of a new Utopia than that of technology, represented by images of “the machine.” The industrialization of the landscape and the prevalence of a machine aesthetic in the design and production of goods linked Modernists to workers and helped connect artists to the realities of everyday life. This notion inspired the multidisciplinary design and art program at the Bauhaus school in Germany. Bauhaus founder and architect Walter Gropius believed that the innate design of an industrial object, building, or home could directly affect community and city planning. Many important artists, designers, and architects contributed to the Bauhaus experiment through teaching, including László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Marcel Breuer.

Modernism’s cultural and political associations were often central to its dissemination. The crusading nature of Modernism gave rise to countless exhibitions, books, journals, posters, and advertisements influenced by abstract painting, simple graphics, and photomontage (cutting and combining different photographs to create a new image). Modernist theater, dance, and cinema were also laboratories for Utopian ideas. Theater designers such as the Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer experimented with new materials and choreography, moving beyond the stage into galleries, shops, and the street. Filmmakers including Soviets Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein developed cinematography and editing techniques that altered, manipulated, and reinforced dramatic subjects through their juxtaposition. The syncopated flow of imagery through time, and the off-kilter collision of disparate pictures, helped establish a new Modernist language in filmmaking which strongly influenced later documentary and narrative cinema.