Modern Beauty? The Trans-Siberian Railroad and the Aesthetics of War and the Machine

January 22–April 6, 2014
The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum @ 10975 SW 17th Street

In the 1910s, a small group of poets, artists, and architects defined modernity in terms of the simultaneous experience of sights, sounds, and narratives. They created works that were centered specifically on this perceptual simultaneity, producing densely layered pieces that heightened viewers’ receptivity by requiring them to construct meaning actively from the diverse impressions that they formed though sensory perception. Such a focus on perceptual simultaneity contributed significantly to the development of a modern sensibility, creating a jarring new beauty that fit with the violent circumstances of the early twentieth century, in particular industrialization, civil unrest, and war.

Featuring Wolfsonian objects on view at The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, Florida International University, Modern Beauty? explored this intersection of poetry and the visual arts found in the Simultaneiste movement. It centered on La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (1913) from The Wolfsonian’s collection, a long scroll with an elaborate book cover by the poet Blaise Cendrars and artist Sonia Delaunay-Terk, and incorporated various other forms of Wolfsonian visual, sonic, and material media to evoke a multisensory experience.

The installation was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and co-curated by Gray Read, FIU Department of Architecture, and Renée Silverman, FIU Department of Modern Languages.