When More Is More

There is something wonderfully ironical in the spectacle of the Museum of Modern Art, whose reputation is based on its championship of the new and extreme, taking New Yorkers biack to Methuselah with a major exhibition devoted to modernism’s arch-enemy, the Ecole des Beaux Arts, headquarters of French Architectural education and practice from the 1780s to around 1900. True, in recent years the artistic avant garde seems to have run out of steam, at least for the time being, so that museums and galleries everywhere have been replacing their customary presentations of the new with rediscoveries of the hitherto disregarded past, especially in the fields of nineteenth century academicism.

Still, at least to a layman, it seemed as if the Ecole des Beaux Arts—whose stranglehold on architects was broken in the early twentieth century by the innovators of Art Nouveau, and which was finally done in by the machine aesthetic of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, the Bauhaus, and MOMA itself—would rest in peace on history’s dust heap. Whatever their individual idiosyncrasies, today’s architects all take for granted the dicta of modernism— “Form Follows Function” and “Less Is More.” What possible relevance, then, could the bombastic buildings of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, with their insistent symmetry, their wasteful squandering of space, their ever-exuberant ornament, their relentless use of styles and motifs from the past, have for the 1970s?

RB

About the Author

Ruth Berenson

Featured Tags

There is something wonderfully ironical in the spectacle of the Museum of Modern Art, whose reputation is based on its championship of the new and extreme, taking New Yorkers biack to Methuselah with a major exhibition devoted to modernism’s arch-enemy, the Ecole des Beaux Arts, headquarters of French Architectural education and practice from the 1780s to around 1900. True, in recent years the artistic avant garde seems to have run out of steam, at least for the time being, so that museums and galleries everywhere have been replacing their customary presentations of the new with rediscoveries of the hitherto disregarded past, especially in the fields of nineteenth century academicism.

Still, at least to a layman, it seemed as if the Ecole des Beaux Arts—whose stranglehold on architects was broken in the early twentieth century by the innovators of Art Nouveau, and which was finally done in by the machine aesthetic of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, the Bauhaus, and MOMA itself—would rest in peace on history’s dust heap. Whatever their individual idiosyncrasies, today’s architects all take for granted the dicta of modernism— “Form Follows Function” and “Less Is More.” What possible relevance, then, could the bombastic buildings of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, with their insistent symmetry, their wasteful squandering of space, their ever-exuberant ornament, their relentless use of styles and motifs from the past, have for the 1970s?