Christopher Wilk, curator of the Modernism show at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London, has achieved what for any museum struggling to persuade the public to buy more tickets is the holy grail of exhibition making. He has managed to ignite a public row on a scale that he could never have predicted, even in his most optimistic dreams. Every broadsheet has been rehearsing the arguments for and against Modernism, very often with just as much heat as they had 75 years ago. The Architects' Journal cartoonist Louis Hellman portrayed Modernism this week as a Frankenstein's monster rising from the dead. Even BBC Radio 4's Today programme pitted Wilk against the improbably named self-styled classical architect Robert Adam to argue the toss about flat roofs, streamlined Frankfurt kitchens and the machine age.
The row is not so much about the show itself, which everybody seems to agree looks spectacular. The real issue is whether Modernism was a good thing. Or, as the pundit Simon Jenkins, reduced to a frothing paroxysm of polemical excess, suggests, was it a very bad thing indeed. Certainly that is the only message that emerges with much clarity from a piece Jenkins wrote last week, urging his readers in The Guardian to go and see what he says is "the most terrifying show I have ever seen." The public, it seems, need no urging.
They are flocking to look for themselves. More than 1,100 people crammed in on the day the exhibition opened, trying to discover if Modernism was simply a style, supposedly a matter of straight lines and glass walls, or whether it meant something more. Not that this caricature represents the full and often contradictory range of Modernist expression, from the sculptural curves of Erich Mendelsohn, to the elegant restraint of Mies van der Rohe, none of which seemed to be inspiring much actual terror on the day I went.
To judge by the fevered nature of Jenkins's arguments, you might be encouraged to conclude that he was putting his readers at serious personal risk. He appears to be characterizing Wilk as acting the mad scientist, breaking into a locked vault, thawing out the last surviving frozen vial of the long-dead plague virus of Modernism, hurling it into a reservoir and standing back cackling hysterically.
While there are many subjects on which Simon Jenkins is a perceptive and intelligent writer, aesthetics is not one of them.
This is a man who, it might be remembered, in his role as a Millennium Commissioner in Britain, once suggested that Lottery money would be wasted on the Tate, London, since it was, "a place dedicated to presenting dirty underpants as art," and that Bankside power station should instead be turned over to a museum of 19th-century machinery, rather than be contaminated by Modernism.
At one point he suggests that the housing policies of the welfare state were like the forced deportations of the totalitarians. And his grasp of some key facts is also occasionally hazy. Jenkins is wrong to say that Hitler closed the Bauhaus. The Nazis would have been content with purging its Jewish teachers. It was Mies van der Rohe, its director, who closed it rather than accept their terms.
Jenkins goes on to claim that "the creations of Mies van der Rohe ... along with the cruel brutalism of Le Corbusier, must have caused more human misery than any other in history." Including, presumably, the atom bomb.
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