Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Dreams and Nightmares: Utopian Visions in Modern Art
December 8, 1983 – February 12, 1984
A major loan exhibition of 136 works by 62 artists casts a sidelong glance at George Orwell's 1984 as we actually enter that year. It explores artists' visionary conceptions of the 20th century—both optimistic and pessimistic. Paintings, sculptures, architectural projects, works on paper, and a video piece reveal the shift from Utopian confidence in an ideal society, embodied by Futurism, Purism, Bauhaus, De Stijl, and others, to the apprehensive disillusionment of the postwar years, seen in the works of Ben Shahn, Jacob Landau, and others.
Catalogue
