From Bauhaus to Our House – Kritisk Revy, Popular Culture, and the Roots of “Scandinavian Design”
In: A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1925-1950Search for other papers by Torben Jelsbak in
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Abstract
The Danish architectural magazine Kritisk Revy (1926–1929) occupies an important position in Scandinavian avant-garde culture of the interwar period. Edited by a group of young architects and left-wing intellectuals, the magazine served as an ideological platform for early Scandinavian modernism in architecture and design. As such the magazine may also be regarded as an early stage in the emergence and construction of the notion of “Scandinavian Design”. Kritisk Revy’s leading concept of “humane art, art for society’s sake” was formulated in an on-going dialogue with contemporary currents and positions in international modernism and the avant-garde such as Le Corbusier, Russian constructivism and the German Bauhaus School. As part of its strategy of promoting a modern ‘democratic’ or ’classless’ culture to replace traditional styles and genres of bourgeois culture, the magazine embraced a wide range of modern topics and phenomena – from advertising and shop window design to jazz music, variety theatre and film. This article analyses how Kritisk Revy’s vision of cultural modernity was developed as a response to the two apparently opposing phenomena of cultural modernity, the artistic avant-gardes on the one hand and capitalist popular and commodity culture on the other.