Classic/Fantastic: Selections from the Modern Design Collection

Order and disorder, reason and emotion, restraint and excess—opposing impulses such as these have influenced design since the beginning of civilization. The exhibition juxtaposes these divergent approaches, presenting an Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy of design philosophies in the modern era. Of the approximately seventy-five works in a wide range of media—including furniture, metalwork, ceramics, glass, textiles, and drawings—half are devoted to designs rooted in the centuries-old vocabulary of classicism, updated yet still linked to the rules and traditions of the past, and the other half to romantic and surreal subjects of fantasy, drawn from the realm of pure imagination.