Battle of design

A tea service or a radio set is unlikely to elicit the same depth of emotional or intellectual response as a painting or sculpture.

In design exhibitions, more depends on the narratives created by the curators' selection, juxtaposition and interpretation of objects.

The ambition and range of the Victoria and Albert Museum's new exhibition is huge.

It explores modernist design in the cold war decades on both sides of the political divide in Europe, the US and the Soviet Union within the context of fine art and film. Its artefacts range from Stalinist town planning to Pierre Cardin frocks, from Picasso ceramics to the Messerschmitt micro-car.

This massive topic is organised chronologically under seven themes through which the cultural arena of the cold war is explored. The era is defined as one which promised "both utopia and catastrophe" and the response of artists and designers to this dual vision forms a strong framework to the themes.

The first section, Anxiety And Hope In The Aftermath Of War, explores the stylistic opposition of the two power blocs. The Stalinist classicism of a reconstruction scheme for east Berlin is contrasted with west Berlin's modernist housing schemes by Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius.

The adaptation of wartime technologies to peacetime purposes is shown in works such as Eames's plywood furniture. A model of The Destroyed City, 1947, Ossip Zadkine's anguished monument for Rotterdam, evokes both hope and despair, while Edgard Varèse's spooky soundtrack to Corbusier's experimental film Poème Électronique evokes cold war anxieties.

The second section explores the ways in which art and design "were conscripted for propaganda" by both sides. We learn that the US financed west Germany's influential Ulm School of Design and Britain's international competition for a Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner.

The maquette of Reg Butler's winning entry for this is bizarrely juxtaposed with a model of Yevgeny Vuchetich's Soviet Victory Monument in Berlin, despite its subject matter being unrelated thematically to Butler's work.

As the exhibition's theme is modernism, there is understandably no room for discussion of the ideological debates about non-modernist and modernist socialist realism. However, the inclusion of a few non-modernist socialist realist works divorced from this context merely reinforces existing prejudices against it.

The true heart of this exhibition lies in the next five sections, which deal with various aspects of late-1950s and '60s modernism.

Starting with the Khrushchov thaw, it introduces us to the modernist designs of the Soviet block. We see works such as the elegant bio-morphic forms of a coffee service by Polish designer Henryk Tomaszewski, the child-centred designs for the modernist Pioneer Palace in the Lenin Hills, Moscow, and surrealist free-form glass work from Czechoslovakia.

Crisis And Fear explores the effects of the Cuban missile crisis on art and design via works such as Adams's set designs for Kubrick's film Doctor Strangelove (1964) and radio and television sets whose design evoke themes of surveillance and spies.

The influence of the space race forms the basis of the fifth and arguably most stunning section.

Fashions inspired by space suits are shown alongside the real thing worn by astronauts and cosmonauts. The peaceful harnessing of technology is seen in futuristic designs for telecommunications towers, including models of London's Post Office Tower and Moscow's Ostankino Tower.

One of the most thrilling architectural designs here is the model and drawings for Karel Hubácek's combination of a telecommunications tower and hotel in Libere, Czechoslovakia (1968-73), which appears to hover effortlessly above its base like a spaceship.

A small section exploring the posters and films engendered by the direct action revolutions of the late 1960s leads us to the finale, The Last Surge Of Utopian Thinking.

Here, we see intriguing speculations on alternatives to consumerist living and the beginnings of ecological awareness, such as the Slovak art group VAL's Heliopolis, (1966-7), which imagined building an entire city delicately poised on top of the Tatra mountains to prevent human interference with the beauties of nature.

The exhibition is open-minded in its attitude to the Soviet bloc. Indeed, it is driven by a passion for post-Stalinist modernism. However, the differing ideological outlooks and historical circumstances of the two blocs is insufficiently explored.

A virtually unscathed US should not be directly compared with a Soviet Union so horrifyingly scarred psychologically, emotionally and materially by the war without explanation of this difference.

The Soviet bloc's design and production for durability stemmed from Marxist ideology - providing for need rather than profit, as opposed to capitalism's relentless drive for marketable novelty. Moreover, a concern with a desirable domestic environment enshrines bourgeois values.

Communism is subtly undermined or presented as passé while the hegemony of capitalism is implied by its not being defined.

However, the exhibition does consider the ambiguities faced by artists and designers. It will open the wider public to the very existence of important art and design behind the Iron Curtain and its focus on European countries is a welcome and much-needed alternative to the stereotypical US-Soviet polarity.

It introduces fascinating themes and surprises us with many rare and wonderful artefacts. Based on pioneering, scholarly research, it manages to also entertain, educate and enthral.

Exhibition runs until January 11. Price £9/£5-7 concessions.