Oh! What a lovely Cold War exhibition

I knew I wouldn’t have anything bad to say about this exhibition when I turned a corner and came across a masterpiece by Andrej Wroblewski, the undiscovered Polish Picasso, whose paintings always make my eyes water. Wroblewski’s brilliance was cut short by his death at 30 and his pictures have never been exhibited in Britain but here was one of his best — a large canvas from 1949 in a mournful palette of blue, olive and white, which showed a series of male figures in poses that evoke the violence of the Second World War, the poverty in its aftermath, and heaps of psychological torment. It is the experiences captured in this painting which explains all the wildly imaginative and daftly ambitious exhibits to come in this brilliant exhibition about design in the Cold War.

From Charles and Ray Eames’s plywood leg-splint to Picasso’s painted plates and the glass-curtained Lever House skyscraper in New York, I have never seen an exhibition which organised such a diverse array of artworks and design objects with such historical coherence.

Typewriters, chairs and lamps, kitchen clocks (with timers), films, paintings and posters, architectural models of pavilions and radio towers, photographs, caricatures, crockery and sputniks have been organised into four rooms with distinctive themes and chronological continuity — from post-war reconstruction to political ideologies, space and the future.

The show serves up many of the iconic images of Cold War design, such as Roman Cieslewicz’s Opus magazine cover featuring two identical superhero characters, each with the initials of a different superpower emblazoned on his chest — USSR and USA. There’s a smattering of the geodesic domes of the Futurist Buckminster Fuller, including a drawing of his loopy idea of covering half of Manhattan in one. I knew I’d come across an IBM electric typewriter, and the classic East German communist car, the Trabant (which spawned scores of jokes such as: why does a Trabant have wheels? So you don’t have to carry it).

Yet the charm of this exhibition lies in the inspired arcaneness of many of the exhibit choices. I like to think I have some familiarity with the esoteric marginalia of communist history and the potholed B-roads of Modernist design, but I was completely out of my league in this show. There is early work by Boris Mikhailov, the Russian photographer known for his stark images of the poor and homeless of post-Soviet Russia from the Nineties. Here they are showing his photographs from the late Sixties of communist military parades, when he was still an amateur photographer from the Ukraine. The images, dominated by the official political colour — red — have a wonderfully ironic drabness: soldiers stand to attention in front of a tractor on a podium, a racing driver salutes as he passes a line-up of army officers.

Other Eastern European highlights include stunning collages by the Czech artist Jiri Kolar, which are virtually unknown here. With great precision the curators picked a "diary" series from 1968, the year of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

As one might expect, a vitrine is devoted to the influential West German HfG design school of Ulm, which like all German design schools seems to have been meticulously functionalist. But who would have guessed that the nerdy curators would have placed opposite a selection of equally sleek modernist items from Zagreb’s EXAT 51, including a model of its pavilion for the 1952 Brussels Expo, which it took them two years to find. There is a clever point, as always, behind this juxtaposition. In the old days, communist culture was depicted as a grey monolith, where every artist slavishly followed the official style of Social Realism. In fact, artists and designers of the Soviet bloc constantly struggled to subvert the official rules. There were outposts of modernist innovation in Eastern Europe as in the West.

A wry sense of humour towards the past runs gently through the show, which, one gets the impression, includes all the wackiest moments of Cold War design. Thus the V&A technicians have reconstructed Oasis 7 by the Austrian design group Haus-Rucker-Co, which was exhibited at the German international art expo, Documenta V, in Kassel in 1972. This strange structure was a huge bubble of inflatable plastic suspended from a second-floor window. Inside was a scaffolded stairway by which one approaches two palm trees with a hammock suspended in between. The purpose of this aerial desert island was to — you guessed it — "alter perception of a familiar public space, thereby suggesting the possibility of experimentation and change." History has a habit of turning the most earnestly expressed ideas of artists into great moments of comedy, and somebody should really have warned Oasis 7’s designers about that.

Artists and architects reflected the Cold War in their work — in paintings of nuclear explosions and war zones (there’s a terrific hanging of one of Robert Rauschenberg’s splodge-and-screenprint images of conflict next to Gerhard Richter’s painted blur of fighter jets). But there was also a reverse process. The Cold War affected the kinds of art and architecture that were being produced. Another smirk-inducing section of the exhibition brings together scale models of the radio towers of different parts of Europe which, whichever ideology one belonged to, were symbols of technology and truth. One may compare and contrast our relatively dumpy Post Office tower, from 1965, which looks like a tube of Polos, with Moscow’s slim rocket-like Television Tower, from 1967 — and both are shamed by Czechoslovakia’s Jested telecommunications tower, whose cone protrudes from the top of a mountain like the nose of an enormous spaceship. Both sides in the Cold War competed to out-futurise each other in their designs, and it all looks a bit Buck Rogers now.

The material of Cold War Modern is displayed with a great sense of humour, yet this is not a lightweight exhibition but a landmark one, which reflects the new historical thinking on both communism and the Cold War. In the old days, the battle between East and West was depicted as one between an all-powerful state, where everyone queued for their food (that’s Russia) and a technological utopia of Hoovers and colour TVs (that’s us).