Modern matters.

The big exhibition at the V & A heroically sets out to provide answers and attempts to look at the whole designed world between 1914 and 1939. The dates are chosen to focus on the heroic period, when the ideas were at their freshest and most radical, before they were diluted by big business and bureaucracy following the Second World War. Partly because of the great diversity of Modernism, and the energy and intelligence of the exhibition, curated by Christopher Wilk and evocatively designed by Eva Jiricna, it rapidly becomes clear that the phenomenon was not just produced in the twentieth century--in many ways, Modernism was the twentieth century, forming our lives, externally and internally.

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Wilk and his colleagues are concerned to demonstrate the enormous range of Modernism by focusing mainly on architecture and product design, though there are some paintings, films, photography and a little sculpture. These latter arts, particularly painting, demonstrate the extraordinary subjectivity of some of Modernism's expressions. Clement Greenberg, the American critic and protagonist of the movement, quoted in the catalogue, claimed that in a Modernist painting, 'the arrangement and invention of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colors, etc [dominate] to the exclusion of anything outside of itself'. This is Modernism at its most subjective: art for art's (or artist's) sake taken to a twentieth-century extreme. Yet the early abstracts of Kandinsky and Malevich are some of the most lyrical and optimistic paintings ever created: whole new relationships between humankind and the physical world are explored.

In architecture, the exhibition stresses the social commitment of many designers and their wide range of political attitudes, from the authoritarian social zoning of Le Corbusier's happily unbuilt 1922 design for a City for Three Million Inhabitants, to the generously urbane work of people like Bruno Taut, Ernst May, J. J. P. Oud and Cornelis van Eesteren for '20s German and Dutch housing associations (much of which still exists amid flourishing landscapes and, after renovation, is very popular). The contrast between authoritarian and liberalising Modernism is shown in the other arts. Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times emphasise the potential domination of machines over humans--and so do Oskar Schlemmer's costumes for the Triadic Ballet of the Bauhaus, which are funny and deeply frightening at the same time, for they turn people into machines. Equally and sinisterly absurd are the films of prancing and marching mass gymnastics in Germany and Russia, showing the origins of the Hitler and Communist Youth movements. (After the horrors of the War, Modernists were very keen on health: sunlight, fresh air and exercise were built into their programmes.)

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Yet machines could be tools for liberation. They made possible the Frankfurt kitchens, designed by Margarete Schutte-Lihotsky (one of the first feminist architects) and prefabricated largely in wood for May's municipal housing programmes. Designed on Taylorist work-study principles to reduce the effort needed in cooking by women who were often out at work during the day, the fitted kitchens were estimated to reduce the walking distance required in preparing a meal from over 80 metres to about nine. A complete kitchen is included in the exhibition--it is even smaller than it looks in the photographs. At the other end of the social scale, the machine itself could be a liberator. A shining silver version of the splendid Tatra T87 saloon car, made in Czechoslovakia with its monocoque shell structure, rear engine, three headlights and energy-efficient streamlined shape (unlike most cars even today) is one of the highlights of the show, and one of the very few cars ever made that can really be called beautiful.

The exhibition has had a mixed reception in England. In The Guardian, Simon Jenkins used it as an opportunity to argue that Modernism was a forcing ground for totalitarianism. There is truth in this: the authoritarian side of the movement was part of a general post-war attempt to establish order, and foster industrialisation to increase prosperity. But Communist Russia, Nazi Germany and (eventually) Fascist Italy all violently turned against Modernism in almost all its aspects. In contrast, the newly independent democracies of the twentieth century like Czechoslovakia, Norway and Finland regarded Modernism as an essential part of their ethos. A criticism of the V & A show is its relatively slight coverage of the achievements of the movement in such countries, and its total lack of reference to Modernism in places like Palestine under the British Mandate and Latin America. Nor is there proper coverage of the Organic School. But to do justice to every aspect of Modernism would require the whole museum, not just the temporary galleries.

I'm still not sure that I understand what Modernism is (or was)--certainly not a style, for it encompassed Futurism and Suprematism, Dada and the Neue Sachlichkeit, lavish houses for millionaires and Existenzminimum. But the V & A show exhilaratingly demonstrates how it is part of everyone who has lived in the twentieth century and, at its best, it has offered us possibilities unrivalled by any of our predecessors.

Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-1939, V & A, London until 23 July. www.vam.ac.uk