WASHINGTON, D.C.- The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden presents "Metropolis in the Machine Age," an exhibition exploring how the modern city inspired numerous avant-garde artists in the 1910s, 20s and 30s. The show continues through Sept. 2, 2002. This sixth and largest exhibition in the museum’s "Collection in Context" series, which uses works from the collection and other Smithsonian sources to explore broad historic themes, focuses on the early 20th-century era when technology altered the look and feel of life, manufacturing replaced the rural economy, and cities grew upward and outward. As embodied by nearly 40 works on view, some 23 painters, sculptors, printmakers and photographers working on both sides of the Atlantic – from the Cubo-Futurists in Europe to the Precisionists in America – used urban images as metaphors for utopia and streamlined geometric styles as visual equivalents for a "machine-tooled" future. Their visions range from gleaming skyscrapers and semi-abstract symbols to close-up photographs and sculptures of workers who built and toiled in cities. Valerie Fletcher and Judith Zilczer, the Hirshhorn curators who organized the exhibition, use extensive wall labels to trace the show’s theme. In an introduction (paraphrased here) they state: “When the Eiffel Tower was created for the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris, its status as the highest structure in the world challenged European and American architects to design ever-taller buildings, altering the shape of the modern metropolis. Improvements in elevator engineering and steel manufacture made possible the towering edifices that began to dominate skylines. Before long, the skyscraper came to symbolize civic pride, economic success, and modernity.” “Revelations offered by history are often unexpected,” the curators continue. “Although the exhibition was conceived before September 11, 2001, the memory of that day’s events may impart, for some viewers, a particular poignancy to the images presented here. Let us hope that this view of the past, when artists interpreted the city and its buildings as compelling symbols of modern life, leads to revealing perspectives on the present.” The exhibition, presented in three contiguous galleries on the second floor, begins with “The New Urban Landscape,” a section of paintings and prints from the century’s early decades by Americans John Marin, Abraham Walkowitz and Max Weber. In them, Cubo-Futurist principles of simultaneous perspective, actions compressed in time, and repetitive lines evoke the energy of crowds in the streets and the speed of mass transit. Also included are clean-edged, prismatic cityscapes by the American Precisionist Louis Lozowick; New York, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Seattle and Butte, Montana are the subjects of these paintings and prints.