1913 focuses on the role of sculpture in a year poised, richly and precariously, on threshold of the First World War.

The exhibition looks at the different understandings of sculpture and ‘the object’ in relation to painting, drawing, photography, architecture, theatre, dance, and music. This pan-European exhibition explores the place of sculpture across and between schools of thought: the –isms such as Cubism, Futurism, Orphism and Suprematism. 

Showing sculpture alongside other art forms, 1913 asks to what extent sculpture helped shape, demonstrate and further ideas of the time – and to what extent it illustrated them. This was the year of the first experiments with sound sculpture and kinetic sculpture; of Duchamp’s ‘Bicycle Wheel’ and Epstein’s ‘Flenite Relief’; of Guillaume Apollinaire’s ‘Cubist Painters’ and Roger Fry’s ‘Omega Workshops’; of Cubism arriving in Moscow and the Armory Show opening in New York. On the eve of the centenary of 1913, this exhibition’s subtitle alludes to Robert Musil’s great unfinished novel ‘A Man Without Qualities’ set in 1913 that studied, with the sharp wit, the onset of a new, modern attitude that left fin-de-siècle Vienna behind. 

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