WASHINGTON, D.C.—By late July, when the government slows to a swampy crawl and Washington, D.C. empties of most everyone but sun-baked tourists, the capital can resemble a ghost town. But this summer, two exhibitions chronicling the frenzied Utopian projects and visual experimentation of interwar Modernism breathe life into the stagnant city. An impressive show at the Corcoran Gallery of Art charts the evolution of Modernism as a design principle, while another, at the National Gallery of Art, surveys the rapid-fire growth of photography in Central Europe during the same period.

And if, as the organizers of documenta 12 suggest, we should be asking ourselves if Modernism is our antiquity, both shows might just form the urtext for two contemporary exhibitions also on view here this summer. At Meat Market Gallery, emerging German artist Stephan Schulz takes up the convergence of body and machine that preoccupied so many artists in the Corcoran show, while Wolfgang Tillmans's triumphant mid-career survey at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden brings new vitality to the photograph in today’s ever-proliferating media culture.

Total Design
The first gallery in the Corcoran's "Modernism: Designing a New World 1914–1939" is a spare overture to a packed exhibition. Five iconic objects—among them Marcel Breuer's leather and tubular-steel club chair (1925), a study for Le Courbusier's Villa Savoye (1928), and a model of Vladimir Tatlin's 1920 proposal for a Monument to the Third International—stand up against the museum's Beaux-Arts interior and announce a new era. Assembling more than 390 works from international collections, the show originated at London's Victoria & Albert Museum; the Corcoran exhibition, its lone U.S. engagement, ends July 29.

The show divides art, design, and architecture into themes such as "Spiritual Utopia," "Suprematism and Constructivism," and "Healthy Body Culture," with dozens of examples of each movement, preoccupation, and ideal. The comprehensive exhibition spans from icons to rarely seen gems, demonstrating the degree to which designers strove to turn modern life into a gesamtkunstwerk. A section devoted to the Bauhaus, for example, ranges from familiar lamps and table objects by Marianne Brandt to rarely exhibited jewelry by Kiev-born Naum Slutzky, and includes all the nesting tables, textiles, and building plans in between.

Bringing Fordist efficiency to daily life is an original "Frankfurt Kitchen," designed in the 1920s by the architect Grete Lihotzky and recently removed from a German estate after 80 years of continuous use. A promotional film for the kitchen screens nearby, detailing what were seen as liberating ergonomic advantages for the almost comically objectified housewife.

The one conspicuous absence in the show is a contextualization of the works in 20th-century political narratives. Nevertheless, the exhibition succeeds in conveying how, in the fractured aftermath of World War I, artists believed they were in a period of unimaginable possibility, a staging ground for the radical projects that would ground contemporary design.

Capturing Modernity
The period following World War I brought severe political and social upheaval, and many artists expressed their shock at collapsed empires and changing values through a medium that itself signified Modernity. "Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918–1945," at the National Gallery of Art through Sept. 3, brings together some 150 works from Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, and Poland. The books, magazines, and photos are concentrated in a series of corridor-like galleries, but rather than feeling cramped, the close quarters encourage connections between individual works and thematically organized sections, including "Modern Living," "New Women—New Men," and "The Spread of Surrealism." The show will travel to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York from Oct. 12 to Jan. 13.

Like the Corcoran show, the NGA exhibition mixes work by well-known artists with strong surprises from their less famous contemporaries. A gallery of abstractions, for example, brings together Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's Photogram with Eiffel Tower (1925–29) and a delicate exposure of flowers and gauze by Walter Peterhans with comparatively unknown experimental works such as a study of mechanical devices by Czech photographer Eugen Wiskovsky.