At the National Gallery's exhibit on Central European photography, the machinery is glamorous and the pretty women are mangled.

Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1945 is organized in an unclosed loop, moving from one war's aftermath to the next. This smartly designed show has a definite storyline--the dreaded return of war is mirrored by the return of photomontage, the technique that creates what the curators call "the cut-and-paste world," the technique of making art from wreckage--but never feels heavy-handed. The show moves easily through surrealism, political propaganda, and design for advertising, each genre and style part of the same propulsive storyline that pushes inescapably from awe through horror to salvage.

From the first room, the "modern" sensibility is obvious: The important lenses for viewing the world are technology, politics, and newspapers. The emphasis on confusion and reconstruction, scissored or discolored photographs, jumbled text unmoored from meaning, suggests a kind of pre-post-apocalyptic style. The use of rolls of film and cut-up photos as pieces of the work of art stems from a self-conscious focus on the maker of art as well as its subject. Religion as a means of understanding the world, or as anything more than an anthropological artifact, is almost entirely absent from the exhibit's works.

(Exceptions are one harrowing montage, Hans Bellmer's 1937 Machine Gun(neress) in a State of Grace, in which a mounted gun has grown lips and breasts; and perhaps the ersatz blood-and-soil mythos of Nazi propaganda.)