Thanks for posting this review. It was a beautiful essay and confirmed most of the impressions I've gotten over the years of studying the period.
That Hobsbawn's high school had Blue Rider paintings including Franz Marc was enough to convince me, these were heady days. Marc was killed in WWI, but he had done enough paintings to put himself into the big expensive art history books.
Kelley wanted to know about architecture on another thread. Just go to a big fancy library and find the architecture section and pull books and look at them. The Bauhaus was essentially modern architecture. Fill your visual mind with Bauhaus stuff for everday life. Doug's wonder as to why not have beautiful things. That was the Bauhaus concept. The US answer was a little retro, but very nice also, the Arts and Crafts movement. Frank Lloyd Wright is the best known of that direction. If you can suspend your image of an barren US airport in the 50s, and try extra hard to re-conceive modernity, then you might want to try to look at the American, Charles Eames... (list members like Dennis Claxton can go visit the Eames house in Pasadena [I think]) Try to imagine how wonderful some of his design concepts were in their period, especially combined within a context of living forms from house plants, glass inclosed gardins, sunlight, water, stone, and other forms---kind of going Japaneseq. Imagine Henry Mooore and Barbara Hepworth combined with textures, pottery, textiles all made of natural materials.
If you can do this just right, you get a really beautiful asethetic. This was the height of modernity. Something like a Mac Pro with a 24" (!:161 aspect) LCD screen would fit perfectly well in such a place, designed sixty years ago.
CG