Germany’s Bauhaus school †the most famous and influential Modernist institution in the Twentieth Century †brought together an extraordinary array of artists, architects and designers in a remarkable dialogue about the nature of Modern art. Seeking to rethink the very form of contemporary life, the faculty and students of the Bauhaus (literally, “house of building”) created dazzling experiments in the visual arts. Between its founding in 1919 and 1933, when it was shuttered by the Nazis, it formed a close partnership among craft, design and production, influencing what we now call industrial design in ways that are still felt today.
Marking the 90th anniversary of the establishment of the Bauhaus †and the 80th anniversary of the founding of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the museum has organized “Bauhaus 1919‱933: Workshops for Modernity.” On view through January 25, the exhibition brings together more than 400 works that document the impressively broad range of the school’s activities, including furniture, architecture, industrial design, graphics, photography, ceramics, theater and costume design, painting and sculpture. Included are works by famous faculty members and students, such as Anni and Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, Lyonel Feininger, Walter Gropius, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Oskar Schlemmer, plus less well-known but equally inventive talents.
The show is organized by MoMA’s chief curator of architecture and design Barry Bergdoll and curator in the department of painting and sculpture Leah Dickerman and MoMA colleagues.
In contrast to the conventional approach that uses the Bauhaus as a shorthand for a timeless style of international Modernism, co-curators Bergdoll and Dickerman examine the school in its historical moment, 1919‱933 †the same years as the Weimar Republic †positing it as a lively experimental school rather than an aesthetic movement.
The Bauhaus was led by three directors, each an important architectural figure and each with different outlooks and philosophies: visionary founder Walter Gropius (1919‱928), communist Hannes Meyer (1928‱930) and pragmatic Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1930‱933). The school occupied sites in three cities with different cultural and political climates. Founded in 1919 in Weimar, birthplace of Goethe and Schiller, it was forced by local political opposition to relocate to the industrial city of Dessau in 1925, where it occupied buildings designed by Gropius. In 1932, after the Nazis closed that site, a small group of faculty and students tried to carry on in Berlin but, under pressure from the Gestapo, closed in less than a year. Director Mies van der Rohe blandly explained that “the economic situation does not allow for a continuation of the institution.”
The Bauhaus saga began in 1919 when the task of merging Weimar state schools of applied and fine arts fell to Gropius, 32, a vigorous, successful and ambitious architect. Issuing a call for artists in all media to gather around new artistic purposes, both aesthetic and social, he wrote in 1919, “The arts have become ‘isolated’ in the modern age, and the school must forge a ‘new unity’ between design and technology.”
In picking the faculty and organizing the curriculum, Gropius challenged conventional art hierarchies, placing fine art, architecture and design on an equal footing. As Bauhaus historian Nicholas Fox Weber writes in his superb, recently published The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism , “Gropius’s optimism and tenacity, and his powers of persuasion, made the Bauhaus a magnet for eager students and brilliant faculty members.”
Emigrating to the United States in 1937, Gropius became an enormously important figure as professor of architecture and then chairman of the department in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. While helping to revolutionize American architectural education, he designed a number of important buildings and wrote prolifically on his architectural doctrines.
Works in the exhibition demonstrate how the school functioned as a cultural think tank for new products, engaging in a 14-year exploration of the nature of art in an age of technological progress, industrial production and global communication.
Some of the most interesting Bauhaus designs came from Breuer (1902‱981), a Gropius protégé. As a student and later faculty member, Breuer responded to Gropius’s call for complementing technical knowledge with aesthetic ambition. Breuer’s tubular-steel chairs, Bauhaus icons, were sleek, light and space-efficient. Although hardly revolutionary, they contributed to demonstrations of new ways of living. “Cheap, mass producible and easy to hand[le], they were meant to make no demands, to take no room, to be subservient to the user’s actions, and to allow the free unfolding of modern life,” writes Frederic J. Schwartz in the exhibition catalog. One expert opined that Breuer’s club chair, 1925, is at least as important as a pioneering work of Modern art as Picasso’s celebrated painting “Demoiselles d’Avignon.”
On view is a startling circa 1926 photograph of a young woman in a Bauhaus-woven dress sitting in a Breuer club chair, wearing a primitivist mask made by German painter Oskar Schlemmer. The “blank visage” of the mask, co-curator Dickerman writes in the catalog, “is both deracinated and classless, just as the Bauhaus accoutrements of modern life are stripped of cultural traces&The Bauhaus subject is a robotic mute,” passing “easily across political borders.”
Breuer’s striking five-legged “African” chair, made of gaily painted cherrywood and oak and adorned with a colorful textile weave of gold, hemp, wool, cotton, silk and other fabric threads by Gunta Stozl, was a considerable departure from contemporary European designs. It embodied the spirit of romantic experimentalism that pervaded the early years of the school. After emigrating to the United States, Breuer designed a number of important buildings, as did Mies van der Rohe, notably Manhattan’s Seagram Building.
Josef Albers (1888‱976), another student-turned-instructor, demonstrated his commitment to exact, succinct forms in stacked, minimalist wooden tables and innovative, sandblasted glasswork. Emigrating to the United States in 1933, he taught at Black Mountain College and Yale University, and became famous for his “Homage to the Square” paintings.
Joseph’s wife, Anni (1899‱994), was a gifted, progressive textile designer whose beautiful decorative weavings featured bold, simple abstract compositions that set her apart in the field. Breaking away from symmetry, she created remarkably dynamic work at the Bauhaus and continued in that vein throughout a celebrated career in the United States.
Hungarian-born, Berlin-based Moholy-Nagy (1895‱946), who shared Gropius’s ardor for machine-made forms, hastened the school’s embrace of modern technology, an important element in the institution’s development. As head of the metal workshop, Moholy-Nagy advocated geometric abstraction and creation of a new vision for the modern age. He also sparked interest in new media forms like photography and film. His obliquely angled architectural photographs and challenging, cameraless photograms created abstract images that attracted considerable interest.
Painters whom Gropius lured into the fold, especially Josef Albers, Kandinsky and Klee, were important players in the early years of the school. Russian-born, German-trained Kandinsky (1866‱944), philosopher of abstraction, writer and painter, served on the faculty 1922‱933. Entranced by the relationship between music and art, he used vivid colors and bold, Modernistic signs and symbols to evoke sound as well as emotion in his work. Case in point: “Schwarze Form (Black Form),” 1923. Kandinsky’s writings and art, widely disseminated, continue to be influential.
Klee (1879‱940), born in Switzerland and trained in Munich, taught at the Bauhaus 1921‱931. Brilliant, reticent and productive, he created 10,000 works, including delicate paintings that are highly inventive, witty, joyous and lively, often featuring sequences of parallel lines and playful figures. When photography, photomontage and graphic design eclipsed painting at the Bauhaus, Klee left for Switzerland. The sensitivity and originality of his art placed him in the front ranks of the avant-garde †and earned him designation as a “degenerate” artist banned by the Nazis.
Schlemmer (1888‱943), who invented a unique form of figurative painting (“Bauhaus Stairway,” 1932) and was an inventive and ballet and theater designer (“Study for ‘The Triadic Ballet,” circa 1921), came on board for eight years. He headed the school’s theater workshop and maintained an informal journal chronicling the school’s activities. Schlemmer’s work was included in the Nazis infamous “degenerate” art exhibition of 1937.
Bayer (1900‱985), an Austrian who created dazzling graphics, spent seven years at the Bauhaus and, as Weber puts it, became “one of the most important graphic artists of the Twentieth Century.” He created eye-catching signage for Bauhaus exhibitions, posters and book covers, among other contributions. In the United States, Bayer designed exhibitions for MoMA, including its 1938 Bauhaus exhibition, and served as a designer for major corporations.
Feininger (1871‱956), an American of German parentage, was Gropius’s first faculty appointment, serving from 1919 to 1932. His woodcut of a soaring, abstracted Gothic cathedral graced the cover of a 1919 leaflet containing a brief Gropius manifesto explaining the aims of the new school. Returning to New York in 1937, Feininger carved out a successful career creating Cubist-inspired paintings characterized by architectural forms fractured by a prismatic breakdown of light.
As MoMA director Glenn Lowry points out in the catalog, it is fitting that his museum organized this superb exhibition. Its collections, building and overall mission mesh well with the aims of the Bauhaus school. Indeed, MoMA’s founding director, Alfred H. Barr Jr, once wrote, “I regard the three days which I spent at the Bauhaus in 1927 as one of the important incidents in my own education.” Concludes Lowry, “The establishment of the Bauhaus and MoMA can be seen as parallel efforts to adapt art’s existing institutional structures to the art of a new age.”
Considering its breadth, depth and astute organization, augmented by a perceptive catalog, this is likely to be the definitive Bauhaus exhibition for some time to come. It makes clear that the bold German experiment in melding art to the technology of the day has had a lasting impact on art and design everywhere. As co-curators Bergdoll and Dickerman put it, “Our world is no longer the late-Modernist one in which artists, designers and architects intensely sought validation from the Bauhaus, or reacted oedipally against it. In the perspectives freshly possible, what had seemed the paradigmatic Modernist institution may offer not only an alternate vision of modernity, but a keenly relevant example for our complex present.”
The 344-page catalog, with major essays by Bergdoll and Dickerman and brief commentaries by more than 20 scholars, is published by MoMA.
The Museum of Modern Art is at 11 West 53rd Street. For information, 212-708-9400 or www.moma.org .
