The Bauhaus, Unexpurgated
by Phyllis Tuchman
JANUARY 7, 2010 TAGS:
Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity delivers on many fronts. For one, it’s a classic Museum of Modern Art survey exhibition: It has masterpieces by heroic figures of the 20th century, unknown artists who pique your interest, classics in new contexts (Marcel Breuer’s Club Chair) and unfamiliar artworks by popular painters (hand puppets by Paul Klee).
Then too, the sprawling, cluttered show celebrates the founding of the Bauhaus in Weimar 90 years ago. In the wake of the Great War and concurrent with the birth of the Weimar Republic, a school of applied arts and an academy of art merged, flourished, and ultimately perished amid Hitler’s rise and a global Depression. The displays at MoMA tell the unexpurgated version of this story through paintings, prints, pottery, wall hangings, photographs, rugs, chess sets, chairs, wallpaper, and theater designs, not to mention egg cups, samovars, and ash trays executed by homegrown German talents as well as Russian, Hungarian, Swiss, Dutch, and even Japanese and American artists.
This survey also upends widely held notions regarding the legendary school. For decades, the Bauhaus name has evoked flat-roofed buildings with smooth white walls and bands of horizontal windows. Now, it turns out, the instructors and students embraced a plethora of styles, not just an aesthetic favoring primary colors, cubic forms, and lots of glass and metal. As artist Oskar Schlemmer, an instructor for eight years, observed in 1929 regarding the sleek and the reductive, “This style can be found everywhere but at the Bauhaus.”
In the end, however, it’s the elegiac tone that will haunt you long after you’ve seen this exhibition, which closes Jan. 25. With one or two exceptions, students and their instructors made everything MoMA has installed while they were in residence in Weimar (1919-1925), and, after the program moved, in Dessau (1925-32) and finally Berlin (1932-33). You’re left wondering what might have been created had this amazing institution with its radical curriculum kept its doors open longer.
Initially, several Bauhaus artists were preoccupied with folk tales, fragmented visions, and death. Theater director Lothar Schreyer’s circa-1920 coffin cover, with the painted effigy of a woman formed from geometric shapes, is the first of the show’s many discoveries. A cross between folk art and medieval tomb sculpture, Death House for a Woman, as Schreyer called his work — he also made a death house for himself, but in the end used the two coffins to bury his mother and father -- reminds viewers, as all such work does, of the fleetingness of life. The reconstructed casket also references the back story of such Bauhaus figures as founding director Walter Gropius, an architect who spent World War I as a cavalry officer on the Western Front.
Other work in the earliest section of the show is by artists who were only briefly at the Bauhaus. Attracted by the preliminary descriptions of the program, more students attended the school’s first semesters than any others. Shunning traditional studios, they chose to participate in craft workshops in six areas: sculpture (stone, wood, ceramics, plaster), metalwork, cabinetry, painting/decorating (wall, glass, panel), printmaking, and weaving. Architecture wasn’t introduced until Hannes Meyer became the school’s director in 1927; and it became the sole focus when Mies van der Rohe took over in 1933, the last year.
Students like architect Marcel Breuer, weaver Gunta Stolzl, and colorist Josef Albers, who all became Bauhaus masters, make the MoMA show so poignant. In 1921, Breuer and Stolzl created a magnificent oak and cherry wood African chair with a tapestry-like cushion and back. The earliest surviving piece of Bauhaus furniture, it only resurfaced in 2004. Its primitive design, autumnal colors, and expressive execution stop you in your tracks. Other Breuer chairs, including another made with Stolzl, as well as tables peppered throughout the show reveal how a machine-age aesthetic can emerge from once-handmade properties.
For that matter, Josef Albers is seen here as a jack-of-all-trades. He’s represented by glass grid pictures, a fruit bowl, a tea glass with saucer and stirrer, two armchairs, stacking tables, a writing desk, twelve gelatin prints, wallpaper, and sandblasted glass images of skyscrapers. What was in the water at the Bauhaus? The luminosity of Albers’ glass pictures is so enthralling, it’s worth the price of admission to see.
Other knockouts at MoMA include the enchanting hand puppets miniaturist Paul Klee made to entertain his son, Felix, in 1923 and designs for beguiling wall paintings by his housemate, Vasily Kandinsky, created in 1922. If exhibited anonymously today, both projects could pass as works by contemporary artists. So would Laszlo Moholgy-Nagy’s Constructions in Enamel of 1923 as well as some of his photograms. Modern artworks that hit their mark clearly remain ageless.
As befits a survey show that opens with the whiff of death, Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity draws to a close with several paintings rooted in memory. One of them, Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus Stairway (1932), has long been a touchstone of 20th century art. It has hung, on and off for decades, in a MoMA stairway that resembles it, and Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein paid homage when he copied it in his deadpan style. No wall labels existed to indicate that Schlemmer’s tenure at the Bauhaus ran from 1921-1929. Consequently, it was a surprise to learn he painted his wonderful glass-lit Dessau interior after he heard the school was closing. “The work,” co-curator Leah Dickerman points out in the superb exhibition catalogue, “is a memorial.” With paintings by Klee and Kandinsky hanging near it, the three former masters were, Dickerman concludes, “No longer aiming at ‘the summary of all that is contemporary,’ [but instead] they offer ruminations of the past.”
In 1938, Gropius and designer Herbert Bayer, a former student and master, organized MoMA’s last major Bauhaus survey. Because they focused on the years 1923-28, many of the treasures in the current rendition were excluded. Bringing a You Are There immediacy to the latest scholarship, curators Leah Dickerman and Barry Bergdoll have allowed us, with no sacrifice of quality, to experience the uncertain moments as well as the glory years of the remarkable Bauhaus.
Then too, the sprawling, cluttered show celebrates the founding of the Bauhaus in Weimar 90 years ago. In the wake of the Great War and concurrent with the birth of the Weimar Republic, a school of applied arts and an academy of art merged, flourished, and ultimately perished amid Hitler’s rise and a global Depression. The displays at MoMA tell the unexpurgated version of this story through paintings, prints, pottery, wall hangings, photographs, rugs, chess sets, chairs, wallpaper, and theater designs, not to mention egg cups, samovars, and ash trays executed by homegrown German talents as well as Russian, Hungarian, Swiss, Dutch, and even Japanese and American artists.This survey also upends widely held notions regarding the legendary school. For decades, the Bauhaus name has evoked flat-roofed buildings with smooth white walls and bands of horizontal windows. Now, it turns out, the instructors and students embraced a plethora of styles, not just an aesthetic favoring primary colors, cubic forms, and lots of glass and metal. As artist Oskar Schlemmer, an instructor for eight years, observed in 1929 regarding the sleek and the reductive, “This style can be found everywhere but at the Bauhaus.”
In the end, however, it’s the elegiac tone that will haunt you long after you’ve seen this exhibition, which closes Jan. 25. With one or two exceptions, students and their instructors made everything MoMA has installed while they were in residence in Weimar (1919-1925), and, after the program moved, in Dessau (1925-32) and finally Berlin (1932-33). You’re left wondering what might have been created had this amazing institution with its radical curriculum kept its doors open longer.
Initially, several Bauhaus artists were preoccupied with folk tales, fragmented visions, and death. Theater director Lothar Schreyer’s circa-1920 coffin cover, with the painted effigy of a woman formed from geometric shapes, is the first of the show’s many discoveries. A cross between folk art and medieval tomb sculpture, Death House for a Woman, as Schreyer called his work — he also made a death house for himself, but in the end used the two coffins to bury his mother and father -- reminds viewers, as all such work does, of the fleetingness of life. The reconstructed casket also references the back story of such Bauhaus figures as founding director Walter Gropius, an architect who spent World War I as a cavalry officer on the Western Front.Other work in the earliest section of the show is by artists who were only briefly at the Bauhaus. Attracted by the preliminary descriptions of the program, more students attended the school’s first semesters than any others. Shunning traditional studios, they chose to participate in craft workshops in six areas: sculpture (stone, wood, ceramics, plaster), metalwork, cabinetry, painting/decorating (wall, glass, panel), printmaking, and weaving. Architecture wasn’t introduced until Hannes Meyer became the school’s director in 1927; and it became the sole focus when Mies van der Rohe took over in 1933, the last year.
Students like architect Marcel Breuer, weaver Gunta Stolzl, and colorist Josef Albers, who all became Bauhaus masters, make the MoMA show so poignant. In 1921, Breuer and Stolzl created a magnificent oak and cherry wood African chair with a tapestry-like cushion and back. The earliest surviving piece of Bauhaus furniture, it only resurfaced in 2004. Its primitive design, autumnal colors, and expressive execution stop you in your tracks. Other Breuer chairs, including another made with Stolzl, as well as tables peppered throughout the show reveal how a machine-age aesthetic can emerge from once-handmade properties.
For that matter, Josef Albers is seen here as a jack-of-all-trades. He’s represented by glass grid pictures, a fruit bowl, a tea glass with saucer and stirrer, two armchairs, stacking tables, a writing desk, twelve gelatin prints, wallpaper, and sandblasted glass images of skyscrapers. What was in the water at the Bauhaus? The luminosity of Albers’ glass pictures is so enthralling, it’s worth the price of admission to see.
Other knockouts at MoMA include the enchanting hand puppets miniaturist Paul Klee made to entertain his son, Felix, in 1923 and designs for beguiling wall paintings by his housemate, Vasily Kandinsky, created in 1922. If exhibited anonymously today, both projects could pass as works by contemporary artists. So would Laszlo Moholgy-Nagy’s Constructions in Enamel of 1923 as well as some of his photograms. Modern artworks that hit their mark clearly remain ageless.
As befits a survey show that opens with the whiff of death, Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity draws to a close with several paintings rooted in memory. One of them, Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus Stairway (1932), has long been a touchstone of 20th century art. It has hung, on and off for decades, in a MoMA stairway that resembles it, and Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein paid homage when he copied it in his deadpan style. No wall labels existed to indicate that Schlemmer’s tenure at the Bauhaus ran from 1921-1929. Consequently, it was a surprise to learn he painted his wonderful glass-lit Dessau interior after he heard the school was closing. “The work,” co-curator Leah Dickerman points out in the superb exhibition catalogue, “is a memorial.” With paintings by Klee and Kandinsky hanging near it, the three former masters were, Dickerman concludes, “No longer aiming at ‘the summary of all that is contemporary,’ [but instead] they offer ruminations of the past.”In 1938, Gropius and designer Herbert Bayer, a former student and master, organized MoMA’s last major Bauhaus survey. Because they focused on the years 1923-28, many of the treasures in the current rendition were excluded. Bringing a You Are There immediacy to the latest scholarship, curators Leah Dickerman and Barry Bergdoll have allowed us, with no sacrifice of quality, to experience the uncertain moments as well as the glory years of the remarkable Bauhaus.
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