Design Review | 'Bauhaus'
Finding a Bit of Animal House in the Bauhaus
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
Published: November 5, 2009

Ask most people what they think of when they hear the word Bauhaus, and they’re likely to come up with tubular steel furniture, prefabricated housing, ranks of naïve utopians and Tom Wolfe’s withering disdain for all of the above. A show about the Bauhaus? No thanks. Who, after all, really needs to see another Breuer chair?
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Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Art Resource, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity at the Modern includes Josef Albers, Gitterbild. More Photos

Which is why “Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity,” opening on Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, is such an unexpected treat. The kind of exhibition that comes around once in a rare while, it takes a sledgehammer to the clichés, particularly the notion that the Bauhaus marched in lockstep to a single vision.

Organized by Barry Bergdoll, the museum’s chief curator of architecture and design, and Leah Dickerman, a curator of painting and sculpture, the show makes much of the ideological and creative clashes that rocked this German school during its brief but remarkable history — between commercial and creative values, pragmatists and idealists, social activists and aesthetes. It makes a convincing case that the remarkable creative output of the Bauhaus had as much to do with this constant discord as with the individual genius of any of its members.

A big surprise is how much of the school’s mission still feels relevant, from the effort to come to terms with mind-bending technological advances to the desire to serve an audience beyond the usual cultural elites. It’s true this mission was pursued with an optimism that would be hard to conjure today, but if the show has a message, it’s that a little naiveté can be productive.

One of the many revelations here is the quasi-religious mysticism that infused parts of the Bauhaus in its earliest years. The first image you see when you step into the galleries is an Expressionist painting from 1919 by Johannes Itten, who ran the school’s introductory course. Its colorful abstract forms, which break down into a dense pattern of overlapping triangles, circles and rectangles, evoke the refracted glass of a stained-glass cathedral window.

Just below it is a design for a coffin lid drawn in 1920 by Lothar Schreyer, a director of the Bauhaus theater, for his wife (which, in a nice Freudian twist, was used for his mother’s burial instead). A woman’s figure, composed of interlocking circles and laid over a vibrant background of gray and blue, is framed by the lid’s trapezoidal outline. Farther along you come up against Marcel Breuer’s 1921 “African” chair, whose crudely chiseled wood frame looks so out of place with conventional images of the Bauhaus that you may wonder if you’ve walked into the wrong show.

These works reveal an ambivalence about the machine age and what was being left behind. Even as Walter Gropius, the school’s founding director, was promoting a mass-production aesthetic, Itten and others were advocating a more atavistic approach, one that was rooted in the skills of the medieval craftsman. (Itten even began his classes on abstract art with a series of yoga exercises that were meant to reawaken the physical senses and bring the students in closer contact with their work.)

Such conflicts, central to the experimental nature of the Bauhaus, were never fully resolved. In 1923 Gropius replaced Itten with the Hungarian painter Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who brought with him the agenda of the Soviet Constructivists, whose pure abstract forms were meant to form the building blocks of a new world order.

His paintings known as “EM1,” “EM2” and “EM3,” compositions of lines on a white surface that were produced in a factory by applying porcelain and enamel to sheets of steel, are among the most radical works in the show, and still have the power to startle 86 years after they were made. They fit perfectly with Gropius’s vision of the artist as someone who worked in partnership with the machine.

In Gropius’s mind that system would soon be applied to the entire range of industrial products, from architecture to graphics, textiles, lighting and furniture design. The alliance between designers and leaders of modern industry would spread his message around the world.

Yet even in Moholy-Nagy’s work the message is more mixed than it at first seems. The steel paintings, inverted crosses in primary colors, evoke their own brand of spiritualism. In a more conventional oil painting he made the same year, hanging on a nearby wall, the overlapping lines and planes bring to mind the quasi-religious subtext found in some of Konstantin Malevich’s works. Is it an architectural plan? A child’s rendition of a plane in flight? Or a fallen cross?

The most heart-warming objects in the show are often those where you feel the presence of the artist’s hand. These include a series of puppets that Paul Klee, who taught a color and form class, made for his son from 1916 to 1925. The puppets, which include a scary clown with protruding ears and a figure of Klee himself in a black robe, look as though they were crudely patched together out of papier-mâché and leftover pieces of wool while Klee was sitting at a kitchen table.

Harder for the show to convey is the mischievous spirit that was such a fundamental part of the Bauhaus experience. There is a very funny photo of a performance workshop, with students dressed up in expressionless masks and padded costumes — human machines. Another image, a blown-up version of which adorns the exhibition’s entry, shows students packed inside a towering grid of wooden crates: a reference to the Gropius-designed dormitories that was ceremoniously handed to the director on the eve of his departure from the school.

But the show doesn’t capture the general tumult: the crazy costumes, the political rallies, the spontaneous parties that often spilled out onto the streets and scandalized its buttoned-up middle-class neighbors.

It wasn’t until Hannes Meyer created the architecture department in 1927 that the school’s messy, playful energies, as well as the wild back and forth of ideas they gave rise to, began to be contained by academic categories. Like Gropius, Meyer, who shortly became the school’s director, envisioned the Bauhaus’s studios as industrial workshops that would not only train modern artisans but also forge alliances with the commercial world. (A collection of textiles released in 1929 was the most profitable line in the school’s history.) But his architectural philosophy was more overtly political, stressing humble materials over sleek forms, and small clusters of human activity over the large geometric compositions favored by his predecessor.

It is worth spending some time with his drawings for the ADGB building, for instance, a trade union school in Bernau. (They are the only technical drawings in the show.) In contrast to Gropius’s Bauhaus dormitory, with its taut glass shell, the ADGB is broken down into small, color-coded blocks. The sleek built-in furniture favored by Gropius and Breuer is replaced by inexpensive wood pieces, made to fold up and roll away in tight spaces.

The Nazis despised Meyer’s leftist outlook, and in two years he was forced out by the region’s right-wing government. And one of the first things that Mies van der Rohe did when he took the school over was to force students to sign a declaration that they were not Communists. An aesthete to the core, he was convinced that creative issues were above politics — and anything that might advance his agenda was within bounds.

Mies pushed architecture to the fore, and his enormous presence quickly began to crowd out other voices. In the last room of the exhibition there are a series of student drawings made during his tenure, glass-and-steel compositions that look uncannily like reproductions of Mies’s own work, as if the students were now there to worship at the master’s feet. Whatever mysticism was left was sublimated behind enormous sheets of reflective glass.

Mies, of course, didn’t fare much better with the Nazis than Meyer had, and on April 11, 1933, the school’s doors closed forever. Its most prominent figures scattered to different countries, some to Moscow, others to the United States. Three-quarters of a century later its most famous objects — chairs, lamps, a chess set — can be found in the MoMA gift shop, harmless examples of what was once a radical vision.

Yet for a moment at least the show allows you to glimpse just how wild that creative roller coaster really was. The school’s creative clashes were a reflection of how much their participants had at stake, both aesthetically and politically. All of them lived somewhere between the world as they saw it and the world as they wished it could be. Their yearning, never fulfilled, haunts you long after you leave the show.

“Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity” runs from Sunday to Jan. 25 at the Museum of Modern Art; (212) 708-9400; www.moma.org.