Emdashes. The New Yorker between the lines

Best of Emdashes: Hit Parade
Our Daily Comic: The Wavy Rule
Archive: Ask the Librarians

Send us a question!

November092009

The Warm Glow of the Bauhaus at MoMA

Filed under: Looked Into   Tagged: , , , ,

Jonathan Taylor writes:

Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity is the Museum of Modern Art's first major Bauhaus exhibit since 1938. Janet Flanner ("Genet") wrote in 1969 about a Bauhaus retrospective at the Musée National d'Art Moderne (then on the Ave. du Président Wilson) and the nearby Musée Municipal d'Art Moderne in Paris, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the school's founding. Flanner wrote that the show was to go on to Chicago. The article gives little detail about the contents of the show—it's more of a primer on the great artists the Bauhaus gave the world: Kandinsky, Klee, Mies.

The new MoMA show is more about what great artists gave to the Bauhaus. Many reviewers have felt the need to cite an invented consensus perception of the Bauhaus: in the words of the Times's Nicolai Ouroussoff, "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?"

But even if one's opinion going in is less hostile, the chance to see so many products of Bauhaus design, craft and manufacture is a revelation, if one has never had the chance to experience their sheer materiality in person. The school's emphasis on the properties of their materials—metal, wood, glass, and in the case of the playful photomontages, paper—lends these objects, in their contemporary context, a real warmth (aided somewhat by the yellowing of the paper exhibits, and the patination of metal). Even after the Bauhaus's turn away from its Expressionist roots in nostalgia for the premodern, and toward the stark geometry and sans-serif typography it's better known for, there's a wonderfully consistent presence of the earthy and decorative in the Bauhaus's textile products and wallpapers, by artists including Anni Albers and Gunta Stölzl.

For me, the highlight of the exhibit, exemplifying the quest for ingenuity and the personal touch inherent in the Bauhaus's formation of master craftsmen and -women, is a pair of textiles whose patterns were devised by Hajo Rose using a typewriter. In one case, the pattern consists with rows of nearly interlocking typed "9"s, creating a semiabstract pattern that Alexandra Lange describes well as "letterforms turning into repetitive and almost floral scallops." The exhibit includes both the swatches of typed paper, and the resulting textiles. I've looked for an image online to link to, but can't find one. It's just as well—this show is about what you can learn about the Bauhaus from being in the presence of its art, rather than reading about it.

0 comments

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, it may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Thanks for waiting.)

See me speak at SXSW 2010 (http://sxsw.com)
2008 Webby Awards Official Honoree
2009 New Yorker Desk Diaries
Inkleaf Studio illustration