[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: December 21, 2009]
Maybe you've already attended the comprehensive Bauhaus blast at MoMA. Half the city seemed to be there the evening I went. And if you have, you saw some substantial works of art.
Indeed, "Der Traum" by Franz Scala, about the first thing you'll see as you enter, makes you feel good about the show's relevance and modernity. An elegant 1919 dreamscape on the cusp of expressionism and cubism, it incorporates urban iconography, a hint of psychoanalytic smarts, shards of shattered language - it covers the avant garde waterfront in assured if not entirely cohesive manner. A bit like the show as a whole.
The Bauhaus - which, if you want to express it simply, was a German design school - provided a backdrop, perhaps a stimulus, to the work of an all-star cast of painters, sculptors, architects, furniture-makes, potters and decorators. Its sensibility, as MoMA understandably seeks to persuade us, was resolutely modern. In fact, the teeming variety of the show serves as a reminder that modernity - and modernism in the arts - has been far from a homogenous project.
The school, after all, passed through not only a series of disparate locations - including both Berlin and the peaceful Saxony town of Dessau - but also a series of directors of contrasting commitments and passions. The interests of its faculty were more various still. The creator of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, was a successful commercial architect who sought to incorporate avant garde aestheticism in affordable, functional design. This, perhaps, is the enduring sense of Bauhaus in art history - an attempt to introduce modern beauty into everyday life. Gropius also introduced distinctive classes in the basics of art and design - studies of shape, spatiality and color. His successor, Hannes Meyer, on the other hand, was a communist, hostile to aestheticism - a representative work on show here is the austerely functional "Worker's Apartment." Meyer in turn was succeeded by another superstar of the commercial architectural world, Mies van der Rohe.
And so the show moves from stark student exercises in abstraction, past Marcel Breuer's once radical, now over-familiar, exercises in minimalist furniture (anyone who has dined at A Voce has the sense of what sitting in a Breuer chair is like), and Herbert Bayer's almost pop-art exercises in typography, to all kinds of lights, fittings and tableware which, because unquestionably influential, no longer especially suprise.
All along the way, as a kind of background commentary on the randomness of the show, works by Klee and Kandinsky interrupt the functionalism by reminded the viewer of the entirely idiosyncratic personal universes of those artists, each of whom taught at the Bauhaus for years.
One pedagogic connection of which more might have been made is the work of Josef Albers. He brought his teaching of elementary aesthetic components - shape, color, arrangement - to North Carolina's Black Mountain college, influencing not only a generation of abstract painters and sculptors, but also poets, musicians, choreographers. Indeed, the Bauhaus show whetted my appetite for a similar Black Mountain retrospective (Olson, Cage, Rauschenberg, Cunningham), which I suspect would show much greater consistency of interest, purpose and achievement.
This is undoubtedly an educational experience, if you have the patience and the elbows for it, but treated as an art show it's simultaneously overwhelming and unsatisfying. You have until January 25 to see if I'm right, and the MoMA exhibition site can be accessed via this page. More usefully, jill Krementz has captured a representative selection of the works in a photo-journal at the New York Social Diary site here.
