Exhibit of the week: Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity

Museum of Modern Art

New York

Through Jan. 25, 2010

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What do the sleek, “fastidiously up-to-date” pieces of furniture and decor sold by stores like Crate and Barrel and Ikea all “have in common?” asked Alexandra Lange in New York. “They are the distant (and not-so-distant) offspring of the Bauhaus,” the path-setting German art school that flourished during the 1920s. Though the Bauhaus taught painting, drawing, and other crafts, its greatest influence has been in the disciplines of architecture and design. Bauhaus bigwigs such as Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe advanced a radically simplified aesthetic of straight lines and smooth surfaces, “teaching acolytes to discard the unnecessary, champion the streamlined and the utilitarian, and design always with mass production in mind.” Today, that’s pretty much the definition of good design.

Not everyone agrees this is a good thing, said Candace Jackson in The Wall Street Journal. Tom Wolfe, in his book From Bauhaus to Our House, blamed “the movement for creating a herd mentality” that turned designers away from classical elegance and ornate decoration. But a new exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art convincingly shows that the Bauhaus movement “is credited—and blamed—for much more than it should be.” The school didn’t push a single visual look, and the artists who worked there had a wide diversity of styles. By placing works from the school’s best-known alumni side by side with those of less-celebrated contemporaries, MoMA sheds light on both.

What united the Bauhaus wasn’t a visual aesthetic but “the desire to serve an audience beyond the usual cultural elites,” said Nicolai Ouroussoff in The New York Times. Visual ideas plucked from abstract art found their way into everyday clothes, furniture—even coffins. That drive to democratize good design certainly is exemplified by mass-produced objects such as Josef Albers’ vibrantly colored nesting tables, Marianne Brandt’s shiny hemispherical teapots, and Marcel Breuer’s now iconic tubular steel chair frames. But it’s equally evident in quirky works such as Paul Klee’s colorful, “crudely patched together” puppets and the rough-hewn wood forms of Breuer’s 1921 “African” chair. Works such as these can seem so “out of place with conventional images of the Bauhaus that you may wonder if you’ve walked into the wrong show.” You haven’t. This just happens to be the type of eye-opening exhibition “that comes around once in a rare while”—one that thrillingly reintroduces a subject you thought you knew.