Object Lessons From The Bauhaus

This line of reflection leads to a problematic consequence of the primacy accorded to formal rigor and technical competence at the Bauhaus, and what is still the most unresolvable aspect of its legacy.The prodigious evidence of creativity on the part of the school’s faculty and students cannot fail to expose the slipperiness of a fundamentally methodological approach to cultural production and the ease with which “Bauhaus modern” could become available for multiple purposes. Undoubtedly, in the ’20s, the urgent necessity to dispel a growing perception of the school as a hotbed of left-wing radicals militated in favor of its increasingly estheticized and depoliticized positioning, culminating in Mies’s directorship. The abortive tenure of Hannes Meyer, a committed Marxist who polemically attempted to link the school’s production to a vision of social and political transformation—and who from the distance of the Soviet Union in 1931 would denounce the “irreconcilable opposition” between working-class art and the reigning bourgeois ideology in Germany—was exceptional, and it is no surprise that it aroused so much hostility both outside and inside the Bauhaus, including on the part of Gropius, who, having initially recommended Meyer, subsequently withdrew his support.

The talented Herbert Bayer, on the other hand, who came as a student to Weimar and ended up a master of the visual communication and typography workshops in Dessau, and whose work remains one of the school’s most paradigmatic products, created designs following the Bauhaus period that fit as seamlessly into Nazi publicity campaigns as into those of the Container Corporation of America and other commercial and institutional clients in the United States, where he emigrated in 1938.

Bayer’s pragmatic complicity with the Nazis in the ’30s, like the dalliances of both Mies and Gropius with the regime before each decided to move permanently to the U.S., has perhaps been sufficiently aired in recent literature (design historian Rolf Sachsse has called Bayer’s sea change from Nazi propagandist to American marketeer an extraordinary “mutation trick”). But it is a little shocking to come across a wall and a half in the last gallery at MoMA given over to projects by the lesser-known but also multitalented Kurt Kranz. A Bauhaus student from 1930-33, Kranz would not only be a close collaborator with Bayer and continuer of his graphics in die neue Linie and other publications, but would go on to work for Nazi engineer Fritz Todt’s organization during the war. Later based in Hamburg, Kranz, like Bayer, would have a successful postwar career as a designer, artist and educator. The unsavory background is worth mentioning not so much to impugn a reputation at this late date (although one might have expected a curatorial allusion or two) as to underscore the contradictions implicit in a form of practice automatically deemed “progressive” by virtue of its experimentalism and avant-gardism.

The issue can be particularly explosive in a medium whose primary function is to communicate and persuade. With respect to pure technique, there is little distinction between an anodyne commercial advertisement and a more virulent and propagandistic work. The contradiction between a form of rationality that is based on enlightened social-ethical values and one that is purely instrumental—famously characterized by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their 1944 book Dialectic of Enlightenment but already anticipated by Walter Benjamin a decade earlier in his warning against the estheticization of politics by fascist artists using modernist techniques—is latent in a form of design practice (or a model of esthetic education) predicated exclusively on technical competence and professionalism. It is worth noting that the emergence of the Frankfurt School for Social Research, where these theorists initially formulated their critique, was exactly contemporary with the “objective” phase of the Bauhaus, 1923-33; the ideas and evolution of both the Bauhaus and the Frankfurt School should be understood as symptomatic responses to this fundamental dilemma posed by the “rationalism” of technological modernity.

Finally, it seems to me a genuinely missed opportunity that MoMA did not use the occasion of this exhibition to reexamine its own history, which is so deeply bound up with the Bauhaus and its diaspora in this country. Alfred Barr’s 1927 visit to the school in advance of the museum’s opening two years later, and its 1938 exhibition “Bauhaus 1919-1928,” the first major presentation of the Bauhaus in the United States, were central to the formation of MoMA’s early identity. The current show is the museum’s first revisiting of this piece of its past in 70 years. While the curators’ stated intent is to counter the mythos cultivated by Gropius after he came to the U.S. and to dispel the stereotype of a monolithic “Bauhaus style,” these battles have already been waged and won, especially with the deaths of most of the main protagonists. Several decades of careful scholarship as well as periodic anniversary exhibitions around the world have offered a much more complex portrait of the Bauhaus and its internal conflicts, and Tom Wolfe’s generation-old screed, From Bauhaus to Our House, has receded into the used bookstore.

MoMA’s 1938 exhibition, about which the current show remains nearly silent, was presented in the museum’s temporary quarters in the concourse of Rockefeller Center one year after the “Degenerate Art” show opened in Munich and nine months before Hitler’s invasion of Poland. The installation was designed by Bayer, who was still in the process of clearing his emigration status but nonetheless managed to spirit many artworks out of Germany for the exhibition. As already suggested, the show and catalogue (edited by Bayer with Ise and Walter Gropius) downplayed the school’s Expressionist beginnings and excluded the periods under Meyer and Mies; Mies reportedly was asked to take part but demurred. The names of Bauhaus artists still living in Germany were suppressed in the show for fear of reprisals against them, and Barr stops well short in his preface to the catalogue of condemning Hitler: equally concerned that the show would be viewed as anti-German and that the Bauhaus would be seen as a “Jewish-Communist cabal,” he proposed to include a statement specifying the small number of faculty who were Jewish. Gropius apparently dissuaded him from doing this but had to be prevailed on in turn to omit an assertion that the school under the directorships of himself and Mies “had always been deliberately non-political in character.” Bayer’s installation, a demonstration of his “field of vision” concept—a strategy aimed at engaging the spectator as actively as possible—featured objects and photographs pitched off the walls at aggressive angles, directional shapes and footprints inscribed on the gallery floors, and innovative materials like corrugated cardboard as space dividers. It elicited a spate of negative reviews from the critics, who found it manipulative, chaotic, and gadgety. (Lewis Mumford’s positive column in the New Yorker was a rare exception.)

The handsome, scrupulously curated exhibition of 2009-10 is obviously a far cry from its unruly and conflicted predecessor, and largely reads today as a “classic” MoMA show. Yet it is not altogether without revisionist thrust. One welcome accomplishment is to show the pervasive presence of women in the creative life and output of the school, and not just in the expected context of the weaving and interiors workshops—although there are many beautiful textiles by Anni Albers, Gunta Stölzl and others. One gets the impression that women were at least as important at the Bauhaus as they were within the other modernist movement with which they tend to be most closely associated, Russian Constructivism. It is especially satisfying to see so many works by the enormously gifted Marianne Brandt, some of whose elegant and ergonomic designs for table objects look like they could have been created as recently as the 1960s. Brandt is also represented by a series of witty and feminist collages that recall the work of Hannah Höch.

On the other hand, one may be churlish enough to complain that there are too many objects by Klee, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy and, perhaps, Schlemmer in the show (appealing as this work is), given their familiarity and the fact that they don’t all advance the main theme of the exhibition. Nor would Breuer have a lesser claim as the most important furniture designer of the 20th century had a few of his pieces been edited out. The complete absence from the show of Max Bill, a student at the Bauhaus from 1927 to 1929 and one of its most important future evangelists, should also be registered. Most of all, though, the exhibition lacks any significant representation of the performances and carnivalesque celebrations that were so integral to the school’s communal life. This exuberant, emancipatory, post-Dada streak running throughout the Bauhaus’s lifetime was more than just an escape valve for hothouse energies; it represents the dialectical other of the school’s emphasis on rigor and productivity, and a major esthetic contribution in its own right, as borne out by subsequent developments in the art world.

MoMA’s one autobiographical gesture is the featuring of Schlemmer’s Bauhaustreppe (Bauhaus Stairway). This painting, which for so many years hung in the stairwell of the original 53rd Street building, was completed in 1932 and bought by Philip Johnson for MoMA at Barr’s request the following year, after Barr saw it in a show in Stuttgart, where it was the subject of right-wing attacks. It hangs in the current exhibition in the middle of the long wall of the last gallery, yet its placement somehow lacks the pungency that one might wish, given both its thematic value for the exhibition and its iconicity with respect to MoMA’s past. It receives a somewhat more privileged treatment in the catalogue, where it is the final object presented and the subject of an elegiac essay by Andreas Huyssen. Huyssen reads the painting as an image of the Bauhaus’s enlightened educational ideals at a moment when the dangerous forces of incivility were literally at the gates. Rather than ciphers of a dehumanizing modernity, he argues, Schlemmer’s semi-abstracted figures are positive emblems of universalism and post-gender egalitarianism avant le déluge.

On studying the painting closely again (something always difficult to do while climbing a stair!), I find myself struck, like Huyssen, by its spatial ambiguities, distortions and transparencies. The flattening of the geometry of the actual Bauhaus staircase causes the figural forms to become interwoven with the compositional grid, as in a Bauhaus tapestry. The solidity of the figures seems to be dissolving into the matrix of diffuse primary colors, especially in the upper half of the canvas. In the painting’s metaphysicalized ambience, the slow, purposeful ascent of the students reads as an allegory of history. The apparitional figure who has turned around to look down recalls Benjamin’s angel propelled backward into the cataclysm of “progress.”

Currently On View “Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, through Jan. 25. (Click here for Official site)

1 “Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model,” organized by the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau and Klassik Stiftung Weimar, appeared at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, July 22-Oct. 4, 2009. 

2 Leah Dickerman, “Bauhaus Fundaments,” in Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, eds., Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 2009, p. 15.

Joan Ockman is an architectural historian and critic based in Philadelphia and New York.