Form and Function in New England
When the Bauhaus was founded in Germany in 1919, New England was still a bastion of Yankee rectitude, decidedly conservative in matters of the arts and crafts. Meanwhile, the Bauhaus was a school hell-bent on artistic revolution, bringing together painting, sculpture, textiles, ceramics, glass, furniture and architecture. Fast forward to 1930, when a group of Harvard students decided to mount an exhibition of the work of the Bauhaus. It was an act that was both prescient and vaguely transgressive. At the time, the Fogg Museum was not exhibiting modern art, and so the exhibition had to be relegated to the Harvard Cooperative Society, known familiarly as the COOP. This was the first major showing of Bauhaus work in the United States. “It was getting modern art into Harvard through the backdoor,” says Laura Muir, research curator at Harvard Art Museums. To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus, Harvard and numerous other institutions around New England are mounting exhibitions. Why the odd affinity between New England and the Bauhaus? The region’s large numbers of academics definitely played a part, as they were always looking to Europe for inspiration. Yet there is also something in the reductive simplicity of Bauhaus design that calls to mind the no-nonsense work of early American architects and even New England’s Shakers.
Installation view of the exhibition The Bauhaus and Harvard, on display February 8–July 28, 2019 at the Harvard Art Museums.
Photo: Karen Philippi; © President and Fellows of Harvard College.
The Bauhaus and Harvard | Harvard Art Museums | harvardartmuseums.org | Through July 28, 2019
In this small yet enlivening show is a woodcut of the Bauhaus’s founding “Manifesto and Program.” Emblematic of the zeal of the founders, led by Walter Gropius, this proclamation has a not-so-subtle religious undertone. The horrific events of World War I had shaken the foundation of traditional Judeo-Christian teachings and left a spiritual void, which Gropius and his associates rushed to fill: “One day [a new unity] will rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like a crystal symbol of a new faith,” the proclamation reads. Their goal was nothing less than a tabula rasa, unbeholden to a recent past that had wreaked such havoc. The exhibition is organized into three sections. The first is devoted to material produced by the Bauhaus in Germany. (Harvard has the most extensive collection of Bauhaus works outside of Germany. While only 200 objects of the total 32,000-piece collection are on display in the current exhibition, they were still enough to fill the museum’s largest galleries.) The themes include: “The Preliminary Course,” a showing of early student work; “The New Dwelling,” exploring the Bauhaus and architecture; and “Weaving,” showcasing the exquisite fabrics produced, mostly by women. The second section examines the effects of Bauhaus pedagogy in the United States. The third and final section highlights the Harvard Graduate Center, designed by Gropius in the late 1940s. Gropius had been head of the architecture department at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design since 1937.
Radical Geometries and Postwar Visions | Museum of Fine Arts, Boston | mfa.org | Through June 23, 2019
This is a dual exhibition whose major strength is how it segues from pre–World War II Bauhaus prints and other graphics, Radical Geometries, to postwar European photography, Postwar Visions, and how profoundly the latter was influenced by the former. In Radical Geometries we’re treated to a cornucopia of work by Wassily Kandinsky, such as his portfolio of prints, Twelve Worlds. They are a riot of color and motion. Meanwhile Hungarian modernist László Moholy-Nagy adds to the MFA show with works that seem to stride the boundaries between photography and printmaking such as Untitled (Shipboard View) from about 1925. Postwar Visions shows that the Second World War further fueled the modernist urge, expressed exclusively as photography. Ilse Bing’s Paris Street-Sweepers turns this most quotidian activity into a compelling geometric composition. Peter Keetman’s 1950s work at the Volkswagen factory both recalls and advances the Machine Age aesthetic.
From left: Wassily Kandinsky, Kleine Welten IV, 1922. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gerd Balzer, Prellerhaus Balconies, Bauhaus (Dessau), 1933, gelatin silver print. Museum Purchase, Lloyd O. and Marjorie Strong Coulter Fund, Bowdoin College Museum of Art. László Moholy‑Nagy, Untitled, 1923, from the portfolio Constructions. Courtesy of the Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston. Josef Albers, Self-Portrait, 1917. Courtesy of theMuseum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Beyond Bauhaus | Providence College Galleries | pcgalleries.providence.edu | Through August 1, 2020
“Through a lens of ethnic and gender diversity, we are looking to fill out Bauhaus history,” says Jamilee Lacy, the college gallery’s director and curator. With support from the Andy Warhol Foundation, Providence College is going a step further by interrogating the Bauhaus body of work. “In this artist-driven evaluation of the enduring legacy of this beacon of the Modernist movement, cutting-edge artists today will create new forms, borrowing from old models and hybridizing more recent materials and technologies to build new visual scholarship,” according to the exhibition catalogue.
Arresting Fragments: Object Photography at the Bauhaus | MIT Museum | mitmuseum.mit.edu | Through September 1, 2019
The MIT exhibition confines itself to photography from the Bauhaus Archive Museum of Design in Berlin. “It’s a look at the entire 19 years of the Bauhaus’s existence,” says Gary Van Zante, curator of architecture and design at the museum. At the outset, Van Zante wondered if there was a distinctive Bauhaus school of photography. He found that there were major contributions by photographers Lucia Moholy, Walter Peterhans and Erich Consemüller (all featured in the exhibition). “In fact, the 1920s, when these artists practiced,” Van Zante says, “was the most innovative era in photography since its invention a century before.”
Perverse Furniture | ArtSpace New Haven | artspacenewhaven.org | May 19–June 29, 2019
Perverse Furniture lives up to its name as a different take on the “machine aesthetic” of the Bauhaus. “It’s an exhibition that interrogates furniture as architecture for the body,” says Sarah Fritchey, curator of the show and the gallery’s director. Much of the show takes iconic work like Marcel Breuer’s chrome cantilevered chair and refracts it through a feminine eye such as Bernadette Despujols’s Bimbo Chair 2, draped with synthetic hair. “[Perverse Furniture] represents the unacknowledged feminine contribution to the Bauhaus,” Fritchey says.
Modernism for All: The Bauhaus at 100 | Bowdoin College Museum of Art | bowdoin.edu/art-museum | Through May 12, 2019
According to Modernism for All’s curator Joachim Homann, the exhibition zeroes in on the Bauhaus as a teaching environment. “The idea was to explore how the Bauhaus’s students’ work was grounded both in form and color and in craft,” says Homann. “So we feature the work of the masters of form and color like Klee and Kandinsky with the lesser-known masters of craft like Gerhard Marcks and Otto Lindig. Gropius believed mastering both form and color with craft would shape a new generation of artists/craftsmen.” It seems that Gropius was right. The Bauhaus didn’t create a new religion, but it did produce a body of work that found a home in New England and spurred many movements.
James McCown is a Boston-based journalist specializing in architecture and design. In addition to Art New England, he writes regularly for Architectural Record, Metropolis, ArchitectureBoston and other regional and national publications.