TextSearch

An exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris suggests that the school's evolution is more complex and contradictory than it first appears.

DESIGN SHARE The History of the Bauhaus Reconsidered An exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris suggests that the school's evolution is more complex and contradictory than it first appears. 11 MIN READ Oskar Schlemmer; Bauhaus-Archiv A group of performers from a Triadisches ballet by Oskar Schlemmer, produced during his time with the Bauhaus (1927) By Joseph Giovannini January 12, 2017 The prevailing message that followed Bauhaus survivors into their diaspora after Hitler came to power was as clear, simple, and distilled as a tubular steel chair cantilevered into thin air: modernity meant industrialization, which demanded the simplification of form for easy industrial fabrication. The mass production of functional, inexpensive, “purified” objects would elevate the standard of living for the masses. But the densely documented show “The Spirit of the Bauhaus,” which runs through Feb. 26 at Paris’ Musée des Arts Décoratifs, located in a wing of the Louvre Palace, reveals a much more complex story behind the Bauhaus’ short but incandescent 14-year existence, from 1919 to 1933. Originally inspired by the medieval guild system and the integration of arts within construction, as in Gothic churches, the school drew from turn-of-the-century movements such as the Vienna Werkstätte and the British Arts & Crafts, with their emphasis on handmade objects and the absence of ornamentation. Another precedent was Germany’s own Deutscher Werkbund, which integrated art and industrial production. The ideology of the school evolved through often messy, contested transitions involving the rise, fall, and absorption of different design movements and disciplines: Expressionism, mysticism, de Stijl, folklore, and Constructivism, plus, as Tom Wolfe wickedly pointed out in From Bauhaus to Our House (Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1981), garlic: the school promoted diet and exercise programs for healthy living. Josef Albers; The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation Scherbe ins Gitterbilde by Josef Albers (1921) Rather than reiterating the well-worn narrative of the Bauhaus as it was eventually exported, trotting out the warhorses already enshrined at, for example, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the exhibition takes a long historic view and reveals an evolution that was hardly simple and linear. Co-curated by Olivier Gabet and Anne Monier, both of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the show does not treat the Bauhaus as an artistic movement or even a style but as a working school, and its pedagogical history was diverse, dynamic, compressed, and accelerated. Though the utopian goal of revolutionizing the way people live remained consistent in all its phases, just how to get to utopia was not clear at the outset. The pedagogy of the school did not spring into existence monolithic and full blown. The Bauhaus was many things at different points in time, and only froze as an apparently unified vision when it went into exile. With more than 900 artifacts, the show builds its argument on both bottom-up and top-down evidence—not just the obvious Bauhaus icons but also the student work coming out of the studios in all phases of its history. The public image of the Bauhaus suddenly becomes more complex and even contradictory. Theobald Emil Müller-Hummel; Kallik Siftung Pillar with Cosmic Visions by Theobald Emil Müller-Hummel (1919-20) The antechamber to the show and the movement is an introductory vestibule with displays of handcrafted objects of preceding Arts & Crafts movements in England, Austria, and Germany, displays that set the stage for the early Bauhaus. Only several fundamentally Euclidean objects by Germany’s Werkbund intimate the potential of machine logic to reshape modern life (the catalog illustrates, for example, a geometrically Euclidean vase by Peter Behrens, its neck a cylinder growing up from a sphere). The show quickly moves on to the student work, especially the color and form studies and textiles done in the introductory courses, which broached new ways of teaching art, profoundly different from the academic regimes of most art schools of the time. In the Bauhaus context, ceramics are particularly surprising: the early work out of the pottery studio, which was disbanded after several years, was heavily influenced by a craft-driven, folk aesthetic, exemplified in a series of earthy ceramic vases, each unique rather than serially produced. Contrary to the image that architects brought to England, the U.S., South America, and even Asia after they immigrated, the early Bauhaus was an expression of its time, largely a refined craft movement based more on the hand than on the machine. The pedagogy, influenced by William Morris, grew from the British Arts & Crafts movement’s opposition to the machines that were churning out meaningless, inexpensive objects manufactured in dehumanizing factories. Carl Rogge; Bauhaus-Archiv Haus Sommerfeld, designed by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer in Berlin (1920) Though all arts, applied and fin...