Finding a Bit of Animal House in the Bauhaus
Ask most people what they think of when they hear the word Bauhaus, and they’re likely to come up with tubular steel furniture, prefabricated housing, ranks of naïve utopians and Tom Wolfe’s withering disdain for all of the above. A show about the Bauhaus? No thanks. Who, after all, really needs to see another Breuer chair?
Which is why “Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity,” opening on Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, is such an unexpected treat. The kind of exhibition that comes around once in a rare while, it takes a sledgehammer to the clichés, particularly the notion that the Bauhaus marched in lockstep to a single vision.
Organized by Barry Bergdoll, the museum’s chief curator of architecture and design, and Leah Dickerman, a curator of painting and sculpture, the show makes much of the ideological and creative clashes that rocked this German school during its brief but remarkable history — between commercial and creative values, pragmatists and idealists, social activists and aesthetes. It makes a convincing case that the remarkable creative output of the Bauhaus had as much to do with this constant discord as with the individual genius of any of its members.
A big surprise is how much of the school’s mission still feels relevant, from the effort to come to terms with mind-bending technological advances to the desire to serve an audience beyond the usual cultural elites. It’s true this mission was pursued with an optimism that would be hard to conjure today, but if the show has a message, it’s that a little naiveté can be productive...
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Which is why “Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity,” opening on Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, is such an unexpected treat. The kind of exhibition that comes around once in a rare while, it takes a sledgehammer to the clichés, particularly the notion that the Bauhaus marched in lockstep to a single vision.
Organized by Barry Bergdoll, the museum’s chief curator of architecture and design, and Leah Dickerman, a curator of painting and sculpture, the show makes much of the ideological and creative clashes that rocked this German school during its brief but remarkable history — between commercial and creative values, pragmatists and idealists, social activists and aesthetes. It makes a convincing case that the remarkable creative output of the Bauhaus had as much to do with this constant discord as with the individual genius of any of its members.
A big surprise is how much of the school’s mission still feels relevant, from the effort to come to terms with mind-bending technological advances to the desire to serve an audience beyond the usual cultural elites. It’s true this mission was pursued with an optimism that would be hard to conjure today, but if the show has a message, it’s that a little naiveté can be productive...