To the Barbican for their Bauhaus: Art as Life exhibition, biggest one for a generation, apparently, including artefacts from the former East Germany. A detailed chronological account of the development of the institution from the amalgamation of pre-existing art schools in 1919 – ceramics, prints, painting, fabrics, photography, sculpture – to its last phase, 1930 to 1933, when Mies van der Rohe turned it more or less into an architecture school. From Arts and Crafts to Modernism.
The German word Bau means building or construction, so the word Bauhaus literally means construction house, building house. More loosely, House of building, House of construction. You can see why it’s generally left in the original German.
The Bauhaus is famous and important because the principles it developed, its approach to design, went on to influence the design of almost everything in all industrialised countries, for the rest of the 20th century, having a particularly huge impact on modern architecture:
“The Bauhaus was based on the principles of the 19th-century English designer William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement that art should meet the needs of society and that no distinction should be made between fine arts and practical crafts. It also depended on the more forward-looking principles that
1. modern art and architecture must be responsive to the needs and influences of the modern industrial world and that
2. good designs must pass the test of both aesthetic standards and sound engineering. (Iconic interiors)
All skyscrapers, all office furniture, all Habitat/Ikea style simplicity of design, with clean straight lines, all this derives from Bauhaus principles.
But the exhibition itself has nothing about Bauhaus’s impact, instead focusing in great detail on the actual artefacts produced by the classes through the years, and so is very small scale, with rooms dedicated to early woodcuts, experiments in typography, a room of puppets from the puppet theatre they built, and so on. My son thought a lot of it looked like the paintings and woodcuts and fabrics and pottery produced in his school art department, and it reminded me of school, too.
But a number of more finished things stood out. I liked the paintings by Kandinsky and Moholy-Nagy. I love geometric, abstract shapes, but with asymmetries, unexpectednesses. Kandinsky is a fascinating artist; his experiments with shape and colour directly mirror Schoenberg’s experiments with music and they knew each other and corresponded.
In 1925 the school moved from Weimar to Dessau where the mayor gave them land to build an institute based on their design principles. The strikingly modern result is captured in umpteen photos and films, along with recreations of the furniture they designed for themselves, and even a recreated view from the Director’s room.
Photo of the Bauhaus, Dessau, as it looks today
Most striking were the costumes students and staff made for their regular parties and theatre productions. The ‘Metal Party’ where all the outfits had to be entirely made of metal looked amazing. The theatrical productions were an opportunity to experiment with abstract design, costumes, movements combined with experimental light affects.
Contemporary photo of experimental Bauhaus dance costumes
But eventually the party had to end. The school had moved to Berlin in 1932 where, under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, it concentrated on revolutionary new architectural styles, but struggled for funding. The exhibition stops dead in its tracks on the July day in 1933 when the Bauhaus dissolved itself under pressure from the new Nazi regime. Most of its teachers and students made their way to America where they influenced a generation of graphic designers and architects.
Having reviewed in detail a lot of the output of the school, including a lot of juvenile or practice work, it would have been good to be given some sense of the final Impact or Influence of the Bauhaus. Doubtless that’s the subject of a trillion books and monographs, but it would have been handy to have it summarised or even referred to.
Related links
- Bauhaus: Art as Life continues @ the Barbican until 12 August 2012
- Review in the London Review of Books
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