The Bauhaus, the visionary German school of art and design that opened in Weimar in 1919, moved to Dessau in 1925 and survived – just – into the era of National Socialism, was a unique experiment in art education whose influence is still felt to this day. Its aim, as its founding director, the architect Walter Gropius, wrote in a manifesto of 1919, was to “reunify all the practical artistic disciplines – sculpture, painting, the applied arts and crafts”. And architecture too, for that matter. No longer would there be craft on one side and fine art on the other; no longer would the ideal creator exist as a solitary maker. Nor would industry be kept at arm’s length, for all its dark, recent role in the wholesale production of armaments. Instead, the practical application of ideas nurtured in the studio or the workshop would have a direct impact on – in fact, would help to transform – the world at large.
These ideas seem bold, simple – and, from our perspective more than 70 years later, almost self-evidently true. The Bauhaus ethos has fed into our thinking and the general practice of our schools of art and design.
It is almost 40 years since the last big retrospective of the Bauhaus in a museum in England – the Royal Academy staged an important survey in 1968. This show at the recently founded Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art is, however, smaller and more delicately nuanced than its predecessor. Encompassing furniture (including colourful pieces for children), drawing, photography, graphic design, metalwork, weaving, ceramics, painting, architecture, and even a copy of the carpet by Gertrud Arndt that once covered the floor of the director’s own office, it brings home the full range of the institute’s interests. Mima, in the industrial north-east of England, is a fitting venue, given that its own permanent collection, culled from two regional museums, brings together fine art and craft objects. (I wish, though, that it had produced a more substantial catalogue to accompany such a significant exhibition.) Mima’s show draws our attention not only to the Bauhaus’s achievements but also to its limitations and conflicts – to the tensions between some of its teachers, for example, or to the fact that, in the early years, Bauhaus was still being influenced by the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement: our view of it as a pioneer of modernist practice in architecture, interior design and furniture came a little later.
It also makes evident that no matter how “progressive” the Bauhaus may have proclaimed itself to be, it had a very limited view of the role of women. Anni Albers, the wife of the celebrated Bauhaus teacher Josef Albers and an important artist and educator in her own right, had much more scope to develop her own work and ideas when the couple taught in the US after the second world war.
That sense of tension between one teacher and another is immediately evident as we walk into the first room of the exhibition. Immediately ahead is a display of half a dozen chairs, raised up on a white plinth, by the likes of Marcel Breuer and Josef Albers. All these prototypes were developed in the cabinet-making workshop from the 1920s. They are cool, clean-lined, and eye-catchingly restrained and fastidious in their elegance and simplicity. What strikes us is just how familiar these objects seem to be – Breuer’s tubular steel armchair of 1931 with its saggily comfortable-looking brown cloth seat, for example. We have all sat in one, or one just like it. Such has been the Bauhaus’s influence on chair design that some of these designs simply do not look dated. They have become part of the furniture, one might say.
The graphic works on the walls of this same room are from the hand of another Bauhaus teacher, Wassily Kandinsky, and are quite different in feel. The same could be said of the works of another Bauhaus teacher, Paul Klee, in the adjacent gallery. Kandinsky’s suite of etchings is entitled “Small Worlds”. Each is a teeming explosion of small graphic elements, a miniature universe of abstract symbols. Klee’s tiny, self-contained worlds – glowing lozenges of colour; a tiny being teetering across a tightrope – are so fantastical and idiosyncratic that we wonder how they fitted into the Bauhaus’s idealistically pedagogical atmosphere. They seem to be wrestling with complex questions about the relationship between music and the visual, between the abstract, the figurative and the spiritual, and the role of the beleaguered artist in a world just recovering from the war.
This is an excellent Bauhaus primer, given extra punch by two accompanying shows: one of contemporary artists influenced by the Bauhaus, the other of recent photographs by Hans Engels of surviving Bauhaus architecture. But of course the school’s reach goes far wider than these particular cases: to borrow the epitaph for Christopher Wren in St Paul’s cathedral, if you seek a monument, look around you.
Continues until February 17
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