We carry within us such an ingrained image of the Bauhaus as the cool laboratory of functionalism that it can be hard to remember that it began as a mystically inclined, wildly expressionist, medievalising crafts school. The first teacher of the famous Vorkurs (foundation course) was Johannes Itten, a brilliant eccentric who was a follower of a deeply weird faith invented by a typo-grapher who called himself Dr O. Zarathustra A. Ha’nish. Mazdaznan, a blend of Zoroastrianism and proto-new-age-hippyism involved fasting, purification, vegetarianism and breathing exercises, much of which Itten tried to inflict on his students.
Itten wore steel-rimmed glasses, a shaven head and a monkish habit of his own design. His successor, the Hungarian-born László Moholy-Nagy also wore steel-rimmed specs, but he wore them with worker’s overalls. He was to replace the subjective with the objective, the mystical with the machine. This is Moholy-Nagy: “To be a user of machines is to be of the spirit of this century. It has replaced the transcendental spiritualism of past eras.”
By the time he moved to Chicago in 1937 to set up a new Bauhaus after a short, frustrating sojourn in olde-worlde London, Moholy-Nagy was wearing a pristine lab coat over an immaculate business suit. Josef Albers, who taught the foundation course with Moholy-Nagy and became the longest-serving teacher at the Bauhaus before also setting up in the US, presented a slightly less technocratic face, but it was the combined effect of these two teachers that sent the school spinning off its trajectory as a quasi–religious retreat into a workshop of functional form and experimental modernism.
Moholy-Nagy had arrived in Germany via Vienna after fleeing the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919. Already established as a radical painter influenced by Russian constructivism and suprematism, he had worked his way to Germany as a signwriter. Albers, who was older than Moholy-Nagy, had been an art teacher and enrolled at the Bauhaus to start over under the tutelage of Itten. At 31 (the same age as his teacher) and prodigiously talented, he was asked by Bauhaus head Walter Gropius to take over the course in 1923.
Moholy-Nagy and Albers, although very different personalities, shared an openness and inquisitiveness about material, technique and process, which made them the perfect masters for a course that aimed not so much to teach as to cleanse, to rid the mind of preconceptions and reboot. Nothing illustrates this better than an anecdote repeatedly related by my old history of design tutor. On the first day of the course Albers apparently walked into class with a sheaf of paper, distributing leaves to each student. He asked them to make something with the paper and left them to it. When he returned an hour later, some students had sculpted elaborate cityscapes, others complex origami swans and so on. One student, however, had merely taken a sheet, folded it in half and stood it up. Albers seized upon this, proclaiming this was the work that exploited paper’s potential. Lightweight, but rigid when simply folded, it expressed the true spirit of the material.
The years in which Albers and Moholy-Nagy’s teaching coincided at the Bauhaus (1923-28) were the years in which the school made its greatest cultural impact and became the engine of modernist design. Those tubular chairs, exquisitely stripped-down light fittings and that radical typography all date from this period. Even though Albers remained until the Nazis forced it to close in 1933, once the Hungarian left in 1928 that early momentum was lost. Consequently, this big and serious show at Tate Modern is as much about the Bauhaus and, indeed, about the emergent formal languages of modernism itself as it is about these two figures who, although their careers collided, were never close, and never even contacted each other after Moholy-Nagy’s departure, even though both ended up in the US.
The experimentation, the techniques and the range on display here are astonishing. Moholy-Nagy, the ceaseless experimenter, emerges as by far the more interesting artist, his oeuvre embracing sly dadaist photomontage, suprematist architectonics, photography, typography, graphics, haunting photograms (produced using film but no camera) and hypnotic kinetic sculpture, nearly all of it stunningly good. His fanatical attempts to remove the last traces of the artist’s hand from his early works include the “Telephone Pictures”, their form dictated down a phone line to an enamel signage company and taken down via co-ordinates on graph paper. The pitiful ephemera of his two years in London, including flyers for Imperial Airlines and graphics for Viyella, Hero Jam, a John Betjeman dust jacket and London Underground are evidence of what seems to have been his most frustrating period, in which he was able to support himself only by designing window displays in the Piccadilly department store Simpsons.
Albers’ work, less harsh and more serene, seems cyclic in comparison, beginning with abstract geometric architectural form studies and ending with his well-known homages to squares, neat ripostes to Malevich’s brooding, revolutionary shapes made decades earlier. Albers seemed content to render tectonic form in two dimensions, while for Moholy-Nagy even the fourth dimension seemed inadequate as he built mad machines to introduce time, light and seeming unpredictability into the equation. The replica “Light Prop for an Electric Stage”, an extraordinary piece of garden-shed kinetic constructivism, seems somehow too new and shiny, like the repro Albers nest of tables available in the exhibition shop.
This show comes at the zenith of a modernist revival. Dan Flavin is on show at the Hayward Gallery along London’s South Bank, Czech modernism is featured at the Royal Insititute of British Architects, Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge has a show on Black Mountain College in Carolina, where Albers ended up, while the epic modernism show at the Victoria and Albert Museum opens next month. The Tate has done well to bring this stuff together and it is an engaging exhibition but I am not entirely sure what point is in this twinning approach. Moholy-Nagy could have easily (and profitably) filled the space on his own while Albers’ more contemplative work arguably suffers by being crowded in. The more you look at the two men’s work, the less it fits together.
Part of the problem is that the artists were at least as influential through their teaching as through their work, so any stab at completeness demands the work of their students, which would include, for example, almost all the product designs of early modernism. Mostly in two dimensions, the show is lacking at least one further dimension. Still, compared with the vacuity of the Triennial at the Tate’s old place, or Herr Kippenberger’s show opposite, this is serious and extremely enjoyable stuff and you can easily see why, post-post-modernism and post-conceptualism, modernism itself suddenly finds itself back in vogue.
‘Albers & Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World’ is at Tate Modern from March 9 until June 4 and is sponsored by BMW UK Ltd. Tel +44 020 7887 8888
