"Workshops for Modernity"

For craft aficionados, it is a great joy to walk into the Museum of Modern Art’s “Bauhaus 1919-1933” show and immediately see a display case of ceramic works. Among the introductory pieces was a pot by Marguerite Friedlaender (later Wildenhain) decorated with a bull in slip trailing. This design relates to other linear decoration in painting and drawings also on view. In fact, the pottery, furniture, weavings in various forms from rugs to upholstery to wall hangings, plus metalwork by many individuals but especially Marianne Brandt and stained glass by Josef Albers, all fitted seamlessly with the paintings by Vasily Kandinsky and Oskar Schlemmer, photographs by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, graphic design by Herbert Bayer, and so on.

That’s the best aspect of the show to me, and that’s also what makes it appropriate for our time, when design and architecture are celebrated mediums and craft is seeping into those fields as well as into painting and sculpture. The Bauhaus’s original idea was that the fine and applied arts were inseparable. In the pointed mixing of the “preliminary course” of the German design school, all students were required to explore materials and design principles. Much invention followed in the crafts, and at the same time, many artists learned through this essential exposure not to fear traditional forms and substances.

The Bauhaus joined art and life. Marcel Breuer’s early wood chairs were completed with Gunta Stolzl’s geometric and sometimes actually structural upholstery. The angular quality of his chairs and, say, Walter Gropius’s newspaper shelf echoes the partial views and unexpected angles and cuts of concurrent photography. At the Bauhaus, the objects that serve in daily life were seen to be just as important as the wall decoration known as painting—in fact, this exhibition provides an excellent opportunity to see the influence of textile structure on some paintings of Paul Klee and Josef Albers.

Maybe the popularity of design today is bringing us back to the same point of fluid exchange. The spectrum of aesthetic expression is the important point: nothing was forbidden or dismissed as inconsequential at the Bauhaus. Of course, such liberal ideas were anathema to the Nazis, who closed the school down.

A substantial program of lectures and workshops has been organized in conjunction with the exhibition, which continues until Jan. 25. Of particular interest is “Women and the Bauhaus,” a series of four lectures, two of which will focus on Anni Albers and Marianne Brandt.