By ALICE RAWSTHORN<\/p>\n
BERLIN \u2014 It wasn\u2019t a happy ending. Once celebrated as Europe\u2019s leading art and design school, by early 1933 the Bauhaus was reduced to camping in a hastily converted telephone factory on the outskirts of Berlin and subsisting on handouts from its director, the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Denouncing it as \u201cun-German,\u201d the newly elected Nazi government forced the school to close.<\/p>\n
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The Bauhaus has now returned to Berlin in very different circumstances. Some 1,000 examples of the work of its students and teachers are exhibited in \u201cBauhaus: A Conceptual Model,\u201d which opened last week in the Martin-Gropius-Bau exhibition hall as the biggest-ever Bauhaus retrospective. The location is doubly significant, not only because its architect (and namesake) was a great-uncle of Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus\u2019s founding director, but because of its geography. The building stands beside what were once the headquarters of the Gestapo, the Nazi\u2019s secret police force, and the Berlin Wall that divided the city \u2014 and Germany \u2014 for decades.<\/p>\n
As the Bauhaus\u2019s history is steeped in German politics, it seems apt that it should be welcomed back to Berlin with such aplomb. The school opened in 1919, the year that the Weimar Republic introduced democracy to Germany, and ended in 1933 when the Nazis seized power. The remnants of the Bauhaus were then divided between three archives: two in its first homes of Weimar and Dessau, on the Communist side of the Iron Curtain, and a third on the other side in West Berlin.<\/p>\n
This new retrospective marks both the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Bauhaus\u2019s 90th birthday. But being big doesn\u2019t always augur well for exhibitions, especially when they are burdened by so much political baggage. Nor does it help that there have been so many other shows about the Bauhaus over the years, not to mention essays and books. Does this one say anything new?<\/p>\n
Luckily it does. The Berlin exhibition, which was organized collaboratively by the three Bauhaus archives and is to open at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in November, combines famous Bauhaus mementos \u2014 from Marcel Breuer\u2019s metal furniture, to Herbert Bayer\u2019s graphics and the record-breaking Marianne Brandt teapot that sold for $361,000 at Sotheby\u2019s \u2014 with some inspired surprises.<\/p>\n
\u201cMany people have a clear idea of what they think the Bauhaus represented, but that\u2019s only part of the story,\u201d said Annemarie Jaeggi, director of the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to show that it adopted different ideas and different approaches at different times.\u201d<\/p>\n
The (not so) \u201cclear idea\u201d of the Bauhaus belongs to the period from 1926 to 1928, when it moved into a brand new bespoke building designed by Gropius in Dessau. Among its teachers were some of the greatest artists and designers of the 20th century. Josef Albers, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee taught art there. Bayer was responsible for graphics; Breuer for furniture; Laszlo Moholy-Nagy for product design; Oskar Schlemmer for performance; Gunta St\u00f6lzl for textiles; and Gropius lectured on architecture. His glacially elegant building filled with Breuer\u2019s gleaming glass and metal furniture created an indelible impression of the \u201cBauhaus style\u201d that, for the general public, swiftly became inseparable from the \u201cmodern style.\u201d<\/p>\n
Seductive though the image of the dazzlingly technocratic Bauhaus-Dessau is, it is only one chapter of the school\u2019s story, as Dr. Jaeggi points out. The Bauhaus\u2019s early years in Weimar were clouded by a power struggle between Gropius and Johannes Itten, a charismatic member of the then-fashionable Mazdaznan sect, which favored an instinctive, spiritual approach to creativity. The school\u2019s first manifesto was illustrated by Lyonel Feininger\u2019s woodcut of an ancient cathedral, and much of the students\u2019 work was primitive in style. A highlight of the Berlin show is the rough-hewn wooden African Chair made by Breuer in 1921 with an artisanal seat woven by St\u00f6lzl. Lovers at the time, they were both students at the Bauhaus in Weimar, and teachers in Dessau.<\/p>\n
Source : http:\/\/www.nytimes.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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