A Surprising Gap in my Education (29 cents)

I went to a noontime slide lecture, held at the Renwick Museum, yesterday. The topic was the Bauhaus Workshops, and the presentation was given by by Ursula Ilse-Neuman. I am not sure who she is because I missed the introduction, but she is a curator somewhere, I believe, and a scholar. She speaks with a slight German accent, but with the speed of a French bullet train. If you blink, she has left you in the dust.

This made her a little hard to follow, as did the fact that she had a lot to say within her allotted 45 minutes of time. I believe that her speed exhausted many in the audience of about 100. There were zero questions at the end, perhaps because of a desire for a little space and some fresh air.

But the presentation was very informative and quite well organized.

Here is where my education failed me. I guess I knew nothing about Bauhaus. I knew it was a German movement, I knew it was a between the wars movement. I knew it involved Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. I know a Bauhaus inspired building when I see it (usually). And I thought I knew that Bauhaus was a modernistic, but pared down industrial inspired architectual movmement.

I had no idea that the Bauhaus was a school that lasted for fourteen years (first in Weimar, then in Dessau and finally in Berlin), until Hitler shut it down (with great publiciity) in 1934, that it involved an extraordinary number of well known twentieth century artists (as teachers or instructors, as students, or as both), or that it was reconstituted in Chicago (where it was renamed and now forms part of the Illinois Institute of Techonology, and inspired Black Mountain College in the Piedmont region of North Carolina (also home to an array of famous twenty century artists) which closed in 1957, and also had influence over artistic teaching in Northern California.

I now know that, in addition to architecture (which hardly was mentioned yesterday), Bauhaus involved painting, fabrics and weaving, pottery, metal working and jewelry, furniture, and sculpture. That it was a holistic program, designed to blend the working of craftsmen with the working of artists, and on an equal footing (it was in a sense a socialist, or at least social democratic movement), and that the major item of contention within the movement itself was how much focus should be put on industrial design (i.e., items that can be manufactured), rather than on individualistic pieces of art. It spread in both directions. For example, in the U.S.A., Chicago was more industrially oriented (and techologically), while Black Mountain seemed to be more individualistic.

Josef and Anni Albers, Marcel Breuer, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Andreas Feininger all taught at Bauhaus. Josef Albers was a student, as was (at Black Mountain) both deKoonings, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Jacob Lawrence, Franz Kline and others.

Oh, yes, one more rather important point. The Bauhaus style inspired some extraordinary works in all of the categories mentioned above, much of which is now quite familiar. Only when you see it context with the Bauhaus philosophy, however, does it all (to my untrained) eye, all fit together in surprising ways.