natalia ilyin

In addition to being a place for me to put long articles originally published in foreign languages (how much of that did you actually get through?) I see that this blog is also functioning as a Home for Wayward Book Reviews-- this one of The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism, a book by Nicholas Fox Weber. When the design magazine for which I originally wrote this had an editorial shake-up, I wasn't paying attention and forgot to send the darned thing in. However, it occurs to me that this piece will find as many readers here as it would have in the printed magazine for which I wrote it. Thank you, Google Analytics, for that bit of comforting knowledge.

The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism

It took one determined trumpet to fell the walls of Jericho, but it has taken 90 years for scholars and curators to begin to grapple with and dismantle the Gropian curtain wall that created and defends our perceptions of the Bauhaus.

Recent shows at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity) and at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model) included many more aspects of the work done at this most influential of design schools than have any previous exhibitions. The great tussle between the Bauhaus’s Expressionists and its Constructivists is more fully exposed than ever before.

Similarly, a current crop of books and monographs (Gunta Stolzl: Bauhaus Master; Bauhaus Women: Art, Handicraft and Design; Bauhaus Conflicts, 1919-2009: Controversies and Counterparts, to name some) seem uninterested in shoring up the heroic quality of their subjects, and very interested in looking deeply into their subjects' humanity. This is a refreshing change.

The public façade of Bauhaus uniformity was a relatedness of vision that Gropius worked hard to achieve. His most notable effort was the MoMA 1938 retrospective “Bauhaus 1919-1928,” which he himself curated. At the time, he was chairman of Harvard’s architecture school. And in this exhibition--the first to show Americans what the Bauhaus had done-- he skillfully manipulated the facts. People at the school who had become his political enemies or had worked in genres that he considered a bit shop-worn and not of-the-moment were simply downplayed or not included. It was this warped vision--Gropius's public relations campaign-- upon which we began to create our current design history.

For years, young designers have been taught that the Bauhaus, though made up of individuals, had an “essential uniformity of vision,” an essential uniformity that informed all of its students’ work. Because a Bauhaus tea kettle had nice lines, our teachers somehow gave us the impression, inadvertantly or adamantly, that the person who had designed said teakettle had a direct line to the Spirit of Order in the Universe, and that this designer was more rigorous, more righteous, less messily human— more "modern" than we could ever hope to be. Certainly, quiet references were made to one or two "dissenting voices," but generally, we were given to believe that the Bauhaus was about clean lines and order. Nothing, it turns out, could have been farther from the truth.

And this is why Nicholas Fox Weber’s book, The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism, is such a wonderful thing to read. It’s the story behind the façade of the Bauhaus. It’s about the messy, sloppy, lovelorn, narcissistic, masochistic, petty, courageous lives of the people who did much of their best work there.

The wall of impersonality finds no role in our Facebooking world. It is interesting to note that the huge Berlin exhibition “Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model” was created to mark the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. We are seeing that the seamless, impervious State-- the seamless, impervious corporate facade-- cannot hold up to a tweeting generation.

In getting to know these six people of the Bauhaus group (Gropius, Klee, Kandinsky, both Albers and Mies van der Rohe) in getting to know their financial troubles and their small successes, we get to feel closer to them. When Weber pulls them off their pedestals, we have the opportunity to learn from them in much more intimate ways than we ever learned from their "cleaned up" selves.

There is a downside: Seeing these artists and designers clothed in their everyday humanity is like catching the Wizard of Oz behind his curtain. In reading Weber’s book, Bauhaus modernism loses some of its somber, Germanic, patriarchal high seriousness for us. It is a serious loss, this loss of the heroic. We are losing it everywhere, not just in books about famous designers. But it is a loss that allows the Bauhauslers into our lives— makes us care about them, rather than revere them. Love, as Shakespeare mentioned, is not idolatry.

Today I found a lovely thick, letterpressed holiday greeting card in the mail from Pentagram, which made me feel included and cozy and like they haven't forgotten me and a bunch of other things that an ex-New Yorker feels.

It says, "While we would all love to be atypical, we all fit a type."
And then urges me to discover mine at:
pentagram.com/seasonsgreetings09
password: character

The whole thing seems a bit slow until you get to the part where he holds out the little pad, and then it gets pretty cool.

Just so you know, I'm Plastica.
Which I can embrace. Though perhaps I was merely in a Plastica mood at the very moment I took the test, which concerns me. I'll need to repeat it when I'm feeling more outgoing.

And you?

Whew. What a last minute flurry trying to get on the road again. I just posted the fabulous new student spotlight (on my website's student page.) It's the blog for NowWhat, three Cornish students who have started a music poster design company here in Seattle. More about Seattle, grunge and poster art on the student page, or you can go straight to their blog:

http://nowwhatposters.wordpress.com/

Thomas, our NY Times-reading all-things design eyes and ears in NYC contributes this article about the challenge of type-sensitivity to lighten your Monday morning.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/arts/16iht-design16.html?_r=2&em

I'm honored that Blonde Like Me made the recommended list for "Women Unbound," A Striped Armchair's new reading challenge.

I love a challenge. This one runs from right now until Nov 2010.

http://astripedarmchair.wordpress.com/2009/10/30/women-unbound-a-new-reading-challenge/

It really is worth checking out "A Striped Armchair". Not just to get to the challenge blog, but just generally. It makes me feel surrounded by intelligent friends.

I forgot to mention here that Stefan Bucher's new book is out. He and the publisher had a big party for it in L.A. but I had the flu and couldn't budge. This was annoying for I imagine that they did things right.

The Graphic Eye: Photographs by Graphic Designers From Around the Globe is the perfect present for your design friends this year. And add one in for yourself. Stefan's stringent editing and thought-through book design make this the object with which to collapse into a big leather chair after holiday preparations have taken their toll. The photos are so revivifying that soon you'll be humming "It's Cold Outside" and warming up the hot buttered rum.

Some projects just fly on wings.
Here's a note from Aaron, a student I met during a RISD workshop
two years ago:

As many of you know, last summer I started a collaborative poster
project in support of Barack Obama's campaign,
Design for Obama (http://www.designforobama.org );
it aggregated a sizable poster collection, formed an international
community of designers ranging from novice to professional, and got a
fair amount of attention in the process.

After receiving a phone call from the legendary filmmaker and
activist, Spike Lee, he and I teamed up to publish the growing poster
collection. Spike had been sent one of our posters, specifically a
remix of his "Do the Right Thing" movie poster where the title had
been changed to "Did the Right Thing" and Spike had been replaced with
Obama. This poster led him to the entire collection.

Thanks to his efforts, those of legendary design author and
historian Steven Heller, and the good people at Taschen Books,
this November 4th will see the publication of
Design for Obama - Posters for Change: A Grassroots Anthology.

I am incredibly excited and honored that my foreword will
be accompanied by essays from Lee and Heller, not to mention 200 of
the best posters submitted to designforobama.org in the course of the
2008 presidential election.

The book is available for preorder on amazon.com now
(http://bit.ly/CEZ16) and will be released this November 4th
to celebrate Obama's historic win.
We'll be having book signings in New York and Los Angeles
(details to come) and I'd love to see you there!

Here, now, the birds start up early. The first sleepy chirp sounds at 3:30. A real chirpfest by four am. Head under pillows, what’s left but to push back the percale and stumble out and make coffee and sit watching the light come. The white sky deepens to clear blue--the green of new leaves, the climbing rose spilling yellow blossoms over the balcony.

People have their favorites, but when sleep is not an option I read Rilke. I go back to Letters to a Young Poet. It's not just for the young. In the face of these clear words, everyone is young.

Here’s something from Rilke about criticism. It may seem strange coming from me, since I write criticism. But I agree with him.

“… And let me here promptly make a request: read as little as possible of aesthetic criticism— such things are either partisan views, petrified and grown senseless in their lifeless induration, or they are clever quibblings in which today one view wins and tomorrow the opposite. Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just to them.

Consider yourself and your feeling right every time with regard to every such argumentation, discussion or introduction; if you are wrong after all, the natural growth of your inner life will lead you slowly and with time to other insights. Leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything.

Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist’s life: in understanding as in creating.”

Sun. All of Seattle is pinned down by it, all of us lizards upon rocks.
Although the deadline looms for my manuscript, I have settled down again in the sun-splotched studio with Dr. Zee’s, “Fearful Symmetry: the Search for Beauty in Modern Physics.” As I said in my Amazon review, I avoided reading Dr. Zee’s book, fearing I wouldn’t understand it. But Anthony Zee is a storyteller as well as a theoretical physicist, and his book is about the beauty and simplicity of the design of the Universe. For people like me, schooled in the modern and post-modern agendas, this book serves to strip away much theoretical dross. I recommend it wholeheartedly to the thinking designer. I also suggest that my students read it leisurely over the summer, because it will be a part of our conversations in the Fall.

http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_1_snd-postmodern-financial-crisis.html

"...Postmodernism, which places itself “beyond good and evil,” beyond true and false, inhabits a cosmic bubble. It would be a good thing if fear of a universal crisis allowed us to burst the mental bubble of postmodernism—if it washed away the euphoria of our pious wishes and brought us once again to see straight. That may be no more than another pious wish. But we should not succumb, as so many did in the 1920s, to a catastrophic sensibility. Yes, history is tragic, as Aeschylus and Sophocles knew. And yes, it is as stupid as set forth in Aristophanes or Euripides. No roll of the dice and no act of God or of mathematically refined finance can abolish chance, corruption, or adversity; the providence of the stock market cannot save us any more than that of the state. Let these lines from Plato be inscribed at the entryway to future G-20 meetings: “Is there not one true coin for which all things ought to be exchanged?—and that is wisdom.”

(André Glucksmann is a French philosopher.
His article was translated from the French by Alexis Cornel.)