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.
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