Word: art
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Over time the Bauhaus faculty would include some enduring names in 20th century art and design, including Josef and Anni Albers, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. They were all in their different ways ardent modernists, but in its first years the school was caught in a contradiction: a romance with individual craftsmanship at odds with the modernist ideal of mass production. Even the name Bauhaus (House for Building) carried echoes of Bauhütten, the shared lodgings of the medieval craftsmen who built the great cathedrals. As for the painters connected to the Bauhaus, whatever systems and principles Klee and Kandinsky...
...monolithic institution we meet in "Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity," a new show at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City, which runs there until Jan. 25. It's a collective of fierce individuals and a continuing work in progress. But while the school may have been a group enterprise, it was largely the creation of one man. In 1919, the year it opened, Walter Gropius was a young German architect recovering from dual traumas--World War I and his turbulent first marriage to the formidable Alma Mahler. One of history's supreme narcissists, she betrayed...
That lyrical and nostalgic strain was amplified by Johannes Itten, the unlikely man Gropius first picked to teach the entry course. A vegetarian, Zoroastrian and state-of-the-art bohemian, Itten knew more about yoga than he did about factory floors. In the years when he set the tone for much of what the school produced, the would-be school of industrial art could seem more like a hippie craft shop. A product of the Bauhaus could be a hand-thrown pot or a funky hand-carved chair...
...turning point came in 1923, when Gropius dismissed Itten and replaced him with the resolutely modern Hungarian Constructivist László Moholy-Nagy. In the same year, the school mounted an exhibition with the no-nonsense title "Art and Technology--A New Unity." The painter Oskar Schlemmer announced the back-on-track Bauhaus ethic in a polemic that was only partly tongue in cheek: "Death to the past, to moonlight, and to the soul...
...this is no joke. On Saturday, the Vatican invited 250 of the art world’s Very Important People to its digs in the Holy See for a little face-time with Benedict XVI. The aforementioned Bocelli and Kapoor, as well as Ennio Morricone, Arvo Pärt, and other literary and artistic luminaries, put in appearances. The general mood in the artist camp was one of awed reverence; the general dress code, black. Nobody wants to clash with the supreme leader of the Catholic church...