Word: bauhaus
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...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...
...came much more of the work we think of as quintessentially Bauhaus: spare, sharp-lined products like Marianne Brandt's geometric tea-and-coffee sets and Josef Albers' austere little stacking tables. Marcel Breuer devised his soon-to-be-famous tubular steel chairs with their bands of stretched black canvas, a skeletal combination of lines and taut planes that looked like an X-ray of a chair. Even then, while factory production may have been the aspiration for many pieces, old-fashioned handcraft may still have been the method behind them. The interlocking grids of Albers' glasswork Goldrosa give...
...Bauhaus way of thinking, geometric abstraction was the language of modernity, and the grid was one of its most powerful instruments, a formal system that could confine Expressionist excesses. In the catalog to the MOMA show, which was organized by curators Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, there's a color photograph of Gropius' righteously Cartesian office, with a right-angular chair resting on a grid-patterned carpet and a grid-patterned tapestry hanging on one wall...
There's something poignant in that picture about the yearning for a universe of reason and order that those right angles symbolized at a time when Germany was gradually going insane. By the mid-1920s, the Bauhaus was under steady pressure from the conservative government of Thuringia, which funded the school but regarded it as a left-wing, bohemian swindle. When the provincial legislature stopped paying faculty salaries in 1925, the Bauhaus relocated to the more welcoming industrial city of Dessau, where it eventually occupied its famously forward-looking new building designed by Gropius. But a few years later...
When the Nazis came to power in Dessau, the Bauhaus moved again, this time to Berlin under the directorship of none other than Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. He did what he could to appease the Nazis, forbidding left-wing student gatherings and producing exhibitions of what he hoped would be seen as apolitical abstract work, but it was no use. In 1933, with Hitler firmly in power, Mies arrived one morning at the converted factory where the school was housed to find it surrounded by black-uniformed Gestapo. Soon after, he shut it down for good and made...