Word: bauhaus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...some of the show's inclusion is that the school was eventually disbanded by the Nazis for the political beliefs expressed in its manifestoes. Its ideal was to promote egalitarian social conditions by providing visual continuity at every level of life. For example, a perfect start to a Bauhaus day would be to wake up in the morning to coffee in a mass-produced coffee cup designed to blend pleasantly with that day's newspaper type, whose forms in turn would intermesh smoothly with the rest of the Kitchen, the house--in short, the world, Waking to that well-designed...
...show is that the Busch-Reisinger is uncommunicative. The museum raises your curiosity but gives no explanations for the show's diversity or what it implies about the power of the school at its early stage. Most viewers won't come to the show with a fund of Bauhaus history. Instead, they're interested because the name connotes an austere functionalism in design that has infiltrated 1970s American life everywhere from typography to the mass-produced Marcel Breuer steel tubular chair. They'll wonder how this regulated style ever evolved from these 51 varied graphics--expressionist, primitive, whimsical. realistic...
...certainly not beyond the Busch-Reisinger Museum's resources to do this. In 1937, Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, migrated to Cambridge. He headed Harvard's Graduate School of Design, brought associate Gyorgy Kepes to MIT, and inspired a Bauhaus focus at the Busch-Reisinger. His gift of half the exhibited graphics (the other half were given this year by Lyonel Feininger, a long-time Bauhaus faculty member and his wife) is a dazzling portion of the Busch's substantial Bauhaus collection. Beyond that, the museum could easily have borrowed around Cambridge, a last stronghold of the Bauhaus...
...order to flesh out the graphics exhibit, the Busch has pulled a few favorite Bauhaus works from its own collection. Klee and Feininger paintings, 1920-23, and Bauhaus crafts. The crafts, like the graphics, are a wide-spread sampling alongside yet another influence of the Bauhaus, art nouveau crafts. The resulting conglomeration is fascinating but confusing...
What you do get from "New European Graphics" is visual excitement, With the exception of major French artists, this is everything that was happening in European art in 1921. For a refreshing change, it's not the scholars who made this selection but the artists themselves. Bauhaus teachers invited contributions from the artists they admired. It's a medley of masters and, as with a museum's permanent exhibits, you wander through and enjoy your favorites...