Word: bauhaus
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...surprising to think of large numbers of artists aligning themselves with the Bauhaus. Over time, Bauhaus design, with its stress on rectilinear, functional style, has shaped teacups, posters, skyscrapers, tapestries, op art, striped dresses, the Container Corporation of America's containers, and T.V. dinners. This is all in keeping with the Bauhaus image of art as intervening to save the visual environment from awesome but ugly technology. Still influential 50 years after the school's demise, the Bauhaus style of teaching permeates Carpenter Center and other university art departments. But this pervasive influence had not yet made itself felt...
Intrigued, the viewer tries to sense what it was about the fledgling school that raised support from such diverse artists It all begins to make sense with hindsight, because many of these artists eventually intermingled with Bauhaus faculty. Wassily Kandinsky was a famous Bauhaus teacher, so it seemed natural to see included in the show a lithograph by his ardent imitator, Rudolf Bauer. But Kandinsky hadn't yet arrived at the Bauhaus...
...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...