Barbican Art Gallery, LondonVisited June 2012

Bauhaus,Art as life

Eugene Batz, “The Spatial Effects of Colors and Forms”from Kandinsky’s course (1929)

Bauhaus:

the art school seen to embody sober, purist German modernism:

form follows functionForm Folgt Funktion

The Barbican’s exhibition Bauhaus: Art as Life is irreverent, unexpected, and ranges broadly across documentary material and works of art and design.

Paintings, usually overlooked in accounts of the Bauhaus, play a starring role: the entire Bauhaus story is summed up by the gulf between Lyonel Feininger’s expressionist “Studio Window” (1919), its surging crystalline planes symbolising Gropius’s founding Utopian vision, and Kandinsky’s sombre, abstract “Development in Brown” (1933), made shortly before the Bauhaus was closed under Nazi pressure.

Josef Albers’s set of four stacking tables

Lyonel Feininger

Studio Window1919

Marcel Breuer’s tubular steel Club Chair, Anni Alber’s textiles, Wassily Kandinsky’s paintings, Oskar Schlemmer’s costumes and Walter Gropius’ buildings...

These key pieces sourced from institutes across the globe – in particular from the three cornerstone collections of Bauhaus: Klassik Stiftung Weimar, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin and Stiftung Bauhaus.

Marcel-BreuerClub chair, 1925–26Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Anni AlbersWall hanging 1926 (remade 1964)

Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Anni Albers,

Tablecoth fabric sample,1930

M.o.M.A., New York

Gunta StölzlFive Choirs, 1928.

Die Museen für Kunst und Kultursgeschichte der Hansestadt Lübeck

Marianne Brandtea set, 1924

The formal principles of the Bauhaus school: circle, globe and square are the basic forms of the construction.

WassiliKandinsky,

Circles in aCircle,1923

Peter Keler,

De Stijl 1, 1922

KandinskyDevelopment in brown(Entwicklung in Braun), 1933

Paul Klee painted luminous, interlocking, architectonic abstractions – “Double Tower”, “Tomb in Three Parts” – that resemble stained glass

Paul Klee's Tomb in Three Parts 2

Paul KleeDouble tower(duppelturm)

Private collection, Franz Marc Museum

Oskar Schlemmer

Triadic Ballet,the wild theatre design of Oskar Schlemmer

Bauhaus was founded, in Weimar by Walter Gropius in 1919 – the year in which he published what has become known as the Bauhaus manifesto, Programme of the State Bauhaus Weimar. Developed from “romantic socialist and utopian aspirations,” the pamphlet called for artists to return to the crafts.

“Masters of form” and “workshop masters” would instil formal and theoretical instruction and the technical skills in which to realise them. The products of these workshops would eschew distinction as either art or craft and instead realise something far greater, a term that resonates with today’s multidisciplinary ambitions, to unite the arts in Gesamtkunstwerk or, “total work of art.”

WalterGropius,Curriculum Graph

Stone, wood, metal, fabric, colour, glass and sound – the base for building art

Bauhaus (1925), by Walter Gropius

Bauhaus – Art as Life Barbican Art Gallery, 3 May 2012 - 12 August 2012

• http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/event-detail.asp?ID=12409

©Mário Ricca, 2012