On Exhibit

On the first floor balcony of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, six mannequins pose in costumes one might expect to see either at the Mardi Gras or on the Tom Corbett Space Cadet television program. One of the dummies sports a mask composed of a Chinese red semi-sphere and what looks like one half of a stone arrowhead with a black eye hole in the center. One of his arms is a lance, surrounded by a bell-like guard. The other arm, wearing skin-tight silk encased in a gourd shaped sheath, holds a golden club. The remaining five costumes, all designed by Oscar Schlemmer for a Bauhaus ballet, are only a little less spectacular.

These costumes, together with paintings, sculpture, photographs, and designs, are all products of the now defunct Bauhaus School of art and architecture. The school was formed and headed by Walter Gropius. And from its inception in 1919 until 1933 when the Nazis closed the school, the Bauhaus made the most startling and the most widely copied innovations in both functional art and art teaching techniques. The exhibit currently at the Busch Reisinger Museum is actually but a small part of the Bauhaus show now in Boston. The rest, which mainly accentuates the work of Dr. Gropius, is at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

Perhaps the best known among the Bauhaus painters represented at the Busch-Reisinger in Paul Klee. In the last few years his colorful, semi-cubist abstractions have become more and more popular. Besides some of these oils there are a few delicate lithographs and an especially interesting etching entitled, "The Miser." In this work Klee employed a technique which he used successfully in some of his other etchings, that of two faces registering opposite emotions superimposed on each other. One face wears the expression the world sees, the other that of the subject's own personality.

Contrasting to Klee's cubism and abstraction is the sculpture of Gerhard Marcks. Unfortunately, Allied bombing destroyed most of Marck's work, and it is practically impossible to gather together a representative sampling. A majority of the forms shown--cast in bronze--are long, lean, and austere. There are, however, one roly-poly figure called "A Dutchman" and a very appealing ceramic of two lovers kissing which looks like something Picasso might have translated into a third dimension.

Lyonel Feininger's section includes fine, sketchy prints and cubist canvasses. Although his oils are certainly interesting, none of them is particularly vivid or eye-catching.

As a contrast to Feininger, there are Herbert Bayer's colorful posters. Bayer, a leader in advertising techniques, has done an amusing burlesque on his own field. He shows the possibilities of popularizing a fictional "Regina Toothpaste" through a specially constructed building. On the outside of this structure he has drawn a loudspeaker which blares forth the product's name. On the inside, movies portray the advantages of the toothpaste, while the building's chimney spouts smoke in the form of "Regina." Bayer's only oil on display, a dull study in browns, whites, and blacks, is far below the standard of his posters.

Besides his geometric abstractions which stress color, form, and shading, Josef Albers has done bright and glossy studies in sandblasted glass. To make his patterns, Albers put together sheets of laminated glass of different colors and blasted his designs from the top plates, allowing the underplates to show through. Albers also worked with plastic, and the engraving called "The Tight Rope" shows his particular talent at its best.

The most important contributions of Laszio Moholy-Nagy to the fields of art and photography cannot be shown in any exhibit. Moholy-Nagy was primarily a great teacher, but his work in developing new types of photography is also outstanding. On display are some of his photograms, plates exposed without the aid of a camera. There are also vivid geometric abstractions in water color, and a construction in chrome and lucite. Another of Moholy-Nagy's innovations is a seeming monstrosity called a light machine. It is used to project abstract light images on a screen for the benefit of abstract motion pictures.