Artists of the Bauhaus

Bauhaus art is self-consciously the art of the Machine Age, the age in which, according to Walter Gropius, the school's founder, the dominant spirit is "the idea of a universal unity in which all opposing forces exist in a state of absolute balance."

To most of the artists now exhibited at the Busch, unity of the arts in an industrial era demanded the use of industrial forms. Shapes are generally geometric, textures are flat, and colors slightly metallic. Such is Lyonel Feininger's "Architecture II, or The Man from Potin," a bright street scene in which the men built of cylindrical, conical and spherical forms assume the appearance of machine parts.

The paintings of Oscar Schlemmer, Herbert Bayer, Paul Klee, and others also reflect this mechanical trend, but it reaches perhaps its greatest extreme in the works of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy who completely eliminates the objective elements from his painting, retaining only geometric abstractions. Unlike most current abstract-expressionists, Moholy-Nagy shows a great amount of skill in juggling forms and colors to achieve a very definite (and intended) effect. In his "Composition A-18," the clever placing of several dotted lines directs a jumble of planes to recede from the viewer into a large white circle, and the whole melange tumbles into a dark corner. However little meaning the painting may convey, its perspective, crispness, and balance show it to be the work of a first-rate designer.

A second trend--frequently embraced by the same artists--proceeds from another Bauhaus principle expressed by Gropius in 1923. "We perceive every form," he wrote, "as the embodiment of an idea, every piece of work as a manifestation of our innermost selves. Only work which is the product of inner compulsion can have spiritual meaning." The most familiar examples of this concept are Paul Klee's fantasies but, Feininger and, especially, Wassily Kandinsky submit to the same influence.

All of these men were experimenters and, although their experiments sometimes fail artistically, they add considerable excitement to the Bauhaus work: some utilized the texture of the cloth they paint on, others created directly on photographic film without a camera, carved into laminated plastic, or painted on glass. And most of them not only painted but designed buildings, fabrics, furniture, and tried their hands at other arts relevant to the visual environment.

Unfortunately, the Busch has assembled an exceedingly unimaginative show out of fascinating materials. With no hint of an understanding for the effects the movement has had on contemporary art and architecture, and with little consciousness of the unifying concept the Bauhaus had of the arts, the Busch merely presents the viewer with unrelated objects.

For the art scholar this kind of exhibit is fine; for the person who visits a museum merely to see some nice pictures it is fine. But for the person who views the world as the Bauhaus did--in terms of unity, it is hard to imagine how the museum's directors could ignore an opportunity to show, among other things, how Kandinsky's abstract expressionism has led to such things as Jackson Pollack's dribblings, how Moholy-Nagy's geometry has led to Mark Rothko's squares within squares, and, most important of all, how the Bauhaus attempt to unify the visual arts has led to widespread acceptance of what now is called "environmental architecture"--the attempt to enlarge the artist's realm beyond the single painting or building, to include the total physical environment.