New scholarship
emphasizing inter-artistic dialogue and ideological ambivalence has challenged
existing narratives of modernism that equated artistic progress with medium
specificity and/or with leftist political agitation. Political and intellectual
developments over the last twenty years made a comprehensive reevaluation of
the Bauhaus both desirable and necessary.
This
review examines the three very different catalogues that accompanied the 2009
Bauhaus exhibits. The Klassik Stiftung, Bauhaus-Archiv, and Museum of Modern
Art collaborated in that they coordinated their events and contributed objects
to each exhibition. However, each exhibit and catalogue represents a discrete
scholarly intervention motivated by the specific histories and politics of each
host institution. Exhibitions and catalogues appeared in chronological
succession over the course of 2009, thereby reenacting the Bauhaus’s
chronological, geographic, and artistic evolution. The Klassik Stiftung’s
exhibit and catalogue appeared first, focusing on the preliminary phase of the
Bauhaus in Weimar beginning in 1919. Located in the nation’s capital, the Berlin
exhibit gave equal weight to the school’s three regional locations (Weimar,
Dessau, Berlin), and dwelt above all on questions of national importance. The
Museum of Modern Art’s exhibit and catalogue appropriately closed the sequence,
since so many Bauhaus teachers and students fled to America after 1933, when
National Socialists effectively forced the school’s closure. The Museum of
Modern Art’s catalogue explores the Bauhaus’s relationship to modernist
aesthetics and politics in both Europe and America.
The three 2009 publications offer strikingly
distinct and sometimes contradictory views of the Bauhaus. Was the Bauhaus at
heart international or German? To what degree did it present continuities with
pre-war developments? Did its experimentation stem from exclusively progressive
political imperatives? Scholars contributing to the three catalogues offer
differing answers to these important questions. Together the three publications
suggest that debates related to the Bauhaus are alive, current, and deeply
unresolved. The following review essay treats each catalogue successively, and
concludes with some general observations.
Katherine Kuenzli
