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The Bauhaus: The World at a Slant
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17486 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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7 / 1990 |
1,704 Words |
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Jeannine Fieldler and Louis Kaplan
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They are lined up like a hot jazz band of the roaring twenties. But unlike the conventional group portrait that steps from left to right, T. Lux Feininger has presented his Bauhaus pals in a vertical key. It was only meant to be a snapshot, a way to capture the everyday life of a sixteen-year-old art student. But through this simple turn, we are presented with one of the basic features of photography at the Bauhaus - an unusual perspective by which we can see the world anew. This slice of life is one of the pieces in the Photography at the Bauhaus exhibition presented by the Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin, which is currently on tour throughout Europe. In showcasing its vast collection, the Bauhaus-Archiv is displaying the photographic work of one of the most important art schools of this century for the first time. While there have been smaller shows on the subject, this is the first comprehensive treatment of photography at the Bauhaus (ca. 435 works) by the institution entrusted with collecting the artistic output of the school.
Avant-garde Mecca
Founded in 1919 by architect Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus became a flourishing community for avant-grade artists in Weimar Germany. Artists like Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Oskar Schlemmer taught and worked there. Until its closing under the political and artistic repression of the Nazi regime in 1933, the Bauhaus steadfastly supported artistic experimentation and alternative lifestyles. The products of the various Bauhaus workshops (i.e., furniture, weaving, and metal work) and the individual achievements of its masters and students have been receiving public and critical recognition for many years. For instance, the first exhibition of the Bauhaus in the United States at the Museum of Modern Art in New York dates back to 1938; it was organized as Gropius' first project in American exile.
It was only recently, however, that the importance of photography at the Bauhaus has been valued. This has to be understood in a wider context. Over the past twenty years, the appreciation of twentieth-century photography has grown rapidly in aesthetic terms and in market value.
This belated appreciation parallels the formal role of photography in the history of the school. It is significant to consider that about one-half of the images in this exhibition come from a period when there was no formal training in photography at the school. It was only in the last four years of the school's existence that Walter Peterhans was appointed to head a photography department and to offer technical courses in this field at the Bauhaus. Independent of any professional training and outside their formal workshops, the Bauhaus students and teachers were moonlighting with photography. In such an unrestricted atmosphere, they began to experiment with this black box using whatever was at hand.
The results are exhibited in a variety of genres-portrait dialogues in which friends interacted via a lens, individual portraits in which mirror reflections became the device for reflecting upon oneself, still-lifes in which a metal globe distorted a student's studio environment into a "New Vision." The students were open to every significant current or altered vision in this decade of artistic upheaval. Therefore, they cut and pasted their way through the picture media, miming Dada collage techniques and created photomontages. They studied the work of the Russian
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