The Black Von Scrolls

Seven people gathered at the home of artist John Powers last night and discussed the current Bauhaus show at MOMA. We talked about the Futurists, Constructivists and other movements taking place at that time and how they influenced each other and how Modernism was born. Todd Gibson started the talk by asking the group questions - and one of them was “If painters were in charge of the Bauhaus school and not architects, what kind of school would it have been?”

Felix, John, Erik, Josephine and Geoff weighed in with some great dialog, while I mostly sat there to listen and occasionally ask questions. I wanted to know what was happening around Bauhaus and how it related to other nearby artists at the time (my fascination is the Dadaists, who were also working in Berlin). Dadaism rejected conventional art and was part of the “anti-art” movement, a radical beginning to conceptual art. I wanted to know what divided the Bauhaus school & Dadaists, because some of the art looked so similar to me. The answer was staring me in the face the whole time: Dadaists had something political to express, while the Bauhaus school experimented and promoted modern art, design & technology into our everyday lives. Even though both groups borrowed techniques from the other (for instance, László Moholy-Nagy from the Bauhaus and Dadaist Hannah Höch were friends and influenced each others’ work), the separation is quite clear to me now: at the Bauhaus school, art was taught from the basis of color theory. Dadaists might have studied in more conventional art schools, but broke away and declared art as readymade. In Hannah Höch’s case, she was a pioneer of feminist expression in art. Whether Marxist, Fascist, Feminist or Revolutionary; the Bauhaus school, Dadaists, Futurists, Constructivists and Cubists all embraced technology and rejected the past - under the roof of Modernism.

László Moholy-Nagy, Untitled, 1925-27

Hannah Höch, Da Dandy, 1919

John added that nationalism was part of a European zeitgeist between the Great War and WWII, which had me thinking about what the common person was experiencing, and how artists respond to it. He noted that Modernism was coined by Alfred Barr as a way to bring the international artistic community together, instead of groups doing similar things but isolated behind a nationalist curtain. Artists and creatives were rebelling and pushing boundaries in many different arenas. The upshot was a lot of compelling art, design, architecture, literature, music by looking toward the future and not from the past.

We discussed the difference between science and pseudoscience in the Bauhaus manifestos, and why they were wrong. This is when the discussion became heated - Felix, Erik, Geoff, Todd and me to one side, and John and Josephine on the other. Todd was especially interested in the Kandinsky Questionnaire and his methods of “scientific testing” with his students on colors correlating to shapes. I just took the test and completely failed: http://bit.ly/3AeBAw.

Many of us agreed the textile wall hangings in MOMA’s show were most impressive, here’s a favorite:

Unknown weaver, possibly ELSE MÖGELIN, Wall hanging c. 1923
Linen, rayon, and wool 55 7/8 x 112 3/16” (142 x 285 cm)

Erik mentioned his obsession with Native American textiles and their amazing graphic quality. I thought of a contemporary African artist from Ghana, El-Anatsui, who works in bottle caps and blew us away at the Venice Biennale 2007:

A last question I had was: what artist today embraces the Bauhaus completely? Answers were “Ikea” and “Jonathon Ive” of Apple. If we were actually going to answer the question in terms of an artist, I added Andrea Zittel.

The Bauhaus period was an innovative time to push boundaries and create everlasting design concepts which are incorporated into everything we see today. More and more, I find myself looking back at history to solve puzzles. I think it would be tragic to reject the past - I am not inventing a new way of painting and I doubt I ever will. So it’s awesome to imagine inventing brand new artistic methods, but not my focus. I’ll leave that to the Germans.