The Bauhaus at the Busch-Reisinger Museum

The influence of the famous German design school, the Bauhaus, on the arts today is as apparent as the ubiquitous Volkswagen is on U.S. streets. Mushroom-topped lamps, svelte coffee pots, paintings of surreal geometries, and clean, functional buildings are associated with the Bauhaus attitude as readily as jimmies are with Boston ice cream cones. In its art work the Bauhaus mixes mysticism with the concrete. In its pedagogy it encourages imaginative thinking yet demands well-defined results. And from this composite house of arts-crafts-architecture, appeared distinct personalities like Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Walter Gropius, Lazslo Moholy-Nagy.

The Busch-Reisinger Museum (B.R.) has finally pulled out some representative works from its basements filled with Bauhaus archives. Since 1948, at the instigation of Charles Kuhn (B.R. Curator 1932-68) and the presence of Walter Gropius as Chairman of the Department of Architecture, the Museum has been collecting Bauhaus items-from class notes to textiles. The Museum's present curator, John David Farmer, with the help of two design consultants, Peter Kemble and Lynn Yudell, has arranged an attractive yet small package of the Busch Bauhaus.

The show illustrates the course of study of this 14-year institution, started by Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919. To separate any Bauhaus exhibit into class divisions is misleading since a primary doctrine was to unite the crafts with the fine arts and to fuse these two into a third and ultimate structure-the building. Thus resulted buildings like Harvard's Harkness Commons with a mural of colored tile by Herbert Bayer, a brick relief by Josef Albers, the textiles by his wife Anni Albers, and the architecture by Gropius.

Josef Albers, who is known for his rigorous color studies and 3-D paper exercises, is unusually represented in the exhibit by his photos; for example, his Garden Chairs reiterates his geometric, figure-ground play. Bayer ,too, has an unusual photo, unlike his prolific posters and typography (his invention of san-serif type); Surrealist Composition, 1937, is a view of unstable, never-in-full-view spheres and cones.

What is missing in the exhibit is the eccentricity of certain personalities such as Johannes Itten and Georg Muche who shaved their heads and dressed as monks, or Oskar Schlemmer's stage sets and ballets. Yet the imagination of Klee works, or even of a doll-house like representation of a Metal Exhibit (Joost Schmidt 1934) complete with boat propellers and model airplanes, shows the creative richness of the Bauhaus that encouraged a tradition in education as well as art. The Bauhaus brought art off its pedestal and seduced even the common Pygmalion; the Busch should bring such attractive nuisances up from the basement more often.