A Puzzling Show of Support

"New European Graphics," the exhibit at the Busch-Reisinger Museum through August 30, is the result of a widespread cooperative artistic effort on behalf of the Bauhaus School in 1921. That year, 51 artists from Russia, Italy and Germany contributed prints, most of which had been made quite recently, to a group of Bauhaus portfolios. They underlined this show of support with a financial gift--all proceeds from the published books were to go to the Bauhaus School.

It's not surprising to think of large numbers of artists aligning themselves with the Bauhaus. Over time, Bauhaus design, with its stress on rectilinear, functional style, has shaped teacups, posters, skyscrapers, tapestries, op art, striped dresses, the Container Corporation of America's containers, and T.V. dinners. This is all in keeping with the Bauhaus image of art as intervening to save the visual environment from awesome but ugly technology. Still influential 50 years after the school's demise, the Bauhaus style of teaching permeates Carpenter Center and other university art departments. But this pervasive influence had not yet made itself felt in 1921, the year of these loyal contributions. In fact, the Weimar, Germany Bauhaus School was only two years old. The puzzle in the enthusiastically supported portfolios is that at this time most of the contributors hadn't met each other, had not graduated from the Bauhaus, and worked in very different styles.

Intrigued, the viewer tries to sense what it was about the fledgling school that raised support from such diverse artists It all begins to make sense with hindsight, because many of these artists eventually intermingled with Bauhaus faculty. Wassily Kandinsky was a famous Bauhaus teacher, so it seemed natural to see included in the show a lithograph by his ardent imitator, Rudolf Bauer. But Kandinsky hadn't yet arrived at the Bauhaus in 1921.

Another clue to some of the show's inclusion is that the school was eventually disbanded by the Nazis for the political beliefs expressed in its manifestoes. Its ideal was to promote egalitarian social conditions by providing visual continuity at every level of life. For example, a perfect start to a Bauhaus day would be to wake up in the morning to coffee in a mass-produced coffee cup designed to blend pleasantly with that day's newspaper type, whose forms in turn would intermesh smoothly with the rest of the Kitchen, the house--in short, the world, Waking to that well-designed harmony, you were expected to feel one, good, and two, part of a universal humanity. Considering the social overtones of the school, portfolio contributions from German social satirists George Grosz and Max Beckmann are understandable.

The weakness of the show is that the Busch-Reisinger is uncommunicative. The museum raises your curiosity but gives no explanations for the show's diversity or what it implies about the power of the school at its early stage. Most viewers won't come to the show with a fund of Bauhaus history. Instead, they're interested because the name connotes an austere functionalism in design that has infiltrated 1970s American life everywhere from typography to the mass-produced Marcel Breuer steel tubular chair. They'll wonder how this regulated style ever evolved from these 51 varied graphics--expressionist, primitive, whimsical. realistic, neo-classical, and architectural. And the Busch-Reisinger is not helping anyone by providing enlightening text or more visual information. No linear historical perspective adds to the horizontal historical sample of European art in 1921.

It is certainly not beyond the Busch-Reisinger Museum's resources to do this. In 1937, Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, migrated to Cambridge. He headed Harvard's Graduate School of Design, brought associate Gyorgy Kepes to MIT, and inspired a Bauhaus focus at the Busch-Reisinger. His gift of half the exhibited graphics (the other half were given this year by Lyonel Feininger, a long-time Bauhaus faculty member and his wife) is a dazzling portion of the Busch's substantial Bauhaus collection. Beyond that, the museum could easily have borrowed around Cambridge, a last stronghold of the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus teaching method, which emphasizes perceptual rather than emotional qualities of art, has become the new academism at Harvard and MIT, where Kepes still teaches, Bauhaus style lectures will dwell on the physical perception of color rather than a particular style of painting. Carpenter Center's introductory courses are well stocked with Jose Albert's systematic color studies and laszlo Moholy Nagy's experiments with plexiglass and other transparent materials. Cambridge's resources seem too much to ignore--but enough regrets.

In order to flesh out the graphics exhibit, the Busch has pulled a few favorite Bauhaus works from its own collection. Klee and Feininger paintings, 1920-23, and Bauhaus crafts. The crafts, like the graphics, are a wide-spread sampling alongside yet another influence of the Bauhaus, art nouveau crafts. The resulting conglomeration is fascinating but confusing.

What you do get from "New European Graphics" is visual excitement, With the exception of major French artists, this is everything that was happening in European art in 1921. For a refreshing change, it's not the scholars who made this selection but the artists themselves. Bauhaus teachers invited contributions from the artists they admired. It's a medley of masters and, as with a museum's permanent exhibits, you wander through and enjoy your favorites.

Many of the German contributions, such as Heinrich Campendock's woodcut of a sinister fairy tale world, show the influence of a melancholy expressionism. Max Beckmann turns his acerbic melancholy on German society in "Wrestling Match:" a joyful orchestra accompanies two headlocked wrestlers in front of high society onlookers who hoot from gilded balconies or eat delicacies at tables bordering the fight. In a lighter vein, Franz Marc characteristically uses animal symbolism in his woodcut "Creation." Lighter still is Dadaist Kurt Schwitters' "Composition with Profile," a well-composed, child-like doodling.

The Italian prints span styles from the ex-Futurist Carlo Carra's surprisingly static "The Acrobats," to the Surrealis precursor Giorgio de Chirico, who by 1921 had also reverted to a more academic style. De Chirico had switched from his earlier eerie, suspended space and stifled-emotion realism to a less exciting neoclassicism.

Russian highlights include Archipenko's monumental nudes and a gleeful Mare Chagall work, "Self portrait with woman." In 1921, Chagall had not yet emigrated from Russia. A leading art educator in Vitebsk, he portrays himself happy, in familiar surroundings, a woman floating breezily from his hand like a kite.

The Bauhaus master teachers' prints which are displayed here, enable you to understand inspiration that united the other diverse artists. Even in its early, turbulent years. Bauhaus ideals were evolving--ideals of exhaustive perceptual study coupled with artistic creativity, art combined with craft, superior industrial design integrated into everyday life, and universal communication through common functional terms. Despite dogmas and manifestoes, the freedom and complexity of Bauhaus work can be seen in Paul Klee's Bauhaus work, which combines spontaneity and discipline. klee's spidery sketches are whimsical, ironic and sometimes ridiculous. They are supported by intricate color grids. Following Groplus' belief of applying fine art to crafts, klee's official role was as a teacher of bookbinding. Two Johannes Itten works exhibited also reveal Bauhaus idiosyncracies, Itten was later to stress a common vocabulary of form, turning composition into a science. As you'd expect, his "House of the White Man" looks like an architectural sketch. In contrast, his "Dictum" of the same year could have been done by a Dadaists. It consists of a word collage over a pink pastel valentine.

"New European Graphics" is anecdotal by nature. It's a collaboration between artists who were widespread both geographically and stylistically. As such, it's an effort to communicate with each other and the public. It also says something about their support of the Bauhaus ideal of integrating the artist into society, and something about the early, catalytic years of the Bauhaus which inspired this support. Unfortunately the Busch-Reisinger does not elaborate either visually or with text to explain what that something is. The anecdotes remain hinted at, but untold, visually powerful, diverse, intriguing, and in puzzling.