Thursday, February 04, 2010

Art as Manifesto


From : The hoover Institution




Nicholas Fox Weber. The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism. Knopf, 544 pages. $40 .



Bauhaus is back. With the 90-year anniversary of the founding of the famed German school of art and craft and design — the school that calls to mind sharp corners and flat roofs, glass and steel and exposed materials, simple furniture and bold painting — have come the exhibitions, retrospectives, and commemorations. Among these is a book by the art historian and writer Nicholas Fox Weber that seeks to illuminate new aspects of the Bauhaus through new descriptions of its major players.
This is all to the good, for to understand the Bauhaus it is necessary to understand the people who ran it. This may seem an odd claim to make considering that one of the school’s most cherished and foundational ideals was that personality, in the slimier, egotistic sense of the word, had no place within its walls or in its work — but that, alas, was an ideal. In reality, the brief and tumultuous history of the Bauhaus’s existence (1919 to 1933) is a history of a handful of artists and craftsmen, and their philosophies and ideas, working with and against one another to create the shifting and singular styles that would irrevocably change the world’s understanding of art, architecture, and design.


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