Radical Geometries Bauhaus Prints, 1919–33 February 9, 2019 – June 23, 2019 Clementine Brown Gallery (Gallery 170)

Radical Geometries
Bauhaus Prints, 1919–33

February 9, 2019 – June 23, 2019
Clementine Brown Gallery (Gallery 170)

BUY TICKETSMEMBERS SEE IT FREE

• 

  View Credit

Celebrate the centenary of this groundbreaking school of modernist abstraction

The Bauhaus—Germany’s legendary school of art, architecture, and design—was founded in Weimar by architect Walter Gropius in the spring of 1919. Gropius assembled an international group of faculty members including Josef Albers (German), Lyonel Feininger (American), Wassily Kandinsky (Russian), Paul Klee (Swiss), and László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian). The school relocated twice during its brief existence (to Dessau in 1925 and Berlin in 1932) before its closure by the Nazi regime in 1933, but its aesthetic of geometric abstraction—and its stated goals of collaboration across disciplines and harmony between form and function—have had a lasting impact on the fields of architecture and industrial and graphic design.

“Radical Geometries” marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus with a group of more than 60 works on paper, primarily prints but also a number of drawings, photographs, and ten of the 20 postcards designed by faculty and students for the first Bauhaus exhibition at Weimar in 1923. The objects on display are drawn primarily from the MFA’s collection, augmented with key loans from private collections. The recent gift of Kandinsky’s dynamic portfolio of 12 prints Kleine Welten (little worlds), the artist’s magnum opus in printmaking, is shown in the exhibition for the first time.

“Radical Geometries” is timed to coincide with a wide range of centennial Bauhaus exhibitions across the country and the globe, including “The Bauhaus and Harvard” at the Harvard Art Museums and “Arresting Fragments: Object Photography at the Bauhaus” at the MIT Museum. A companion exhibition at the MFA, “Postwar Visions: European Photography, 1945–60,” explores the continuing influence of Bauhaus abstraction in the decades following World War II.

---

In the News

• The Boston Globe (2/20/19): "At the MFA, it’s the Bauhaus and beyond"

The Geometry Of Innocence -The 100^th Anniversary Of The Bauhaus In Wiemar Germany After World War I

By Laura Perkins

I get to do this short commemoration of the Bauhaus in Germany from 1919 to about 1933 by default. Or because I am currently running an on-line series on art works entitled Traipsing Through The Arts. Although we have no official section titles and have not had them for a while I am the “art go-to person” (maybe an official title like art editor would be better but that is not a battle I want to fight right now when I am being besieged by half the American arts cabal from curators to gallery owners  for my unorthodox views of my self-selected artists). I actually know, or I should say knew, since I have hustled myself through the small Bauhaus exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the more expansive one at the Harvard Museums next to nothing about the movement except for a few names like Gropius and Moholy-Nagy. (Who knows what other museums with even the most tenuous links to the Bauhaus will roll out their red carpets for the commemoration like happened a couple of years ago with the Summer of Love, 1967 where even the MFA had a dinky exhibit down in the dungeon of the American Arts wing closeted from view along with the Native American and Mezo-American art.)   

Aside from learning about the very real connections between Harvard and the movement brought on by the exile of many of the figures associated with the school once Hitler and his wreaking crew pulled the hammer down I was surprised to see how many modernist painters like Klee and Kandinsky passed through the doors either as teachers or students. Also the link between the Bauhaus and the famous Black Mountain College down in North Carolina which produced a significant number of culturati. (Frankly the first reference I knew about Black Mountain was not the college but one of Bessie Smith’s blues, Black Mountain Blues, which is a very different take on that location.)

More than anything else though I was fascinated by how important geometric figures were to that movement not only in the obvious architectural and design areas but in the art. Especially the work of Joseph Albers who would later help found Black Mountain College. That is why I titled this sort piece “geometric of innocence” since 1919 nobody, or almost moody knew what hell was coming down when the Wiemar Republic fell down.