From Today’s WSJ / wsj.com:

A.J. Goldmann

Berlin

Copious Gropius

No artistic movement of the 20th century has been more lauded, ­debated, misunderstood and maligned than the Bauhaus, the interdisciplinary workshop for modernity whose name has ­become practically synonymous with the stripped-down functionalism that the movement brought to architecture and ­design in the short-lived Weimar Republic.

Bauhaus turns 90 this year and Berlin is celebrating with “Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model.” The exhibit presents a comprehensive overview of the school in all its plurality and paradox. The exhibit is organized by Germany’s three main Bauhaus institutes, the ­Bauhaus Archive Berlin, the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau and the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, with assistance from the ­Museum of Modern Art in New York, where a more modest version of the show will be mounted in November.

With nearly 1,000 ­objects—including models, studies, paintings, photographs and furniture—spread over the ground-floor galleries of this stately neoclassical building, the exhibit is the largest Bauhaus retrospective ever mounted and the first time that the three Bauhaus institutes, once separated by the Iron Curtain, have collaborated.

“There are different notions, or different views of the Bauhaus in the three different institutions,” says Annemarie ­Jaeggi, director of the Bauhaus Archive Berlin. “There isn’t one Bauhaus, but many Bauhäuser,” she adds, stressing the amount of transformation within the Bauhaus itself during the years of the school’s existence first in Weimar, then in Dessau, and ­finally (briefly) in Berlin.

“Bauhaus” is often tossed around as a catchall phrase for the constellation of modernism, design and architecture. ­Another misconception is that Bauhaus refers to a specific ­architectural style noted for its clarity and functionality; in fact, this was true of only one phase of the Bauhaus, a two-year ­period in Dessau under the ­directorship of Hannes Meyer. “Many people think that Bauhaus is a style, or a period, or that Bauhaus stands for modernism, for everything that was created between the two World Wars and maybe even afterwards,” Ms. Jaeggi said. But, she noted, Bauhaus was only a piece in the puzzle of European modernism.

Walter Gropius, who founded the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919, was fueled by populist ideas. He spoke of Bauhaus’s ability to unite individuals “using the idea of new producing, working and living communities.” Responding to the “eclecticism” of contemporary trends in art, his goal was to merge the arts under the wing of architecture. In 1923, he pronounced a new ideal: “art and technology—the new unity.”

The bursts of creativity and exuberance are seen in the roles that Bauhaus masters and students took in Expressionism, Cubism, Constructivism and Dadaism. It is discernible in a list of the school’s teachers: Oskar Schlemmer, László Moholy-Nagy, Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Josef Albers were internationally recognized artists all, but the Bauhaus was for many of them just one stage in a long and varied career.

At the Bauhaus, Gropius had a tough time controlling all the egos he had gathered around him. The Bauhaus masters could often outdo Gropius in the loftiness of their proclamations. Johannes Itten, who structured and taught the school’s preliminary course, the Vorkurs, told his students “to awaken the personal life that is inherent in the form.” Klee, who later taught the course, stressed a study of nature to “freely design abstract shapes that go beyond the forcedly schematic and arrive at a new naturalness, the naturalness of the work.” The exhibit showcases teaching materials and exercises from the Vorkurs, ­including myriad studies in composition, contrast, rhythm, material and form. What all these classroom analyses show is the intense dissection and experimentation being pursued by both masters and disciples.

The exhibit progresses both chronologically and thematically, with different colors corresponding to periods and topics. Most of the time, displayed items are left to speak for themselves, without much in the way of accompanying text.

One of the most extraordinary items is Moholy-Nagy’s “Light Space Modulator” (1922-30), a mechanical apparatus that fuses light and color with movement inside of a blue and purple display. In his Vorkurs, Moholy-Nagy emphasized visual and tactile perception. The importance that he ­attached to light can be gleaned through his photography and filmmaking, and this kinetic sculpture was, in a sense, a logical outcome of his fascination.

The exhibition makes clear the double sense in which Bauhaus was a school: It was a new approach to art, comparable to other European modernist movements; but it was also an academy, a community, a social entity. The photos of everyday life at the Bauhäuser—students playing sports, attending parties, playing music and creating their art—affirm this rapturous description in Tom Wolfe’s otherwise critical book “From Bauhaus to Our House”: “It was more than a school; it was a commune, a spiritual movement, a radical approach to art in all its forms, a philosophical center comparable to the Garden of Epicurus.”

In the artistically and experimentally charged atmosphere of the Weimar Republic, the Bauhaus strove to be exemplary and exceptional. To this end, its members harnessed propaganda to spread their message. Many items on display deal with how the school ensured it was talked about. Its name became a seal of quality and a label. This branding is responsible for the enduring misunderstandings about Bauhaus, as well as its lasting successes.

Ninety years on, it’s tough to pin the Bauhaus down, and the exhibit shies away from raising critical questions about its guiding philosophy. Concentrating on the 14 years of the school’s existence, the ­exhibit doesn’t interest itself in the Bauhaus’s origins or reception: neither the parallel theories of art education in Germany during the Weimar Republic nor the world-wide spread of Bauhaus in the postwar era.

But even without these perspectives, the show brings the Bauhaus vividly to life as a movement in a constant state of flux between idealism and ­indecision.