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To mark the centenary of the endlessly influential art school’s foundation by Walter Gropius, BBC Four spent a night in the Bauhaus. It began with a half-hour trot through the life and pioneering artwork of Anni Albers, in A Life in Thread. From her banishment to the weaving workshop (where female students were expected to go instead of metalwork or other departments – progressive institutions always have surprisingly traditional limitations) we witnessed her transformation of the ancient craft into unique art and a lauded career.
Then we had an hour of Bauhaus at 100, tracing its roots as a reaction against expressionism and a bid to put the pieces of a shattered postwar world back together in a new and better way. Whether it worked is an open question. The school was effectively shut down by the increasingly powerful Nazi regime in 1933 and the programme was bookended by a discussion about the controversial decision to cancel a recent event at the Bauhaus building (now a Unesco heritage site) after far-right activists threatened to disrupt it. But, as one of the contributors noted, no experiment in creativity can ever really be said to have failed. Let alone one in whose influence we are still steeped today, with whose designs – both typographical and architectural – we still live, even if we have not kept hold of the idealistic message the marriage of form and function was intended to convey.
After all that edutainment, you might have felt ready for a bit of fun. Along came Bauhaus Rules, presented by “Jim Moir, AKA Vic Reeves” – as he was billed in the credits – to provide. The unashamed gimmick here was to take a handful of art students and give them a different Bauhaus-based task, overseen by a different artist, every day for a week and see how they took to the school rules. Ian Whittlesea did the breathing exercises that Johannes Itten, who developed the Bauhaus “preliminary course” that still forms the basis for all art foundation courses, believed helped expand the self-awareness vital for artists. If you find yourself bursting with opinions about the self-awareness of artists, see me after class. They take such things seriously here, even while munching on the garlic mush Itten insisted students eat as part of his commitment to Mazdaznan (a fire cult; don’t worry about it). Then they had to make some art out of contrasting materials. Whittlesea’s response to one piece – “So little evident work” – was the most beautifully constructed thing of all.
It was fun – a neat way of giving life to the beliefs and theories that animated the Bauhaus founders and, at times, even providing a glimpse into varying artistic temperaments. On the day, Kandinsky’s correspondence theory got a run-out (this is the theory that all circles are essentially blue, triangles yellow and squares red, and you can go and eat more garlic mush if you prefer); some thrived on the rigidity of it, while others … did not. “I don’t agree with it,” said Amar, while Lizzy reckoned: “I trust myself more than Kandinksy.” Oh, to be young and confident again.
It also returned to points raised by the earlier programmes. When the students were tasked by Kate Butler, the head of product design at Habitat, with producing a (useful, beautiful) domestic item, we learned that as well as discouraging women from metalwork, the Bauhaus founders believed women could not think in 3D. Marianne Brandt insisted on doing both, eventually succeeding the metalshop master László Moholy-Nagy and producing iconic modern industrial works still revered and imitated today. She must have been quite the headscratcher (and surely worth a half-hour to herself). Also noted was Itten’s transformation from spiritually alert artist into man with a hard-on for eugenics and no issue with the seam of Aryanism that ran through his chosen cult, which went unmentioned in the formal documentary.
Overall it was a night that conveyed the wonderment that attends the invention of something genuinely radical and new. Because it has shaped our world so thoroughly over the last 100 years, the awe at the achievement – at any such widely adopted achievement – needs to be periodically disinterred and felt anew. So little evident work, it seems now. Yet this gave back the notion that it wasn’t little work at all. It was a vision of a better world, expressed through all forms of art. How amazing. And how surpassingly impossible it seems now.
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