MoMA exhibition guides Bauhaus towards its place in the history of modernity

摘要

The Bauhaus is history now: that is the message conveyed by the huge exhibition organised by Berlin's Martin-Gropius Bau and the Museum of Modern Art in New York (where I saw it) to celebrate 90 years of Bauhaus and 80 years of MoMA's activity. It is quite unlike the entrancing 1968 show in Stuttgart or the Royal Academy in London, whose design and organisation emulated the way in which some of the best of the Bauhdusler might work. That was back when Walter Gropius, its founder, and several of his colleagues were still about and so gave the sense that the chord had not yet been cut.rnOddly enough, there is no reference to that event in the New York show, nor in the otherwise generous catalogue which celebrates the very first Bauhaus exhibition, sponsored by MoMA in 1938, which gave the school its first 'public' outing after being brutally closed by the Nazis in 1933. Although its catalogue quickly became the most important account of the Bauhaus, it mainly emphasised the Gropius regime.