THE MOST EXHILARATING BAUHAUS SHOW YET'

摘要

Can the Bauhaus be news again? The exhibition which has just opened at the Barbican will show you that it certainly can. I had expected an opening party full of over-60s, but it was crowded by the under-40s. I belong to the first lot (more's the pity) and am a veteran of Bauhaus exhibitions - Stuttgart in 1968 and its reincarnation at the Royal Academy later that year, and MoMA in New York in 2010. This last - and much the biggest - started in the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin, the old Arts and Crafts museum which stood close by the Berlin Wall and was called after its designer, the great-uncle of the Walter who founded the Bauhaus. The MoMA/Berlin show was huge and the most complete, yet the poorer Barbican one is the most exhilarating, in part because the designers, Carmody Groarke, have managed to make sense of it in the intractable exhibition space.