Pioneering vision
Andrew Lambirth
Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World Tate Modern, until 4 June Sponsored by BMW (UK) Ltd Here are more than 300 works in yet another mammoth exhibition at Tate Modern. Perhaps the sheer size of it puts people off, though many of those I have spoken to on my travels through the art world hardly knew the show was on. Perhaps the Bauhaus tag puts people off, with its inescapable connotations of didacticism, though this doesn’t seem to have deterred the public from visiting the V&A’s Modernism blockbuster, which also celebrates the Bauhaus aesthetic. Likewise the Utopian thrust of such teaching is perhaps felt to be irrelevant — the belief in progress and the possibility of a better world. To contemporary cynics such idealism must seem ludicrous, and yet it contains the seed of all art — the credo of possibility and change. Albers and Moholy-Nagy, both wrought in the Modernist forge of Weimar Germany, were great believers in the redemptive power of art. This exhibition is a rather extended tribute to their pioneering vision.
Josef Albers (1888–1976) was German, László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) Hungarian, and neither has a name to sell an exhibition to the general public. (Indeed, many people have trouble even pronouncing the Hungarian’s.) Yet both were inspiring teachers, and it was while teaching at the Bauhaus between 1923 and 1928 that their careers overlapped. The Bauhaus was the most famous of 20th-century art and design schools, a cradle of Modernism founded in Weimar by the architect Walter Gropius in 1919, which then moved to Dessau in 1925 because of political pressure. Albers was the longestserving member of the Bauhaus (a student for three years and then a teacher for ten, beginning his association in 1920), whose initial interest was in stained glass. And it is with the glass and copper assemblages of Albers that this exhibition begins.
Moholy-Nagy had studied law before enrolling as a soldier in the Austro– Hungarian army in the first world war. He began to write poetry and make drawings, and after the war determined to be an artist, taking a particular interest in photography and light. Room 1 contains not only Albers’s early glass collages, but also a couple of Moholy-Nagy’s more austere paintings and a group of his abstract photograms. These were made by arranging objects on light-sensitive paper and exposing them to various intensities of illlumination. Room 2 showcases their Bauhaus involvement, with Albers’s nest of coloured-glass-topped tables and geometric painted glass designs like electrical circuitry. An impressive wall of severely rectilinear paintings by Moholy-Nagy, with impersonal titles such as ‘Composition QIV’ or ‘KVII’ (this from the Tate’s own collection), deals exclusively with parallel lines and circles in a restricted palette. For context, there is documentary material on the Bauhaus, and at this point you can short-circuit the chronological development of the exhibition and move through into Room 9 to compare the teaching both artists undertook when they fled Europe for America.
Otherwise, continue to Room 3. Moholy-Nagy’s appointment at the Bauhaus as replacement for the colour theorist Johannes Itten was symptomatic of the change from a craft-based to an industrially-inspired aesthetic. MoholyNagy became the most influential teacher there, stressing the importance of photography and turning the graphic workshop into a typography studio. Room 3 contains excellent examples of his photographs and collages, and a rather lovely oil painting of a black circle with abutting coloured beams.
Room 4 explores Albers’s sandblasted glass compositions, which become increasingly assured and spatially inventive, and juxtaposes them with some of his photographs, never exhibited or published in his lifetime. Room 5 features MoholyNagy’s ‘Light Prop for an Electric Stage’ (1930), specially reconstructed for this exhibition. It’s a kinetic revolving sculpture (‘arguably one of the earliest examples of installation art’, the press release trendily suggests), dramatically lit, with an abstract film on a screen in the wall nearby. This is a room of great seriousness, and it is perhaps the unrelenting high-mindedness of the art on show that has limited its popular appeal. Not much humour here, nor indeed much enjoyment for the senses. The hard edges of Modernist discomfort (metaphorically both physical, in the angularity of the furniture, and mental, in the relative inflexibility of dogma) elbow out all but the most dedicated.
This is a shame (particularly as we’re not even halfway through the exhibition yet), for there is a lighter side, particularly to Albers. Room 6 is a corridor of his woodcuts and linocuts, which evince much play with the circle and the rectangle. Indeed, Albers’s art is a fundamentally ludic activity, a characteristic we are more likely to associate with the Surrealists than with hard-edge abstract painters. Just as the Catholic mysticism of his upbringing balanced the precisely cerebral quality of his design, so the sensual infiltrated the intellectual. Look at the ‘patchwork’ colour studies in Room 8, made after Albers settled into his new life in America, or the brilliantly vivid leaf studies in Room 9. Here is the other side of Albers the strict pedagogue. (He was a full-time teacher, first at Black Mountain College and then at Yale, and numbered both Robert Rauschenberg and Kenneth Noland among his pupils. Rauschenberg comments, ‘I consider Albers the most important teacher I’ve ever had.’) The lavishly illustrated catalogue (£24.99 in paperback) contains a clutch of scholarly and specific essays. A far better general introduction to Albers at least is provided by T.G. Rosenthal in his text for the bibliophile edition of Albers’s great print sequence ‘Formulation: Articulation’. Originally published in 1972 as two boxed portfolios, it is the summation of Albers’s thought, demonstrating through closely related visual imagery the artist’s methods of formulating ideas. Rosenthal contributes an admirably lucid and pithy introductory text to this beautiful new single volume (published by T&H at £60), which is a feast of colour and fine printing. Albers was justifiably furious when he asked the assistant in a men’s outfitters for a grey tie, and was told he had no colour sense. His mastery of colour comes across superbly in this most desirable book: highly recommended.
In 1947 Moholy-Nagy wrote: ‘Art is the most complex, vitalising and civilising of human actions. Thus it is of biological necessity.’ We all need to be reminded of this at regular intervals. Like truth, humanity can only take a little art at a time. My advice is to be very selective in the ‘Albers and Moholy-Nagy’ exhibition: there are many fine things here (like Albers’s various ‘Homages to the Square’ or Moholy-Nagy’s pencil and crayon studies), but they are scattered like jewels through 12 rooms. Don’t let the volume of work overwhelm you. Remember Albers’s dictum — ‘The aim of art: Revelation and evocation of vision’.
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