What do you think?
Rate this book
Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics
An investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus's signature sleek surfaces and austere structures.
The Bauhaus (1919-1933) is widely regarded as the twentieth century's most influential art, architecture, and design school, celebrated as the archetypal movement of rational modernism and famous for bringing functional and elegant design to the masses. In Haunted Bauhaus, art historian Elizabeth Otto liberates Bauhaus history, uncovering a movement that is vastly more diverse and paradoxical than previously assumed. Otto traces the surprising trajectories of the school's engagement with occult spirituality, gender fluidity, queer identities, and radical politics. The Bauhaus, she shows us, is haunted by these untold stories.
The Bauhaus is most often associated with a handful of famous artists, architects, and designers--notably Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, L�szl� Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Breuer. Otto enlarges this narrow focus by reclaiming the historically marginalized lives and accomplishments of many of the more than 1,200 Bauhaus teachers and students (the so-called Bauh�usler), arguing that they are central to our understanding of this movement. Otto reveals Bauhaus members' spiritual experimentation, expressed in double-exposed "spirit photographs" and enacted in breathing exercises and nude gymnastics; their explorations of the dark sides of masculinity and emerging female identities; the "queer hauntology" of certain Bauhaus works; and the role of radical politics on both the left and the right--during the school's Communist period, when some of the Bauh�usler put their skills to work for the revolution, and, later, into the service of the Nazis.
With Haunted Bauhaus, Otto not only expands our knowledge of a foundational movement of modern art, architecture, and design, she also provides the first sustained investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus's signature sleek surfaces and austere structures. This is a fresh, wild ride through the Bauhaus you thought you knew.
The Bauhaus (1919-1933) is widely regarded as the twentieth century's most influential art, architecture, and design school, celebrated as the archetypal movement of rational modernism and famous for bringing functional and elegant design to the masses. In Haunted Bauhaus, art historian Elizabeth Otto liberates Bauhaus history, uncovering a movement that is vastly more diverse and paradoxical than previously assumed. Otto traces the surprising trajectories of the school's engagement with occult spirituality, gender fluidity, queer identities, and radical politics. The Bauhaus, she shows us, is haunted by these untold stories.
The Bauhaus is most often associated with a handful of famous artists, architects, and designers--notably Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, L�szl� Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Breuer. Otto enlarges this narrow focus by reclaiming the historically marginalized lives and accomplishments of many of the more than 1,200 Bauhaus teachers and students (the so-called Bauh�usler), arguing that they are central to our understanding of this movement. Otto reveals Bauhaus members' spiritual experimentation, expressed in double-exposed "spirit photographs" and enacted in breathing exercises and nude gymnastics; their explorations of the dark sides of masculinity and emerging female identities; the "queer hauntology" of certain Bauhaus works; and the role of radical politics on both the left and the right--during the school's Communist period, when some of the Bauh�usler put their skills to work for the revolution, and, later, into the service of the Nazis.
With Haunted Bauhaus, Otto not only expands our knowledge of a foundational movement of modern art, architecture, and design, she also provides the first sustained investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus's signature sleek surfaces and austere structures. This is a fresh, wild ride through the Bauhaus you thought you knew.
296 pages, Hardcover
First published September 24, 2019
About the author
Elizabeth Otto
10 books9 followersElizabeth Otto is a historian of early twentieth-century visual and media culture. Her authored and edited books focus on issues of gender in art, film, and photography, and on the Bauhaus experimental art and design school, which became one of the most influential art institutions the world over. Otto is a faculty member at the State University of Art at Buffalo.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 26, 2024
Turn the ms over to a "writer." Plenty of vivid characters here, and nifty photos, but this compilation of facts needs a rewrite. (Before ordering, I wondered why there were scant reviews anywhere).
November 16, 2022
Elizabeth Otto’s Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities and Radical Politics takes up a mantle that is by now not unfamiliar to modernist art historians - the writing of an ‘other’ Bauhaus - a task which seems to have especially gained traction since its 100th anniversary in 2019. However, Otto’s book approaches the Bauhaus from different angles than it is normally characterized, and this makes for an engaging study which seeks to do a bit more than simply recuperate minoritarian subjects which have been written out in the past. A recuperative art history is simply not enough - although it is shameful that some of the figures Otto mentions have not made it into the histories, it’s important to consider that as a symptom of a larger problem, which is, of course, the painting of the Bauhaus as a deeply rational system. The irrationality of the Bauhaus, then, serves as an important counterpoint and a way to discuss missing subjects.
Otto pledges theoretical allegiance to Avery Gordon’s more sociological theory book Ghostly Matters, and indeed in the larger Fruedian theory that whatever is obscured will, in time, find a way to emerge.
The chapters roughly correlate to the categories mentioned in the book’s subtitle: occult spirituality, gender fluidity, queer identities and radical politics. Although it takes up a fundamental irrationality as its subject, the book itself is fairly straightforward, clear, and relatively short.
Occult spirituality is discussed not only in terms of subjects such as astrology but also in terms of an era-and-place-specific proliferation of ‘health culture.’ This culture is connected back to the condition of the battered body post-WWI and to movements such as the Wandervogel. As other (non-art) historians of this period, such as Geoffrey Giles, have shown, the principles of the Wandervogel were not an ideologically forgone conclusion and could be - and indeed were - co-opted by National Socialism. In terms of the Bauhaus, Gordon highlights in the final chapter that, similarly, its principles did not predetermine ideological affiliation and could be co opted by far-left and far-right radical political movements alike.
The “gender fluidity” is separated into two chapters, about, unsurprisingly, the femininity of men and masculinity of women, respectively. It is also unsurprising that Otto cites Klaus Theweleit, whose Male Fantasies remains a compelling source decades after its publication (it is worth considering, I think, why this is.) Male Fantasies contains, of interest to art historians, a large number of pictures, but ekphrasis is largely absent from Theweleit text. On the contrary, Otto’s explanations of each image are very thorough. The anarchy of Theweleit is contrasted by the - strange to say it, given the subject - rationality of Otto’s text. I am dubious of some of Otto’s ekphrastic readings.
Otto takes up “queer identities” by teasing out where “a love that dare not speak its name” can be spotted. It is, admittedly, quite surprising that the Bauhaus’ queerness has not been considered until now, especially given the proliferation of scholarship about queerness in Weimar Germany more broadly as legally prohibited but practiced socially. I think Otto’s point about “medium drag” in this chapter - a man taking up weaving, for example, is a contentious one that I’m a bit wary of. It certainly requires further unpacking. How does a woman Bauhausler participate in medium drag? By doing, like, architecture?
Otto’s book makes a historiographical intervention into “art history” books by expanding the field of medium to include not simply architecture, weaving, etc. but also “life experiments.” This radical expansion is especially useful when researching pedagogical experiments. The artworks themselves, then, are seen as “artifacts of life experiments.” I do question Otto’s characterization of the term “Bauhausler” to mean “citizen,” this vocabulary of the nation-state I think is perhaps too contentious, for, as we know, citizenship in both the Bauhaus and in the larger state project was not stable.
Although it desires to be an radically alternative history, Otto’s point - that behind the cool rationality of modernism, there is always a spectral presence threatening to emerge - is one which I think is by now common among by many other contemporary scholars of modernism today and certainly those which I've read thus far. It does, in any case, successfully counter the myth of the bauhaus as being “dryly objective.”
Otto pledges theoretical allegiance to Avery Gordon’s more sociological theory book Ghostly Matters, and indeed in the larger Fruedian theory that whatever is obscured will, in time, find a way to emerge.
The chapters roughly correlate to the categories mentioned in the book’s subtitle: occult spirituality, gender fluidity, queer identities and radical politics. Although it takes up a fundamental irrationality as its subject, the book itself is fairly straightforward, clear, and relatively short.
Occult spirituality is discussed not only in terms of subjects such as astrology but also in terms of an era-and-place-specific proliferation of ‘health culture.’ This culture is connected back to the condition of the battered body post-WWI and to movements such as the Wandervogel. As other (non-art) historians of this period, such as Geoffrey Giles, have shown, the principles of the Wandervogel were not an ideologically forgone conclusion and could be - and indeed were - co-opted by National Socialism. In terms of the Bauhaus, Gordon highlights in the final chapter that, similarly, its principles did not predetermine ideological affiliation and could be co opted by far-left and far-right radical political movements alike.
The “gender fluidity” is separated into two chapters, about, unsurprisingly, the femininity of men and masculinity of women, respectively. It is also unsurprising that Otto cites Klaus Theweleit, whose Male Fantasies remains a compelling source decades after its publication (it is worth considering, I think, why this is.) Male Fantasies contains, of interest to art historians, a large number of pictures, but ekphrasis is largely absent from Theweleit text. On the contrary, Otto’s explanations of each image are very thorough. The anarchy of Theweleit is contrasted by the - strange to say it, given the subject - rationality of Otto’s text. I am dubious of some of Otto’s ekphrastic readings.
Otto takes up “queer identities” by teasing out where “a love that dare not speak its name” can be spotted. It is, admittedly, quite surprising that the Bauhaus’ queerness has not been considered until now, especially given the proliferation of scholarship about queerness in Weimar Germany more broadly as legally prohibited but practiced socially. I think Otto’s point about “medium drag” in this chapter - a man taking up weaving, for example, is a contentious one that I’m a bit wary of. It certainly requires further unpacking. How does a woman Bauhausler participate in medium drag? By doing, like, architecture?
Otto’s book makes a historiographical intervention into “art history” books by expanding the field of medium to include not simply architecture, weaving, etc. but also “life experiments.” This radical expansion is especially useful when researching pedagogical experiments. The artworks themselves, then, are seen as “artifacts of life experiments.” I do question Otto’s characterization of the term “Bauhausler” to mean “citizen,” this vocabulary of the nation-state I think is perhaps too contentious, for, as we know, citizenship in both the Bauhaus and in the larger state project was not stable.
Although it desires to be an radically alternative history, Otto’s point - that behind the cool rationality of modernism, there is always a spectral presence threatening to emerge - is one which I think is by now common among by many other contemporary scholars of modernism today and certainly those which I've read thus far. It does, in any case, successfully counter the myth of the bauhaus as being “dryly objective.”
May 15, 2024
Anyone who is already into the subject of the Bauhaus, the famous new invention of the public arts, trades and crafts school the Weimar Republic came up with between the first and second world war, is going to read this book so there's not much point in deeply reviewing it since you will or won't anyway. But for anyone who finds the paradox in the perception of an arts education existing as a public access opportunity, has to wonder how did all this begin and how does such an idea as a creative way of life even exist in an institutional setting that is not based in pure exclusivity? And so we know to look here, at this school, as a time capsule of the most remembered early experiment in democratizing art.
In the old days words like Republic once meant radical reforms to introduce democracy to a formerly absolute monarchist kind of setting. It was once a word that meant cutting edge modernity but also a celebration of 'common' people's arts as a possible revival of a broken society.
After the unprecedented slaughter of the first world war, the public had a tremendous appetite for change, was willing to try new things, and had a greater demand for equality. The Weimar Republic promised all manner of things we'd recognize today as ordinary demands, including gender equality and access to education for the public. The Bauhaus was meant to symbolize its hopes - a reversal of the traditional strangle hold noble families had on the arts, by creating a hybrid school that taught not just arts but traditional crafts like weaving and furniture making with formerly exclusive fields like architecture and fine art. They were going to improve ordinary lives by creating accessible, creative and well-made environments. Their job was simple at least in concept - create new art for a new society that is oriented around social justice.
And the story as you know winds up being a tight rope walk, we as readers know what is about to happen. We know it starts with a utopian ideal most of us share, we know that some of its students will become legends in creating the simplified, even occasionally brutal look of modernity that still commands secular and public taste, and we know that some of its teachers and many students will die in concentration camps, even as we know a few of the students will collaborate with the fascists to form their effective propaganda arm. So scholars of art look to the seminal idea of an elective art college, now an ordinary opportunity in any large city but at that moment a revolutionary democratic experiment, because its outcomes were so contradictory and yet seminal. Not to say the school itself decided the whole aesthetic and cultural shift, but that the events that lead to it, the excitement of cooperatively inventing its programs, and the way it faced and experienced the disaster of social collapse that allowed the misanthropes to storm the capital - it's all too spectacular a story for history to ignore.
That's for the newbies, most readers already know this stuff. So what the book does provide us, and makes it highly commendable, is how it looks at almost every angle that is not the story the informed are most accustomed to hearing. Usually it's pretty monolithic, a perfectly good idea, quickly ramping up proof that arts education for all is a profitable, historic direction for a government to go, and then nipped in the bud by paranoid fanatics who like to stalk and attack teachers in the name of a much darker, less civil form of social engineering. You might be tempted to call it a tale of the optimists who hold out for a while against the pessimists before being cannibalized by them - who believe so much in coming destruction they eventually manifest the very thing they fear for themselves. But in that telling the school is angelic, its students are pure modernity - no clinging to the past, the full discard of stuffy old order ways. This book adjusts that view by looking at the students more closely.
And this book fills the gap practically by covering this mirage with the facts. That's what this book is for. A lot of people who are thrilled by the history of public education are not always so thrilled by the radical acceptance politics nurtured openly in the halls of this school, which was among the first to promise equal gender enrollment. Like virtually anywhere in the world. That is the true tragedy of nasism - the tragedy of their rise to power to come obscures the great leaps towards fairness and discovery that took place just before, and even stole a few notes from such goals - sullying an entire nation to this day by misinformation, insincere promises, and erasing its own brilliant early performances in the name equality, all for the actions of a cadre of haters. Practical, properly invested in and supported from the top type experiments are always worth a closer look. That is why this school's name will not likely be forgotten, it is a memorial to real, human and free thinking people being authentically new so that the inauthentically new nasi targeted them, those who destroyed their own neighbors and children.
But it was never purely about the new humanist. The book covers how fashionable the occult was in Germany and therefore also within the school, not unusual during war time when spiritual philosophy is a soft landing from hard reality and so many have died that their ghosts are felt in most any home. The Weimar period for all its hope is utterly haunted, and so too are its new fangled, modern schools. There are far more women than men in that country at that time and the new schools were clearly looking to them to help reinvent the nation. But for all its pure modernity, the popularity of eastern religions, including the less familiar to us now 'Mazdaism' as well as other esoteric study groups both near or far from what we'd regard as cults, inseparable in that time from the fledgling ideas of psychology, is a bizarre other side of the coin reflection on the racial occultism that the Nasi would adopt, almost as though everything they did was the extreme shadow of every hope of a just society embodied by this new kind of school. And it is in certain ways regrettable that the nasi tried to purge these 'outside' trends by kicking up its own mud, because you know how that went. So artists don't like to talk too much about the metaphysical climate that hatched modernity because of this very reason - the weird race cults of psuedoscience that are kind of entangled in with genuinely wholesome enthusiasm in embracing or at least understanding other world cultures. It's such an advanced topic to discuss the inevitable binaries, dualities, mirror images in historical language that come with experiments on this scale, and people truly fear its being handled poorly as it is so against what you'd think was common sense - both tend to arise together, any enlightenment seems to bring its own shadow, like the clenched xenophobia of that minority of people who just don't like the educated and somehow manage to whip up a frenzy now and then to liberty's collective loss.
But that's why this topic still engages, when there were so many other little experimental public schools that do not have quite as many shelves dedicated to them. This story is just that poignant and dramatic in outcome and vision alike.
It was rigged from the beginning, but being such a pioneer great flaws are inevitable. The school was chartered to show what a gender equal school looked like, but Gropius (the hero of new education design) secretly suppressed the number of women going into some fields and tried to channel them to 'womanly' fields like weaving (in his opinion) and so we have prejudices even in the architects relied onto combat them, of the new way of doing things. Not a big shock, the study of this topic is about the new, about the inevitable challenges, and likely fame and reward that comes from risking the new. So the book is not a damnation of its failures as some have chosen to approach the topic, sick of anything too old or too new depending on what's expected of them. I am happy to report the book is a delightful sifting for aberrations, that poke a hole in the perfect image of a perfect tabula rasa and instead show what a realist might expect - the chaos of young people, getting a chance in a lifetime to start a creative life, and exploding with ideas and risks and wild freedom which is, I have heard, more or less exactly what happens in such places today now that they are ubiquitous.
I found the book incredibly comforting, with the dwelling on various flavors of in-betweenness that you already find when you look for practical realities of the people themselves, and go beyond institutional renown which the salespeople often guard in a panic. Often, perhaps always, any experiment in justice is held together in great precarity. It's a great reality check for the topic itself and thus a necessary book. We all know about the Bauhaus professor who became a nasi designer, the great Judas of Modernity who shall not be named. We all know the students were obsessed with Vaudeville and early jazz (big problem for the komissars and therefore extra attractive to the kids) and how trendy young people will always be - in their case dancing on the school roofs to banjo, eastern style drum circles, and wearing their straw boater's hats. In those days America seemed punk to these youths - it is having a moment by celebrating its regular people, its rural and folk self-image, and it must have seemed so refreshing an alternative to classical noblesse. Yes it helped set the aesthetic for new design especially commercial design and remains alive as a high brow form, but its students were just as rooted in the muddy curiosities of the past, and superstition and nerdism and this disrupts the clean narrative that too many believe about the dawn of modernism in the arts with reality.
My favorite thing about the book was that the author expertly mined the archives to curate illustrations you don't often see, rarer cuts from the well known archives, humorous ephemera drawn in their hands, and that definitive art of this transitional era, for all its wins and tragedies, the cut-up or collage, where the very printed matter of society is torn apart and reassembled into often transgressive humor. Print was praised as the great liberator, the press was free, and the response was to tear it up and make playful fun of its archetype, for print once carried the archetype of power and this was already starting to fall into the more sane place of being in question, requiring a more critical approach. If at the end of this book you don't smile at yet another lovely addition to one of art's (and education's) greatest and most notorious stories, where it really is driven home hopefully that the field is often quite dangerous - you really might risk your life by choosing an equitable and creative way to go, because you must still share your reality with people who are much less free wherever you go - then I think you still don't understand the exciting drama in this tale. It didn't decide anything, that's a sales pitch. But it opened the floor to questioning, and it put real resources to the problem of making society better and more delightful. That's research not everybody wants to see happen, as its cautionary tale, its new archetype carrying is of the imprisoned teacher or poet, now carries instead. So let down your bias that education must (or even could) always be cleanly idealistic, and have a closer look at the Bauhaus through its participants, which you know helped make your way of life possible and that you already claim to love. Embrace it more thoroughly, now shown in even more humanistic terms, warts and all.
In the old days words like Republic once meant radical reforms to introduce democracy to a formerly absolute monarchist kind of setting. It was once a word that meant cutting edge modernity but also a celebration of 'common' people's arts as a possible revival of a broken society.
After the unprecedented slaughter of the first world war, the public had a tremendous appetite for change, was willing to try new things, and had a greater demand for equality. The Weimar Republic promised all manner of things we'd recognize today as ordinary demands, including gender equality and access to education for the public. The Bauhaus was meant to symbolize its hopes - a reversal of the traditional strangle hold noble families had on the arts, by creating a hybrid school that taught not just arts but traditional crafts like weaving and furniture making with formerly exclusive fields like architecture and fine art. They were going to improve ordinary lives by creating accessible, creative and well-made environments. Their job was simple at least in concept - create new art for a new society that is oriented around social justice.
And the story as you know winds up being a tight rope walk, we as readers know what is about to happen. We know it starts with a utopian ideal most of us share, we know that some of its students will become legends in creating the simplified, even occasionally brutal look of modernity that still commands secular and public taste, and we know that some of its teachers and many students will die in concentration camps, even as we know a few of the students will collaborate with the fascists to form their effective propaganda arm. So scholars of art look to the seminal idea of an elective art college, now an ordinary opportunity in any large city but at that moment a revolutionary democratic experiment, because its outcomes were so contradictory and yet seminal. Not to say the school itself decided the whole aesthetic and cultural shift, but that the events that lead to it, the excitement of cooperatively inventing its programs, and the way it faced and experienced the disaster of social collapse that allowed the misanthropes to storm the capital - it's all too spectacular a story for history to ignore.
That's for the newbies, most readers already know this stuff. So what the book does provide us, and makes it highly commendable, is how it looks at almost every angle that is not the story the informed are most accustomed to hearing. Usually it's pretty monolithic, a perfectly good idea, quickly ramping up proof that arts education for all is a profitable, historic direction for a government to go, and then nipped in the bud by paranoid fanatics who like to stalk and attack teachers in the name of a much darker, less civil form of social engineering. You might be tempted to call it a tale of the optimists who hold out for a while against the pessimists before being cannibalized by them - who believe so much in coming destruction they eventually manifest the very thing they fear for themselves. But in that telling the school is angelic, its students are pure modernity - no clinging to the past, the full discard of stuffy old order ways. This book adjusts that view by looking at the students more closely.
And this book fills the gap practically by covering this mirage with the facts. That's what this book is for. A lot of people who are thrilled by the history of public education are not always so thrilled by the radical acceptance politics nurtured openly in the halls of this school, which was among the first to promise equal gender enrollment. Like virtually anywhere in the world. That is the true tragedy of nasism - the tragedy of their rise to power to come obscures the great leaps towards fairness and discovery that took place just before, and even stole a few notes from such goals - sullying an entire nation to this day by misinformation, insincere promises, and erasing its own brilliant early performances in the name equality, all for the actions of a cadre of haters. Practical, properly invested in and supported from the top type experiments are always worth a closer look. That is why this school's name will not likely be forgotten, it is a memorial to real, human and free thinking people being authentically new so that the inauthentically new nasi targeted them, those who destroyed their own neighbors and children.
But it was never purely about the new humanist. The book covers how fashionable the occult was in Germany and therefore also within the school, not unusual during war time when spiritual philosophy is a soft landing from hard reality and so many have died that their ghosts are felt in most any home. The Weimar period for all its hope is utterly haunted, and so too are its new fangled, modern schools. There are far more women than men in that country at that time and the new schools were clearly looking to them to help reinvent the nation. But for all its pure modernity, the popularity of eastern religions, including the less familiar to us now 'Mazdaism' as well as other esoteric study groups both near or far from what we'd regard as cults, inseparable in that time from the fledgling ideas of psychology, is a bizarre other side of the coin reflection on the racial occultism that the Nasi would adopt, almost as though everything they did was the extreme shadow of every hope of a just society embodied by this new kind of school. And it is in certain ways regrettable that the nasi tried to purge these 'outside' trends by kicking up its own mud, because you know how that went. So artists don't like to talk too much about the metaphysical climate that hatched modernity because of this very reason - the weird race cults of psuedoscience that are kind of entangled in with genuinely wholesome enthusiasm in embracing or at least understanding other world cultures. It's such an advanced topic to discuss the inevitable binaries, dualities, mirror images in historical language that come with experiments on this scale, and people truly fear its being handled poorly as it is so against what you'd think was common sense - both tend to arise together, any enlightenment seems to bring its own shadow, like the clenched xenophobia of that minority of people who just don't like the educated and somehow manage to whip up a frenzy now and then to liberty's collective loss.
But that's why this topic still engages, when there were so many other little experimental public schools that do not have quite as many shelves dedicated to them. This story is just that poignant and dramatic in outcome and vision alike.
It was rigged from the beginning, but being such a pioneer great flaws are inevitable. The school was chartered to show what a gender equal school looked like, but Gropius (the hero of new education design) secretly suppressed the number of women going into some fields and tried to channel them to 'womanly' fields like weaving (in his opinion) and so we have prejudices even in the architects relied onto combat them, of the new way of doing things. Not a big shock, the study of this topic is about the new, about the inevitable challenges, and likely fame and reward that comes from risking the new. So the book is not a damnation of its failures as some have chosen to approach the topic, sick of anything too old or too new depending on what's expected of them. I am happy to report the book is a delightful sifting for aberrations, that poke a hole in the perfect image of a perfect tabula rasa and instead show what a realist might expect - the chaos of young people, getting a chance in a lifetime to start a creative life, and exploding with ideas and risks and wild freedom which is, I have heard, more or less exactly what happens in such places today now that they are ubiquitous.
I found the book incredibly comforting, with the dwelling on various flavors of in-betweenness that you already find when you look for practical realities of the people themselves, and go beyond institutional renown which the salespeople often guard in a panic. Often, perhaps always, any experiment in justice is held together in great precarity. It's a great reality check for the topic itself and thus a necessary book. We all know about the Bauhaus professor who became a nasi designer, the great Judas of Modernity who shall not be named. We all know the students were obsessed with Vaudeville and early jazz (big problem for the komissars and therefore extra attractive to the kids) and how trendy young people will always be - in their case dancing on the school roofs to banjo, eastern style drum circles, and wearing their straw boater's hats. In those days America seemed punk to these youths - it is having a moment by celebrating its regular people, its rural and folk self-image, and it must have seemed so refreshing an alternative to classical noblesse. Yes it helped set the aesthetic for new design especially commercial design and remains alive as a high brow form, but its students were just as rooted in the muddy curiosities of the past, and superstition and nerdism and this disrupts the clean narrative that too many believe about the dawn of modernism in the arts with reality.
My favorite thing about the book was that the author expertly mined the archives to curate illustrations you don't often see, rarer cuts from the well known archives, humorous ephemera drawn in their hands, and that definitive art of this transitional era, for all its wins and tragedies, the cut-up or collage, where the very printed matter of society is torn apart and reassembled into often transgressive humor. Print was praised as the great liberator, the press was free, and the response was to tear it up and make playful fun of its archetype, for print once carried the archetype of power and this was already starting to fall into the more sane place of being in question, requiring a more critical approach. If at the end of this book you don't smile at yet another lovely addition to one of art's (and education's) greatest and most notorious stories, where it really is driven home hopefully that the field is often quite dangerous - you really might risk your life by choosing an equitable and creative way to go, because you must still share your reality with people who are much less free wherever you go - then I think you still don't understand the exciting drama in this tale. It didn't decide anything, that's a sales pitch. But it opened the floor to questioning, and it put real resources to the problem of making society better and more delightful. That's research not everybody wants to see happen, as its cautionary tale, its new archetype carrying is of the imprisoned teacher or poet, now carries instead. So let down your bias that education must (or even could) always be cleanly idealistic, and have a closer look at the Bauhaus through its participants, which you know helped make your way of life possible and that you already claim to love. Embrace it more thoroughly, now shown in even more humanistic terms, warts and all.
January 27, 2021
Rough pretentious start but good background on Weimar Republic and marginalized artists of the movement. A bittersweet look back that is very relevant to our current fascist times.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews