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Cliven its diasporic inlluence in our lives toda1,,the Bauhaus is so familiar that rvc think of it as a form of ur- modernism, a point of ml.thic origin.Yet at the same time, there are wavs in which it is not well known atall,overshadowedasithasoftenbeenbythemanrmeaningsgivenroitinlatervears.Acurrent strain ofrvriting, conversely,stresses failure, describing its tenuous fcroting as a business,for example, or the way the goal ofcreating goods for mass production often eluded it.2 Despite the iconic quality images the of so many Bauhaus and objects, school's most significant achievement may be its nurtur- rs9 ing ofa sustained cross-media con'ersation about the nature ofart in the modern age:over thc course of fourteen l'ears - preciselv those of the tumultuous tenure of the'Weimar Republic - the Bauhaus brought together artists, architects, and designersin a kind ofcultural think tank for the times. z Certainiv the duration is unprecedented, but the rich mix ofprominent participants in different 6elds c ofthe visual arts is ncarli' so.This purposeful diversity,present from the start, provoked a reimagining of I c the relation between fine art and design that offered a formidable challenge to the distinction between c them. Thc result was hardlv monolithic in orientation, but rather a seriesof positions, varving and z sometimes at variance u'ith one another, that attempted to work through the u,a)'sin which a nerv modern culture of technological media, machine production, global communication, and postwar poli- z tics might shape the role of the artist.Thinking of the Bauhaus thisrvayhighlights its commitment to theory as lvell as practice, though ofcourse the two are deeply intertu'ined. Rather than trace the school'scomplicated histor'., rvhich has been richly chronicled elsewhere,this essayexamines a seriesof kev precepts that gar.especific shape to Bauhaus m<.,dernism.l

Teaching as Experience Although the Bauhaus was ultimatel)' many things - publisher, advertising agencv,industrial-design partner, fabricator - it was first and foremost a school, and its approach to modcrnism was defined pedagogically. Skeptical about the possibilitv of teaching the skills necessaryfor the making ofgreat arr, the school'sfounding director, Walter Gropius, placed "workshops" at the center of its curriculum in his April r9r9 manifesto (cats.38,39).In doing so he v'as aligning himselfwith a current ofprogressive thinking about design reform established before the war.oAlready an important element in the program ofseveral modern craft schools, workshop-based education was aimed at bringing students out ofthe studios ofthe academiesthat had flourished in the later nineteenth century, where theywere taught by imitating historical examples,and into the processofrnaking things, in order to gain an understanding of materials.And where academic models reinforced the distinction between 6ne-arts and applied-arts education, the Bauhaust workshops were to be led by both a master craftsman(Handuterhsmeister,later TbcbniscberMeister or'Verhmeister) and a 6ne arttst (Formmeister),a pairing that spoke of Gropius's de sire to assurethat technical knowledge was complemented by aesthetic ambition.This too had prccedents in modern craft schools,sbut the radical potential ofplacing artists in the v'orkshops was heightened bv the type of artist Gropius invited to take on the role: his 6rst faculty picks were plucked from the crucible ofthe avant-garde, theoretically confident and distinctlv antiacademic in approach.s The most novel part of the Bauhaus curriculum, however, had no place in Gropius's r9r9 program. Dismaved by the talents of the students who enrolled in the first year - a motley crew of 1 young, the Weimar th:rt were analgamated to form the Georg Muche war veterans no longer leftovers from schools Untitled(Weaving workshop). rgzr Bauhaus,and those seeking a certain meal in time oframpant food shortagesT-Johannes Itten (cat.z), Gelatinsilver print who had become form master for the sculpture, metalwork,woodu.orking,*'all-painting, and wear.ing 6Vax 4r1zro"(r5.8 x rt.9cm) u'orkshops, proposed a preliminary course.t Itten had founded his ou.n school in Vicnna in 1916:his TheMuseum of ModernArt, NewYork ThomasWalther Collection. Gift of charisma is suggestedb1'the fact that no fewer than sixteen ofhis students there followed him to the ThomasWalther I3auhaus,and perhaps equallv by the fact that the famous Alma Mahler, by then married to Gropius, proposed hin'r as a faculty member to her husband. Gropius and Itten agreed that greater theoretical r16 -

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-o training $'asnecessary to raise the general Icvelofstudent work.v Intended to offer an introduction to issuesof color, form, and materials considered fundamental to all visual expression,the preliminary o course erased the boundaries between craft and fine-art education.Taught continuously from the O fall of ryzo throughout the school's existence, 6rst by Itten, later by I-dsz16Moholy Nagy andJoscf = Albers, q.ith complementary color and form courses taught byVasilv Kandinsky and Paul Klee, and requirecl from rgzt until rgJo for students ofall disciplines, it \,!'asin the end the school'smosr defining peclagogicalfeature.ro Itten began his classeswith a focus on the students' bodies, leading a seriesofexercises that drew on anciencyogic traditions and must have seemedfar more exotic in rgzo than today: stretching to produce physical flexibility, isometric relaxation oIdifferent body parts in turn, rhythmic chants and breathing - a regime that Klee wryly dubbed "a kind of body massageto train the mzrchineto function with feeling."lrYet the Eastern origins and corporeal focus ofltten's practice can be read with a critical edge: Itten often spokc of his interest in Oswald Spengler's bookThe Decline oftbe'WestQ9t8lryzz),which denounced$Testern rationalism and technology.t2A seriesof quickfire drawing exercisesintendecl to awaken the psyche, senses,and hand followed: in some, students would be directed to render the experience ofa dramatic situation - a storfr or battle, for example - rapidly and freelv, in a form of automatism predating its adoption by the Surrealists. Like his own teacher Adolf Holzel, a pioneer in teaching abstraction, Itten took the old mas- ters as a starting point, projecting black and u.hite lantern slides for the class to analyze. In charcoal drarvings made after icons of German culture such as tbe Crucifxion panel fiom Griinewald's Isenheim Altarpiecc

First \ve seekcontact with material.... Instead ofpasting it, rve will put paper together b), ses'ing, buttoning, riveting, t,vping, and pinning it; in other words we fasten it in a multitude of u.ays.We rvill test the possibilitics of its tensile and comprcssion resist:rntstrength. In doing so, we do not alwa1,5create "*"orks of art," but rather experiments;it is not our ambition to fill museums:\rie are gathering expcrience.''

Experience, not knowledge, was the Bauhaus watchword. But the term is hardly a neutral one, for it is preciselv the decline of experience in the modern age that is lamented by so many cultural com- mentators at the time -\j/alter Ben.;amin, Edmund Husserl, Georg Simmel, and Ferdinand Tonnies among them. "Never," wrote Benjamin, "has experience been contraclicted more thoroughly: strate- gic experience has been contravened bv positional warfare; economic experience, by the inflation; physical experience, byhunger; moral experience, bvthe rulingpou'ers."l8 ln.ach of the critic's exam- ples, an overarching understanding ofa complex u'holc has becn replaced b,va scverelv impoverished vieu'.The integrated selfis succeededby an anonymous rcplaceability. In this context, the expcriential amlritions of the preliminarl'course offered afragile buhvark against rhe dt.sphoriaof modernity. Basic Units Itten's distilling drive initiated a key impulse at the Bauhaus: an effort to de6ne the primary elements of visual form, in a parallel process to the attempt in the preliminary course to return to the basic core ofthe student's mind, stripped ofthe interference ofcultural convention. Beginning in r9zz, both Kandinskyand Klee taught classeson basicformwithin the preliminary-course curriculum.re Kandinsky's book Punht und Linie zu Flache (Point and line to plane, ryz6i cat.254), based on this @1a c teaching program and with a ritle inventorying the irreducible elements ofgraphic work, issued an - overarching directive: "'We must at the outset distinguish basic elements from other elements' viz. - ; elementswithout which a work in anyparticular art cannot even come into existence."20Aspart of this ; ofvisual experience- became an important l mandate, the theory ofcolor - that most basic component : focus within the preliminary-course curriculum. Itten developed a tu.elve-spoke color wheel, incor- € primary colors, three secondary ones, and six intermediate tones, to create a color o porating the three system rhat he correlated with the twelve notes of the musical scalc(cat. (16). In his earlier writing I o Kandinsky had concentratecl on single colors in isolation in order to define their most basic affective capacities,and haclfound that "the tv'o great divisions u'hich at once become obvious are: r) the rvarmth o or coldness ofa color: and z) the lightness or darkness ofa color." l'he number ofpermutarions was o "I. r,r'armanct r) light or z) dark; or II. coltl, and either r) lighr or z) dark."21 a thus limited, he concluded, preoccupation rvith the three primarv colors and primary forms - triangle, circle, a Kandinsky's o\4rn and square- lefr a direct, ducklinglike imprint on his students,visible in I{erbert Baver'swall-painting clesignfor the staircase in the Van de Velde building the school occupied in Weimar ltqzy car.tgz), Peter Keler's cradle (tgzz; car.zo8), anclHeinrich Bormann's graphic analysisof a musical composition $93o; cat.37o).Theseefforts to describe fundamental elementsand the rules oftheir interaction proved defining in anotherway aswell: scienceprovided a template for art in the modern age,and the Bauhaus was imagined as an experimental laboratorS with art the product not ofinspiration but ofresearch. Kanclinskyworked with some sensethat the most distilled forms of expression would allou' for correspondences among mediums. "Every phenomenon of the external and of the inner world," )2 hewrote in Punht und Linie zu Fldche,"can be given a linear expression- a kind of translatron." Lineat cliagrams he made in r9z5 from photographs of the modern dancer Gret Palucca, who often visited rhe Bauhaus,seem a kind oftest case(cats.38r, l8z): w'orking from these stilled images- Kandinsky felt that the "precise structuring" of Palucca'smovements was best captured by the camera - he made simple linear.drawings that defined the "large simple forms" of her poses.2rKandinskv was hardly alone at this moment in trying to devise new modes of dance notation that would offer a stable visual 24 coclefor performance, a kind oflanguage that w-ould capture experience u'ithout resorting to text And he q'assimilarly interestedin developingmusical notations baseclon graphic marks and primary forms rather than the conventir>nalscript ofnotes on a stafl25These disrillcclfornts, Kandinsky sug- gested,g,ould ofl'er a frameu'ork for crossingboundaries betu.eenthe visual arts, music, ancldance. The basicunits defined within the teaching of the preliminary coursebecame the building blocks for larger sysremsin the products of the workshops. Around r9zz, Bauhaus faculty and srudents beganto createa broad rangeofworks using recombinablemodular clements.The artist was reimag- ined as a designer ofsystems. -Ib one side ofa drarving farchitecture, designing a series of Baahasten,cubic components for single-family hous- ing,whichwere to be prefabricated, then ordered and combined in different configurations (cat. z8). These primaryforms took aplace within a newpostwar culture of standardization:inr9r7, a national organization, the Normenausschus der Deutschen Industrie, had been established to regulate units of measurement, symbols, and basic elements of manufacture (such as screws) within and across

industries.26The more things were standardized, the more they could be combined. rs9

Grid Logic 3 By rgzz the Bauhaus had made an important shift away from the marriage of Expressionism and craft reform that had marked its founding years. After an "impassioned romanticism that was a faming protest against materialism and the mechanization ofart and life" came a "reversal ofvalues," wrote I Oskar Schlemmeq who arrived at the Bauhausin the winter of rgzr to head the wall-painting workshop. Schlemmert text was not without an overheated romanticism of its own:

B z Dada, court iester in this kingdom, plays ball with the paradoxesand makes the atmosphere free and easy.Americanisms transferred to Europe, the new wedged into the old world, death to the past, to moonlight, and to the soul, thus the pres- ent time strides alongwith the gestures ofa conqueror. Reason and science, "man's greatestpowers," are the regents,and the engineer is the sedateexecutor of unli mited possihilities.2/

The changewas publiclyunveiled on the opening dayofthe r9z3exhibition ofstudent and facultywork, where Gropius gave a speech announcing changes at the school and offered a slogan intended to brush away the remaining cobwebs of mysticism:Kznst und Tecbnih:Eine neueEinhezT (Art and technology: a new unity).28 One explicit change was the introduction ofa new businessunit, run by a businessmanager charged with assuring the school's financial viability through partnerships with outside retailers and manufacturers. (The r9z3 exhibition itself was mounted in part to solicit buyers for the school's products.) This realignment'was complex - the school'srelationship to industrial production was in the end ambiguous, characterized byparadoxes ancl false starts more than sucesses- but at this moment the Bauhausartisr decisivelydropped the robe ofthe shaman to take on theguise ofthe technician.2e The visual idiom that emerged is marked b-va tenacious embrace of the grid as structuring frameu'ork, if stretched into new domains:Anni A lbers'stextiles (cats.163, t64,276),-IosefAlbers's luminescent glassr.r'orks (cats.83,93,94,277-79), the three-dimensional grid of X{arcel Breuer's tubular-steel chairs (cats.z96-r18,3or,3oz),Andor'Weininger's kinetic stage designs (cat.zzr), and Bayer's Bauhaus letter- head (cat.245)are only some of many examples. If we can discern the dominant imperatives of other forms of modernism - the wayfahturabelongs to the Russian avant-garde of a certain moment, and fracture to Dada - then it is certainly the thorough working-over of the logic ofthe grid that gives overarching shape to the products of the Bauhaus. The change betrays rhe influence ofavant-gardes outside the Bauhaus:the cloubleimpact of de Stijl and Constructivism. In r9zz, Theo van Doesburg, impresario of the de Stijl group, had forged an alliancebetween Constructivism, de Stijl, and Dada at the school'sdoorstep, organizing an inter- narional congressin Diisseldorf that May and a second in \Veimar itself in September (cat.3)- a united front of critics of Expressionism.A major shou,ofv'ork from the new Sovict Union, at the Galerie van D iemen, Berli n. in 1922,had offered the \X/esta fi rst vieu. of deve lopments i n th at country sincc the Rcvolution.Van Dcresburghad taken up residencvin\Xrcimar in April r9zr, publishing his De Stijl magazine @20

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€ o there - the first journal dedicated to a theory of abstraction. And although he was nercr asked to join the Bauhaus facultl', from tgzt to r94 he offered private instruction in the city, attended by a number of I o Bauhausstuclents, and he servedas a familial critic to the school,giving lectures praising its pedagogical ambitions but disparaging the directions taken.30 o Gropius's hiring of Nloholy-Nagy in tgz3 gaveleadership to the new direction. Three years ear- 3 o lier this Hungarian artist had settled in Berlin, a crossroadsfor the artists and intellectuals ofCentral = and Eastern Europe, where he had establishedties with the Dadaists Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Hoch, and Kurt Schwitters; u'ith the Russian El Lissitzkv. v'ho had studied with Kazimir Malevich; and u'ith Van Doesburg himsell, all key players in\ran Doesburg's international congresses.Moholy's work was both manifesto and testing ground for a Constructivist and de Stijl vocabulary. His paintings of this moment - strongly influenced by Lissitzky in particular (cat.4) - explore the intersection ofabstract forms in abstract space, and are inhabited by floating planes without mass and ofvarying degrees of transparency (cats. r43-45,\47,\52,ry3).'[he model is no longer perspectival, an image ofthings seen,but rather the idiom of de:criptive geometry. Moholy's latticeworks of forms intersecting on horizontal and vertical axes bring painting close to the language ofarchitecture.3r(And.Vloholy, like Lissitzky, often deployed axonometry, a form of spatial projection common in architectural rendering, inwhich orthogonal lines remain parallel rather than meeting at the vanishing point oftraditional perspective.) These works create an equiva- lence between the floating planes ofcolor in the painted surface and those ofthe wall, ceiling, and floor ofthe built structure. This congruence opens the r.vayfor the radical integration ofpainting and archi- recrure in works such as Keler's designs for Moholy's studio (cats.4r,42) anclBayer's advertising kiosks and other building s (cats.zz4-29). But it also implicitly proposes a new model ofarchitecture, in which planes slrde past one another on a three-dimensionalgrid rather than the closed boxes of traditional architecture (cats.46-3r). Here one seesthe ascendancyofu'hat forYve-AlainBois are the twin premises of de Sttll32elementarization, the distillation of fundamental forms seen in the ruled line and the right angle, and the use ofprimary colors plus black, gray, and white; and integrarzbz,the binding

3 Participants in the lnternational Congress of Constructivists and Dadaists, Weimar,1922 Top row, left to right: Lucia Moholy'NaBy, Alfrdd Kemdny, Liszld Moholy-Nagy. Second row from the top: Lotte Burchartz, El Lissitzky,Cornelius van Eesteren, Eernhard Sturtzkopf Third row: Max Eurchartz (with child). Harry Scheibe,Theo van Doesburg, Hans Vogel, Peter Rohl. Front row, standing: Alexa Rdhl, Nelly van Doesburg. Tristan Tzara,Njni 5mit, Hans Arp. Foreground, left: Werner Graeff. On ground: Hans Richter Photograph: photographer unknown. Septembet 25 ot 26, 1922. Gelatin silver print. 6 rlax 8 5/e"(r7.r x 2r.9 cm). Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin the Bauhaus' In the absorption ofthese principles at ofthese forms togetherin a new,encomPassingwhole. thegridbecameaStructufaltoolallowingforthecreationofspacesthatintegrateddisparatemedi-

umsintooverarchingdesigns-painting,furniture,andtextilesintoarchitecture(cat'zo).Andintheof the auto- and his students - remaking the fan shape Bauhaus,sfinal phase, Ludwig Hilberseimer architecture - fulfilled this mode of thinking by taking cratic ciry inro gridded rectalgular blocks (cats. into city planning '1+1,445)' Gricllogicot.ou...had,p"cl"lrelevancefortextiledesign,sincefabricisdefinedbythe horizontalanclverticalintersectionof*.^'po.,d*"ft.ThewomenoftheBauhausweavingworkshop,in voiced their col- form master, the painter Georg Muche'33 rebelling against the leadership of their first to the making forms that followed a pictorial logic fcrreign lective opposition to the use of crrvilinear ofcloth,committingthemselvesinsteadtoabStraCtcompositionsexploringth-einfinitepossibilities ofthegrid.Althoughneveramasterintheirworkshop,Kleehadanimportantinfluenceontheweavers, used the grid as a matrtx and ornament.3aIn hls classesKlee growing out of a mutual interest in patteln forpatterndevelopment:st.',d.,'ts*e,einstructedinaseriesofalmostmusicaloperations-rotatlon, (cats compositions of of complementary colors r zo'364'36)' inversion, mirroring, the transposition coloredSqualesfollowingsimilarprinciplesflourishedinKlee,sownlvatercolorsandpaintingsatthis The computeriike punch pto*imity of pedagogy and practice moment (cats.85-88) - a testam"nt to th" cardsusedintheJacquardlooms(p.20B,fig.r)boughtforth.workshopinlgz5offeredanintensified technologicalfiameworkforthiswayofworking:thepixillatedstructuresofGuntaStolzl'sJacquard digital logic' designson graph paper (cats' 267,268)presage

Antinationalism Theembraceofanervlanguageofuniversalform,groundedinthegeclmetric,entailedthepurgingofa :isclear in the move- of a preindustrialworld. This shift German identrtl,, silnaled in emlrlems romantic in the shapeof samovarof tgzz(cat.ro9), with its spigot ment from carlJucker,s hammered-metal abearclawconjuringaGermanhuntingtradition,orfromGyulaPap'scandelabraofthesameyear (cat.rlo),itssevenarmsalignedinaplanemakingreferencetotheoriginaloldTemplelampofbiblical description,s5tothegeometricallybasedmetalworkturnedoutinthemetal$,orkshopafterNloholytook lr rrr,16z,t65-67)' itoverinrgz3,muchoiitbyhisirodigiouslyralentedstudentMarianneBrandt(cats ElLissitzky (Bycontrast,inhisbrieften"tt"'fo'*masterofthemetalworkshopintgzz'Klee'inthewordsof Proun r9D. c.ig22 ..spiritual intellectual doorknobs',,;3s production of samovarSancl Ge5so,oi1, paper, and cardboard on plywood Xanti Schawinsky, had gu:idedthe ..Bauhaus fi1m,,photomontage x (97 told it himself in his 383/a f8r/4' Sx 97.2 cm') the Story can be tolc] in many ways; Breuer Brrt his and Stolzl's The Museum of Modern Art, New York. from the romantic primitivism of (r926;cat.96), rvhich ofiers tit'"^oiit traiectory Katherine S. Dreier Bequest " .African,,chairoflg2ltotheSupPortoftlrehumanbodyonacushionofairatanunspecifieddatern

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O = a both inside the Bauhaus and well beyond it' interiority too much the stuff of another moment for many = imperative to define what is esscntial and uni- in a rare point ofavant-garde consensus.But the urgent versalis characteristicallv Bauhaus (cats' 257 conducted frc:m tgzz until his Bayer's proiect to clevelopa universal lettering ,z5B)' the modern form ofthe spiky blackletter departure from the school in rgr8,tttook aim at Fraktur, in the r9zos, Fraktur even appears German script, now emphatically nationalist in claim. Ubiquitous of the Baubausbiicberbook series(cat' 5)' in the businesscorrespondence ofAlbert Langen, the publisher a truly international alphabet that spoke Bayer sought a letter stflpped ofsuch national signifiers, with Roman letters as the foundation of the of the dream ofunfettered global exchange. He began their histolical traces ofhandwriting' the up- \Tesrern letterforrn, but rationalized them, jettisoning and thicks and thins oftraditional letterforms' and down strokes ofthe pen seenin the serifflourishes the small inventory of forms from which Insread, Bayer used compass,T-square, and rule to create (cat.257)True, this was the languageofthe engineer'but put al1the letters ofhis alphabet might be made geometry, in a repudiation of stvle and the to a specific task: the purging of natlonal identity through is clear: a universalist program had strong inlluence of culture. That it rvasto tre understood politically merninginrhi:momenr rfrerrheclev:rstrtionof \xorldwlrl,andtheconsequent:hocksofclasswar- right. Bayer himself wrote that "the typographic fare, failecl revolution, anclthe rising power of rhe ..not event but went hand and hand t'ith a new rer.olution,,,of rvhich he rva, pio.'."., *", an isolatecl " then, that a modification introducing Fraktur tvpe social and political consctousness."3sOne irnagines, in the midst ofthe inflationary crisis into the banknotes that -Bayerdesigned for the state ofThuringia his consent (cat' 6; see also cat' z6z)'3e that took hold in Germany in r9z3 was executed without and the lecent experience of The connection between the Bauhaus,sgeometric imperative 5 warismadeexplicitinthechesssetdesigneclintgzz-z4byJosefI-Iartwig,thetechnicalmasterofthe Printed form letter from Albert Langen Verlag, 168,169)Inanarticleinthe Munich, to newspapers announcing the wootlcarvingandstoneworkshopsandanavidchessplayerhimself(cats ..an that chessplayers were in for enormous surprise, second, revisededitlon of L,szlo Moholy Nagy, Leillziger Tagesbldtt|n 1924,Hartwig announced and their Mo lerei, Fotograla e, Fi/fi (Paintin g, photography' replacedthe game'straditional pieces, the demilitarization of chessme.r,as it *".e,"00 for he had fi1m . Bouhausbtlcherno. B March r928 Against the background of the chessboard's rcferencesto medieval rvariare, rvith fully abstract obiects. i1 x 85/s"(77.9 x 21.9cm) and the rook' fiom its characteristic movement: both the pawn Letterpress on PaPer grid, the lbrm ofeach piece rvasderived move of the Berlin oi thc board, are cubic,while the L-shaped Bauhaus-Archiv fbr example, which move paralleI to the edges :'-- _"v---i :t" ::il,: :' rri*: {.t.i3 P*;- - ; b !. r € b-b'.i I{'; "',;:,

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knight is expressedin a cantilevered shape and the bishop's diagonal passagein an "x" form. In later variations ofthe set,even the chessmen'ssmall base,with its lingering sculptural resonance,disappears,

pushing forward this diagrammatic logic. For Hartwig this revamping followed a historical trajectory 23? in which the game, which had functioned "for more than a thousand years as an imitation of a battle al between hostile armies,"now advanced to its present role "as a pure abstract game of the mi nd." 'War versus abstract logic were the terms of discussion. "new men" to serveas the perfect analogues The twentieth century was rife with proposalsfor C I of the age.The list includes the speed-addictedpersonality of Italian Futurism, the traumatized ego of Dada, the hygienic nationalist of the FrenchEgritNouveau,the collective, technologicallyastute subject of the Russian avant-garde,and the armored psyche ofproto-fascism. A seriesofphotographs hint at z the outlines of a "new figure" for the Bauhaus:in one, by Erich Consemiiller. a woman rvearing a paintcil z rnetallic theatrical mask by Schlemmer, and a dress made in the weavingworkshop, sits in Breuer's with tea- tubular-steel club chair (cat.7),a2 while in a related rmage a masked male figure sits at a table consuming products of the metal workshop spread on top of it (cat. 8). These are half-mechanical automa tons, like so many others in the visual culture of the decade,but here the mask is key: its blank visage is both deracinated and classless,just as the Bauhaus accoutrements ofmodern life are stripped ofcul- tural traces.Devoid of mobile orifices, the rigid form of the mask enforces silence.The Bauhaussubiect is a robotic mure: pared down to essentialgeometric forms, it passeseasily across political borders.

Disenchantment with Language Allred Arndt recounts a telling anecdote from ltten's course.The students were .instructed to "drar' the v,ar." Erich Dieckmann, a veteran with a shattereclarm, sketched detailed images of trenches and barbed wire, guns and troops.'$7a1terMenzel, who, as the class'syoungest student, had escaped the conflicr, stabbed the paper with his chalk and quit in frustration. Itten dismissed Dieckmann's work as a "Rgmantic picture" but praised the emotional authenticity of tr'Ienzel's,"It's all sharp points and al harsh resistance." Arndt's story speaksto a core Bauhausfascination rvith the mute mark, emotlonally rr\unanr and disdaining narrative conten(. A key text offerecl theoretical grounding for this disenchantment with the literary: Kandinskv's Concentingthe Spiritua/ in Art,ofrgrr. The essayhad been offered as a manif-esto,a first theory ofabstrac- rion, pur fbrrvarclsimultane ouslywrth a practice that served as a model. lbgether they had had an extraorclinaryinfluence on a generationofartists and intellectuals.Kandinsky's torveringreputltrun joi as a philgsopher of abstraction was certainly a prime reason for Gropius's invitation to him to n the Bauhausfaculr1,, but er.enbefbre his arrival, in r922,the text had a shapinginfluence on Bauhausthought. Conurningthe Spiritual in Art is permeated by a profound concern with the status oflanguage in art. Describ|ng a salon exhibition, for example, Kandinsky writes that the pictures

6 shadow,drinking, standing Herbert Bayer representin colour bits ofnature - animals in sunlight or in roo,ooo.ooo-markemergency banknote in water, lying on the grass;near to, a Crucifixion by a painter who doesnot believe '1' rgi.q'q1 rnF,td.e bdnr ot fnuliagid Coun- Christ . - . ; many naked women, seenforeshortened fiom behind ' ; portrait of Adapted from Bayer'sorigina design so and So.. . .All this is carefully printed in a book - name of artist - name of Ic rfclude Fraktur type. lg23 cillor Letterpre5son paper picture. Peopler.ith these books in their hands go from s,a1lt6 rvall, turning over the 2%x51,? (7x14cm) pages,reading the names.Then they go awav,neither richer nor poorer than when they Eauhaus Arch v Berlin carne.and are absorbedat once in their business,which has norhing to do wrth art.oo @24

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O the verbal and the basem:lteria lism of Here and elsewhere,Kandinsky builds an associationbetween to do with art." For hi m, the most profou nd ar t spurn s o moderniry - the "businessv.hich has nothing be,vondthe reach of words "a5This any content that can be named, instead offering "lofty emotions a6 = "inner need." In this paradoxicallyloquacious worcllessterrain is rhe realm of what Kandinsk,vcalls the linSu:istlc,to circumvent language - argument for the ineffable. abstraction emergesas rvav to shun mode of expression that Kandinsky and thar form of cognition rhar is language based.The alternate form to supplant the communicative with seekswould isolate the phvsiological impact of color and body and psyche: "'Ihe soui being one the sensory. Kanclinsky srressesthe lack ofbarrier between "psychic sh.ck'"47 with the body," he rvrites, phvsical impressions may procluce Kandinsk,vpra,,.,,h.BelgianSymbolistplaywrightNlauriceMaeterlinckforusingwords toexpressaninnerharmonybyrepeatingtheminapoeticContext..trvice,threetimesorevenmore an abstract.resonanceinstead ln r9t3' rn a f."qr"ntly,,," detaching them fron their meaning to create woodcuts' the artist poems calledSounds illustrated with his abstracted volume of Kandinsky's own 'ae isolating sound images physiologically' guided his reader to repeat words until they became senseless, verbal techniques' a means of simulating Friedrich Kittler has read a form of logophobia into these Klee's painting Das Vohahucbder Kammersingerin aphasia.5oSomething similar might be seen in the way cat. rr8) materializes language awav from com Rosasilber (Yocal fabric of the singer Rosa Silber, lgzz; the gessoground and muslin tabric gi'e the munication: letters become musical or aural units, while than through the frictionless conduits of surface a thick, texrural density, appealing sensually rather assigning broacllyabout the alphabet as pictorial in this period, verbal exchange.Klce was thinking sr year make compositions from combinations oiletters students in his color theory course that same to in German means not only "vocal" but "vowel"' And then there is the matter of the title's puns: vokal and S of the singer'sname appear alongwith the and in Klee's work, against the gridded backdrop, the R to the sl4)pageofx'ords, to u'ords' failure five vowels, the primary rool, ofth" singer'sart.s2 Puns point 7 language itsclf to mean unambiguously, and so to the thickening of Erich €onsemi.iller Untitled(Woman Beyeror lseGropius] Schlemmertoolvassel|-consciousabouttheroleofwordsinhisTriadiscbeBallett(Triadic ILis theatrical form, as a B'eu' w'"r:l g held up Baroque masked dance, an obsolete n B3-lub -h.r D/ M"rLFr ballet, rgzz; Cats.2t6,2\7)'schlemmer of face maskby Oskar Schlemmer and a dress for renewal."5l Discussing the abolition a model for momasks in these dancesrn r772,hc rernarked that "dates Gelatinsilver prlnt a critical coutlter- stagesof clecline."5aFor Schlemmer,the mask offerecl 5x 6rla"(12.5 x r7.2cm) an ascent,actually mark the expressil'egesture ofExPressionist theater' Prlvateco lectlon point to the heighteneclemorional pitch and exaggerated . .: i:;,..' .'-:

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an "art figure" Thc human actor \\rasnot a psr-chologicalsubject but a geometrical phenomenon ancl trr- (Kunstfgur)stcrcare.l g'ith costumes that rationalized thc bodv thr6ugh circles' sphcres, s6 that ofsilence angles.And bv lar the grearcsrvirtr:e .fBaroque theater for Schlernmerrvas criuldnot be ren- Disclosingthc charracteristicBauhaus beliefthat therervas no pnnciple that rvith "ballct/pzrntomime." dered cliagr:r*maticallr., Schlemrner publishecla clrarvingcontrasting "d rama" is "the oral stage"rvhile each representeclbr.a right triar.r.ele(cat.9). The bng sicleof thc cJramatriangle l3ellet/pantominlerc\-crst5 the r elnes: the shorter stclcsare "plal or lrlastic stage"ancl "visual stage." "oral is rcplacedaltogether "plav or plasticsta{ae" is ntlr-tlominant. "r'tsualstagc" seconcl:rn', ancl stase" q'riting, reve:rlsa lrscination lyith bv"aural st:rge."ln :ru,aythat rtsonalesg-ith Kanclinskr''s Schlenlmer "\\'hen the $'ord ntute plar.ers:he secsrhc seometricallv rationalizctl hgurc as a ncinlinguisticcntit\' thenitisfiee "57 issilent,"he*,rites,"ghenthtbocivaloneisarticulatcanclitsplavisone'xhibition" idee ofballet as a kinetic Yet at thc same tinrc, Sch]crrnter'sextravagant costumes u'ork againstthe ttlovtlnent at the \Jnre event. Exaggeratedheadclrc'sscs aricl m:rsks, padclecl torsos and linbs, inhibit timethattheYlenclspcctucularvisibilitvtt.ithe pose.Nlovinglromorlestaticposrtionro'rnother' tor photographrc each a nev, starklv geontetric ctllllposition. Schlemner's iigures scem clesisncd I a judging irom the nunttrer of c;rnleraimages taken of them, thts $ rrsrndcctl Photographerunknown representation and (probably Erich ConsemLjller) ntaj0r prrt ,,l tht rr tLtn,t inn {r.tt.2It) Untitled (Man s'orclswriting in i')25' wearing a mask by Oskar r\t the Bauha.s, eventhe act oireacltng q.asrcconfigureci to be lessabout Schlemmer with Bauhaus metal work pagesfostered bl the Moholv lantentccl"the tnonotonous grav of recent books''58 the unrlif'tcrentiatecl on adjacent tabletop\. t9z6-21 n a ,lc!gn hts ilrvn f rom tl-ratvear, for a Gelatin silver print line br-line. leit to right. fop to bottom rnocleoi'reacling. I 'rf x (r3.G thceighthinrhe:Bauhuusbiicber 5la 4r12" x rr.4 cm) sectionofhisbrvtk.lltlerciPltotler(rphitI:iln(Iraintilrtphoto{raphr'film The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (cat r:) T)hotoeraphsofcitv Viervs' serics:cat. :.1). \loholv breaks clos'n the traciitional page block to sich innerhaib ifuer verug liir sich a bstehen und Jede dieser Gattunges selbstzu vollenden wobei eine die Fiihrende il;.;;;fun zweieroder alls &i! Qattungo' die bis zur mathematischeo .'* *"q-tlt-"i"" fnge du Gewichtsierteilung' Regisseur' pd.i"" kann. Ihr Votlstreckerist ds universale '.,,.'*.;l"tfag* t%ffi

ffiffiNt :,9PrE.LB.?|)E den Vorzug Vom Smdounkt des Materials ausgeeheir, hat der Schauspieler Matqial ist er- *lb*; sein i* un.inibukei, ud Umbb:ingilkeit' Sein der zuglelch urchlcr Xijrcer. seine Stimme, Geste, Bewegung' Du Edelryp, ist jedoch heute ist und uminelbr ai. auch disWort gestaltet' "i"h ".lbst Shakepae, der erst spielte' eine idele Forderung. Ehedem erfiillten diese commedia del arte bevor er dichtete und die inprovisirenden Akteue ds Wort des Dichters' Der Schauspieler von heute gtiindet seine Existeu aufdc und desen Spiel Oo"t, to a*Wo.t wo allein duKiirper spricht "erstumritl der Gesetzgeber zw Schau getmgen ryiid - ist er frei ud -.ils.Tdu* seins selbst. : ;.. ' , Du Materiat de Dichtss istWori oba Ton. Sondeifalls, wo er unmiitelba selbst Sch-auspieler,Sanger @26 Mit Ausnahme des und oder Musiker ist, schaft er den Dr*ellugsstoff fijr deren 0bmngung c Stinme T Reoroduktion auf dq Biihne, sei es dirrch die orgoische menschliche dieser oder durch kosstruktiv'abstnkte Ins;tnmeqte Die Veruollkommnung lnstrumente erueilen auch die Gstattugsiiglichkeiten mit ihnen, w:ihrend und die menschiiche Stimme zw begrwts, aber einzigpniges Ph?inomen ist bleibt, Die mechdische Reproduktion duich Appmte vamag lnstrumenrton und Stimme vom Menschen abzuliisen und diese tibq ihre MaB' und Zet- ; hinans d steigim. € bedingtheit o

I o a o ofa city square, often takcn at oblique angles- a wireless mast, electric signs at night, an aerial view z juxtaposed t'ith bold gridded ; srrecr lights - arc disperse<1across asYmmetricallv comp()sedpages and v'hich lincs, n.mbers, pictographs, and staccato bars of text ("electric signsrvith luminous writing ofthe modern vanishcsand reappears,""tempo tempo-o- tcmpo-o-o"). such pagesevoke the experience Film was citv, full of flashes of sensory infofmation. I n both form and content' Malerei Pbotographie technologi- a manifesto for embracing the expandecl role ofphotography in modern life' Precipitous images' on ctn- cal changes,Nloholv argued- the saruration of the public spherervith photographic human emil screensand in illustrated ne*'spapers and magazines - had fundamentally transfbrmed they alreacly col- perceprion, People, he.suggested,might soon st:rrt collecting color slides the wav made from materials lected gramophone rccords, and "kinetic, projecteclcompositions" and works se homes proclucedfor the "electro-technical industrv" *'ould replace paintings on the walls ofmoclern this new "typo- t71,t/ereiPh\tographie Film lzrs a book fbr this modern rvorld. And it is notable that the page, fbrming grapl.rical-r.isual-svnopticalfcrrm"6o dramaticall-v reduced the number of words on ia and avant- ,.,er',,isu"l literature"6r bascd on the integration ofphotomechanical printing techniclues garrlcn pogrlphit expcrimrntet tutt. status of Nloholv was not alone among the clesignersat the Bauhaus in working to revise the the culture ofthe book rhc rrritten u'ortl. Bayer,fcrr example, designeri tyPe that corlespondcdiess to movement, ear- tlran to spccch itself: ibllou'ing thc KleinschreibungOirerally,"u'ritinB small") reform expert, in his rgzo ncstlv promotccl by Dr.\ralter Porstmann, a gclvcrnment efficiencv and standards in all Bauhaus corre- book spracheund scbrift,Q Baver famously proposecl abandoning capital letters 63 cnticism "'We do not spondence anrl printe j matter. The policy rvasadoptecl bv Gropius to much in sound - speaka capital a and a small a," Baveru'rote, pegging typography to the basisoflanguage 9 a vocalized word, binding rhat is. languagein irs sensu.us,embodied fbrm.6aBaver's tvpe imagines Oskarschlemmer DraBram reproduced in oskar Sch emmer. sound and mcaning into a untt body - the psvche and );e Euhaa im Bo)h0u., l-e tneat" oi I n this pen asrvedisenchantment u.ith language,it is preciselvthe :he Bauhaus).Bauhausbilchet na.4. Mrr.h: communication ln 1922-23' sensririumcornbinecl- tl-ratseems tO off'era conduit for a new form Ofdirect Albert Langen Verlag. 1925 a psvchol69icaltest t9 Rauhausstuclents and faculty on behalfofthe *'all-painting The Museum of Modern Art L brary, New \ork Kanclinskl.clistri[utecl triangle, a square' and s.orkshop (cat.ro). The firrm rnstructeclrecipients to 6ll in the blank outlincs ofa (that is, if $'orclsmigbtbe a circle *.ith thc colors that each iorm sceme

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fbuncl) to explain the choice. Perhaps not surprisingly, most agreed with Kandinsky's own well- blue for the circle. This tvpe of clisselrinated linkages, l,eliou' fbr the triangle, red for the square, and (the exerciservas not nes. for Kandinsky; much ofhis effort in the years he had spent at Inkhuk insti- tute of artistic culrure), Moscow, immediately before coming to the Balrhaus,lay in charting laws ofsubjective rcsponse to color and form in rvhich the "physiological effect should serve simply as a bridge to the elucidarion oFthe psychological ef-fect."55The Bauhausquestionnaire sPeaksto a defining aspiration: to faciiitate a form of immediate prelinguistic communication. Here Kandlnsky seems to har.ebeen clrawing on the rvork of Wilhelm Wundt, who founded the first laboratory for experimental psvchology in Leipzig in r875,and whose early studies focused on sensoryPerception, in particular on those sensations that preceded consciously formulated experience' Yet part of the problem for Kandinskn in his rnultiple attempts to chart mechanisms for univcrsal psychic response,seems to have been that ofcracking the code.Though overshadowedin recent scholarly thinking by the systems of Sigmund Freud and Ferdinand de Saussure,his approach it offers an imporranr modernist model, one that is neither psychoanalytical nor semiotic lnstead, leans to*,ard the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, s.hose methodology was based on bracketing out the exisrenceof the cxternal world in order to attend to the pcrcciving bocly and primordial fbrms of signification.

Gesamtkunstwerk Thinking In his r9r9 program fbr the new school(cats. 38,39), Gropius declaredhis purpose:the arts had become "isolated" in the modern age,ancl the school had to forge a "nerv unity." "The Bauhaus"'wrote Gropius, "srrivcs to bring togerher all creative effort into one whole, to reunify all the disciplines ofpractical 10 66 ofa new archirecrure " VasilyKandinsky art - sculpture, painting, handicrafts, and crafts - asinseparable components of this new Questionnai.e distributed by the Architecture - and specificallythe model of the cathedral -was imagined as the culmination wall-painting workshop, filled in by an Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art binding diffcrent fbrms of creative endeavortogether. The house unidentified Bauhaus student (possibly commissionecl from Gropius bv the Berlin timber merchant Adolf Sommerfeld(cats.77-82) offercd Gertrud or Alfred A rndt\. tgzz z3 contributions Lithograph, pencil, and colored crayon an importanr first opportunit-v to reahzethe architect's aims; built in rgzo-zr, it involved on paper from the glasspainting, woodworking, metalwork, anclweavingworkshops, all using a neu'abstract 9%e x 51t215'(23 3 x t5.r cm) language 6icubic ornament to produce an environment at once luxurious, coordinated, and modern' Bauhaus-Ar.hiv Be.lin Ery: FARTIYUR: FAReENSONAYINE (3 YAKTE) - l. REIHE: I.ktbt iluDs ae ars anhrDrfi.l. Du.6 zurDnh. I Ls.o d.isa To&l!. \ia jrw.rr !io. F60.ft Bc P.'!!g :6:bD.n'd& 2. REIHE: D; Fihn. Di. So€dbr b.dnnr dit s.in.h rilr

3. FEIHE: Dn MsiL, I- 4, REIHE: Dn skillDR J., &*.sbir.. I:Ep.n v'i[cod dB dn.!T.iL dd Soordn. 6lrlt 8-l2a€liod!n ikhdi stlluns ds b9.h; ;o. tloli:onhilise h 1R.i[.n - ibd.io&det.o.dn.rDt LrhF.!,zur hDFr6.n dd{ E h.n 06.! d v6.hi!&r .iDs.d.Lht vd.i voD 2PdoD.n&dLnt DsO6.h.rrolFin d{Rdh.ry fol3. I I l.1 ue. Dr.fi Ob.nchr.idDnt dE Ln[! inlln 6.hein.D di Lnitf.ld.r ih der leihsrols! lon ob.n n*[ u!trn GiJ! Rrihr9) udd vcShth. dl Toib.w.FdEdeRdht t. s. REIHE: Ds 06.0 &.*h.bloDc' d;ld d< R.i[.ddlF 'n 6. und ?. REIHET H.u!nlidhDr6.ul< -1.2.1.t g, - REIHE: Di. WidcRrtud., in J( S.Vdrihlrubrik .dold d6 ds T6r.h. - b! lur idlts.n V.dunl.ldns d.r Li(h! -.*.,,".,.^".,qu.ftD. Nr &, tidl Jqbp.2 bl?ibr lir8.r ksa - ,d d{Tork,h! bh,t, LoB( lrs.r uld ld'i ubd:u,'o D^.o xobbrnrboo bTrk / T.h2, LRubrik. DsEinnhJt.n dq s/id.riind.rnd ni.h *hrh{,driD d.6 Mon.nr ddv.rdunkdui*JL l-:hF ff.dh,6cn *.id.d und nur Lnn. I f,kht .!8.!d.r. *EIHE: Drls.a C*rorbild Dn-.hcuih&nr.nJ.n I Lir

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c r If Gropius saw his "new unity" of mediums as culminating in architecture, the same impetus ; permeated manv of the school's other activities. In this, the director got support from Kandinsky, an influential advocate of the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk even before'World'WarI. The term itself derived ; 'Wagner, from Richard rvho had used it to describe his vision of opera as a total spectacle expressing € o the mythic aspirations of a culture. But Kandinsky transformed the concept, imagining a fully abstract intermedia experience addressing an inner world ofbodily and psvchic effects. In an essaypublished on the I o occasion ofthe Bauhaus exhibition ofr9z3, Kandinsky began on a familiar note: modernity, he rvrote, was characterized by the "isolation ofthe arts." Theater provided the antidote: it could serve as a "mag o net . . . attracting all these languagestogether." In its modern form, it would function as an experimental o laboratory in which the resourcesofarchitecture, painting, sculpture, music, dance, and poetrywould be deployed simultaneously'to create "a monumenta.l abstract art," both multisensory and immersive.6T : Abstract theater indeed emerged as something ofa modern grail at the Bauhaus, pursued with enormous collective energy. An early program entitled MecbanischesKabarett (Mechanical cabaret; cat. zzo), staged bv Kurt Schmidt with other students at the r9z3 exhibition, spoke more to aspirat ion than to achievement: in what seems to have been a charmingly goofy presentation, dancers moved rhythmically across the stage to modern music, rvith brightly painted cutouts of geometric forms attached by belts to their black costumes.$Teininger too, over a period ofyears, developed designs for a mechanized performance featuring abstract moving elements and puppets instead ofactors (cat.zzr). Baffles around the stagewould rotate to reveal different-colored faces,while moving belts, seemingly borrowed from a factory assembly line, would be suspended horizontallv and vertically in a grid structure. \)feininger, one ofthe Bauhausstudents who attended Van Doesburg'sclasses inS7eimar, later described the project as an outgrowth ofhis desire to create a "constantly changing de Stijl painting."58 Between tgzz and r925,Ludwig Hirschfeld-NIack, working with Kurt Schwerdtfeger and FIarnvig, achieved severalstagings ofan experimental media form he called "reflected light composi- tions" (cat.rr). Here, to a musical accompaniment, independently controlled beams of colored light were projectecl through templates ofcutout geometric forms onto the back ofa scrim that faced the audi- ence. For Hirschfeld-trIack, the compositions useclthe very elemcnts of expressionneglected in most modern 61ms- "light in motion, arranged in a rhythm basedon time sequences"- and these elements, in distilled, abstract form, u,ould stimulate "powerful physicaland psychologicalef-fects."6eAbstract Iight theater was positioned here as an afterimage ofthe new popularization offilm, a way ofprocessing modern sensoryexperience.Hirschfeld-IIackl primitive media machine hasdescendants in later Bauhaus efforts such as Kurt Kranz's libretto for an abstract 6lm (r93o; cat.373),whose leporello format moves 11 LudwigHirschfeld-Mack the vierver'seye from image to image in a sequential way, evoking the duration of time-based media, Sctlpt f ot Dreitei I i ge Fa r ben so n ottne and Moholy's lichtrequisit einerelektrischen Bilbne (Light prop for an electric stage, I93o; cats.374,37), (Color sonatina in three parts) a kinetic object u,ith rotating, perforated metal parts that seemsto have been designedin part for As reproduced in Liszld Moholy'Nagy rcpresentation in film and photography. In fact Moholy used it to make works in both mediums. Molerie PhotagraphieFilm (Pa ntlng photography fi lm) Bouhousbicher The culmination of this ambition - the uniting of architecture and perforrnance - mav no. 8 (frrst editlon). Munich: well be the commission (iropius received int9z7 f16a the radical director Erwin Piscator for a fullv Albert Langen Verlag. r925 mechanizecl theater (cat.37z).Piscator hoped to replace the "peep box" ofthe proscenium stage,rvith The Museum of Modern Art Llbrary, N ew York TEMPO.o.

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("spatial its perspectival assumptions, with a Raumbiibne stage," ofren translated as "total theater"), I a spacewithout stalls, balconies, or boxes that would allow the audience'sactive participation.To This was also to be a spaceof media saturation: "I imagined," Piscatorwrote, "something like a theater c machine, technologically designedlike a typewriter, an apparatusequipped rvith the most modern I C lighting, horizontally and vertically moveable and revolving parts, innumerable film projectors, public

addresssystem etc."7rGropius's unrealized schemefor this theater, developedwith a Bauhausteam that z included Weininger, Schawinsky,and Heinz Loeu, featured a revolving central disk that could place the stage in the center of the structure for theater in the round. Sets would be replaced by images or 6lm proiected from a central media tower onto screenshung betv.een trvelve supporting columns, while the parabolic shape ofthe roofwas determined by acoustic considerations. Not surprisingly, such intermedia impulses transformed the boundaries between mediums, and it is rvorth meditating on the fate ofpainting at the Bauhaus.The autonomy of the discrete easel picture was challenged from the school's6rst years.Over the span ofthe institution's life, painting became an element of a fully designed environment, in a modernization of an Arts and Crafts model; its ambitions were appropriated by large-scale textile wall hangings; it was reconceived as wall paint ing, inseparable from the architectural spaceit defined; and it rvasdematerialized into mechanically produced light displays. It seems clear that the structure of the Bauhaus,with its Gesamtkunstwerk aspirations, spelled the obsolescenceof traditional painting. In contrast to a more familiar narrative of modernism (crucially shaped in an Anglo-American context by the writings of Clement Greenberg) that saw painting on a trajectorv toward ever greater medium speciGcity,the Bauhaus offered an alter- nate model, one shaped bv the productive relationships among artists in different media fostered at the school itsell often across the divide between fine and applied arts.

The Modern Specialist The ambitious-Bauhausbiicberpublication program (cat.z54),a seriesofbooks announceclby its coeditors, Gropius and I'loholy-Nag1,, in t9z4 (cat. z;5), put the school's intellectual agenda on displa.v.T2Across a seriesofprospectuses, each offering a list of titles that together to121e1.ss fi ftl'volumes, we glimpse the invitees to the ultimate Bauhaus f?te, a virtual clinner party of the simpatico. Fourteen books were ultimately produced. A 1925list supplemented u.orks by inhouse authors with proposed texts by Piet Mondrian on design,Van Doesburg on de Stijl aesthetics,Schwitters on N{erz, HernrichJacoby on musical education,J.J. P. Oud on Dutch architecture, George Antheil on mechanical music, Albert tt Gleizes on Cubism, Filippo Tommaso lVlarinctti and Enrico Prampolini on Futurism, Tristan Tzara Liiszl6Moholy-Nagy on Dada, Lajos Kassik and Ernst Kdllai on the Hungarian avant-garde, Le Corbusier on architecture, Spreadfrom Dynomikder Gross-Stadt Friedrich Kiesler on the spaceof the city,Jane Heap on America, and Nlartin Schdfer on constructi\-e (Dynamicof the metropolis) section biologi,'.7rEachplanned or realized volume rvould stand as a primary statement on the nature of the in Moholy-Nagy,Molerei photogrophie ambitious seriesis the FilD(Painting photography film). modern. Signaling a thoroughgoing commitment to theoretical anal,vsis,this BauhausbDcherno.g (firstedition). Bauhausprogram thar mosr fully expressesthe school'sself-conception as a think tank- "Our goal," Munich:Albert LangenVerlag,1925 rvrote Constructivist Aleksandr Rodchenko, soliciting a contribution, The ltlloholy in a letter to the Russian Museumof ModernArt Library, NewYork ''is togire a Summaryof all that i:...,1"-por.,... '" @30 c I

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3 o = But the lists also speakof a political worldview, a commitment to dialogueand internationalism over retreat and isolation. The titles envision a rl'orld of keenly interconnected global efforts in different areas ofendeavor subsumed under the aegis of"design." Field permeability is the mantra, and a chartlike publication program that Moholy rvrote in r9z5 offers a manif-esto:

These books deal with the problems ofart, scienceancl technologv, and for the spe- cialist of today they attcmpt to furnish information about the complex problems, u'orking methods and research results in various areasofdesign, thereby providing the individual with a criterion for his os'n studies and with progress made in other areas.In order ro be able to tackle a task ofthis magnitude the editors have enlisted the cooperation of the most knowledgeable experts from r.arious countries who are trying to integrate their specialized rvork with the totality ofphenomena of thc modcrn u orld."

tr{oholv choosesthe rvorkmanlikc languageof the technical expert: w'ith v-ordslike "working methods," "inl:ormation." "specialist,"he deploys metaphors of the laboratorr,.R&D for the arts. pushing aside fbr good the personaof artist as shaman nurtured bv ltten. In a r9z5photo bv l-r.rcial'Ioholy (cat.r3), Mohol]' played rhe part: dressedin mechanic'soveralls with slicked-backhair, rimlessglasses, and tie, he has every bit the look ofthe factory He posesagainst a clean rvhite plane uninterruptecl bv -anage..tu rvainscoting or ornamenr, evoking a de Stijl environment in three dimensions and suggestingwhat might be the appropriate architectural analogue fbr this figure of modernity. After the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, in r925,it abandoncd the teaching-model pairing o{ Werkmeisterand Formmeister,but while 13 workshops, the rolc oftechnician was subsumetl by Lucia Moholy technical masters lr,ereno longer appointed to the Untitled(L;szlo Moholy'Nagy) t9z6 the artists themselves. Gelatinsilver print The books u'orked ro brand the morlern under the name of the Bauhaus.Nloholy's clistinctive 91116x 6%" (23x r5.9cm) - consistenttrim size,thc placement oflogo anrl seriestitle on front cover and spine,and Bauhaus'ArchivEerlin design the signaturcde sign elementslike sansseriflcttering and heavvmles - rer.ealsa thought-out to give ; Plan I the seriesan ovcrarchin.qvisr.raliclentttr'.'lhis n'pc of thinkingl'as in itself ncu': the practicesof branding i

and product stanclarclizationhatl emerged onlv in the vearssincer r9oo. as lr\-procluctsofthe vertiginous I I 31!

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growth of a modern commoditv culture." Ilut Nloholv rvasalso stepping farther into a pioneering role: during the first clecac.lesof modern markcting. advertising campaigns hacl for the most part been developedbv businessmana{rers anrl executetlbv print-shop d rrrftsmen.78 Offering a combination of avant-gardeaesthetics and professional knorrleclge,Iloholr. nt.rrvclaimed this role for the visual artist, rvith the Bauhausitself as both client :rnd irgcnc\'. I n r 925, Baver cles ignegraphics t rade j otrnal Offiet. Buch und Otti Berger IVerbekunst prbl ished a special issueon Bau haus tvpographt and acl'r,ertising,wi th a cover by Schm idt Io5ttofel (touch panel) made for preliminary (car. z7i. In r9zt1,a publ ic ity card issucd bv t he school clescribecl its print and advertising depart- course taught by L;i:zl6 Moholy Nagy. r928 ment as a full-scrvlce design shop u'hosc capacitics rncludc.dthe production ofprinted matter in and board on ,lhreads wire backing with roosely attached multicolored square modern tvpographl'; consulting in neu,aclvertising design: lavciut and prociuction(or overseeingpro- paper cards duction) ofpublicitv rnaterials,busincss clocunrents, catalogues, brochures, posters, advertisement etc.; 221h6x 5V2"(14 x Sl cm) Bauhaus-Archiv the creation ofconrpanv logos. rr:r(lc namcs, u intlou displavs,cxhibition clesigns,and advertisingpho- Berlin tographs.sor\rtl'ork u'asherc rcimaginccl;rs mcriia u'orkr the line art printmaking and bookbinding E F I

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I o o o = workshops of the school's firstyearss'ere transformedwith the move to Dessau into studios for advertising clesign and typographlsl J'he school's ef'fectivenessin claiming the modern as a brand identity is suggestedby l{annes Meyer's ironic quote in a lecture of rg2gt"Bauhaus is fashion. All the ladies at the cocktail parties chatter about Bauhaus constructiv.ism.Their calling cards are in 82 lowercase Ietters."

Tactility In the Bauhausworldview as in'Walter Benjamin's, experiencewas closelyassociatecl with the handling of things - henceJosef Albers's mandate for "contact rvith material."83Besides debunking traditional academic models ofteaching through emulation, Bauhaus pedagogy took aim at another long-held premise of artmaking: the prirnacv of the visual. In t9zt, a the young Gunta Stolzl, who in r9z7 would become the school'sfirst female master, recorded the philosophy ofher preliminarv-course teacher Itten in her notebook: "Draw'ing is not the reproduction ofrl'hat is seen,but making whatever one sensesthrough external stimulus (naturally internal, too) flow through onet entire boclv."8aItten placed sensorytraining at the core ofhis teaching, setting exercisesin rvhich students closed their eyesand explored a seriesoftextures rvith their finger- tips. "In a short time," he reported, "their senseof touch irnproved to an astonishing degree."85 Tl-ris tactile emphasiswas only heightcned in later preliminarv-course training, with Nloholv enthusiasti cally conducting what he called "tactility exercis es"(Tastiibungen).86 In his book tr/on fuIateria/zu Architehtur of ryzg,widelyknownin English asTbeNeutVision,Nloholy outlinedtheprinciplesof hisBauhaus teaching, arguing that touch is the fbundation ofsense perception - the "basic sensor.r'experience, 87 u'hich, nevertheless,has been least developedwithin a discourseofart." For trloholl', modernity posed t3 me recently Konrad Piischel a threat to tactile experience:"Hov'neglected our tactile education is was clemonstrateclto Texture study for preliminary course taught x'ith the director ofa training school ofnurses who spoke ofthe difficulties she had encounteredin by Liiszl6 Moholy-N agy. 1925-27 teaching massage."88His attempts ro rectifv this situation in the preliminar-vcclurse included the Three ink drawings and one tempera drawing assignment chartlike touch panels (Taxtafeln), data-gathering tools u.ith'w'hich to record on cardboard, mounted on cardboard ofcreating I ho x 8rzn"(29 x zr cm) the psy'chologicalreactions of individuals to clilTerenttextures.8e l'he weaver Otti 13erger,for example, 5tiftung Bauhaus Dessau made a grid ofthreads of various fibers holding small colorcd paper squares(cat. r4). In other exercises, studentswere asked to procluceoptical translationsoftextural properties (cat.l5).

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.I'he couf se nurtured a certain bodily sensorl marerial,based curriculum of the pleliminaq/ a that Nloholy could conceive ofthe photogram as focus in Bauhaus artmaking. It *.as in this context bv laying materials of varying degreesof majcir fcrrm of avant-garde practlce. Made witl-rout a camera, photogram offered not an image ofthings seen rransparencv on light-sensrtivephotographic paller, the but a trace ofphysical contact. -lvloholyfirstexperimentedwithphotograms(andwithphotographicprocessesgenerally)in the lbllowing year' Between r9z3 and r9z8' pho- Berlin in rgzz, shortly before coming to the Bauhaus (cats.zBo-85), part of a larger effort to reconcelve tograms became an intense pfeoccupation for him abstract a laboratory form of sorts. Moholy made his pulrrtirrg as an art not of pigment bui of light - pho,og.".,aklngsidehispaintingpracticeuntjlrgz8,whenheabandonedthelatter,oniytoreturnto throughout his hiatus from painting' and inte- ,, ,r..n-u."., 1r,"..!o H" contirr.,ed to make photograms (cat of the prelim inary cour5e l6)' gr.rtcrl t hcm. a. dirl.lo'qf A lbet' in t hs rcrching field that 6xed "light phenomena "er These ghostlv images mapped an insistentlv nonierspectival to have an intense claim on reality in that they As manv commentators have noted, photograms seem But they also point to the transfofmative mediation are producecldirectlv bv the things thev represent. first primary form.e2Y/riting around the time of his of the artmaking process itself - of meclia in its that' along with abstract films like those of cxperiments with photograms in l9zz, Moholy suggested VikingliggelingandHansllichter,clrerperimentsusingphonographic..groove-manuScriptscores'', thephotogramcouldserveasakindoftrainrnggrounclfordevelopingtheindivirlual,s..functional the demands of a new technological age'e3Herein epparat.ses,' - for bringing the sensesin line wtth or com- the Bauhaus: stripped of representational lay a rationale fo. abst."ct-ion in the context of of technological rnediacould reshape municative functions, the clematerializcdsenr;ory framework l6 CharlotteVoepel-Neujahr human perceptton. .factilityreacheditsapotheosis:intheweavingu.orkshopofthelateBauhausperiod'9oAfter Exercisefor preliminary co!rse taught away from large-scalewall by losef Albers. c. r927-29 dlt"ttu1 in l9z8 the workshop moved tr{ever'sappointment as thc school's ' Cyanotype fabrics (photogram) production oftonally subtle, texturally rich hangings exploring grrcl compositions torvard the lie/E x r76'(29.4 x 29.r cm) -I'his subor- - the n.rutingof sound, thc reflection oflight' BauhausArchiv rvith a u,iclevariety of functional capacities Berlin textural in favor ofoverall structures and heightened dination ofdesign (with its appeal to the I'isual) rhetoric of the Mever moment' ancl ,tualitiesreflecred the shift of regimes:in the politicallycharged ; € @34

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I o o on a class basis' in only partially veiled critique of the Gropius years' the "decorative" was attacked one ofthe key legaciesofthe o as a luxury, and a new mandate was issued for mass production. Indeed Korting & Mathiesen, school,slast yearsis the signing of licensrngagreements for Bauhausdesigns, with (to proclucelamps),eu - operating under the tradena"m""K"n.1.-,itt and Schu'intzer & Griff in lgzB (to woven fabrics), and Gebr. Rasch & co. in rg2g (to produce wallpapers),Polytextil in r93o produce on which these fabrics van Delden in rg3r (to produce printed fabrics).Tactilitywas also the basis the advertising cou.rse *'ere publicized: a campaign promoting Bauhaus textiles was produced within in (cat.18B),q,hich after the arrival of'$Talter Peterhans, in r9z9,was olTeredwith a concentration photographic idiom brings erther photography or printing. Peterhans's(and his students')characteristic shows the fabric detail into focus through extreme closeups and strong raking light, and strucrural tt (cat. rather than as a flat plane with pictorial in folds, highlighting its malleability r7), 'eso""tce Berger, champion of this new "One has to be able to 'comprehend' [a fabric] with one's hands," wrote functional approach, in r9z9.eB interior spacein which Lilly Reich's arrival atthe school in r932helalded a new conception of cubic language of wall hanging textiles were not hung like paintings - as in Gropius's office, where the (cat. into an integrated, and carpet corresponded with the architectural forms zo) - but diffused van der Rohe had created highly tactile intenor space.In exhibition designs,Reich and Ludwig Mies furnished spacesfeaturing a new model for the clomestic interiol as a set offlowing, open, sparsely by materials' large spans ofnear-monochrome surfaces(cat. I8). Functional zones were differentiated veneers, plush monochrome car such as sheer or nubby fabric drapes, room dividers ofrich wooden interior from exterior' pets, subtly flecked wallpapers, and floor-to-ceiling glass walls that divided the coordinated manufacture In her time at the Bauhaus, Reich created the structural framework for the weaving workshop and the of the products needed for this new modern interior, presiding over what had formerly been the Ausbau (interior finishings) department, established in rgzg to integrate 17 new mandate was for the creation cabinetry, metalwork, andwall-paintingworkshops. Much of the EugenBatz and Tonja RaPoPort wallpaper designs by rubbing chalk pastel over wove papel Photograph taken for photography course of textured surfaces.Bormann producecl to create designs for printed laught by Walter Peterhans.c. r93o in a form ofapplied frottage (cat.4lo), while Hajo Rose used a typewriter prtnt (cats.387389,39o).eeThescript Gelatin silver fabrics,anareaReichmadeparticulareffortsroreviveandmodernize 91116x 611116"(23 x 17cm) unit, in an with the mechanical production ofsymbols: each letter a discrete Bauhaus Archiv Berlin spoke ofa fascination the sign of the machine's impact, tn unrerhering of the running lines of hand$,ritten script - each languagerendered as texture. :,1;

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Commemoration I Painting presenteda critical paradox fbr the school. On the one hand, all of Gropius's 6rst appoint- ments were painters, and they played a critical role in the school as teachersand theoreticians, shaping z one ofits defining legacies:the setting ofcraft and design in dialogue with contemporary avant-garde artistic practice, in a formative conversation that fundamentally changed the terms ofboth. On the other, the relevanceofthe medium itselfwas suspect;only in r9z7 did "free painting and sculpture" classesbecome part of the school's curriculum. Despite the contested position of painting in the Gropius vears, the medium (and its practi- tioners on the faculrv) had an even less certain role after his departure. Under both Meyer and X{ies, the primary focus was architecture. Kandinsky, Klee,Joost Schrnidt, and Schlemmer were limited to teaching special subiectswithin the overarching framework ofJosef Albers's preliminary course, and "free painting" classeswere isolated from the workshop curriculum, in a kind of slow untwisting of the knotted strands ofcollaborative, reciprocal pedagogicaland theoretical influence between art and design that had existed in the school's earlier years.The importance of the preliminary cou.rse itself was also contested, through accusations of "formalism" that echoed similar labels in the Soviet Union ofthose years.InJuly r93o, Communist students at the Bauhaus published a broadsheet con- demning "the abstract, hence 'non-functional' use ofcorrugated cardboard, chicken wire etc." in the preliminary course as "a formal 'thing in itself" and calleclfor the course'sabolition.lo0 Kandinsky and JosefAlbers were parricular targetsofscorn in this new era oftheoretical skepticism,and as ofr93o, matriculation in the preliminary course was no longer completely obligatorl'.1or Ultimately the dual pressuresofleftist instrumentalism and the increasingefforts offirst local, then national Nazi of6cials to disable the Bauhaus macleteaching at the school untenable for many of the painters on the faculty. In r()29,Schlemmer took a position at the Staatliche Akademie ftir Kunst und Kunstgeu,erbe in Breslau;Klee left for an appointment at the Diisseldorf Akademie in r93r.At this moment, however, one can seethe reemergence ofone ofpaintingl most traditional functions. plavecl out against the antimnemonic tenor of the thrust of Bauhaus activities: that of commemoration. In r932,the year after Klee's departure and on the eveofthe school'sflight to Berlin, Kandinskv painted a large gouache that seemsso close to the style of Klee it could easilybe mistaken for it. Called l8 MassizterBau (Massive building; cat.3z6), the work deploys an architectural vocabulary: interlocking tilly Reich rectanglesoverlay a grid pattern that reads as both floor plan and facade,but in either casemost recalls Ground floor House, in DieWohnuno uqserer the double Masters'l{ouse that Klee and Kandinsky had shared in I)essau- a souvenir of a friend- Zeit (The dwetring of our time), Deuts'che Eouousstellu ship and of a home, made as Kandinskv prepared to leavefor Berlin. ng Berlin (German building exhibition Berlin), the Bauhaus. organi?ed by Ludwig Mres Klee, in the same year but now in Diisseldorf, offered his os.n metlitation on van der Rohe.r93o_3r Called Maske Furcht (Mask of fear; cat. r9), it shows a mask that seems to be nonc other than the one View of the lady,s bedroom by Schlemmer worn the female hgure photographed in Breuer's club chair (cat.7). To this over- Photograph:photographer bv unknown. r93r. b.elatinsilver print. tr46 sizedegg-shaped head, Klee a

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reu'orking of the New N{an of the vulnerable in a Flumptl' [)umptv kincl of $'av-:rn ironic 'rrVoman r92:l-25watercolors (cat 87)sprouts fiom the Bauhaus.An arrow that seernsplucked irom the artisr's ola mustache curl the Pickelbaube' top of the ligure,s heacl,evoking especiallv u'itlr the adclition u'ith the collapsc of the German empire the spiked helmet oithe Prussian rrnircrial arm\'. relinquishcd humor' the picture'stitle underlinesthc con- ar the end of \ilorlcl war.1. Dcspitc Klee',sch:rracteristic it mal hicle' cealingfunction of thc mask. anclthe cortntervailing emotions RaultdustrePPe(Bauhaus Perhapsthe mosr lamous cif all Llauhauspaintrngs is Scl-rlemrntr's jnrci3:.u'henthcarrist'no$'athree YearresiclentoiBreslau' stairway; c^t.417).Thistoos'asnracle l)cssau burltling:rite r the National Socialist heard about the school'sirnmine nt rieprrture tlonr its party,sdecreecr.ictingitfionthecin inAugustoithatycar'Paintedinthes'eeksfOllowing'theu-ork Schlcmmer,srecollection of the stairwell in OPensa SPaCe-the spaceof mcnorr'itself betrl-een The internYintng of built sp:rceand human the Dessaubuilding and the architecturcas it actualh'$'as. a modern lbrm of llgurativc history p:llntlng, form relates to thc arrist's ambirion of the tinre to clefine of rationalizcclboilies in modernist space' but rather than a cclebratronof a r.isionof the integration 19 'l colieaguesno\\'clispersecl, all exhibit a pro the work is a memorial. his trio of p:rintings.bY former PaulKlee at "the summarY of all that speaksto the of historv' No longcr aiming Moske Fur.ht (Ma.k af fear) t932 ibunclnostalgia tbat Pressures ('ll tll' Oi on burlap i\ Contenlforalr." ther oltrl Illlrrln;ll lr'rr\ Ir't\l 395/sx 221/2'llaa :1r 57.rcrill The Museum of Modern Art, New York Nelson A. Rockefeller Fund

L *9,-. l. For an annotated biblio8raphy on the reception history of the Bauhaussee Andreas 8. Throughoutits history the schoolused various terms to describethe preliminarycourse, Haus,ed.,Bauhaus-ldeenryr9-t994. Bibliogrophie und Beitraigezur Rezeptiondes Bouhaus- including Vorunterricht, Vorlehre, Gtundlehre, GrundbegrifJe der Gestoltung, Allgemei ne, gedonkens(Betlin.D. Reimer, 1994). A short essay drawn from Winfried Nerdinger's Vorbildung,andVorkurs. Fora descriptionofthis shifting terminology seeAdrian Sudhalter, important book Eouhous-Maderneim Notionalsozialismus:zwischen Anbiederung und "r4 Years Bauhaus:A Chronicle," in the present volume. Verlolgung(Munichi Prestel, 1993),on the relationship of the school and its studenis 9. Franciscono,6ropius ond the Creotianofthe Bouhous,p.162, n 32. Francisconorefers to and products to Nazi cultural policy, appears in Englishin KathleenJames-Chakraborty, the minutes of the M eisteilatssitzungof September20, r92o, and of a meeting of faculty ed.,Bouhaus Culture: Ftom Weimar to the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota and students of October t3, r9zo. Sammlung Gropius, Bauhaus-Archiv,Berlin. Press,2oo5). On the divjded legacyofthe Bauhausin Eastand West Germany see Greg 1o. SeeWick, Teachingot the Bouhaus,p- 83. 32y Castillo,"The Bauhausin Cold War Germany,"in James-ChakraborIy,ed., Bouhous Culture, 1f. Paul Klee, letter to Lily KIee,January 15, 1921, in Felix Klee, ed., Pdul KIee.Briefe and pp.r7t -93. Other sourcesinclude Ra;ner K. Wick, " PreliminaryRemarks on the Reception die Familie,vol. I l, t9o7-t94o (Cologne: DuMont, r979), p. 97o. Eng.trans. in Whitford, of the Bauhausin Ge tmany," in Teachingat the Bauhaus(Oslfildern'Ruit: Hatje Cantz, fhe Bouhous:Mosters ond Studentsby fhemselyeJ(New York: The Overlook Press,r993), zooo), pp.3oz-37; Paul 8etts, The Authoity of Everydoy Objects: A Culturol History oJ p.54. WesaGermonlndustriol Design (Be(keley,Los Angeles, and London:University of Caljfornia 12.Johannes ltten, Gestaltungs' und Formenlehte.Vorkurs am Bauhousund spater,g64,

Press,zoo4); Margaret Kentgens-Craig,ed., The DessauBouhaus Building ry26^1989, EnE. lrans. as Design and Form: The Bosic Caufie at the Bouhous oncl Loter, t963 (ev. ed. I trans.Michael Robinson(Basel: Birkhauser, 1998); and Christian Grchn, Die Bauhausldee: New York: Litton Educational Publjshing, r97il, p. 9, Entwurf,WeiterfAhrung,Rezeption, Neue Bouhousbiicher(Betlin: Gebr. Mann, i99r). On 13.For a later articulation of this theory see ltten, Designond Form, pp.10-12. the receptionof the Bauhausin America see.James'Chakraborty,"From lsolationjsmto 14. lbid., p.7. z lnternationalism:AmericanAcceptanceoftheBauhaus,"inherEouhousCulture,pp.i5370. 15.On the influenceof modern thinking about early'childhoodeducation on the Bauhaus OthersourcesincludeMarBaretKentgensCraig,TheBouhausandAmetica:FitstCantocts, see FrederickM. LoBan,"KinderBarten and B auhaus,"College Artlorrrdl to, no. I (Autumn 1919iB6(Cafrbtidge,Mass.:TheMlTPress,rggg);TomWolfe,FromBauhaLtstaOurHause t95o):36-43; Franciscono, G/opiuJ ond the Creation of the Bauhous, pp.18o-8r;.,. Abbott (New York:Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, r98r); rnd William H. Jordy,"The Aftermath of the Mlller, "Elementary Schooi," in Ellen Lupton and Abbott Miller, eds., the obc! o/^ra: Bauhausin America,"in DonaldFleming and BernardBailyn, eds., fhe htellectualMigration: The Bouhousand Design fheoty lNew yotk: Herb Lubalin Study Center of Desi8n and turcpe ond Amer)ca,ryJo-r950 (Cambridge,Mass.: Belknap Pressof Ha rvard U niversity TypoBraphy,the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Scienceand Art, r99t, pp.4-21; Press,r969). a.d Wick, feachinq ot the Bauhous. 2- See,among others, FredericJ. Schwartz, "Utopia for Sale:The Bauhausand Weimar 16.see Abbott Miller, "Elementary school," p.5. Germany'sConsumerCulture,"inJames Chakraborty,ed.,BduhausCulture,pp.i15_l8. 17.Josef Albers, "Creative Education,"r928, in Wingler, Ihe 8duhaus, p. t4z. and Anna Rowland,"Business Management at the Weimar Baulaus," Journal of Design 18. Wafter Benjamin, "Experience and Poverty," in Wolter Benjomin:Selected Wtitings,vol.2, Histoty 1, nos.3/4 ig88):r5j-75. 1921-1934,eds. Marcus Bullock and M ichael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap L The catalogueof Fhe Museum of Modern Art's r9l8 exhibition Bouhaus 1919-1g28, Press,i999), p.732. organizedby Walter Gropius, has strongly shaped American re.eption ofthe Bauhaus, 19.Wick,Teoching at the Bouhous,p.z35,andClark V. Poling,Kandnsky: Russian and Bouhaus reproducinB many ofthe works we now consider iconic. Hans Maria Wingler's book lhe Years,ryr5-r93j, exh. cat. (New York: Solomon R- GuBgenheim Foundation,r98j), p. 17. Bouhous:Weimor, Dessou,Berlin, Chicago,lrans. Wolfganglabs and BasilGilbert, eo.losepn 20. Vasily Kandinsky, Punkt und Liniezu Fl(iche,D26, pu'lished in Englishas Point ond Stein(Cambridge, Mass.: The MtT Press,r969, and jater editions) is a defining volume for Liheta Plane,B47,trans.Howard Dearstyneand Hilla Rebay(reprint ed. New YorkrDover, the historiographyof the Bauhaustfi rst publishedin German in 1962, as DosBouhous (jrd 1979),p.20. rev.ed. r975),it lncludesa short narratjve history and a vast compilation ofdocuments. 21, Kandinsky, Uber das Geistige in der Kunst, t9r1, published in English as Conceming the Othe.keyhistories includeMagdalena DrosIe, Bauhous191g igJJ (Cologne:B.Taschen. Spiritualin Att,lrans. M. T. H. Sadler(New York: Dover, 1977),p. 16. r99o);Jeannine Fiedler and Peter Feierabend, Bouhaus(Cologne: Kdnemann, r999, Eng. 22. Kandinsky,Point dnd Line to Plone,p.68. trans.2ooo); jn Marcel Ftanciscona,Wolter Gropius and the Creotion ofthe Bauhausin Weimot: 23. Kandinsky,"Tanzkurven: Zu den Tinzen der Palucca," DosKu nstblatt, Match Da6, The ldeolsahd ArtisticTheoilesof itsFounclirg yeors (Urbana: U niversity of Illinois press, p.117 i9, published in Englishas "Dance Curves: The Dancesof Palucca,"in Kandinsky: r97r): Gillian Naylo( Ih e Bauhous Reossessed:Sources and Design Theory (New york: Dutton, Conplete Wtitings on Art, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (Boston: G. K. Hall, t985); aod FrankWhitfod, Bouhaus(London; Thames & Hudson, r984)_ r98z), p.5zo. 4. On precedents to the Bauhaus in modern design reform movements see lohn V. 24. The modern choreographer Rudolph von laban, for example,developed a notational Maci!ika, Wilhelmine Precedentstor the Bauhaus."in lames Chakraborty,ed., Barhdus system,first publishedin r926, to transcribe body movements 3nd thus permit the repli Culture, pp. r-25; John V. Ma(iuika, Bet'orethe BouhaLts:Architectute, paljtic5,ot1(l the cation of otherwise ephemeraldance ideas.For an in-depth discussionof Laban'ssystem Germon State,.89o-192o (Camhridge; at the University press, zoo5); Schwartz, Ihe iee Matthew 5. Witkovsky, 'Siaging Language: Milaa Mayefov6 and the Czech Book V'/erkbund:Design Theoty ond MassCulturc betorethe FirstWorld wdr (New Haven: yale 'Alphabet, " TheArt Bulletin 86, no. r (March 20o4):114 35. university Press, rgg5);loan campbel, rhe Germon werAbund The par,.rcsoJ Reform itl the 25.See, e.9., cat.37o, by Kandinskys student Heinrich Bormann,or the musicaldiagrams AppliedArts (Princeton: press, pioreprs at the University r97g);and Nikolaus pevsner, o/ in Kandinsky,Poirf and Line to Plane,p. 43. ModernDesign from Williom Morristo WatterGropius (Harmondsworth: pengurn,r96o). 26. 5ee Robin Kinross,Modern Typography:An Essoyin CriticalHiilory (London: Hyphen 5' William Richard Lethaby'sCentral Schoolof Arts in London, the technical worK5nops Press,r992), p.9o. in BirminBham,the Glasgowschool ofArt, and Hermann obrist,s and wirherm Debschitz,s 27.Oskar Schlemmer,"The StaatlicheBauhaus in Weimar,"from the publicity pamphlet private school of art and design in Muntch alI oftered various forms of inspiration for TheFitstBoullausExhibitianinWeimor,JulytoSeptemberig)3 reprintedinWingler,Ihe bropius's dual teaching model. Some of these models are discussedin Maciuika, gefore BouhoLts,p. 65. the Bauhaus. 28. Gropius gave his lecture "Kunst und Technik:Eine neue Einheit'on August i5, 1921, 6- Gropius drew tightly from an Expressionistpool: all of the artists he inviteclto Jornthe in the Bauhausvestibule. racultyhad connections to D€rsturm, the magazrnelaunched by Herwarth Walden in r9ro, 29. SeeSchwartz, " Utopia ForSale, ' and Rowland,"Business Management at the Weimar and to the Berlingallery of the same name, which together served as the primary Instr- Bauhaus."on the figure of the technical expert in Welmar Germany see Schwartz,8/ind tutional structure for Germany'spaftictpation in broader avant-gardecjrcles, publjshrng spof5,pp. and l7-ror. exhibitingFrench jn modernistwork Gerntanyand defining an Exp.essjonistaesthetic 30. 5ee Kai-LlweHemken's essays in Bernd Finkeldeyet al..Korstroktivistische lntetnot@nole ssGermany s own brand of modernism Internationillly. SchapfetischeAtbeit5gemeinsthoftlg22lg2T.UtapienfiireitleeurcpdischeKultut(Stuttgatt: 7- n SeeWhitford, Bauhouj, pp.29_lo. 6erd Hatle, r99.r). 5 ll. See Yve-Alain Bois'simportant essay"The De Stijl tdea," in Bois, Pointing os Model ed. Tut Schlemmer,trans. KrishnaWinston (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Unive15ity (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press,r99o), pp. rr6-zr. Also see his "Mondrian and the Prcss,t97z), p.127. Theory of Architectu re," Assembloge4 (987):102-3o. lt should be noted, though, that s4. tbid. de Stijl was not alone in placing pressureon the boundary between painting and archi- 55. Schlemmer,DEBrhneim Eouhous,tgz5,published in Englishas IDeTheoteroftheBouhous, tecture: artists of the Russianavant-garde, especially those schooled in Suprematism, trans. Arthur S. Wensinger(Middletown, Conn.:Wesleyan University Press,i961), p. 28. explored the architectural potential of painting from l92o on. 56. 'Not burdened with tradition like the opera and the drama, not committed to word, 32. On these two operations see Bois, "The De Stijl ldea." tone and gesture,[theatrical dance] is a free form, destined to impress innovation gently o3a 33, See Anja Baumhofl, The Gendered World of the Bduhaus: The Politics of Power at the u pon our senses:masked, and-especially important-silent." Schlemmer, "Entry for c Weimor Republic'sPremier Art lnstitute, ryr9-1932(Frankfurt: Peter LanB,2oo1); Droste September i922,' p. 127. I and Ma nfred Ludewig, Dqs Bauhous Webt. Die fextilwe*stott am Bauhous.Ein Projekt 57.Schlemmer, Ihe Iheoter ofthe Bouhous,p. 20. c der Bauhous-Sammlungenin Weimar,Dessau, Berli, (Berlin:G+H, r998); SigridWortmann 58. Liszl6 Moholy-Nagy, "ZeitgemEsseTypographie," in Krisztina Passuth,Moholy"Nogy ; Weltge, Bquhaus Textiles:Women Artists ond the Weaving Workshop (London: Thames and (London: Thames and Hudson, r98j), p.294. Hudson, r993); and T aiLinSmith,WeavingWatk otthe Bauhous:TheGendet ond Engendeting 59. Liiszl6 M oh oly Nagy, Malerei Photogrcphie Film, :9z5, publ ished i n Engl i sh as Pdintlng, ; of o Medium, ryt9-r9ll, Ph.D.thesis, University of Rochester,2oo5. Photogrophy,Film,ttans. Janet Seligman, 2nd ed. (Cambridge,Mass.: The MIT Press,r987), : 14. 5ee Jenny AnBer, Poul Kleeand the Decontive in Modern Att (Cambridge and New York: pp. 25-26. o Cambridge Un;versity Press,zoo4), pp. r79-8o. On the relationship between Klee and 60. Schwartz, B/ind5pots,p. 48. the weavers also see Virglnia Gardner Troy,Anni Albers and Ancient American Textiles: 61. L;tszldMoholy-N a1y,Painting, Photography, Film, p, 4o. I From Bauhausto BlackMountain (london and Eurlington, Vt.t Ashgate Typography,pp, o Publishing,2o02), 62. 5ee Kinross,Modern 92 93. PP.8o-89. 61. See 8ayer, "typography and design at the bauhaus,"in Helbert Boyer:The Camplete 35, Exodus 25:31- :17- z p.215: Modernism the Book (New Haven: Yale o 40, 37 4. Works, AlanBattram, Bouhaus, ond lllustrated 35. Xanti Schawinsky, quoted in Sibyl Moh oly-Nagy, Moholy-Nagy: Expetiment in Totolity Unlversity Press,20o4), p. 48; and Brilning, "Herbert Bayer,"in Fiedlerand Feierabend, o (New York: Harper and Brothers, 195o),p. 18. Bouhous,p.338. o 37-Bayer beBanexperimenting with typography in r922-2J, inspjred by Mohoiy's forays 64. Bayer,"Towards a UniversalType," PM 5, no. z (December-.lanuaryt939-t94o):27-32, = in the field, which in turn came out of earlier alphabetic explorations by the Russian reprintedin N/ichaelEierut, Jess;ca Helfand, et al.,eds., Looking Closet 3: ClossicWritings on Constructivists and de Stijl group as well as from Walter Porstmann's findings in the GraphicDesiqn (New York:Ailworth Press,1999), p. 52, where it is lncorrectlycited as PM 4- field ofspeech reform, publicizedin his book5pracheund Schriftof r9uo. Bayer published 65. SeeKa n d ins ky, 'Program for the Institute of A rtistic Culture," in Kandinsky:Complete his "universal" lettering as part of his article "Versuch einer Neoen Schtift," Offset.Buch Writingson Art, r455-72. undWerbekunstno.T()uly1926)398404.SeeKinross,"DasBauhausimKontextderneuen 66. Gropius,"Program ofthe StaatlicheBauhaus in Weimar,"in WinElet,TheBauhaus,p.J2. Typographie,"in Ute Brijning,Dos A und O desEorhorseJ, exh. cat. (Berlin:Bauhaus-Archiv, 67. Kandi nsky,"The Abstract Synthesisof the Theater," i n Kandinsky: Complete Wtitings and Leipzig:Editjon LeipziB,r995), pp.9-r4. on Att,1:506. 38. Herbert Bayer, "On Typo8raphy," in Herbert Bayer: The Complete Works, ed. Atthur A. 68. Andor Weininger. quoted in Andris Ko enet, The Stages of Andor Weininger: From the Cohen (Cambridge.Mass.: The MIT Press,r984), p. 350. Bouhausta Ne|| York(Budapest: 2B Kulturalis es. Mijv Alap, 2o 08), p. 172. 39. With thanks to Michael 5iebenbrodt, of the Kunstsammlung Weimar, for pointing 69. Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, Reflected-Light Compositions, a treatise privately published out this image.See N ele Heise," Das Eaushausin allen Taschen,"i n Patrick Riissler,ed., in r925, reprinted and trans. in Wingler, fhe Bouhaus,p.83. bauhouskommunikotion. lnnovativeStrctegien in Umgang mit Medien, interner undextemer 70. Franz Ehrl ich, " Bauhaus u nd Tota ltheat et," in WissenschaftlicheZeitschtift. Hochschule

Offentlichkeit(Betlin: cebr. Mann Ve.lag. 2oo9), pp. 265-8o. fih Architektur und Bauwesen29, nos. S/6 (19811424. 40. Josef Hartwig, quoted in Anne Bobzinand KlausWeber, Do5I ouhous-Schachspielvon 71. Erwin Piscator,"Proiect: Total Theater for Erwin Piscator, Berlin," in The Walter Grcpius losefHartwig/The Bauhaus ChessSet by loseph Hartwig (Berlin:Bauhaus Archiv i\,,1useum Archive: An lllustroted Catalague oJ the Drowings, Prints oncl Photographs in the Walter f,,rGe

Dolls," in lames'C hakra borty, ed., Bouhdus Culture,pp. 99-too- 73."Prospect!s'8 BauhausBooks'by the Albert LangenPress, Munich (r925),"in Wingler, "How 43. Alfred Arndt, I Bot to the Eauhausin Weimar," r958, quoted in Whjtford, Ihe TheBouhous.p.r3o,where it is incorrectly dated r927. Bouhaus:Masters and Studentsby Themselves,p.57. 74. Ldszlo Moholy-Nagy, "N4oholy Nagy's letter to A eksandr Rodchenko, Weimar, 44. Kandinsky, Concetningthe Spirituol in Art. p. f. i8 December r921," in Passuth,Moholy-Nogy, pp. J92-91. 4s. lbid., p.2. 75. Liszl6 Moholy-N agy, " Prospectus,"r925, in Wi ngler, Ihe Bauhaus,p. 13a. 46, lbid., pp.29-lo and passim. 76. On this photograph see Schwartz, 8/ind Spots,pp. 37-101. 47. l6ad..D.24. 77.See Morgen Witzel, "lntroduction," Morketing(Bristol: Thoemmes Press,2ooo), pp. 48. lbid., p. r5. vii xxxvii. 49. Reprinted in Kd, dinsky:Cohplete Writingson Art, r:291-34a. T8.SeeSchwartz, UtopiaforSale,"pp-i9-25,andBlindSpots,pp.gr 94.SeealsoKinross, 5o. Friedrich Kittler, DiJcoure Networks 18oo/19oo \Stanford: at the University Press, Modem Typogrophy,and Jeremy Aynsley, 6 tuphic Design in Germory: r89o 1945(Berkeley, 1992).pp.216 r7.With thanks to Annie Bourneuf for pointing out Kittler's reference to Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press,zooo). Kandinsky in a discussionon the artist several years ago. 79. Standardpaper sizes were another reform implemented by Porstmannat the No.men' 51.Paul Klee. TheNateboaks of Paul Klee,vol. t, The ThinkingEye, ed. Jarg Spiller,trans. ausschussder deutschen Jndustrie.see Ki ntoss,Modem Typography,p.89, Ralph Manheim (New York: George Wittenborn/Lund Humphries, r96r), p.215. 8o. See Gerd Ffeishmann, Bouhous Typogrofe. Dtucksochen,Typographie, Reklome (Dij.ssel 52. Alfred H. Bafi, Jr.,identi6es this pu n in a letter to Alexander 5achs,October 5. r955. dorf: Edition Marzona, r984), p- r99. Artist files, The Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, 81-The printmaking workshop was dedicated to advertising design and typography in New York. r925. In r927,advertising was offered as one of four main areasof instruction, the others 53.Schlemmer,"EntryforSeptemberrg22,"inTheLettetsandDiariesofOskorSchlemmer, beinBa rchitecture, theater, and free painting and sculpture.On the history of the adver' iL".- tisingworkshop see 8 rining, DosA und O desBauhauses. Qn thefrrst yearsofthe print workshop,when itwas producingfine-artprint portfolios,see Wingler,ed-,GrophicWilk frcmtheBouhaw,Eans.Gerald Onn (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, r965). t2, HannesMeyer, notes for a lecturegiven in Viennaand Basel,rg2g,inMeyer, Bouen undGesellschoft.schrtten,Btiie,Projekte,ed. Lena Meyer-Bergner(Dresden: Verlag der Kunst,198o), p. 54.This trans. from schwartz,"Utopia for Sale,"p. il8. 83.Albers, "creative Education,"from yl. lnternotionolerKongressfair zeichnen, Kunst' unwicht undAngewondte Kunst in Prug,ry24 publishedin Praguer93r, quot€d in Wingler, 3e9 TheBouhaus, p-142- 84, GuntaStolzf, quoted in Whitford, fhe Bouhous:Moste6 and students by Themselves, p.54.Stiilzl's original notebook is in the Bauhaus-ArchivBerlin. 3 8i. ltten, quotedin Whitfotd,TheBauhous: Masters and Studentsby Themselves,p.57. = t6. wick stressesthe "haptic"aspect of Moholy'spedagogy in hisTeachingot theBauhaus, p9.149-54.

87.Liszl6 Moholy-Na gy,The Ne Vision,trans.Daphne M. Hoffman(New York: wittenborn, c Schultz,r947), p.2i.

88.lbid., p.24. z 89.lbid., p. 25. 3 90. SeePassuth, Moholy-Nagy, p.52- 2 9t. Liszl6Moholy-Nagy, "Produktion Reproduktion," in De Stijl7 b922),published in Englishas "P.oduction Reproduction," in Passath,Moholy-Ndgy, p.289. 92.See Liszld Moholy-NaEy,Vision in Motior (Chicago:Paul Theobald, r947), p. r88. 91.Llszl6Moholy-Nagy, "Production Reproduction," p.289. 94.Smith explores the tactilepreoccupation of the Bauhausweavers after Gropius's departurefrom the school in "Llmitsofthe Tactile and the Optical:Bauhaus Fabric in the Frameof Photography,"Grey Room 25 (Fall2oo6):6-3r. I wouldhowever qualify the oppositionshe sees between this tactile interest and what she describes as the purely opticalqualitiesofMoholy's photographyby suggestinga more complex relation between the two,given the tactilefocus of Moholy'steaching and the broadsensory basis for per€eptionconsistently described in hiswriting. 95.The brand name "Kandem" derived phonetically from the initialsofthe lastnames ofthe company'sfounders, Max Kairting and Wilhelm Mathiesen-"(a" [u]nd"eM." 96. SeeWingler, Ire Bauhaus,p, 458,fhis agreementwas precededby earliercollabo- rationswith Kandemby MarianneErandt and Wilhelm Wagenfetd as early as 1927. See Weber,"'Vom Weinkrug zur Leuchte.'Die Metallwerkstatt am Bauhaus," in DieMetollwerk- stqttam Souhous, exh. cat. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin (Berlin: Kupfergraben Verlagsgesell- schaft,r99z), pp. z8-3r. 97.See Smith, "l-imits of theTactile and Optical," p, 7. 9E.Berger, "Stoffe im Raum,"in bauhous-deJsau,special issue of ReD.lnternotionale Monatsschriftfiitmoderne Gestoltung (PGBue) j, no.5 (r93o):r43-45,reprinted in Droste andLudewig, eds., Das BoubausWebt,p.224. 99.Hajo Rose's designs won a competitionfor printed-fabric designs run underthe administrationof LillyReich. On Reich'sefferts to reviveprinted fabrics see Wortmann Weltge,Souhous fextiles, p. I8; Droste,I ouhoust9t9-tg33, p. 224;and Fiedlerand Feierabend,Bauhauj, p. 477 1oo."Demand for the Abolitionofthe preliminaryCourse," r93o, inwingle. TheBouhaus, p.172. 'tol- SeeWick, Ieochmg atthe Bauhaus,p,93,