Bauhaus Exhibit @ MoMA

Last time I went to the MoMA, I saw the Tim Burton exhibition on a Friday in December. Surprisingly, it was well-paced and I got to see everything. I couldn't believe how crowded it was last Saturday! I went to go check out the Bauhaus exhibit for my Seminar in Design class and am required to write a review on it.

This was a good experience for me because I did not even know what Bauhaus was before my professor mentioned it. It is basically a prestigious school of avant-garde art that existed from 1919-1933. It was led by three different directors, all who ran it at different periods throughout its standing. The exhibit displayed different types of innovative works that varied from sculptures, metalwork, cabinetry, paintings, decorations, printmaking, and weaving.

When I first arrived on the 6th floor, I saw the title of the exhibit "bauhaus" written in gigantic red letters with a modern typeface. It almost looked it could be its own typeface title. The name was placed on a giant white wall, off center, leading towards the actual exhibition. Although there was an arrow followed by the phrase "workshops for modernity" beneath, the design of the title alone gave me some perspective as to what this school might have been about. Once I entered the exhibit, the first thing that caught my eye was a large and long painting hung against a pier. The array use of color really told me how attentive the artist was to scale. This was eventually shown in the workshops that further represented the innovative and creative minds of the artists at Bauhaus.

One individual that must be considered is William Morris, who is probably one of the most influential drives of Bauhaus. As a firm believer in the crafts tradition of the Middle Ages, he suggested that there be no distinction between form and function. I believe this is shown in the majority of the Bauhaus exhibit, especially within the interior design. What interested me most about this exhibit was that many artists collaboratively considered functionality and aesthetics together in the building/creating of art via Morris's logic. Many appealed to the modernity, such as the interior furniture designs (chairs, lamps, tables, etc...). It was surprising to me that the extent of the styles/designs of these products are not too far from the things we desire today, despite them existing almost a century ago.

Although many of the products seen in Bauhaus would be agreeable to Morris, others were purely aesthetics and some others were more concerned with modernity. The aesthetic art had no function but to please the eye. One example is a piece of music for a color theory class taught by Vasily Kandinsky, who translated music into visual form. Typography at the Bauhaus was clearly more modern and simple compared to the typefaces back during the Middle Ages. This opposes Morris's logic, for it reaches out more towards abstract forms. One sculpture I saw that was really bizarre was Lazlo Moholy-Nagy's Lichtrequilit einer Elektrischen Buhne (light prop for electric stage). There were so many forms within one form that collaborated to create one aesthetic visual.

Nevertheless, these artworks celebrate the history of design and tells present artists how great works of art evolved from the old to modernity.