The Barbican's exhibition on the Bauhaus school of art and design showcased a wide range of documentary materials and works that spanned the school's history. Key pieces from the founding visionary works of Feininger and Kandinsky to iconic designs by Breuer, Albers, and others demonstrated the school's emphasis on form following function and its holistic approach integrating art, craft, and architecture. The exhibition provided visitors with a sweeping overview of the Utopian aims, teachings, and influential outcomes of the pioneering Bauhaus school.

1. Bauhaus,
Art as life
Barbican Art Gallery,
London
Visited June 2012

2. Bauhaus:
the art school seen to
embody sober, purist
German modernism:
form follows function
Form Folgt Funktion
Eugene Batz, “The Spatial Effects of Colors and Forms”
from Kandinsky’s course (1929)

3. The Barbican’s exhibition Bauhaus: Art as Life is irreverent,
unexpected, and ranges broadly across documentary material and
works of art and design.
Josef Albers’s set of
four stacking tables
Paintings, usually overlooked in accounts of the Bauhaus, play a
starring role: the entire Bauhaus story is summed up by the gulf
between Lyonel Feininger’s expressionist “Studio Window”
(1919), its surging crystalline planes symbolising Gropius’s
founding Utopian vision, and Kandinsky’s sombre, abstract
“Development in Brown” (1933), made shortly before the Bauhaus
was closed under Nazi pressure.

4. Lyonel
Feininger
Studio Window
1919

5. Marcel Breuer’s tubular steel Club Chair, Anni Alber’s textiles, Wassily
Kandinsky’s paintings, Oskar Schlemmer’s costumes and Walter
Gropius’ buildings...
These key pieces sourced from institutes across the globe – in
particular from the three cornerstone collections of Bauhaus: Klassik
Stiftung Weimar, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin and Stiftung Bauhaus.

9. Marcel-Breuer
Club chair, 1925–26
Victoria and Albert Museum, London

12. Anni Albers
Wall hanging
1926 (remade 1964)
Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

13. Anni Albers,
Tablecoth fabric
sample,1930
M.o.M.A., New York

14. Gunta Stölzl
Five Choirs, 1928.
Die Museen für Kunst und
Kultursgeschichte der
Hansestadt Lübeck

15. Marianne Brand
tea set, 1924
The formal principles of the Bauhaus school: circle, globe and square are
the basic forms of the construction.

18. Wassili
Kandinsky,
Circles in a
Circle,
1923

20. Peter Keler,
De Stijl 1, 1922

21. Kandinsky
Development in brown
(Entwicklung in Braun), 1933

23. Paul Klee painted luminous, interlocking, architectonic abstractions –
“Double Tower”, “Tomb in Three Parts” – that resemble stained glass

24. Paul Klee's Tomb in Three Parts 2

25. Paul Klee
Double tower
(duppelturm)
Private collection,
Franz Marc Museum

26. Oskar Schlemmer

27. Triadic Ballet,
the wild theatre design of Oskar Schlemmer

30. Bauhaus was founded, in Weimar by Walter Gropius in 1919 –
the year in which he published what has become known as the
Bauhaus manifesto, Programme of the State Bauhaus Weimar.
Developed from “romantic socialist and utopian aspirations,”
the pamphlet called for artists to return to the crafts.
“Masters of form” and “workshop masters” would instil formal
and theoretical instruction and the technical skills in which to
realise them. The products of these workshops would eschew
distinction as either art or craft and instead realise something far
greater, a term that resonates with today’s multidisciplinary
ambitions, to unite the arts in Gesamtkunstwerk or, “total work
of art.”

31. WalterGropius,
Curriculum Graph
Stone, wood, metal, fabric, colour, glass and sound – the base for building art

32. Bauhaus (1925),
by Walter Gropius

33. Bauhaus – Art as Life
Barbican Art Gallery,
3 May 2012 - 12 August 2012
• http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/event-detail.asp?ID=12409
©Mário Ricca, 2012