A bit late

Back to School

If you stand in a certain spot in the second room of the MoMA’s gorgeous and serious new exhibition Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity (opening November 8) you can see Marcel Breuer becoming modern. On axis with the entrance is his “Romantic” or “African” chair (1921) whose arcing back was woven with silk and hemp and wool by Gunta Stotzl (that’s one of her sketches above), eventual head of the weaving workshop. It seems to have more to do with folk art than modernity, but around the corner you see him transforming the crudeness of the first attempt into something more suave: the TI 1a armchair (1922), with a more refined woven wool seat, and slim legs and bent arms that slide past each other in unusual ways. Across the room, his children’s chairs and table (1923), the first with a flat board back similar to Gerrit Rietveld’s 1917 Red Blue chair, the second the original of the cubic Parsons tables made ordinary by repetition and knock-offs. All this is before 1926. His real breakthrough, the cantilever chair of bicycle tubing, is still hidden beyond another wall, sequestered with other well-known works of architecture and furniture by Breuer and Walter Gropius and Josef Albers.

That putting off of the stars, denying us the best-known objects and sticking to chronology, is a strength for this exhibit. Its underlying intent is to remind us that the Bauhaus was a school. Student work and masterpieces of modern textile art, painting, craft and industrial design are presented as part of the total package. Mies van der Rohe barely shows up until the last room, and we see his students imitating his style, but none of his own drawings. Curator Barry Bergdoll says this was an obvious choice: Mies kept his architectural commissions separate from his teaching, and the show is about the school. This has the lovely effect of reducing the well-known names to beloved profs, allowing us to better observe the hidden talents of the wider Bauhaus pool. One of my favorite cases is at the back of the last room, stocked with samples of Bauhaus upholstery fabrics by Anni Albers and Gunta Stotzl, Bauhaus wallpapers (abstract as can be) by Heinrich-Siegfried Bormann. Thewallpapers were apparently the most successful Bauhaus products. One of the cleverest textiles is practically digital, a 1932 fabric by Hajo Rose whose original sketch was typed on a typewriter, letterforms turning into repetitive and almost floral scallops.

You should go. And you should especially go on one of the days when MoMA is offering hands-on workshops. Pretend to be a first-year in Johannes Itten’s class. Learn color the Albers way. Something different is happening at MoMA when they embrace a little of the Etsy spirit.

Posted November 4, 2009 at 2:14pm in Bauhaus Design MoMA Museums Marcel Breuer

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Rearranging, Part 2

Modernism and organization go together in more than just the corporate world (see Rearranging the Deck Chairs below, on Mad Men). As postwar architects and designers worked to elevate ordinary, well-designed products to the status of museum-quality objects, their best friend was the category. A whole wall of industrial components looks much better than a single example. A table full of simple, solid-color china is sculpture, not dinner. The Good Design shows at the Museum of Modern Art, currently remembered in an exhibit on the museum’s third floor, were exemplars of this approach, and the museum asked the best industrial designers in America to design the shows as well as show their designs.

On a recent trip to MoMA, it was two other exhibits that made me think harder about the power of categories, and to wonder where the museum is going now that capital-M Modern is old hat. The first was the wonderful Waste Not (2005) by Chinese conceptual artist Song Dong, an installation of the wooden frame and contents of his mother’s modest house, a 50-year accumulation of stuff by a woman accustomed to rationing. A pile of this stuff (much of it what we might consider recyclables, if not trash) would be horrifying, but the artist and his mother have sorted it by material, color, function, so that each section tells a story about color or design or accumulation over time. There are glossy paper shopping bags that take up half the floor of the small house, and an icy display of styrofoam packing pieces. There are bowls of all materials and colors, and an islet of shoes. It is art because it is organized, though few objects would individually make it into the design collection.

Meanwhile, up on the 6th floor, the work of British industrial designer Ron Arad has been given a completely disorganized showcase called No Discipline. One of the high-ceilinged special exhibition galleries is now a sort of mirrored discotheque for chairs. I wrote a story about Arad for the New York Times years ago, and found him articulate and thoughful, but I hated his work then and even more so now. His approach to material experimentation is well within the modern tradition, appropriating car seats, carving Corian in new ways, making the club chair tough enough, but he doesn’t care about beauty or simplicity. Part of the MoMA’s original concept of modernism was selection, paring away the awkward and the ungainly, seeing the purest iteration in whatever art form. Arad’s discipline seems to be the opposite of that, but he’s the one selling chairs at sculpture-level prices, while Song Dong’s art is all in the arrangement.

Posted August 20, 2009 at 9:43am in Alexander Girard Design MoMA Ron Arad Song Dong

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