by Jon Lackman | 7 December 2009 | Modern, Museums
Michael J. Lewis writes in the New Criterion:
… the Bauhaus is a moving target, and there is no point in its fourteen-year life when it existed in anything like a definitive form. This is one of the insights of “Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity,” the spellbinding exhibition now at the Museum of Modern Art … [which,] though smaller than that in Berlin (about 420 objects), enjoys the odd distinction of being both a boldly revisionist look at the Bauhaus as well as its first truly comprehensive presentation … Of special note is the handsome catalogue, with essays by the curators Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, that performs heroically in conveying the show’s visual sumptuousness. It is rounded out by thirty-one catalogue entries, all consistently fresh and rewarding (without the duds that frequently sneak their way into these group projects). The last of the entries is of special value, a semester-by-semester chronicle of the Bauhaus … The exhibition is a well-deserved triumph for Bergdoll, who, in 2006, was appointed MOMA’s chief curator of architecture and design. Although a gifted historian of architecture (his monograph on Karl Friedrich Schinkel is the best work on its subject), Bergdoll has a conspicuous gift for the imaginative display of objects, without the historian’s weakness for using them as illustrations in a history lecture. All this is abundantly in evidence in “Bauhaus: 1919–1933.” At the same time, the exhibition is a landmark for MOMA itself, which was founded in 1929 at least in part on the cooperative model of the Bauhaus. Over the decades MOMA’s various departments have tended to retreat into their institutional fastnesses, preferring exhibitions of a monographic nature and working within those categories of genre that the Bauhaus had once sought to abolish. But with its broadly synthetic approach and high degree of interdepartmental collaboration, “Bauhaus 1919–1933” reverts to the institution’s original cooperative model.
