Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New
World
by Joanna Blaire Trezise
May 2006
The premise behind the Tate Modern's new exhibition is that, for five years, Josef Albers and Lazslo Moholy-Nagy taught alongside one another at Germany's Bauhaus School. This serves as a starting point from which to compare the work of two outstanding artists of the twentieth century and is the Tate's first exhibition devoted to early modernist abstraction.
Although Albers and Moholy experimented with a wide range of media, curator Achim Borchardt-Hume manages to investigate the variety evident in their art while still creating an exhibition that is unified and easy for the visitor to digest, regardless of their prior knowledge of the Bauhaus. While it is not possible to examine each of the works included in the show (the number of which exceeds 300) it is useful here to outline the histories of the artists and the various stages in their careers at which the curator has chosen to pause.
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Josef Albers |
While the output of Albers and Moholy-Nagy often seemed to parallel one another, each had come to their conclusions on the nature and purpose of art quite separately prior to their employment at the Bauhaus School.
Josef Albers, the elder of the pair, was highly educated, having trained as a primary school teacher and attended both the Royal Art School in Berlin and the School of Applied Arts in Essen before deciding, at the age of 32, to abandon all that he had been taught and become a student of the Bauhaus. This was the point at which Albers' art, previously influenced by Cubism and Expressionism, became entirely abstract.
In contrast, Moholy-Nagy received no formal art training. World War I interrupted his law education and it was literally in the trenches that he first turned his hand to the arts. (1) Moholy-Nagy's involvement with the Bauhaus began when he gained an exhibition at Hewarth Walden's Galerie Der Sturm (2) and Walter Gropius attended, promptly offering the young artist a teaching position at the Bauhaus School, an offer he had also extended to the student Albers at around the same time.
Gropius, an architect, founded the Bauhaus School in 1919 with a view to challenging the established method of art training and providing students with tuition in a full range of media without a distinction between 'art' and 'craft'. The Bauhaus ideal of 'simplicity and functionality above all' appealed to both Albers and Moholy-Nagy, as did the utopian belief that art had the ability to instigate social change.
In compositional terms, Moholy-Nagy was primarily influenced by De Stijl, with its focus on the use of horizontal and vertical lines and its preference for primary colours. He believed art should be entirely devoid of both representation and emotion and, through the use of geometric forms, desired his work to speak in a 'universal language', a phrase perhaps most famously associated with another Bauhaus teacher, Wassily Kandinsky. The painted works of Moholy-Nagy that appear in the exhibition are, without exception, beautiful - perhaps a strong word to be used in reference to geometric abstraction. While he did not seek to create depth, Moholy-Nagy's forms are overlapped and coloured in such a way as to give the illusion of transparency, creating a subtle interplay of shape and tone.
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Laszlo Moholy-Nagy |
Conversely, having come into close contact with the Dadaists Kurt Schwitters and Hans Arp while living in Berlin, Moholy-Nagy also found the light-hearted nature of Dada appealing and many of his works, such as 'The Big Wheel' of 1920-1 and the collage 'Between Heaven and Earth', 1923-7, evidence his delight in the absurd. Moholy-Nagy also placed little value in the idea of an artist's originality, believing the interpretation of the viewer to be of far greater importance than the artist's method of construction and even, famously, ordering five enamel paintings over the telephone, claiming that his hand had not touched them until they were complete.
Albers also believed it was not necessary to be involved in the physical manifestation of his idea and often employed workmen to execute designs to his specifications. A clear example of this is his sandblasted glass works, many of which can be seen in the exhibition. These works contrast sharply with the 'scherbenbilder', or shard pictures, which greet the visitor at the outset of the exhibition as examples of Albers' early work. While the sandblasted works are strictly geometric and demonstrate an intense focus on design, earlier experiments primarily focused on the materials themselves, many of which were simply irregularly shaped scraps of glass Albers had found while walking the streets. (3)
An additional incentive for Albers in using the sandblasting method was that the process allowed him to quickly create a series of identical works, as, by the late 1920s, successful mass production was increasingly becoming the penultimate aim of the Bauhaus. But Albers did not strictly agree with the idea of mass production, feeling that the benefits of a handmade item far outweighed those of a mass-produced one. The struggle the artist was having to reconcile the Bauhaus ideal with his own beliefs is evident in his 'Set of Four Tables', c.1927, created, in theory, as being easily and quickly reproduced, but in actuality made entirely and painstakingly by hand. The set displayed in the exhibition is, in fact, the only one ever made.
Moholy-Nagy, on the other hand, saw mass-production as a valid way for the modern artist to replace more traditional craftsmanship. Moholy-Nagy's passion for technology also extended to innovations in graphic design, several examples of which are displayed in the exhibition. Between 1925 and 1930 a series of fourteen books were produced featuring the art writing of many Bauhaus teachers. Of these, eleven were designed by Moholy-Nagy and three written by him.(4) Quite apart from the significance of the writing itself, these publications reveal an advanced understanding by Moholy-Nagy of how the arrangement of text and its surrounds could greatly influence the impact of the words.
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Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
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A replica of one of Moholy-Nagy's most original creations, 'Light Prop for an Electric Stage', 1928-30, is included in the exhibition together with 'Light Play: Black-White-Grey', 1930, the film he created from it. The machine acts as the climax of Moholy-Nagy's experimentation with photography, an art form that had preoccupied him for so long that it was largely due to his groundbreaking experiments in the media that it was finally considered worthy of inclusion in the Bauhaus curriculum in 1928. 'Light Prop' is a kinetic sculpture which Moholy-Nagy filmed as it went through its movements. A viewing of the film that, in this case, is accompanied only by the occasional 'thunk' of the machine itself in operation nearby, is an almost surreal experience. As the exhibition's audio guide helpfully prompts, 'Light Prop' looks 'futuristic' even to our eyes, 76 years after its original creation, while the film, of over five minutes duration, creates a wholly original and complete work of art in every frame.
By the time of 'Light Prop''s creation Moholy-Nagy had already been absent from the Bauhaus for two years having resigned, together with Walter Gropius, amidst disagreements over the school's future. Albers, however, remained at the school until its closure by the Nazis in 1933, eventually becoming its Deputy Director under Mies van der Rohe.
When he finally did leave the Bauhaus, Albers' life was to take a completely new turn. Concerned by the increasing influence of the Nazi party in Germany, a few months after the Bauhaus closure Albers accepted a teaching position at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Without access to the extensive workshop facilities of the Bauhaus School Albers was unable to continue working with sandblasted glass and instead turned to printmaking and painting, media he had not used in years. During this period, Albers became increasingly interested in the psychology of sight; the notion that the mind's interpretation of what it sees is just as important as the physical act of seeing. The concept had concerned the artist since his early years at the Bauhaus but this era saw a more concerted experimentation. In printmaking Albers began to play with shape and form, while his painted works engaged with the examination of colour, his compositions far looser and less geometric than ever before.
Also concerned by the rise of the Nazis, Moholy-Nagy moved first to the Netherlands, then to London, then to Chicago, setting up the New Bauhaus school there. After financial problems resulted in its closure, Moholy-Nagy reestablished it under the name of The School of Design, using money he had earned from commercial design to fund it. (5) By the late 1930s Moholy-Nagy was beginning to experiment with Perspex, making sculptures and mobiles. Perspex was just the sort of new, modern material the Bauhaus had encouraged use of, and the artist delighted in its transparency.
Perhaps Moholy-Nagy's greatest achievement during these years was the huge influence he exerted over other artists in all media, both through his teaching and through the publication of his theories on the practice of art. His book 'The New Vision', an English version of the Bauhaus publication 'Von Material zu Architektur', and the post-humously published 'Vision in Motion', continue to exert considerable influence over artists in all media. (6)
By 1946 the priorities of Moholy-Nagy's life had abruptly changed. Diagnosed with leukaemia he was often ill and, as time went on, increasingly unable even to leave his bed. At the same time the artist was deeply traumatised by America's use of nuclear weapons in Japan. For a man who had encouraged advances in technology his entire life the advent of the atomic age was a cruel blow. From this time on Moholy-Nagy's art was devoted to the dual themes of nuclear weaponry and his illness, the intensity of his new focus resulting in his works being given descriptive titles for the first time in over two decades. Still more significantly, these works display Moholy-Nagy's step away from pure abstraction towards semi-representational art. The appearance of a nuclear bomb is converted into the recurring motif of a ball of colour that advances ominously upon the viewer, while his leukaemia appears as abstracted streams of blood coursing with multi-coloured particles. Moholy-Nagy eventually succumbed to his leukaemia in November 1946.
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Josef Albers |
Four years later, at the age of 63, Josef Albers began what was to become his signature series, the 'Homage to the Square'. From 1950 until his death Albers was to create over 1,000 variations on the theme of squares, abandoning the loose forms of the late 1930s and '40s and returning to the hard-edged geometry of his Bauhaus years. Albers insisted the choice of palette was largely arbitrary, the colours used being readily available and applied directly from the paint tube in order to avoid the presence of the 'artist's touch', but as time went on they gradually changed from vibrantly clashing tones to far subtler variations. These works marked a new stage in Albers' continued interest in visual perception. As Borchardt-Hume points out, they are not intended to create illusion or to leave an after-image when the eyes are closed, but rather to concern the viewer purely with the relationship of one colour to another. (7) But, as always, Albers did not see such experiments as an end in themselves, writing: 'When you really understand that each colour is changed by a changed environment you eventually find that you have learned about life as well as colour.' (8) A further extension of Albers' passion was the publication, in 1963, of his book 'Interaction of Colour', an intensive examination of the colour theories Albers had been developing his whole life.
In common with many Bauhaus teachers, Albers and Moholy-Nagy were fiercely independent, forming and developing their artistic ideology separately and rarely showing even the slightest interest in each other's progress. It is this independence which would have made a more traditional 'compare and contrast' style exhibition inadequate, and Borchardt-Hume has resisted the temptation to base his investigation around such a premise. Instead, the work of each artist is presented and interpreted relatively separately, mirroring the separation of two men who often did not even like one another's art. But the exhibition remains unified, alternating easily between two of the most influential artists of the twentieth century and creating a show which, for any lover of modernism, could not be bettered.
Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World is at the Tate Modern, London, from 9 March - 4 June 2006, at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany, from 25 June - 1 October 2006, and at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, from 2 November 2006 - 21 January 2007.
(1) Albers was not drafted into the German Army because of his teaching qualifications.
(2) Achim Borchardt-Hume, 'Two Bauhaus Histories' in exh. cat., Achim Borchardt-Hume
(ed.), 'Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World', Tate Publishing,
London, 2006, p.66.
(3) 'Albers later recalled trawling the streets of Weimar, equipped with knapsack
and hammer, on the hunt for broken bottles and windows.' Borchardt-Hume, p.67.
(4)Authored Volume 4, together with Farkas Molnar and Oskar Schlemmer, 'Die
Bühne im Bauhaus', Volume 8, 'Malerei, Fotografie, Film' and Volume 14,
'Von Material zu Architektur')
(5) In 1944 the school was again renamed, becoming the Institute of Design.
(6) 'The New Vision' was first published in 1932, 'Vision in Motion' in 1943
(7) Borchardt-Hume, p.78
(8) Gerald Nordland, 'Josef Albers: The American Years', exh. cat., The Washington
Gallery of Modern Art, 1965, p.28., cited in Borchardt-Hume, p.78.