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CATALOGUE

ALBERS AND MOHOLY-NAGY
FROM THE BAUHAUS TO THE NEW WORLD
Edited by Achim Borchardt-Hume

Publication February 2006
270 x 230 mm
176 pp
180 illustrations
Hardback
ISBN 1 85437 691 8
£35.00
Paperback
ISBN 1 85437 638 1
£24.99

TWO BAUHAUS HISTORIES

Extract from an essay by Achim Borchardt-Hume

On 13 February 1923, Walter Gropius, founder and Director of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar, announced the appointment of two new Members of teaching staff: Josef Albers, who had been a student at the school for the previous three years, and László Moholy-Nagy, who had been introduced to Gropius only the year before at Herwarth Walden's famous Der Sturm gallery. The atmosphere at Germany's most celebrated art and design school, as Albers himself later recalled, was dominated by the creative rivalries of its teachers, among them artists and architects of such stature as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Oskar Schlemmer and Mies van der Rohe. Albers and Moholy turned out to be no exception to this rule.

Two portraits from the mid-1920s give a flavour of the artists' divergent temperaments. The first, a photograph by his wife Lucia, shows the bespectacled Moholy sporting the scarlet overall of a racing-car mechanic atop a starched white shirt with tie, every bit the modern, technocratic intellectual. The second, a caricature by his friend, the designer Marcel Breuer likens Albers - bearing an early glass piece like a coat of arms or a theological treatise, his hair cropped into a monk's tonsure - to the fifteenth-century Florentine radical Savonarola. In a superficial way, these two images suggest the twin facets of the Bauhaus with which Albers and Moholy (not always by their own volition) became commonly associated: Albers,
the introvert teacher and craftsman; Moholy, the extrovert multi-media artist and propagandist. Questioning this dichotomy offers new insights not only into their work, but also exposes the fictitious nature of a monolithic Bauhaus narrative.

Albers joined the ranks of the modernist avant garde comparatively late in life. Born in 1888 in Bottrop, Westphalia, he had initially trained and worked as a primaryschool teacher before enrolling at the Royal Art School in Berlin. His teaching qualifications spared him from being drafted into the German army; he spent most of World War I in his native Bottrop, frequenting evening classes at the School of Applied Arts in nearby Essen. With the war over, he went to Munich to study with the salon painter Franz von Stuck, a somewhat anachronistic choice (two of Albers's future fellow-Bauhauslers, Kandinsky and Klee, had studied with Von Stuck twenty years earlier). Dispirited by the stealth of academic teaching Albers responded enthusiastically to the wake-up call of the Bauhaus manifesto. He described his impromptu decision to leave Munich for Weimar as follows: 'I was 32, but I went to the Bauhaus. Threw all my old things out of the window, started once more from the bottom. That was the best step I made in life.'

Around the same time that Albers travelled from Bavaria to Weimar, the young Moholy, his junior by seven years, arrived in Berlin as an exile from his native Hungary. He had little formal artistic education, having studied law when he was called to arms by the Austro-Hungarian army. His earliest creative experiments were in poetry rather than the visual arts, and writing would always remain an important activity. It was the shock of the war experience that first propelled him to become an artist. In a quest for a new beginning, he joined a group of intellectuals gathered around the avant-garde journal MA (Today). However, accused of being bourgeois and counter-revolutionary, MA was soon closed down by the Communist Soviets of postrevolutionary Hungary. In the wake of political turmoil and anti-Jewish sentiments, Moholy, together with many other Hungarian intellectuals, emigrated first to Vienna and then to Berlin, the Mecca of the Eastern European avant garde, where he quickly befriended other artists such as the Constructivist El Lissitzky and the Dadaists Kurt Schwitters and Hans Arp.

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	About \| Visiting information \| Book tickets \| Events & Education \| Catalogue Room Guide \| Chronology \| Online Film \| Teachers Pack \| Resources CATALOGUE ALBERS AND MOHOLY-NAGY FROM THE BAUHAUS TO THE NEW WORLD Edited by Achim Borchardt-Hume Publication February 2006 270 x 230 mm 176 pp 180 illustrations Hardback ISBN 1 85437 691 8 £35.00 Paperback ISBN 1 85437 638 1 £24.99 TWO BAUHAUS HISTORIES Extract from an essay by Achim Borchardt-Hume On 13 February 1923, Walter Gropius, founder and Director of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar, announced the appointment of two new Members of teaching staff: Josef Albers, who had been a student at the school for the previous three years, and László Moholy-Nagy, who had been introduced to Gropius only the year before at Herwarth Walden's famous Der Sturm gallery. The atmosphere at Germany's most celebrated art and design school, as Albers himself later recalled, was dominated by the creative rivalries of its teachers, among them artists and architects of such stature as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Oskar Schlemmer and Mies van der Rohe. Albers and Moholy turned out to be no exception to this rule. Two portraits from the mid-1920s give a flavour of the artists' divergent temperaments. The first, a photograph by his wife Lucia, shows the bespectacled Moholy sporting the scarlet overall of a racing-car mechanic atop a starched white shirt with tie, every bit the modern, technocratic intellectual. The second, a caricature by his friend, the designer Marcel Breuer likens Albers - bearing an early glass piece like a coat of arms or a theological treatise, his hair cropped into a monk's tonsure - to the fifteenth-century Florentine radical Savonarola. In a superficial way, these two images suggest the twin facets of the Bauhaus with which Albers and Moholy (not always by their own volition) became commonly associated: Albers, the introvert teacher and craftsman; Moholy, the extrovert multi-media artist and propagandist. Questioning this dichotomy offers new insights not only into their work, but also exposes the fictitious nature of a monolithic Bauhaus narrative. Albers joined the ranks of the modernist avant garde comparatively late in life. Born in 1888 in Bottrop, Westphalia, he had initially trained and worked as a primaryschool teacher before enrolling at the Royal Art School in Berlin. His teaching qualifications spared him from being drafted into the German army; he spent most of World War I in his native Bottrop, frequenting evening classes at the School of Applied Arts in nearby Essen. With the war over, he went to Munich to study with the salon painter Franz von Stuck, a somewhat anachronistic choice (two of Albers's future fellow-Bauhauslers, Kandinsky and Klee, had studied with Von Stuck twenty years earlier). Dispirited by the stealth of academic teaching Albers responded enthusiastically to the wake-up call of the Bauhaus manifesto. He described his impromptu decision to leave Munich for Weimar as follows: 'I was 32, but I went to the Bauhaus. Threw all my old things out of the window, started once more from the bottom. That was the best step I made in life.' Around the same time that Albers travelled from Bavaria to Weimar, the young Moholy, his junior by seven years, arrived in Berlin as an exile from his native Hungary. He had little formal artistic education, having studied law when he was called to arms by the Austro-Hungarian army. His earliest creative experiments were in poetry rather than the visual arts, and writing would always remain an important activity. It was the shock of the war experience that first propelled him to become an artist. In a quest for a new beginning, he joined a group of intellectuals gathered around the avant-garde journal MA (Today). However, accused of being bourgeois and counter-revolutionary, MA was soon closed down by the Communist Soviets of postrevolutionary Hungary. In the wake of political turmoil and anti-Jewish sentiments, Moholy, together with many other Hungarian intellectuals, emigrated first to Vienna and then to Berlin, the Mecca of the Eastern European avant garde, where he quickly befriended other artists such as the Constructivist El Lissitzky and the Dadaists Kurt Schwitters and Hans Arp. Published by Tate Publishing Available from our online shop back to top