Object Lessons: The Bauhaus and Harvard ed. by Laura Muir

Abstract

Reviewed by: Object Lessons: The Bauhaus and Harvard ed. by Laura Muir Kathleen James-Chakraborty Object Lessons: The Bauhaus and Harvard. Edited by Laura Muir. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums. Pp. 287. Cloth $45.00. ISBN 9780300254167. The centennial of the Bauhaus in 2019 was marked by a wide-ranging array of events that circled the globe and considered the experimental school of art, architecture, and design from almost every conceivable angle. Not surprisingly, Harvard University hosted an exhibition and related events, including tours and workshops, that introduced the Bauhaus and its premises to a new generation of Harvard students. In part because key figures associated with the Bauhaus, including its founding director Walter Gropius, eventually taught and also built at Harvard, the collections of its Busch-Riesinger Museum include the most impressive holdings of Bauhaus-related material located outside of Germany. The continued strength of Harvard as a center of Bauhaus-related research is on impressive display in Object Lessons: The Bauhaus and Harvard, which also documents many of the Bauhaus-related activities staged at the university across 2019. Art history and university publicity increasingly dovetail in inward-facing celebrations of the contribution a particular institution has made to an important historical [End Page 388] phenomenon, but Harvard can certainly be excused for gathering together its faculty, the staff of its museums, and those who have been affiliated with one or the other as doctoral students or curatorial fellows. This lavishly produced volume is much more than a tastefully designed object. In addition to the color plates documenting the extent of the 2019 programming as well as the breadth of the Busch-Reisinger Museum's holdings, thirteen essays explore those collections and the pedagogic uses to which current Harvard faculty put them in the anniversary year. The scholarly accounts reflect upon the role that the Bauhaus has played at Harvard, detail the conservation of the university's Bauhaus heritage, and reassess objects that are part of that heritage. An added plus is the recreation of the brochure published by the Harvard Society of Contemporary Art to accompany the Bauhaus exhibition it opened in December 1930, three years before the school closed and seven before Gropius accepted an appointment to teach at Harvard. In her opening essay, Laura Muir recounts Harvard's history of displaying and collecting Bauhaus material since this early and auspicious beginning. The challenges posed by aspects of that heritage are described by Robert Wiesenberger, Kate Smith, and Teri Tensick in essays that focus on Herbert Bayer's murals, which eventually had to be removed from the daily lives of the students living and eating in the Graduate Center, in order to conserve a rather unwieldy work of art. Unfortunately, the student dining hall turned out not to be the most appropriate setting for a major work of modern art! Harvard's formidable reputation as the incubator of some of the best current thinking about the Bauhaus is on display with thoughtful essays by Robin Schuldenfrei, Annie Bourneuf, Jordan Troeller, and Jeffrey Saletnik focusing on works with which they probably first became familiar as students. That three of these essays address the work of women—Lucia Moholy (wife of faculty member László Moholy-Nagy), Otti Berger (a Bauhaus student), and Ruth Asawa (a student of Josef Albers, who studied and taught at the Bauhaus)—demonstrates how far scholarship in the field has moved from its original focus on the school's masters. Nor are these the only contributions that, like much of the best recent Bauhaus-related scholarship, focus on women. The standout essay of the volume, by Kristie La, currently a doctoral student at Harvard, provides a thoughtful comparison of the way in which Hannah Höch, who did not study at the Bauhaus, and Marianne Brandt, who did, made use of African, Asian, and other "exotic" imagery in their photomontages. In a finely nuanced evaluation that also reminds us that the school was not consistently the most progressive locus of the German art world at the time, she argues "that Höch's and Brandt's montages diverge in their mobilization of popular photographic representations of women and the Other, and, as a result...