Review: Bauhaus Construct: Fashioning Identity, Discourse and Modernism, by Jeffrey Saletnik and Robin Schuldenfrei

Abstract

Jeffrey Saletnik and Robin Schuldenfrei editors. Bauhaus Construct: Fashioning Identity, Discourse and Modernism . London and New York: Routledge, 2009, 278 pp., 72 b/w illus. $49.95 (paper), ISBN 0415778360 There is no shortage of new books about the Bauhaus. As readers of the JSAH well know, the school's ninetieth anniversary was marked by a plethora of exhibitions and publications that is unlikely to be matched on the occasion of its centennial in 2019. Bauhaus Construct: Fashioning Identity, Discourse and Modernism is based on a conference organized by the editors, Jeffrey Saletnik and Robin Schuldenfrei, and held at Harvard University in 2008. Three of the contributions appear in slightly different form and in German in the edited proceedings of an earlier conference, Anja Baumhoff and Magdalena Droste's Mythos Bauhaus: Zwischen Selbsterfindung und Enthistorisierung (Berlin: Reimer, 2009) . There is nonetheless a freshness about the current collection that was largely missing from the catalogues of the Berlin and New York exhibitions, which were more committed to upholding the importance of their subject than raising provocative new questions about the school and its legacy. Although Bauhaus Construct includes chapters by such well-established authorities on the school as Frederic J. Schwartz and the doyenne of contemporary Bauhaus scholars, Magdalena Droste, the editors and many of the contributors have recently finished or are still completing their doctorates. The editors describe the focus of the book as the analysis of objects. "This volume," they declare, "examines how objects produced at the …