Historic A B Cs

To be whole and healthy a body has great need of a brain. The vast realm of modern commercial designing has a similar need. No candidates for this cortical job in the U. S. have appeared with sounder title to it than a half-dozen recent emigrants from Germany. Their common background: the famous Bauhaus (Building House), which had an incandescent pioneering success in Germany between 1919 and 1933. To show what this background was, Manhattan's rich, responsible Museum of Modern Art last week opened the first comprehensive show of Bauhaus work yet held in the U. S.

At the social opening gathered a full quota of German artistic exiles remembering the days of their youth. Among the 700-odd items assembled and installed by old Bauhausler Herbert Bayer were photographs of their first, free, jazz age capers as Bauhaus students in Weimar in the early '20s. About the only exhibits that seemed thoroughly dated were these and an elaborate peep show of ballet figures by Oskar Schlemmer, heavily fantastic, machine-obsessed, dusty and dull.

Fascinating to many visitors, however, were the spare, delicate, geometrical results of Bauhaus workshop experiments in wood, metals, textiles, glass and color. Few could stand alone as impressive works of art, but the best proof of Bauhaus importance lay in the field to which all its experiments were, in theory, preliminaries: architecture and industrial design. Examples: tubular and wood furniture, frosted glass and metal lamps, pottery and other useful goods made in the '20s, which no U. S. manufacturers yet surpass; advanced photography done by or under the direction of Bauhaus Instructor Ladislaus Moholy-Nagy; the second Bauhaus building at Dessau by Founder-Director Walter Gropius, called by the Museum's Director Alfred Barr Jr. "architecturally the most important structure of its decade."

Nip & Gyp. Rugged, ruddy Walter Gropius has been at Harvard two years and is now the popular chairman of the Department of Architecture. He helped assemble last week's show, found its success satisfying for one reason in particular.

Last year in Chicago, Gropius' trusted friend and colleague, brilliant, bland Moholy-Nagy, was hired by a businessmen's Association of Arts & Industries to conduct a New Bauhaus, sponsored by Gropius and embodying Old Bauhaus principles. Last autumn the Association refused to reopen the school because of "lack of funds," then changed its tune to a violent but vague splutter about Moholy-Nagy's "Hitlerism" (TIME, Oct. 24). All that appeared to be at the bottom of this fuss was Moholy-Nagy's earnest and methodical teaching discipline; nine out of 13 New Bauhaus teachers stoutly stood by him and Bauhaus believers were shocked at the shutdown.

Last week a little selection of obviously promising work from the New Bauhaus' first year was included in the Old Bauhaus exhibition. Walter Gropius made it plain that he thought his friend had been gypped, his cherished school nipped in the bud. Said he: "What has been done to Moholy makes me very sad. I will not let the Chicago Association use the Bauhaus name for its own advantage."

Mountain Man. A Bauhaus alumnus who has had better luck than Moholy-Nagy since he landed in the U. S. in 1933 is Josef Albers, a granitic little man who once taught preliminary workshop courses in Weimar and Dessau, and is now the pride of Black Mountain College in North Carolina. In Manhattan for the exhibition last week, Josef Albers had a show of his own at the Artists' Gallery on Greenwich Village's Eighth St.: 20 expert abstract paintings, whose clarity and subtle kick showed up the usual dilettante work in that line.

Bauhausler Albers also brought a fresh illustration to spring on people who asked him about art education: "Everybody knows one and one is two. That's arithmetic. But as soon as we see that with an artistic eye, we can see one and one makes three" (here solemnly holding up two fingers parallel and a fingerbreadth apart), "or in this way" (laying one finger across the other), "one and one makes four. . . ."

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