Bauhaus Is Everywhere (Including the Milwaukee Art Museum)

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Photo courtesy of Milwaukee Art Museum

Among the many revelations in Yuval Noah Harari’s book, Sapiens, is that prior to the agricultural revolution, when human beings lived as hunters and gatherers, the average human was slightly more intelligent than one from 2020. It’s a counterintuitive notion, until one considers that over the past 10,000 years, we have continued to specialize to the point that any individual needn’t be especially clever to survive from moment to moment. As we continue to divide our labor into professional specialties, we lose great chunks of general aptitude. Our own society, it seems, isn’t unlike a beehive built of thousands of perfectly integrated hexagons, in which no individual bee has any understanding of basic geometry.

Given society’s creeping reliance on specialization, the art world included, it’s striking to consider the case of the Bauhaus a hundred years after its conception. The school encouraged omnivorous material research and interdisciplinary production in the arts, and its results are visible all around us. One of its most notable exponents, Lázló Moholy-Nagy, is the subject of an intimate show currently up at the Milwaukee Art Museum (through June 7). Writing an entire review of the exhibition, entitled simply “The Bauhaus, Lázló Moholy-Nagy, and Milwaukee,” is difficult, because it’s a small and not particularly sensational affair. But in light of the trophies on display in the Phillips collection show downstairs, the humble show gives a peek at consequential history of art that often goes unnoticed even while its effects are everywhere.

The very fact that a fellow like Moholy-Nagy has a show based on his connection to Milwaukee tells us a lot. He was a Hungarian influenced by Russian Constructivism. He joined the Bauhaus in Weimar Germany, which eventually dissolved under fascism, expatriated to America and created the New Bauhaus in Chicago that merged into the Illinois Institute of Technology. Within that concatenation of eclectic circumstances is the entire story of 20th-century visual literacy. Moholy-Nagy visited Milwaukee on several occasions to speak at the Milwaukee Art Institute, undoubtedly drawn to the local spirit of shaping functional machinery.

His material connection to the area hinges here on a prototype for a small fountain pen holder designed for the Wisconsin-based Parker Pen Company in 1946. In its vitrine, it shines handsomely as a small, obsolete artifact of the golden years of product design. In its spare elegance, it predicts everything from Brooks Stevens to the very Calatrava temple that houses it. On the wall behind the pen holder is an oil painting donated to the museum by the same Mr. Parker of Janesville. Nuclear II is an astounding painting, as grand as the adjacent pen holder is mundane. Made in 1946, it features a large sphere against a scumbled white background, evoking images drawn from the nuclear age. It’s difficult for a contemporary to believe that these two objects were created by a single artist.

The show offers additional artifacts that describe the wild diversity of Moholy-Nagy’s production, from typography books to photographic prints. And the short story they build is one of searching, eclectic productivity. If one is underwhelmed by the paucity of work, don’t worry, just consider that every fork in the museum café, clock on the wall, hand railing on the stairs and chair in the design lab was directly or indirectly a result of the wild material experimentation harnessed and further disseminated by the Bauhaus and its professors, of which Moholy-Nagy was one of the most august and influential.

The material revolution of the Bauhaus was so thoroughly absorbed and replicated by post-industrial mass-reproduction that it’s difficult to notice in 2020. But even as I type on my Mac PowerBook, I’m reminded of its ubiquity. Moholy-Nagy and the Bauhaus’ utopian ethic was based in a holistic knowledge of materials and processes; the raw fuel for the innovations of the last century. Now that we’ve moved into an age where material capability is taken for granted but knowledge is in question, we might be ready for a New New Bauhaus to do for digital information systems what the original did for material innovation last century.

The Bauhaus, Lázló Moholy-Nagy, and Milwaukee runs through June 7 at the Milwaukee Art Museum, 700 N. Art Museum Drive.

Opening This Week

“Fourth Annual Veterans Light Up the Arts”
Friday, March 6, 6-9 p.m.
Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM)
700 N. Art Museum Drive

The Wisconsin Veterans Chamber of Commerce and the Milwaukee County War Memorial join forces to present this “Light Up the Arts” event in MAM’s Windover Hall. The event is an evening celebrating veteran, service member and military spouse artists and performers from throughout the greater Milwaukee area. Come see the healing power of the arts and enjoy an evening of entertainment. Proceeds will benefit the Wisconsin Veterans Chamber of Commerce, Feast of Crispian, Milwaukee Chamber Theatre, Guitars for Vets, Lift for the 22, Warrior Songs and Ex Fabula. For more information, search “4th Annual Veterans Light Up the Arts” on eventbrite.com.

“Queens, Kings and Regal Beings” and “Without a Stitch”
March 6-April 26
5 Points Art Gallery & Studios
3514 N. Port Washington Road

In his solo show and first exhibition in Wisconsin, Gannon Crutcher (“Queens, Kings and Regal Beings”) utilizes the delicate medium of watercolor with acrylic to broadcast imagery of strength, dignity and fashion couture through Mikinsi-inspired portraits. With faces referencing African ceremonial masks and sculptures, this collection of majestic, iconographic portraits brings traditional African spirits into the physical world, which Crutcher deems his “spiritual portraits.” Kierston Ghaznavi, in her solo exhibition (“Without a Stitch”), catapults her signature pinned paper dolls to life-size proportions. Commanding even more attention through scale, these beautifully illustrated, contoured and playfully interactive body-con dolls allow viewers to be voyeurs into their intimate lives as they depict an array of everyday rituals—from cheeky scenes of brushing teeth in undies to darker moments of coping with depression, anxiety and loneliness—in effort to normalize and humanize the people they reflect. For more information, call 414-988-4021 or visit 5ptsartgallery.com/upcoming.

Folk Artist Cruz Enrique España
Tuesday, March 10, 3:15-4:45 p.m.
Greenhill Center of the Arts, Ceramics Area Room 1037
800 W. Main St., Whitewater

UW-Whitewater’s Department of Art and Design brings Cruz Enrique España, an internationally acclaimed folk artist from Guatemala, to campus, where he will give a free lecture (open to the public). España began working in his father’s ceramic factory as a child, and though the expectation was that he’d someday take over the business, he dreamt of being an artist in his own right. Eventually, España opened his own factory and began to make unique ceramic sculptures. His reputation spread, and soon he was invited to participate in folk art exhibitions in Guatemala, as well as abroad. Over the decades, he’s continued traveling, exhibiting and teaching as a highly prolific artist. For more information, visit whitewaterchamber.com.