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‘The Encryption of
Art History in Modernist Art Education’, paper
presented by Anthony Auerbach in Art
History and the Art School: the
Sensibilities of Labour, chaired
by Malcolm Quinn, Association
of Art Historians Annual Conference,
University of Leeds, 7 April
2006.
This paper explored the transmission
of art history in the education of artists in a period when the emphasis was more on art’s claim on the future than on the past. It also reflected on the legacy of the Bauhaus, received as the epitome of the modern school, in contemporary institutions.
This paper has not yet been published (to be honest, it needs to be revised). Only the opening paragraphs are reproduced here.
 I
claim that art history is encrypted in
modernist pedagogy; that while
post-modernist art education
has instrumentalised art history
and has historicised modernism,
it has not necessarily decoded
it. Giving an account of encryption
means talking about a double
manoeuvre of concealment and
transmission. It would seem to
make sense to bring images to
light first in their subjective
associative contexts [since my
talk was not accompanied by slides,
that meant in
my listeners' imaginitive memory]
rather than in the historical
contexts which are revealed by
research. This way of proceeding
should also give you possession
of a means of testing my assertions
and, I hope, helping to develop
my propositions during today’s
discussion.
I would like to start with a
hazy image. The word ‘Bauhaus’ conjures
an image, or rather a set of
images, whose persistence can
be attributed to a combination
of reproducibility and vagueness.
Probably the most vivid, and
at the same time inscrutable
of the images which comes to
mind is the Bauhaus building
in Dessau. Completed in 1926
and restored in its own image
from the 1970s until today, the
building was Walter Gropius’s
second Bauhaus manifesto and
perhaps his greatest work of
propaganda for the institution
he founded. I call the image
inscrutable because it is very
difficult to interpret except
as the Bauhaus building.
While the building’s function
was to house the institution
which became known as ‘the
art school of modernism’,
the image served and continues
to serve to mask the conflicts
and contradictions involved in
that most illustrious attempt
to redefine the relations between
art, work and history. The image
of the Dessau building, however,
does not quite dislodge from
our minds the cathedral which
announced the Bauhaus for the
first time — the expressionist
woodcut by Lionel Feininger which
appeared on the Weimar Bauhaus
prospectus — or for that
matter the shabby former telephone
factory in Berlin where the Bauhaus
finally closed its doors in 1933.
Other images might also come
to mind: Oscar Schlemmer’s
Bauhaus seal (or even the masonic-looking
logo which it replaced), geometric
tea sets, tubular furniture,
sans-serif typefaces, paper folding
exercises, squares, triangles,
circles and so on.
The result is a blur, like one
of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s series
of fuzzy, black and white photographs
of ‘icons’ of modernist
architecture. Sugimoto’s
images pay homage to the empty
recognisability, the prestige
and the pathos, modernist monuments.
The Bauhaus image — the
Bauhaus as blurry image — stands
for consensus. The Bauhaus is
no longer controversial. Recent
scholars who have aimed to bring
the work and ideas of the Bauhaus
into focus and bring to light
its personal, political and pedagogical
complexities have done little
to disturb the consensus or to
stir anyone to its defence. In
the introduction to her book
The Bauhaus
Reassessed, Gillian
Naylor acknowledges how the institution
became an epitome of the efforts,
beginning in the nineteenth century,
to reform and renegotiate the
what we could call in the present
context the ‘labour relations’ of
art, design and manufacture.
She writes:
What is unique about the Bauhaus
[...] is that its ideologies
epitomize changing concepts concerning
the nature and purpose of design
in the early twentieth century.
The school inherited, reinterpreted
and then rejected the craft ideas
of the nineteenth century; it
attempted to discover ‘laws’ in
art that could be related to
design — and — architecture
and its fundamental aim was to
establish a universal language
of form which would represent
the elimination of social as
well as national barriers. (Naylor
1985, 9)
The utopian ideals with which
the Bauhaus is associated were
engulfed by political reality
before they could really be put
to the test. For Bauhaus enthusiasts,
that did nothing but enhance
the standing of the school and
the ideals it seemed to epitomise.
In practice, the European disaster
ensured the dissemination of
the Bauhaus idea — according
to Mies van der Rohe ‘the
Bauhaus was an idea’ — and
it spread in large part as a
result of the emigration from
Germany of former students and
staff. Sympathisers and sceptics
agreed that Bauhaus ideals were
wrecked on their partial realisations
(the cynics blamed the ideals).
There are those who saw the Bauhaus
behind miserable workers’ housing
in the communist East, and those
who saw the Bauhaus-derived ‘international
style’ as the universal
language of corporate capitalism.
And then there are those today
who seem to need expensive reproductions
of Bauhaus furniture to compensate
for the perceived inauthenticity
of Ikea’s version of Bauhaus
principles.
We could speculate on what kind
of school the Bauhaus might have
become: a private school of architecture,
like the Architectural Association;
an elite design school supported
by industry, like the Royal College
of Art; a technology institute
supported by the military, like
MIT; or the art department of
a regional university, struggling
for academic recognition and
public funding. Arguably, it
became all these things, or rather,
all these kinds of institution,
in a fuzzy way, owe something
to the Bauhaus. Reviving Bauhaus
polemics, however, would seem
have very little to contribute
to the current debates — such
as Malcolm Quinn outlined in
his introduction — about
the purpose and status — practical
or academic — of art education,
and hence the role of art history
in art schools. I certainly wouldn’t
recommend looking for solutions
to current problems in the Bauhaus
archives.
My purpose in evoking the after-images
of the Bauhaus is to point out
how, in the same way as the fame of the school obscures its antecedents,
so the Bauhaus image
holds art
history hostage.
[excerpt ends]
Note
- Gillian Naylor, The Bauhaus Reassessed: Sources and Design Theory (London: Herbert Press, 1985). p. 9.
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