Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World
Until June 4; Tate Modern, London

Early Modernist abstraction has been climbing its way to the top of the artistic agenda. A quick promenade around last year’s British Art Show was enough to prove that a new generation of artists is fascinated with the utopian dreams of the early 20th century. Tate Modern has just caught up, staging the Tate’s first exhibition dedicated to early Modernist abstraction in over 20 years.

Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy are not a ready-made pairing. The lives of the German and Hungarian artists collided for five years from 1923, when they both taught at the Bauhaus school. They never met again. Roaming Europe after the Nazis forced the closure of the Bauhaus, Albers and Moholy soon found their separate ways to America, where they ploughed their respective furrows at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, and The New Bauhaus, Chicago.

Asked in 1966 about Moholy, Albers was to say, in his characteristically cranky manner, “When you relate me to Moholy… that’s impossible because I hate that man”. It makes you wonder what they’d say if they were alive to see this exhibition, where art by the two men is mixed and matched so thoroughly that it becomes impossible to separate them in your mind.

In a gargantuan feat of borrowing from public and private sources, over 200 paintings, drawings, sculpture, photography, film and more, fill 12 rooms at Tate Modern. Arranged chronologically, it’s as if the pages of two men’s diaries had been removed from their bindings, and merged according to date into one new volume.

There are pros and cons to this kind of posthumous dialogue. Trying to follow two separate artistic trajectories, as they weave artificially in and out of each other, can leave you struggling to separate the two men’s work. On the other hand, it creates a fertile space in which to explore the debates of the day.

How could the democratic and aesthetic ideals of the craft workshop be integrated into the brave new world of industrial mass-production? Where does painting sit in relation to architecture, design and photography? What are the social responsibilities of the artist?

These issues were at the heart of the Bauhaus agenda, and in answering them, the school pioneered styles of design and architecture which were to transform the way the 20th century would look. Fussy ornamentation was abandoned, and pure geometric shapes embraced. The divisions between art forms, high and low, were broken down, and artists sought to serve society with all the new technological means at their disposal.

Of the two, Moholy was the most excited about the wonders of technology. Almost all of his paintings were named with a quasi-scientific formula to remove the sense of human authorship, and in 1922 he made his famous telephone pictures, one of which is in the show. Legend has it that Moholy phoned up the enamel factory and instructed them to make the paintings, without ever laying hands on them himself.

Albers was more attached to the traditional craft end of things. Head of the stained glass workshop at the Bauhaus until it was disbanded in 1925, Albers created the beautiful assemblages which open the exhibition. Composed from fragments of broken glass found on the streets of post-war Weimar, these objects are unique items, incapable of mass production. Once his workshop had closed, Albers ordered geometrical compositions on glass from professional sandblasters, the precise lines and grids celebrating the skyscrapers of the modern world.

In terms of breaking down boundaries, Moholy made huge advances in the realms of photography and typographical design. His book designs brought Constructivist techniques into the mainstream, and his own book, Painting Photography Film, argued that photography’s importance extended well beyond its documentary functions. His haunting photograms are a stunning example.

To make them, Moholy placed transparent objects on coated photographic paper, allowing ordinary light to do the work a camera would normally do. The results are magical. It’s as if light lives inside these abstract compositions, blurring and glowing around the ethereal shapes. “To paint with light” was the artist’s concern, and as well as the photograms, and reflective metal sculptures, his oil paintings take Constructivism and shoot it through with transparency.

Moving deeper into the careers of the two artists, a fundamental difference becomes increasingly apparent. Their work might appear superficially similar – the precise geometric patterns, the concern with light, and the adherence to a machine aesthetic – but they were pursuing very different goals.

For Moholy, the machine age presented an opportunity to find the whole man, a utopia which was ultimately shattered for him by the dropping of nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Albers’ experiments were of a different nature; it was the perceptual ambiguities of colour and shape which fascinated him. These were the phenomenological driving forces which were to occupy the minds of his students at Black Mountain College and at Yale, the Minimalists of the next generation.

This exhibition is ultimately what you make of it. Albers and Moholy, both celebrated teachers, believed passionately in allowing students to make their own discoveries. Following a meandering path through 200 works, each without individual interpretation, we become their newest students.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 09.04.06