Historian explores modernism's roots

In this informal group biography, art historian Nicholas Fox Weber, the author of Le Corbusier (2008), profiles six key artists and architects from the experimental teaching institution known as the Bauhaus, which flourished in Germany amid the cultural ferment of the Weimar era, only to be shuttered by the Nazis.

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Associated Press

In this book cover image released by Knopf, "The Bauhaus Group," by Nicholas Fox Weber is shown.

Back | Next

Associated Press

In this book cover image released by Knopf, "The Bauhaus Group," by Nicholas Fox Weber is shown.

Back | Next

Associated Press

In this book cover image released by Knopf, "The Bauhaus Group," by Nicholas Fox Weber is shown.

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Although the Bauhaus exerted a profound influence on the development of European and American modernism, it did not espouse any single style or aesthetic.

Rather, it advocated a set of core values, including a respect for human scale and the principle that an object's form must suit its function. As Mr. Weber notes, the ultimate importance of the Bauhaus "was in the way it addressed the connection between our surroundings and our feelings. Morality, emotion, religion, humor: all could be echoed and nourished by what we look at and touch."

Filled with well-turned anecdotes and blissfully free from art-historical jargon, Mr. Weber's text follows the lives and careers of famed Bauhaus architects Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and of the painters Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. Mr. Weber also offers a truly touching portrait of the husband-and-wife team of Josef and Anni Albers, who befriended him during the 1970s, when he was a graduate student and they were teaching art in the United States.

Visiting the elderly couple at their home in Connecticut, Mr. Weber expected to find a pair of dour Europeans, living in an atmosphere of modernist austerity and subsisting on "lean, geometrically organized food." But, to his surprise, he discovered that they were disarmingly casual, liked to tell jokes, wore clothes from L.L. Bean and expressed a genuine delight with the efficiencies of contemporary American life. The Heinz ketchup bottle, for instance, earned their highest Bauhaus praise: such a simple, pure form, and it fits perfectly in the palm of the hand.

Mr. Weber's tendency to stint the political circumstances surrounding the history of the Bauhaus leaves his narrative, at times, lacking a sense of real-world context. Nonetheless, this book provides an excellent introduction to the personalities responsible for some of the 20th century's most innovative experiments in art and design.