Review | Objects in Exile: Modern Art and Design Across Borders, 1930-1960.
Reviewed by Natalya Lusty, University of Melbourne
The reconstitution of modernism under the conditions of exile has been an enduring topic of discussion within modernist studies from a range of disciplinary perspectives, which is not surprising given that the decades that spanned early to late modernism witnessed two world wars and waves of human migration and relocation. The global influence of the Bauhaus on art, design and architecture stemmed from its own diasporic conditions.[1] In Objects in Exile: Modern Art and Design Across Borders, 1930-1960, Robin Schuldenfrei frames the conditions of exilic modernism as “a process of exile, emigration, and resettlement from continental Europe to Great Britain and America, in the interwar, wartime, and postwar period” (1). Informed by meticulous archival research and novel approaches to its subjects, the book traverses both the familiar (Walter Gropius, Macel Breuer, László Moholy-Nagy) and perhaps less familiar (Lucia Moholy, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Josef and Anni Albers, Herbert Bayer) practitioners of the Bauhaus, alongside a renewed sense of the work of each artist/designer under conditions of exile, to show how a set of fundamental ideas about art, modern design, and architecture would be made anew with varying degrees of accommodation and effective realization.
The first section of the book, “Transposition,” covers chapters on Moholy-Nagy’s experiments with light and abstraction informed by the industrial city and its transposition across different media, as well as the experiments in minimal dwelling carried out by Gropius, Breuer, and Moholy-Nagy at the Isokon Flats in London. Economic and artistic émigrés, all three principal Bauhaus artists ended up working for Isolon, the British firm intent on bringing modern architecture and, in particular, ideas about minimal dwelling to bear on English urban architecture and design. And all three relocated to the Isokon Flats, Isolon’s Bauhaus-inspired buildings in North London, which gave the Bauhaus émigrés the opportunity to newly experience and refine the company’s designs for buildings, interiors, and furniture. The translation into English of Gropius’s The New Architecture and the Bauhaus (1935) a year after his arrival in England, saw Gropius emerge as one of the most significant proponents of modern architecture and design. But the more interesting focus on translation in this chapter concerns the experiments in living that constituted the community surrounding Gropius, Moholy-Nagy, and Breuer as they adapted and transposed the principles of minimal dwelling and design arising out of the Existenzminimum movement to their newly adopted dwelling and country.
Schuldenfrei’s second section, “Contingent Conditions,” maps the fate of Lucia Moholy’s valuable photographs of the Bauhaus buildings and objects in Dessau between 1924 and 1928, the opening of the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937 by Moholy-Nagy, and Hilberseimer’s decentralization of urban planning in the context of dwelling design in postwar Chicago and Detroit. It is, however, the chapter concerning Moholy’s experience of exile and the fate of her photographs that offers one of the most compelling, if despondent, accounts of the exigencies of exilic modernism. Required to flee Nazi Germany in haste, Moholy lost ownership of her negatives of the Bauhaus buildings and was forced to begin anew in England, even though her photographs would continue to build and shape the legacy of the movement and its flourishing in exile albeit without proper accreditation. Moholy’s negatives would eventually fall into the hands of Gropius after he moved to the United States in 1937. Her attempts to take back ownership and to be credited and remunerated for her work were thwarted in part because, for Gropius and other stalwart Bauhaus members, “the circulation of the object photographed took precedence over the authored photograph as object” (122) even while “[a]n exceedingly large part of the Bauhaus legacy, explicitly formulated in exile, was visual in the form of photographs, especially photographs taken by Lucia Moholy” (123). Schuldenfrei perceptively demonstrates the fraught conditions of authorship under conditions of exile, whereby artistic mediums and even objects catalyze new meanings and functions through exilic modernism. While photography played an important role in the transnational dissemination of modernism, what Schuldenfrei reveals here is the acute tension between the documentary and discursive functions of photography: “photographs can be the most important means of communication for work no longer extent or accessible, and…their importance as photographs can as a result and perhaps especially under such conditions be overtaken by what they depict and what it comes to signify, by their subject matter and its photographically enabled properties of signification” (123).
Schuldenfrei’s final section, “Remediation,” takes up the work of Josef and Anni Albers upon their relocation to Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and Herbert Bayer’s innovative experiments in graphic design and display, demonstrated through his contribution to the U.S. war effort and its various educational campaigns as well as his work for the Bauhaus exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in 1938. It is, however, the chapter on Anni Albers that rewards a profound example of how artists and designers might newly flourish under the conditions of exile. While Albers had been somewhat reluctant to join the weaving workshop in Dessau, the workshop usually designated for women at the Bauhaus in Germany, her newfound status as an assistant professor at Black Mountain afforded her the opportunity to experiment with a range of materials and to use writing to think through the theoretical dimensions of her practice and design philosophy, often stretching the limits of traditional materials if not the signification of materiality itself: “Little is gained when nothing can be learned about the inherent tidy behavior of matter.”[2] In 1949 Albers would be the first textile artist to have a solo show at MOMA, a testimony to the recognition and success she had received in the U.S.
Despite the focus on objects in the book’s title, Schuldenfrei is as concerned with the intimate circumstances and individual responses of her subjects to the conditions of exile and to the formal and informal mission of modernism’s productive social impact as she is with the material agency of the objects that travelled and were newly conceived in locations far from their original derivation. As the experience of Moholy and Anni Albers illustrate, “[a]n avant-garde aesthetic and design theory did not translate into a democratic social environment, and the Bauhaus preserved remarkably conventional social forms and values.”[3] But while Moholy was cut adrift from the Bauhaus and lost control of authorial recognition, Anni Albers flourished under conditions of exile, successfully remediating her design philosophy across both creative and pedagogical contexts.
Schuldenfrei’s book offers a richly layered insight into how vital the work of adaption and translation was to Bauhaus artists and designers as they responded to new environments, new materials and the experience of exile. While Ezra Pound’s oft-quoted dictum, “make it new” has perhaps become one of the singularly defining, if at times underexamined, edicts of modernism, Schuldenfrei enlists Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Task of the Translator,” to remind us of the creative impetus of the translation process, recalling Benjamin’s warning that “it is self-evident how greatly fidelity in reproducing the form impedes the rendering of the sense.”[4] The Bauhaus artists understood the broader creative lessons that inform translation, remediation, and transposition, and Objects in Exile brilliantly demonstrates how exilic modernism reinvented its own history time and again, and in the process ensured modernism’s enduring legacy.
[1] See Ehrhard Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism, U of California P, 2007; Philip Goad, Ann Stephen, Andrew McNamara, Harriet Edquist and Isabel Wünsche, Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond: Transforming Education Through Art, Design and Architecture, U of Sydney Power Publications, 2019; and Lucy Wasensteiner, ed., Sites of Interchange: Modernism, Politics and Cultures Between Britain and Germany, 1919-1955, Peter Lang, 2022.
[2] Anni Albers, quoted in Objects in Exile, 257.
[3] Anja Baumhoff, The Gendered World of the Bauhaus: The Politics of Power at Weimar Republic’s Premier Art Institution, 1919-1932, Peter Lang, 2001, 170.
[4] Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” quoted in Objects in Exile, 91.
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