Bauhaus Art : Arts and Crafts


By Andrew Milkowsky



Very cool media presentation from the New Yorker magazine, it deals with the new art exhibition at the MOMA with retrospective of works of Bauhaus (first originated in pre war Germany and it deals with how artists then felt and responded to the emerging impact of technology on every day life and attitudes..., in a way,... they predicted lot that followed in our century, Today Bauhaus influance art can be seen all around is in every day objects, building, furniture etc, but in my opionin Bauhaus goes much further than this. it really reflects elaborate and non trivial symbiosis between life art and technology...


Arts and Crafts

November 16, 2009
This week in the magazine, Peter Schjeldahl writes about “Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity,” a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. In this audio slide show, Schjeldahl discusses the variety of works that emerged from the German art and design school as well as his ambivalence about the Bauhaus style.

You can tell the graphic-novels section in a bookstore from afar, by the young bodies sprawled around it like casualties of a localized disaster. There were about a dozen of them at the Barnes & Noble at Union Square one recent afternoon, in a broad aisle between graphic novels and poetry. Not one was reading poetry, but the proximity of the old ragged-right-margined medium piqued me. Graphic novels—pumped-up comics—are to many in their teens and twenties what poetry once was, before bare words lost their cachet. The nineteen-sixties decided that poet types would thenceforth wield guitars; the eighties imposed percussive rhythm and rhyme; the two-thousands favor drawing pens. Like life-changing poetry of yore, graphic novels are a young person’s art, demanding and rewarding mental flexibility and nervous stamina. Consuming them—toggling for hours between the incommensurable functions of reading and looking—is taxing. The difficulty of graphic novels limits their potential audience, in contrast to the blissfully easeful, still all-conquering movies, but that is not a debility; rather, it gives them the opalescent sheen of avant-gardism. Avant-gardes are always cults of difficulty—Cubism, “The Waste Land”—by which a rising generation exploits its biological advantages, of animal health and superabundant brain cells, to confound the galling wisdom and demoralize the obnoxious sovereignty of age.
Start with Chris Ware, the thirty-seven-year-old Chicagoan Picasso / Braque and young Eliot of graphic novels, whose “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth” (2000, Pantheon) is, besides being viciously depressing, the first formal masterpiece of a medium that he has proved to be unexpectedly complex and fertile. Set aside, for now, the graphic novelists you probably most like, if you like only a few: Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, Daniel Clowes. Their peculiar literary qualities are distracting. The same goes for Robert Crumb, for whom there is the added problem of a historical significance: he is the father of art comics. Keep lightly in mind the ever-teeming regions of genre: superhero, action, horror, goth-girl. Give a respectful but wide berth to Japanese manga, which occupy most of the shelf space allotted to graphic novels in bookstores, their bindings as uniform as lined-up vials of generic, obviously addictive pharmaceuticals.
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