Kathleen James-Chakraborty. Bauhaus Culture: From Weimar to the Cold War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. 256 pages. ISBN: 0816646880.

Reconsidering the origins and legacy of the Bauhaus, Bauhaus Culture: From Weimar to the Cold War addresses the political and cultural context that both hampered the Bauhaus's success and ultimately provided for its international influence. Initially the Bauhaus intended to combine the various “high art” practices of painting and sculpture with the “low” forms of traditional crafts by forming “new methods of instruction in the visual arts” (xiii). Whether true to its aesthetic ideals or not, the Bauhaus's ability to extend its inclusive pedagogical practices and its streamlined aesthetic—especially in a Cold War context—ultimately depended on arenas of culture not usually included in histories of the Bauhaus. In focusing its critical discussion on questioning and contextualizing these conventional interpretations of the Bauhaus, architecture historian Kathleen James-Chakraborty's edited volume provides new critical commentary and disturbs the Bauhaus's reputation as a symbol of an “uncomplicated relationship between art, modern technology, and progressive politics” (xii). The essays successfully provide historical context to the Bauhaus's origins, analyze internal aesthetic debates in the school, measure its success in the Weimar marketplace, and discuss the role of the Cold War in determining its legacy from both art historical and architectural perspectives. Following a clearly chronological plan, the book comprehensively addresses how the cultural environment surrounding the Bauhaus should factor into our contemporary understanding of it.

Placing the Bauhaus's origins in a cultural and political context, Bauhaus Culture describes the school's innovative approach to aesthetic education as an extension of folk-based arts and crafts within a utopian context. As James-Chakraborty discusses in her introduction, the Bauhaus's radical approach to education consisted of introducing students to the school through courses in abstraction rather than developing traditional skills such as drawing. Focusing on exercises that “developed skills in formal composition and encouraged students to respect the inherent qualities of their materials,” the school's approach to education changed artistic pedagogy at that time and continues to have influence today (xiv). As the author discusses later, however, much of the Bauhaus's legacy has been determined by the political history of the twentieth century. Despite the Bauhaus's influence on pedagogy, its legacy has been uncertain due to the political events that originally splintered the school. Taking a position “in relationship to fascism, exile, and the Cold War,” the founder of the Bauhaus Walter Gropius often overemphasized the school's antagonism toward the Nazi regime and ignored its complex relationship to nationalist politics (xviii). Bauhaus Culture presents this complexity with admirable focus by considering how Gropius's ability to promote the Bauhaus's antifascism helped ease its reception in the U.S. and also encouraged Americans to view avant-garde art and architecture as a potential weapon in the Cold War.

The usual depiction of the Bauhaus fits within the conventional narrative of a utopian artistic community that fizzled in the face of a fascist threat. Bauhaus Culture contends with this narrative of the Bauhaus, which only considers the school's existence and relevance between the years of 1919–1933. Contextualizing the school's origins in pre-Weimar arts and crafts practices and confronting its anti-fascist legacy, the book fruitfully discusses the Bauhaus's dependence on political and institutional factors in its pursuit of utopian ideals. Art and architecture historian John V. Maciuika's essay, “Wilhelmine Precedents for the Bauhaus: Hermann Muthesius, The Prussian State, and the German Werkbund,” clarifies the Bauhaus's prehistory. Arguing that the “relationship between architecture, decorative arts, and the role of artists as makers and interpreters of form” were gradually being redefined during the era of Kaiser Wilhelm, Maciuika's essay portrays the Bauhaus as not entirely linked to the new democracy of the Weimar Republic but rather with roots in imperial Germany.

To investigate the often overlooked contribution of photography to the Bauhaus aesthetic, art historian Rose-Carol Washton Long's essay, “From Metaphysics to Material Culture: Painting and Photography at the Bauhaus,” surveys how this debate engaged with a central tension within the school itself. Initially, photography's then questionable status as a creative artistic medium led Walter Gropius to privilege painting in his hiring preferences. Yet his hiring of László Moholy-Nagy in 1923 led painters at the school to suspect that they were losing influence (43). Long denies that painting lost influence at the Bauhaus, and instead she shows how the Bauhaus's aesthetic development through its utilization of new techniques continued to explore abstraction that still employed “synthesis” as a defining concept, a concept that motivated Kandinsky's work. But by the time Gropius departed in 1928, Long asserts, photography threatened to overtake painting as the major “stimulus for visual experimentation” (43). Centering on László Moholy-Nagy's concept of “productive creation,” Long argues that the “technical apparatus of photography ['s ability] … to provoke a new way of seeing, and hence a new vision of utopia” provided another appealing creative outlet to Bauhaus students as the school developed (51). In charting this development, “From Metaphysics to Material Culture” emphasizes the process at work in creating a dynamic environment at the school rather than a static and homogeneous product. The school's increasing technological focus acted not only as an inspiration for greater experimentation with materials but also transpired at the level of form.

By looking at how Bauhaus products were received, some of Bauhaus Culture 's essays emphasize the importance of publicity for the Bauhaus, which prompted recognition of its status as “the catalyst for making art relevant to modern life” (63). For example, art historian Frederic J. Schwartz's essay, “Utopia for Sale: The Bauhaus and Weimar Germany's Consumer Culture,” discusses the impact of publicity on Bauhaus style. Analyzing the unsuccessful reception of the Bauhaus on Weimar Germany's market, Schwartz contends that Bauhaus leaders grew uncomfortable with the market's ability to refashion utopian ideals into mere selling points. While the Bauhaus focused on assembly line productions as an aesthetic model, its spare design never successfully separated itself from the debate between type and originality, becoming notable for its fad-like “industrial style” and fitting neatly within the commercial culture it was attempting to transform.

James-Chakraborty's second essay in the collection, “From Isolationism to Internationalism: American Acceptance of the Bauhaus,” attempts to answer a key question concerning the legacy of post-war Bauhaus: how did the Bauhaus become so influential despite American culture's traditional resistance to the principles of abstraction? Arguing that the members of the Bauhaus were able to publicize their style as one embodying the principle of anti-fascist artistic freedom, James-Chakraborty notes that the gradual acceptance of the group's style “required Gropius to purge the history of the school he had founded of those elements least likely to be accepted by Americans” (154). Appealing to the American view of itself as a “tolerant and progressive sponsor of advanced, even experimental art,” Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's architecture exemplified the tension between art and commerce implicit in the reception of the Bauhaus during the Cold War (160). James-Chakraborty ends her essay by addressing this tension through an analysis of two former Bauhaus students' careers in American weaving. She compares the careers of Anni Albers and Marianne Strengell to explore how the former's success in the art world and the latter's success in the commercial world reflected the extent to which they held true to Bauhaus austerity. Strengell's textile prototypes for industrial use (which incorporated printed fabric rather than Albers's rectilinear woven grid) emphasized surface rather than structure, leading to more decorative and less abstract patterns. Strengell's importance to the legacy of the Bauhaus may be found in the degree to which she distanced herself from its austerity in order to fit commercial needs.

The final essay of the book, “The Bauhaus in Cold War Germany,” written by architecture historian Greg Castillo, captures the spirit of the collection by asserting that the legacy of the Bauhaus has been determined as much by political circumstances as aesthetic innovation. Castillo argues that the Bauhaus's early ideological indeterminacy and its members' Nazi-era collaboration in building “the Third Reich's military-industrial complex” was overlooked in promoting it as a “symbol of social progress” (172). Chronicling the various ways in which the Bauhaus's legacy helped to establish innovative post-war art and design schools, Castillo summarizes how the political impact of cold war Germany cemented this legacy as a standard bearer for the democratic ideals of modernism. It is that legacy which Bauhaus Culture successfully puts into question.