Page 62 - Studio International - March 1970

scale cultural history can be really relevant to ordinarily sensitive reaction to culture, and Haus in order
people today if it ignores just precisely those what we can make of culture, has formed so
aspects of our culture that have formed our many of our contemporary attitudes. This The Bauhaus. Weimar Dessau Berlin Chicago by
feelings about art. To put it in crude terms, I prompts in me the absurd thought that there Hans M. Wingler. 653 pp. with 24 colour
gave this book to the Granny for Christmas may be a way in which young people today plates and many monochrome illustrations.
(she is eighty), but I wouldn't give it to my are older than Lord Clark, in terms of their MIT Press. £25 10s.
brother (he is eighteen). experience of art. They certainly have a totally
One reason for the talk-type deficiencies of different emotional view of it. They are quite autobiograph of
this book is the form: the lecture. Lord Clark visibly less certain, more inclined to worry introduction and more. Round I
has always been devoted to lectures, and it is and question, and they are more jokey. They lectur at
noticeable that practically all of his books are watchful, crotchety, wary. They do not University. It was Dr (as
began in this way. That is to their disadvantage. take things for granted and they have sudden he then was) suggestion that they tried me. I
I can well understand why art students kick vivid passions. Talking of which, it must be in
against their 15 per cent quota of art history said that a consequence of Lord Clark's architecture and design. Having some months
and so on when reflecting that the medium majestic progress through the monuments of t hard
through which they are instructed is the the past is a rather blank and exhausted through the summer.
lecture, surely one of the crummiest ways of feeling that really one thing i's much the same discovere existing
imparting information ever devised. Especi­ as another, so long as they're good and in the B and
ally with regard to arty matters; just look at Pantheon. Lord Cl�k never did have a great t information
the history of the art lecture in this country. deal of (to use Duchamp's phrase) chaud au m for
Reynolds' Discourses, instructional encourage­ cul about the way he wrote, but there used to anyone who wanted to know something about
ment to favoured students, have had too be a kind of tasteful way in which he obvi­ it, was that square, b1ue book spawned by the
much reverence. We should be honest about· ously felt pictures that seems now to have Museum of Modern Art's Bauhaus exhibition
them, and admit what everyone privately disappeared, conceivably just written out as a in 1938. It was called Bauhaus 1919-1928and
recognizes, that he had nothing interesting to consequence of the many revisions and edi­ Walter
say about art, and said nothing interesting at tions that television must have imposed on his Ise wife). The title
great length, stuffily and pompously, from the first thoughts. Di the
favoured position of the President behind the Lord Clark's failure to come to terms with Hannes
lectern. Reynolds was pompous, but because modernism is managed rather well (not for things
he was a practitioner talking to practitioners, the first time: see his ignorant but cunning Gropi and
he wasn't patronizing, and so much English essay on modern art, 'The Blot and the for­
art-talk has been this that it's not surprising Diagram' in Encounter, January 1963). But got to
that most p�ple think of art critics as being a his deft evasions reany should be exposed. have been appointed at Gropius's suggestion,
lot of snot-nosed, bow-tied, well-spoken gits. Get this, for instance: 'The incomprehensi­ and that Meyer had arrived in Gropius's own
They quite often have been, after all. I think bility of our new cosmos seems to me, ulti­ t architecture
it no accident that the only lectures about art mately, to be the reason for the chaos of took me notice that
which have ever attained the status of litera­ modern art. I've spent my life in trying to the first five years of the Bauhaus's life, though
ture have been Ruskin's-I am thinking of learn about art, and I'm completely baffled ... ' recognized by the com­
The Queen of the Air and The Mystery of Life and so on. What 'chaos'? Anyone who sets pletely hidden. The absence of Itten's photo­
and its Arts-whose motivation and expression himself up as an art historian should surely graph among the others of the staff should have
were precisely of an agonized appeal to an realize that you cannot dismiss the art of a warned me. He was credited with inventing
audience, not an assured talk-down. The whole century by just saying that it's 'chaos', seemed,
public art-lecture was something that be­ and then go on to talk about something else. his memory too had to be repressed.
longed to the connoisseurs' day, and was the Especially when you're necessarily, as Clark the b doubts
r
classic public form of the connoisseur, just as has to, setting youself up as being more but there was no easy way of resolving them.
its most assured private form was in all that civilized and knowledgeable than anyone One could read Gropius's retrospective essay,
fluting and too-tooing in galleries and draw­ you're talking to. And that kind of flap of the The new architecture and the Bauhaus ( 1935); one
ing rooms, often justly caricatured. Lord hand, the thing about being 'baffled', pushing could complicate things further by reading
Clark is an exponent of the lecture, and the away the most important of all centuries; it is Moholy's post-Bauhaus books of 1946 and
particular kind of telly format he uses-a fail­ surely a bland gesture th�t disguises arro­ 194 7. Here and there one could come across
ing of the series as a whole-does not abandon gance in twinkle-eyed self-deprecation. Not some of the books published by the Bauhaus,
the stance, the attitudes of the lectern. Nor good enough. And here again we should think preferably those that dealt with the Bauharn;
does the book, but if Lord Clark makes my of Ruskin. What gave Ruskin his intimate itself, but these only started appearing in 1925.
granny happy I don't mind too much about relevance to his own day was precisely his The more one read the more it seemed that a.
this. sense of cultural history as something that particular sort of Bauhaus image was being
I do mind about my brother, though. Lord ends today, the sense of the past, not as some­ promoted. At times it looked like conspiracy.
Clark appals him, and in a way I'm glad that thing static, but pushing on the present; At others one felt, rightly I tend to think, that
this should be the case. Here's a story. When something that is to be continually felt, not for all sorts of reasons (political, art-political,
the Duchamp exhibition was on I was walking just as old past history, but as an active com­ art-historical-a firm 1920s image would
past the Tate one evening. There was a knot ponent of contemporary life. This is why his shine more brightly in the books than a more
of people at the bottom of the stairs by the major statements on baroque and classical truthful and much more confused one-reasons
railings, surrounding and peering into the art are in a book called Modem Painters, and relating to personal feelings between the pro­
cars as they drew up. Must be a pop star, I why he continually contrasts the painters of tagonists in tht story, to their subsequent
thought. Not a bit of it. They were hanging his day with the painters of the past; he was a positions and auras, and even perhaps to
around to get a glimpse of Duchamp, the great educator because he knew what it wa� essentially domestic matters), agreeing on one
artist who-surely ?-was the most civilized man to be a contemporary. simplified and advantageous image was both
of our century, and whose wry but extra- TIMOTHY HILTON easier and more effective.

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