Word: itten
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That lyrical and nostalgic strain was amplified by Johannes Itten, the unlikely man Gropius first picked to teach the entry course. A vegetarian, Zoroastrian and state-of-the-art bohemian, Itten knew more about yoga than he did about factory floors. In the years when he set the tone for much of what the school produced, the would-be school of industrial art could seem more like a hippie craft shop. A product of the Bauhaus could be a hand-thrown pot or a funky hand-carved chair...
...turning point came in 1923, when Gropius dismissed Itten and replaced him with the resolutely modern Hungarian Constructivist László Moholy-Nagy. In the same year, the school mounted an exhibition with the no-nonsense title "Art and Technology--A New Unity." The painter Oskar Schlemmer announced the back-on-track Bauhaus ethic in a polemic that was only partly tongue in cheek: "Death to the past, to moonlight, and to the soul...
...Paul Klee's Bauhaus work, which combines spontaneity and discipline. klee's spidery sketches are whimsical, ironic and sometimes ridiculous. They are supported by intricate color grids. Following Groplus' belief of applying fine art to crafts, klee's official role was as a teacher of bookbinding. Two Johannes Itten works exhibited also reveal Bauhaus idiosyncracies, Itten was later to stress a common vocabulary of form, turning composition into a science. As you'd expect, his "House of the White Man" looks like an architectural sketch. In contrast, his "Dictum" of the same year could have been done by a Dadaists...
What is missing in the exhibit is the eccentricity of certain personalities such as Johannes Itten and Georg Muche who shaved their heads and dressed as monks, or Oskar Schlemmer's stage sets and ballets. Yet the imagination of Klee works, or even of a doll-house like representation of a Metal Exhibit (Joost Schmidt 1934) complete with boat propellers and model airplanes, shows the creative richness of the Bauhaus that encouraged a tradition in education as well as art. The Bauhaus brought art off its pedestal and seduced even the common Pygmalion; the Busch should bring such attractive nuisances...
Gregory Ratoff, in his last screen role-he died last December-briefly brings the show alive and, as the curtain line of his career, disgorges a magnificent Ratoffian mouthful: "You vill pe itten py ze volchers!" Otherwise, the most remarkable thing about the film is its sustained improbability. Greco looks as appropriate in a jungle as a crocodile on the Champs Elysées. The languidly sophisticated little love scenes are hardly the sort that a muscular truck driver and his lively young wife would get much satisfaction from. The landscape doesn't look African...