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New Book Puts Spotlight on Bauhaus Design

“The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism” (Knopf, 544 pages, $40.00), by Nicholas Fox Weber: In this informal group biography, art historian Nicholas Fox Weber, author of “Le Corbusier” (2008), profiles six key artists and architects from the experimental teaching institution known as the Bauhaus, which flourished in Germany amid the cultural ferment of the Weimar era only to be shuttered by the Nazis. Although the Bauhaus exerted a profound influence on the development of European and American modernism, it did not espouse any single style or aesthetic.

Rather, it advocated a set of core values, including a respect for human scale and the principle that an object’s form must suit its function. As Weber notes, the ultimate importance of the Bauhaus “was in the way it addressed the connection between our surroundings and our feelings. Morality, emotion, religion, humor: all could be echoed and nourished by what we look at and touch.”

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Filled with well-turned anecdotes and blissfully free from art-historical jargon, Weber’s text follows the lives and careers of famed Bauhaus architects Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and of the painters Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. Weber also offers a truly touching portrait of the husband-and-wife team of Josef and Anni Albers, who befriended him during the 1970s, when he was a graduate student and they were teaching art in the United States.