Marital tensions

Bauhaus 1919–1933, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, until 17 February

With all the ‘boundary-blurring’ going on in contemporary art, the old distinction between art and craft ought to be history. But snobbism is apparently so hard-wired into our aesthetic psyche that the distinction has managed to survive by appealing to the Wildean doctrine, ‘All art is quite useless.’ If something has a use, the theory seems to go, it isn’t art: if it’s useless, it’s in with a chance.

The new Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art — mima for short — set out with a mission to show arts and crafts under the same roof. Its reasons are historic: its snazzy new glass-fronted building unites the collections of the former Cleveland Crafts Centre and Middlesbrough Art Gallery. So a show about the Bauhaus, not seen in Britain since the Royal Academy’s survey of 1968, seemed an obvious choice for its first year’s exhibition programme.

In Bauhaus 1919–1933, teapots, samovars, vases, lamps, carpets, hangings and chairs mingle with recent photographs of Bauhaus buildings by Hans Engels, and paintings and prints by Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Johannes Itten, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Oskar Schlemmer. The multifarious products of an art school founded on the principle expressed in Walter Gropius’s 1919 Manifesto that ‘the artist is an exalted craftsman’, they should serve as cheering proof of the possibility of a successful marriage between art and craft. But marital tensions are already evident in the opening room.

On entering, one is met by a reception committee of Bauhaus chairs, including a version of Marcel Breuer’s tubular steel chair of 1925/6 — allegedly inspired by the handlebars on his Adler bike — which first introduced chrome into the home. The walls, meanwhile, are hung with Kandinsky’s print series ‘Small Worlds’ (1922), offering exploded views of free-associating forms suspended skittishly in abstract space.