Since this column is about the arts, as well as media and culture, may I
recommend three art shows?
One, which has the advantage of being online, is “the bauhaus at the
busch-reisinger.” It comes to us from Harvard and offers details of
Bauhaus design — the thingness of things — in five categories of what I would call Platonic
essences: LAMP, CHAIR, HOUSE, STAGE, AUTO (as in car). Although not interactive (thank
gawd!), the online program is fully engaging.
But if you’re looking for the motherlode of expressionistic architecture, the Bauhaus Archive in
Berlin is the place to go. Its current exhibit, “Building a New World:
Architectural Visions of Expressionism,” runs though Sept.
15. Overlooking the fact that “few of the buildings designed by Bauhaus architects were actually
built,” as it was modestly put by a report in THIS WEEK IN GERMANY (from the official
German Information Center), the Bauhaus style “remains Germany’s most lasting contribution to
architecture.”
For those who prefer less highfalutin arts, or just plain lowlife pleasures — let’s drink a stein of
beer to them — there’s the current exhibit of “Pulp Art: Vamps, Villains and Victors from the Robert
Lesser Collection,” just extended through Oct. 19 at the Brooklyn
Museum of Art. The gritty, lurid, fantastical pulp magazines
from the ’20s through the ’40s had remarkable cover illustrations first created as
paintings. More than 100 of these paintings are on view. For example: Amazing Stories
and New Detective
Magazine.
The pulps were a populist art, “literary dream machines,” according to the exhibit’s online
notes, which take a page from the pulps’ overwrought literary style itself. Especially during the
Great Depression, pulp stories offered “a passport into worlds of adventure and romance,”
while pulp art “helped readers to visualize everything from ancient civilizations to outer
space — from faraway lands to the dark recesses of the imagination.”
What I’d like to know is, were there any Bauhaus artists illustrating pulp magazines? It seems
to me that the style of those existential Platonists could have lent itself mightily to the
medium.
