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August 26, 2003
LOOKING HIGH AND LOW
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.
Posted by at August 26, 2003 11:19 AM