Albers and Moholy-Nagy, From the Bauhaus to the New World, Tate Modern

Exhibition held in Spring 2006

Inspired by the Bauhaus and by the relentless development of the early twentieth century, Joseph Albers and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy were extraordinary visual innovators, continually rearranging abstract forms through a bewildering range of media. The wide variety of material on which these artists depicted their generous family of shapes – shapes such as circles, twists, blocks and orbs – document not only modernist invention, but stand as a virtual timeline of industrial innovation; as each material was developed – aluminium, perspex, sandblasted glass – so Albers and Moholy-Nagy jumped on it and turned it towards their own visual needs.

Josef Albers, Structural Constellation, Transformation of a Scheme No.12, 1950, Tate Modern.

But innovation is not quite a guarantee of artistic quality. Many of the modernist branches they followed may have initially appeared interesting but soon appeared to be dead ends. To an extent, Albers’ experimentation counted against him – he tried so many different routes that it is hardly a surprise that some of them would turn out to be false paths. For example, the works done with sandblasted glass or the later Structural Constellations created from engraved Vinylite. Initially impressive, above all because of their smooth jet-like finish, they soon become lifeless objects, rearranged according to the same formula. The initial idea is appealing but there is little to sustain the variations – you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. As visual designs they are interesting (like many of Albers’ works they would make for affecting album covers) but as artworks their sustained repetition brings little beyond the original conception.

In actual fact, it was Albers’ stated desire to move art and design closer together, so maybe we should be praising him for executing this strategy within his works. One can see the enormous influence that Albers, vigorously inventive in its geometric concepts, has had on later design styles. For example the illusory set of rectangles in To Monte Alban which anticipates the op-art inspired designs of the sixties and seventies; or the nervous but excited lines on the blue background of in open air which seem closer to reflecting the hedonism of the sixties than its actual year of creation of 1936.