Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity

Museum of Modern Art

Kandinsky

Guggenheim Museum

This is an autumn of anniversaries in two of New York’s most important museums. At the Museum of Modern Art, “Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity,” the exhibition saluting the ninetieth anniversary of the opening of the legendary German school of art, architecture, and design, also marks the eightieth anniversary of the founding of the Modern. Up north and to the east, the Guggenheim is capping the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of Frank Lloyd Wright’s still astonishingly audacious building, now freshly restored, with a stirring retrospective of paintings by Vasily Kandinsky, whose work was at the core of the Guggenheim’s mission when it opened its doors as the Museum of Non-Objective Painting on East 54th Street seventy years ago. The year 1939 was also highly significant in the history of the Museum of Modern Art: it was in November of that year, mere months after mounting a pioneering Bauhaus show late in 1938, that the museum unveiled its very own new building on West 53rd Street, a structure whose spare lines were closely related to the vision of a new architecture that had been promoted at the Bauhaus.

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