Founded in Germany in the aftermath of World War I, the art school known as the Bauhaus (“building house”) created a new template for art education. It erased distinctions between the so-called fine arts and applied arts on the basis that fundamental principles of good design could be used across the board.
Beginning in 1922, the young school published a series of print portfolios in an effort to gain publicity and financial support. A selection of woodcuts, lithographs and etchings from the first portfolio, now on view in the print gallery at the Dallas Museum of Art, suggests the range of talent the Bauhaus attracted during its brief life; it shut down when the Nazi government took power.
The sculptor Gerhard Marcks, one of the first faculty to be hired as head of the pottery workshop, contributed a bold, high-contrast woodcut of two cats happily stretched out and enjoying a captured mouse. Marcks’ love of animals indicates the lighter side of a school often stereotyped as stern and impersonal.
Oskar Schlemmer interpreted the human figure in terms of geometric forms connected with each other through mathematical proportions. His woodcut calls attention to a fundamental question for the Bauhaus and modern art in general: how to relate the human to the mechanical.
Lyonel Feininger’s woodcut of a mansion on the beach, also expressed through relationships of simple geometric shapes, recalls Cubism and Futurism in its sense of fragmentation and dynamism. Feininger, a painter, was head of the printmaking workshop, and the first faculty member to be hired by the new school.
Although painting tends to occupy the leading place in histories of modern art, the Bauhaus’ concern for the integration of different media and technology is arguably more influential. The print portfolio offers a fascinating snapshot of a key moment in modernism.
“The First Bauhaus Portfolio” continues through Aug. 15, 2027 at the Dallas Museum of Art, 1717 North Harwood St. Open Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. 214-922-1200. dma.org. Free.