Epsilon Spires continues its virtual cinema series with a showing of “The New Bauhaus: The Life and Legacy of Moholy-Nagy” (2019), an 89-minute documentary by writer, director and producer Alysa Nahmias. The film will be available for viewing on the Epsilon Spires website Friday through Jan. 14. RSVP on the website for a facilitated Q&A with the filmmaker on Jan. 13 at 8 p.m.
In her director’s statement, Nahmias writes that her way into the life and art of László Moholy-Nagy (1885-1946) was to explore his ideas and legacy, especially his final decade in Chicago, which she calls a “dramatic and visually rich chapter of Bauhaus history. His time there was pivotal, not only for his own creative trajectory, but also for American education, art and design.
“Moholy (as he was known) was not a conventional artist, and ‘The New Bauhaus’ is not a typical biography,” she writes. “It’s about the tensions between art and commerce, tradition and experimentation, past and present — and future. It examines the life, philosophy and artwork of Moholy in light of the idea that an artist is not merely a maker of objects; an artist is a maker of her/himself.”
In order to appreciate the impact the Hungarian-born Moholy had on design and education in the United States, one has to go back to World War I, the “war to end all wars,” as it was then called.
Following World War I, the German architect Walter Gropius — considered one of the pioneers of modern architecture — issued his Bauhaus Manifesto in 1919. In it, Gropius declared, “The ultimate goal of all art is the building! The ornamentation of the building was once the main purpose of the visual arts, and they were considered indispensable parts of the great building.
“Today, they exist in complacent isolation, from which they can only be salvaged by the purposeful and cooperative endeavours of all artisans. Architects, painters and sculptors must learn a new way of seeing and understanding the composite character of the building, both as a totality and in terms of its parts…”
First founded in Weimar, Germany, the Bauhaus school (1919-1933) sought to create a new aesthetic suitable for a modern, post-war, industrial world. At the Bauhaus, artists and artisans collaborated — there was no artificial separation between them — and they had one goal: to design objects that were not only beautiful, but also improved people’s quality of life. Moholy, who taught at the Bauhaus school from 1923 to 1928, worked in multiple media himself: painting, sculpture, typography, graphic design and photography. He was always fascinated by light as a medium.
During the late 1920s, as the Nazis came to power in Germany, the Bauhaus school came under increasing pressure because of its revolutionary approach.
Finally, in 1933 it was forced to close. A number of the faculty had emigrated earlier to Europe and the United States, including Josef and Anni Albers, who taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and Mies van der Rohe, who designed the campus of Illinois Institute of Technology and taught there. Moholy emigrated first to Holland in 1934, then to London in 1935. Gropius, who was teaching at Harvard, invited Moholy in 1937 to open a New Bauhaus in Chicago. Moholy’s approach, as described in a brochure for prospective students, encouraged exploration, each person “conscious of his own creative power…working independent of recipes.” He offered students emotional freedom and the opportunity for technical experimentation. Establishing The New Bauhaus had its challenges, both artistic and financial. The school faced insolvency in 1938, and reopened in 1939 as the School of Design. Moholy surmounted those challenges, however, and taught there until his death from leukemia in 1946. Nahmias is a 2019 Sundance Momentum Fellow and an adviser at Sundance Catalyst Forum and Film Independent Global Media Makers program. She holds degrees from New York University and Princeton University, and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Her production company, Ajna Films, is in Los Angeles.
“Beyond history lesson or monograph,” she writes, “I want ‘The New Bauhaus’ to present Moholy and the evolution of his school as a lens through which we can view questions relevant to today: What is the relationship between humans and technology? How does immigration fuel culture? Can art or design change the world? Making this film has reminded me of the importance of finding new ways to create and inspire in a tumultuous time.”
With major retrospectives in the past few years at The Guggenheim Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Moholy is receiving recognition he never received in his lifetime. Featuring intimate interviews with Moholy-Nagy’s daughter and an in-depth exploration of his groundbreaking work, “The New Bauhaus” offers an illuminating portrait of a visionary teacher and thinker.
Petter Ringbom, producer and cinematographer of “The New Bauhaus,” will be available to talk about the film during the Q&A on Jan. 13. Ringbom’s debut feature documentary, “The Russian Winter,” followed musician John Forté’s Russian odyssey after release from prison. His film, “Shield and Spear,” examined freedom of expression in South Africa. Ringbom’s films have screened at Tribeca, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, Hot Docs, Film Society of Lincoln Center, Gothenburg International Film Festival and Moscow International Film Festival. He has been a Film Independent Fellow, a Gotland Film Lab Resident at the Ingmar Bergman Estate and a Berlinale Talent. Ringbom is a founding partner of Opendox, the production company behind “The New Bauhaus.”
He will be joined by Marquise Stillwell, founder of Opendox, a design consultancy that provides talent and resources for ambitious and innovative ventures. Stillwell is the executive producer for “The New Bauhaus,” “Shield and Spear,” “Unspoken” and a number of short films that bring to light untold stories of community and design. He recognizes the power of storytelling to create empathy. Currently, he sits on the board of the Andrew Goodman Foundation and the Lowline Underground Park. He has contributed to various programs at the Joyce Theatre, the New Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. The intermediate pandemic period will be characterized by recovery from the overall clinical, psychological, social and economic shock of the pandemic. Christakis predicted that this will require adjustments through 2024.
Finally, the post-pandemic period will see far-reaching changes in our behavior, our society, and our world which we are only now beginning to appreciate. The disappearances of the handshake, the cross-country trip for a one-hour meeting, the hours spent commuting to a downtown office — all of these changes and more will become a routine part of our post-pandemic world.
This timetable will likely be shortened by one of the major scientific accomplishments of modern history — the development, manufacture, testing and now distribution and administration of millions of doses of a vaccine to prevent COVID-19 infection. In the past, the development of vaccines has taken three to eight years, but an unprecedented effort involving massive government funding, international cooperation and rapid communication has resulted in a vaccine in fewer than 12 months. With this fine book, Christakis has made an outstanding contribution to our ability to grasp what assailed our world in 2020, but I was disappointed that he is so circumspect in his criticism of Trump and the administration’s response to the pandemic. When intelligence briefings as early as January indicated the likelihood of a serious pandemic spreading from China to the U.S., a government-wide mobilization to prepare the nation and the medical system for what was coming was still possible. Instead, the Trump administration and the president served up a daily menu of lies, misinformation, dangerous comments about potential cures (injectable bleach, no less!) and false hopes. The administration suppressed scientific facts from the Centers for Disease Control and refused to institute the Defense Act to produce the needed Personal Protective Equipment. These irresponsible and politically motivated actions have resulted in the potentially avoidable deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
History, as it always does, will judge the performance of the Trump administration harshly as we mourn thousands across this nation who have died because they were abandoned by their government in this time of great need.
For Christakis, an otherwise bold, brilliant and objective scientist and writer, to “pull his punches” on this is disappointing. His references to Trump’s comments as “misinformation” and “plainly scientifically false” minimize these criminal acts.
That said, this is a valuable and readable contribution to our struggle to come to terms with the pandemic of 2020. As Christakis points out, “So we will reach herd immunity, or the pathogen will evolve to be less lethal, or (after a very long time) humans will evolve to be resistant. That is the biological end of the story. But pandemics are also sociological phenomena, driven by human beliefs and actions, and there is a social end to pandemics, too when the fear, anxiety, and socioeconomic disruptions have either declined or simply come to be accepted as an ordinary fact of life.”
Now that there is an effective vaccine and more than 4,000 Vermonters have already been vaccinated, the biological end of this pandemic appears to be within reach. The sociological end of COVID-19 with its long-term changes in our society remains uncertain, but Christakis has given us the science and the sociology to at least dimly foresee what that future will look like.
