IN ALBERS AND MOHOLY-NAGY: FROM THE BAUHAUS TO THE NEW WORLD, opening today at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Modernism meets Postmodernism head-on. Here a posthumous visual dialog between two artists of the Bauhaus school is placed inside a building designed by a Bauhaus-trained architect in such a way as to be more an art installation than a straightforward art exhibition. Amid the non-sequential pacing of the show, which echoes the experimental and theoretical nature of Bauhaus thought, the roots of American Modernist design become evident.

Josef Albers (1888-1976), a German-born glass artisan before he studied and taught at the Bauhaus, in Weimar (later in Dessau and Berlin), Germany, was highly theoretical in his approach to art and design. He strongly believed that through experimentation within carefully structured limits, a student's powers of observation increased, promoting a greater understanding of life and thereby a greater good for society.

These Utopian ideals were shared by Hungarian-born Lazlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), but practiced in very different ways. Moholy was more interested in the meeting of art and technology than in aesthetic theory. Collage and assemblage, using a huge array of industrial and found materials, from machined aluminum to Bakelite, were central to his work.

The first section of the show focuses on the involvement Albers and Moholy had with the Bauhaus, where their paths overlapped briefly, between 1923 and 1928. Among the works from this period are Albers's glass constructions, examples of his largely unknown photographic work, his machine engravings, furniture designs, woodcuts, and some of his early paintings, which are precursors of his later Homage to the Square series. Also featured are a wide selection of Moholy's innovative photographs, including his camera-less photograms, a color slide show, and his assemblages using industrial materials. Books and typeface designs by Bauhaus colleagues, including artists Paul Klee, Theo van Doesburg, and Piet Mondrian, and architect Walter Gropius, further demonstrate the creative explosion of the Bauhaus years.

One of the highlights of the exhibition is Moholy-Nagy's Light Prop for an Electric Stage, a reconstruction of his 1930 kinetic work made especially for the exhibition and said to be one of the earliest examples of installation art. There is also a silent film that captures the multitudinous light effects produced by the piece in motion.

In 1933, the Nazis shut down the Bauhaus. Albers and his wife Anni, a textile designer, emigrated to the Untied States, where Albers took a teaching post at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, until 1949, when he moved to New Haven to head Yale University's Department of Design. After a brief stay in London, Moholy-Nagy made his way to Chicago, where he founded the short-lived New Bauhaus, then The School of Design, which in 1944 became the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology.

The second part of the exhibition presents work produced by the two artists in the United States. Each ceaselessly pushed the boundaries of his established artistic practices, again with very different results. Albers found the transition to living in America easy, and he returned to painting for the first time since his student days. He began a process of experiments in color and optical perception that later culminated in his well known series, Homage to the Square; a number of these are on view. Pages from The Interaction of Color, his findings on color theory, are also here. This seminal 1963 publication influenced a generation of American artists and designers, and contributed to the emergence of the Op Art movement in the 1960s.

Moholy-Nagy, on arriving in Chicago and under the sponsorship of a corporate giant, found that the utopian spirit that infused the Bauhaus years was missing in wartime America. He was profoundly shaken by the dawn of the nuclear age and suffering from the effects of terminal leukemia. Nevertheless he continued his work, producing paintings of great delicacy and light.

Individual pieces by students of these great teachers present a striking view of the power of experimentation in art. Students of Albers at Black Mountain College, given the unifying directive to create the effects of transparency and light on a flat surface, made works of vastly different results in a variety of materials and methods. Seen alongside the work of the masters, they show how sustainable the Bauhaus ideals were and how they have become ingrained in many aspects of American modernist design.

For students and teachers of art and design, Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World is a must.

The Whitney Education staff invites educators and school administrators to a special Open House and preview on Friday, November 17, from 4 to 7 pm. Learn about programs and resources available to students and educators, meet and exchange ideas with colleagues, and schedule a school group visit. To register for this free event, please call 212.570.7745.

For teachers, students, and anyone who needs a crash course on Albers, Moholy-Nagy and the Bauhaus, a Teacher's Pac is available online from the Tate Modern, which produced this exhibition.

(Top image) László Moholy-Nagy, A 19, 1927 (detail) © Hattula Moholy-Nagy / DACS
(Bottom image) Joseph Albers, Repetition Against Blue, 1943
(detail) © The Joseph and Anni Albers Foundation / VG Bild-Krunst and DACS