Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy and the Bauhaus

The website for the 2006 exhibit Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World at the Tate Modern in London looks pretty blah until you start clicking on some of the links. The room guide seems to be just a line drawing of the exhibit space, but if you click on a room number, then you get to see a short description of the collection in that room, and some small images. If you're lucky, there will be some larger images on a separate page. Unfortunately, there are quite a few 'not available' images, but the ones that are there are quite good, although they could be larger.

One of the pleasant surprises on the site is found under the 'Online film' tab. Four different people discuss the work of both artists, and, if some of their words are hard to understand, there is a transcript so you can read along as they speak. In fact, most tabs link to actual useful content - the teachers pack (in PDF format) has material which is not just for teachers school children. It poses questions and suggests activities that help any aspiring artist explore their own creative process. The Resources tab leads to a list of writings by Albers and Moholy-Nagy and works at the Take by the artists. Unfortunately, there is only one by Moholy-Nagy and there are many by Albers that are not online.

The best resource listed is the TATE ETC magazine. The links listed here are to those articles about the two artists in the exhibit, but when you click on those links, they lead to more articles and other collections. The magazine is available in paper by subscription but the articles are also available online back to the first issue in 2004. The Wikipedia entry for the magazine lists articles (with links) from an early version as well. Another absolutely wonderful online journal I found is Tate Papers, which also goes back as far as 2004 and is available in full text online. It is comprised of research papers and would be really valuable to students writing their own papers.

Back to the artists who are in the Tate exhibit: The very good site of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation includes just about everything you would want to know about both of these artists and an exhaustive set of galleries of their work. The Moholy-Nagy Foundation site has lots of images of work (again not large enough), but I would have liked to see better (at least some) linking to exhibits.

The New York Times published an article about this same exhibit when it appeared at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art - which has no online resources for this show - they didn't really start doing online exhibits until early this year.