Was the Bauhaus a great equalizer? Perhaps that idea was beside the point for its visionary founders, but they did have to confront modernity’s democratically inclusive trajectory, which has consistently pitted mass production and its resultant “low” culture against a reductive aesthetic resistant to populist incursions into the “high” art realm. It fell to the Bauhaus, that iconic institutionalization of avant-garde theory and practice, to attempt a fusion through an educational structure that sought to reconcile art and commerce (with a decided bent for the former). Always a subject for modernist art historians, the Bauhaus is under fresh scrutiny from the generation that evolved from the system established by the school’s exiles in the United States. Its brief and ever-changing existence at mid-twentieth century continues to provoke investigation, aided by the availability of information heretofore withheld by East German authorities. Interest in the contradictions within Bauhaus pedagogy has recently increased, as the effects of a curriculum grounded in both design and fine art has become apparent in contemporary practice, evident in the 2008 symposium, “Bauhaus Palimpsest: The Object of Discourse,” mounted at Harvard (bastion of tradition as well as home to Walter Gropius in exile) by HGCEA, the Historians of...