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January 23, 2008
Kathleen James-Chakraborty, ed. Bauhaus Culture: From Weimar to the Cold War Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. 246 pp.; 59 b/w ills. Paper $25.00 (9780816646883)
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John V. Maciuika Before the Bauhaus: Architecture, Politics, and the German State, 1890–1920 New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 386 pp.; 129 b/w ills. Cloth $91.00 (9780521790048)

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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...