In 1938, a very young Museum of Modern Art mounted its first show on the Bauhaus without an official headquarters, spending over half its exhibition budget for the year — a depression year — and negotiating the loan of controversial work from a country under Nazi rule. The endeavor helped mature the museum’s identity, which in turn strengthened popular conceptions of the Bauhaus, steering both to a powerful, though somewhat exaggerated, claim on whitewashed modernity.

Now, 70 years later, MoMA revisits the fabled German school for art, design, and architecture with a corrective lens and a refreshed emphasis in “Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity,” a finely researched display of more than 400 objects culled from numerous private and public collections. With some exceptions, many of the pieces are making their debut at the museum and in the United States, having until now only appeared in photographic reproductions. A special emphasis on the opening and closing years of the Bauhaus, two moments that traditional scholarship has tended to gloss over, brings the well known but often misrepresented movement into sharper focus. Among many noteworthy pieces, highlights include plates for an abstract color movie by Kurt Kranz (a premonition of more recent trends in painting), rustic ornamental furniture designs by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, and Moholy-Nagy’s fabled “Telephone pictures” (ordered over the phone, not painted). Overall, the show, on view until January 25, 2010, presents a dense and historically sensitive picture in which the richness, variety, and coherence of Bauhaus creation claims center stage and its single-minded modernism is thrown into question.

Just as the Bauhaus surveyed the crossroads of modern art’s multiple personalities, from Expressionism to Dada, “Workshops for Modernity” offers itself as a Rosetta stone for the complex network of art practices that is today’s contemporary scene. The exhibition opens with a blow-up of a 1928 Bauhaus collage that looks as if the school were posing in their version of “Laugh In.” The image offers a hint at the show’s main tactic — the curators have grouped objects for visual conversation, regardless of medium or function. Taking this cue, ARTINFO has invited two contemporary practitioners known for moving across disciplines, artist Sarah Morris and architect Charles Renfro, to consider the continuously surprising Bauhaus legacy, and how their own work relates.

Click on the photo gallery at left to read what Morris and Renfro's have to say.