Three degrees of Bauhaus

Exhibition at Sheldon runs through April 9

Case in point, The Bauhaus Legacy in St. Louis: Woodcuts by Werner Drewes, Leslie Laskey, and Jim Harris, a new exhibition at the Sheldon Art Galleries, 3648 Washington Ave., which traces the famous German design school's influence through three generations of Washington University printmakers.

Founded by architect Walter Gropius in 1919, the Bauhaus eschewed ornament and decoration for a spare, classically proportioned functionality. Its embrace of modern, industrial materials and rigorous exploration of process can still be felt in everything from skyscrapers to furniture, graphics and typography.

Photo by Kevin Lowder

Leslie Laskey (left) and James R. Harris, professor emeritus and professor of architecture, respectively, discuss a self-portrait by the late Werner Drewes (1899-1985), a fellow University printmaker. Woodcuts by all three men are the subject of a new exhibition, The Bauhaus Legacy in St. Louis, now on view at the Sheldon Art Galleries, 3648 Washington Ave.

Though closed by the Nazis in 1933, many Bauhaus practitioners soon came to the United States, among them Lászlò Moholy-Nagy, who in 1938 launched the Institute of Design in Chicago (later subsumed by the Illinois Institute of Technology). At Washington University, painter and printmaker Werner Drewes -- who studied at the Bauhaus in 1921-22 and 1927-28 -- taught in the School of Art from 1946 until his retirement in 1965. (He passed away in 1985.)

Drewes' enthusiasm for the woodcut, with its bold contrasts and direct transmission between hand and image, was soon matched by that of his friend Leslie Laskey, a student of Moholy-Nagy who arrived on campus in 1959. Laskey, who retired in 1989, used his Bauhaus training to found architecture's basic design program, where his students included current architecture Associate Professor James R. Harris, who first joined the faculty 1973.

From Gropius to Drewes to the School of Art, from Gropius to Moholy-Nagy to Laskey, Harris and the School of Architecture.

"We all have these strong Bauhaus connections," said Harris, who organized the show with Olivia Lahs-Gonzalez, director of the Sheldon Galleries. (Works were drawn from Drewes' estate, Laskey's and Harris' collections, and private collections, including the University's Gallery of Art.)

Yet despite the common genealogies, Harris describes Bauhaus as "three one-person shows," from which three distinct personalities emerge. For example, where Drewes' vertical composition Redwoods (1957) is an elegantly shambling expressionist landscape, Laskey's similarly composed Blossoms (c. 1960) is more restless and energetic, a precarious pile of line and spheres that suggests mechanics as much as nature.

"Blossoms" by Leslie Laskey, woodcut, c. 1960s.

Meanwhile, Harris' Glyphs series (1999) reveals him as the company abstractionist, neatly balancing a collection of blocks, arranged in various configurations, against simple yet boldly articulated shapes in gold leaf.

"There's not really a Bauhaus model for woodcuts. It's more an attitude about material and process and experimentation," Harris said. "All three of us work very directly on the block -- it's not that we make a drawing and then cut the drawing. The cutting process is where the design takes place, and that's the fun of it.

"As you cut things away, you start to get shapes that you would never have drawn."

Harris, who began creating woodcuts while on sabbatical seven years ago, added that he continues to spend a few weeks each summer studying the medium under Laskey's direction.

"Leslie was my instructor back in the '60s, now he's my instructor again," Harris said, smiling broadly. "And I'm still terrified of him."

Appropriately, the Sheldon also is hosting a second Washington University woodcut exhibition, Tom Huck: Recent Work. Huck, lecturer in the School of Art, has begun to attract national attention for his freewheeling, intricately detailed chronicles of life in his hometown of Potosi, Mo.

Bauhaus and Recent Works run through April 9 and May 14, respectively. Gallery hours are Monday and Tuesday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.; Tuesday, 7-9 p.m.; Saturday 10 a.m.-2 p.m. and one hour before Sheldon performances and during intermission.