Pioneering vision

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Here are more than 300 works in yet another mammoth exhibition at Tate Modern. Perhaps the sheer size of it puts people off, though many of those I have spoken to on my travels through the art world hardly knew the show was on. Perhaps the Bauhaus tag puts people off, with its inescapable connotations of didacticism, though this doesn’t seem to have deterred the public from visiting the V&A’s Modernism blockbuster, which also celebrates the Bauhaus aesthetic. Likewise the Utopian thrust of such teaching is perhaps felt to be irrelevant — the belief in progress and the possibility of a better world. To contemporary cynics such idealism must seem ludicrous, and yet it contains the seed of all art — the credo of possibility and change. Albers and Moholy-Nagy, both wrought in the Modernist forge of Weimar Germany, were great believers in the redemptive power of art.