Rootstock of radicalism

London is about to experience two exhibitions about early 20th-century Modernism. The V&A is mounting a substantial themed display of design, art, film and life, based primarily on France and Germany before 1930. Tate Modern will exhibit jointly the work of two faculty members of the Bauhaus, Josef Albers and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. In anticipation, two exhibitions outside London demonstrate outgrowths from this core of experience, supposedly the rootstock of radicalism in the past 100 years of art and design.

At Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, Starting at Zero: Black Mountain College 1933–57 shows how the European modernist diaspora improbably made one of its significant early landfalls in North Carolina, in a small, underfunded independent arts college. The potter and poet M.C. Richards wrote of its founder, John Andrew Rice, ‘He knew that imagination, intuition, inspiration, are basic to the psyche … A philosophy of education began to form: imagination as fundamental to all learning; artistic making as a model of integrating vision, materials and imagery.’