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ESSAYS

Magazines As Sites of Intersection:

A New Look at the BAUHAUS and
VKhUTEMAS
By Meghan Forbes Posted on September 26, 2018

The Vkhutemas school in Moscow has often been termed the "Soviet Bauhaus" due
to its temporal and pedagogical proximity to its more famous German counterpoint.
This essay argues, however, that the two schools in fact operated independently of
each other, with choice moments of mutual exchange, focusing on the site of the
avant-garde magazine as evidence of this. A vitrine exhibition at MoMA Library—
BAUHAUS ↔ VKhUTEMAS: Intersecting Parallels, on view through October 26, 2018
—features many of the materials discussed below.

In the early twentieth century, two institutions of radical pedagogy—the Bauhaus in

1919 and VkhUTEMAS,1 which was established in 1920 as the successor to
SVOMAS,2 set up in 1918—developed in tandem and more than a thousand miles
apart. Points of comparisons between the German and Russian schools of
architecture and design are notable: both were founded with state support in the
years directly following the First World War on principles of structural
interdisciplinarity, and both were shuttered by the early 1930s. But there were also
significant material and philosophical differences between the two, rooted as they
were in disparate economic and political circumstances.

Vkhutemas is often referred to in relation to its more famous counterpart as the

“Soviet Bauhaus,” relegating it to the diminutive other, and belying an assumption
of a flow of influence from West to East. In fact, an exchange of ideas moved in
both directions, though only occasionally and partially. In many ways, we are
looking at two distinct schools existing at the same time in different places, with
some salient points of productive contact. These points were generated through a
variety of modes, including correspondence, exhibitions, and travel (in the form of
student exchanges and guest lectures).

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Interior spread featuring work from Vkhutemas in Adolf Behne. Der moderne Zweckbau (The Modern
Functional Building). (Munich Berlin Vienna: Drei Masken Verlag, 1926). The Museum of Modern Art Library

The intersections were likewise made visible and further encouraged in magazine
publications. This platform was used across the interwar avant-gardes to
strategically signal transnational alignments and to cross-promote the work of
other movements, as well as to engage in a public dialogue about avant-garde
aesthetics and their social utility. In Moscow, the magazine Sovremennaia
arkhitektura (Contemporary Architecture) reported on various developments at the
Bauhaus, including an article in its very first issue on the move of the school from
Weimar to Dessau.3 And in the Bauhaus magazine, initiated in 1926, personalities
associated with Vkhutemas were featured. Developments at the Bauhaus and
Vkhutemas were not, of course, only regarded with interest in Germany and Russia,
but also garnered trans-European interest and involvement. To take just one
example, information and images related to both schools were shared with some
frequency in the magazine Stavba (Building) in Prague.4 When one room of the First
Exhibition of Contemporary Architecture, held in Moscow in the summer of 1927,
was dedicated to works from the Bauhaus—“comprising photographs and
drawings of student designs for furniture, ceramics, light fittings, fabrics, and
typographical work”—a reviewer stated that the objects on view “were for the most
part already known to us through the publications of the Bauhaus.”5 In evidence
here is the successful utilization of the increased capacity of the print periodical to

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disseminate images and ideas in the early twentieth century more broadly than was
previously imaginable.6

As the magazine has become increasingly valued as an important material site for
telling cultural histories, it behooves us to turn to these dynamic platforms of
exchange to help tease out and complicate the perceived flow of ideas between
Vkhutemas and the Bauhaus. And while certain texts and images pertaining to
either school, its teachers, and students may be well-known in isolation, a holistic,
full-page view of the periodical layout takes into account the curatorial strategies of
its editors, and evidences the connections and mutual points of interaction that
they themselves noted, and found worth highlighting. The examples featured here
speak to the importance of reading the content of a given periodical as it was
published, adding a layer of interpretation to what is available from a close reading
of texts extracted and reprinted elsewhere. It also points to the importance of
researching more fully the print circulation of well-known images.

The magazine ABC: Beiträge zum Bauen, in particular, is considered here for its
rhizomatic properties, as it points to a multiplicity of interconnections in the avant-
garde reaching in several directions. The history of ABC also underscores the
seminal role of El Lissitzky—head of the architectural department at Vkhutemas
before departing for Berlin in 1921, and then upon returning to the school in 1925—
who played a major role not only in making sure that Soviet developments in
architecture and design were known west of Moscow, but also in influencing art
production and theory there.

Sima Ingberman describes ABC, published between 1924 and 1928, as “acclaimed
for its radical Neue Sachlichkeit [New Objectivity] approach to modernism and for
its role in presenting new Russian designs to the West.”7 The latter point can be
attributed to the part that Lissitzky played in developing and designing the
magazine. While in Berlin, Lissitzky was the coeditor and designer of
Veshch/Gegenstand/Objet (with Ilya Ehrenburg) and G (with Hans Richter), two
magazines that were instrumental in circulating information about Soviet
Constructivist art and architecture internationally.8 Mart Stam, who initiated ABC,
had met Lissitzky in Berlin that same year; Stam would go on to lecture at the
Bauhaus from 1928 to 1929 (when the school was in Dessau and under the
directorship of Hannes Meyer). He sought the editorial guidance of Lissitzky for
ABC, which Lissitzky willingly provided, and in exchange, Lissitzky “encouraged

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the group [of ABC editors] to join the network of small international constructivist
magazines that he promoted.”9

The real fulfillment of this suggestion is evident in the second volume of ABC, each
issue of which came in a bright orange wrapper with big and bold black letters
(another contribution by Lissitzky that was, at the time, becoming a familiar trope in
New Typography and Constructivist graphic design) that follows a practice
common across the interwar avant-garde magazines of cross-promoting and
signaling aesthetic alignments through advertisement. The Bauhausbücher series
and publications by Adolf Behne, Le Corbusier, and Lissitzky are advertised on the
inside front cover, and a list of international magazines, including Blok in Warsaw,
G in Berlin, MA in Vienna, and Stavba in Prague, is printed at the back.

Cover of ABC: Beiträge zum Bauen, no. 1, vol. 2 (Basel, 1926). The Museum of Modern Art Library

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Interior front cover of ABC: Beiträge zum Bauen, no. 1, vol. 2 (Basel, 1926). The Museum of Modern Art
Library

interior back cover of ABC: Beiträge zum Bauen, no. 1, vol. 2 (Basel, 1926). The Museum of Modern Art
Library

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Lissitzky’s editorial hand is also evident in a series of issues from the first volume of
ABC. In the second issue, in 1924, a student work from Nikolai Ladovsky’s core
course on “Space” at Vkhutemas is pictured.10 Running alongside the image (of a
proposal for a factory tower) is an announcement that the next issue of ABC will
offer a “report on the problems and goals of the new Russian architecture (with
illustrations).”11 As advertised, the following issue, a double issue which centered
on the theme of “Concrete” (and including work by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who
would later become the third and final director of the Bauhaus in 1930), features on
its front page an article entitled “Russian Architecture,” which introduces Vladimir
Tatlin’s model for the Pamiatnik III Internatsionala (Monument to the Third
International). It also presents another student work for the same project
highlighted in the previous issue, and on the last page, an advertisement by
Lissitzky for his own Berlin atelier. The now-iconic photomontaged self-portrait, of
a hand holding a protractor, overlaid on a head shot of the artist, with graph paper
behind, is a visual manifesto of Constructivist, rationalized tendencies. The hand
with protractor is repeated (without the artist’s visage) on the cover of the now
most famous Vkhutemas publication, which was published by the school’s in-
house print shop in 1927.

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El Lissitzky. Arkhitektura VKhUTEMAS. Raboty arkhitekturnogo fakul'teta VKhUTEMASa, 1920-1927

(Architecture of VKhUTEMAS: The Works of the Department of Architecture, 1920-1927). 1927. The Museum
of Modern Art, New York. Gift of The Judith Rothschild Foundation

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Back page of ABC: Beiträge zum Bauen, no. 2, vol. 1 (Basel, 1924; repr., Baden: Verlag Lars Müller, 1993). The
Museum of Modern Art Library

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Front page of ABC: Beiträge zum Bauen, no. 3-4, vol. 1 (Basel, 1925; repr., Baden: Verlag Lars Müller, 1993).
The Museum of Modern Art Library

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Back page of ABC: Beiträge zum Bauen, no. 3-4, vol. 1 (Basel, 1925; repr., Baden: Verlag Lars Müller, 1993).
The Museum of Modern Art Library

Perhaps the most compelling instance of the interactions between figures

associated with both the Bauhaus and Vkhutemas showcased in ABC comes in a
special issue from 1926 that was guest-edited by Meyer. As described in the
commentary from a reprint of the magazine, Meyer’s issue “presents a
representative, international cross section of currents in the constructivist art of the
twenties.”12 One double-page spread includes two works by Lissitzky as well as
models by Naum Gabo13 and Kazimir Malevich, two other Vkhutemas affiliates. The
band of text that runs alongside these illustrations is an excerpt from the
typographer Jan Tschichold’s “Die neue Gestaltung” (“New Design”), which was
featured in an issue of Typographische Mitteilungen (Typographic News) from 1925
that Tschichold guest-edited, and is followed by a brief text by Lissitzky. This
particular excerpt from Tschichold walks through a series of isms, from
Impressionism and Cubism to Dada and Suprematism (of which Malevich is the
exemplary figure) to Proun and Constructivism (both associated with Lissitzky), and
it ends with a description of the Bauhaus and Vkhutemas—rather than with two
more isms. The editorial decision to excerpt the original text to cut off at this point

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and not later suggests that Meyer deliberately chose to emphasize the march of
early twentieth-century artistic developments as having reached its apex in these
two schools, which are described by Tschichold as “independently parallel
movements.”14 Tschichold emphasizes that while contemporary and comparable,
Vkhutemas and the Bauhaus “were founded independently and inadvertently at
almost the exact same time, and consistently carried out their work along the same
path; that is, in the shared conviction that only in the integration of all artistic work
as construction [Bau] does it become meaningful.”15 In short, and to return to the
argument with which I opened, while the two schools came together ideologically
on critical points, emblematic of the general avant-garde vision across the
European continent in the interwar period, they were working independently of
each other, different trains on parallel tracks occasionally stopping in the same
station.

Interior spread of ABC: Beiträge zum Bauen, no. 2, vol. 2 (Basel, 1926). The Museum of Modern Art Library

Notably, Tschichold dates the inception of Vkhutemas to 1918, which, in fact,

marks the beginning of SVOMAS. This timing also contradicts the assumptions that
the Bauhaus, founded in 1919, and its pedagogical mission served as models for
Vkhutemas. In fact, Lissitzky, in 1927, would go so far as to suggest that Walter
Gropius, the founding director of the Bauhaus, was influenced by Vkhutemas,
claiming: “Rumors of the revolution in Russian artistic life, and fragmentary
information about the structure of the Vkhutemas had percolated into Germany.

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Walter Gropius gathered avant-garde artists around himself, and was fortunate to
be put in charge of part of the former Academy of Weimar.”16 While Tschichold and
Lissitzky did their part to set the insemination of Vkhutemas before the Bauhaus,
as Christina Lodder rightly points out, “The Vkhutemas, as such, did not exist at
the time the Bauhaus was founded, and it is difficult to imagine that the relatively
chaotic State Free Art Studios could have had any precise influence on the German
school.”17

In terms of establishing influence, the question is not so much who came first, but
rather where points of intersection are visible and, in the case of the magazines,
visualized. Where Tschichold’s text in its original appearance in Typographische
Mitteilungen ends with a discussion of photography and film, it is telling that Meyer,
in his special issue of ABC, cuts it short to conclude with a study of these two
architectural schools. Meyer would be appointed by Gropius the following year to
lead the newly formed architectural workshops, and would take over as director in
1928, orienting the school in a more clearly socialist direction, and attempting to
forge interactions with its Eastern counterpart.18 Meyer’s special issue of ABC is a
harbinger of the networks that he would aim to cultivate from within the Bauhaus.

In the same year that Meyer put out his special issue of ABC, Lissitzky, now back
in Moscow, edited (with Ladovsky) the single issue of Izvestia ASNOVA (The
Bulletin of the New Association of Architects). This was the publication of an
organization of the same name, which was established in 1923 in Moscow by
Ladovsky and his Vkhutemas colleagues Nikolai Dokuchaev and Vladimir Krinsky.19
The front page, which employs the bold black lines of Constructivist typography,
bears a striking resemblance to ABC, and indeed a horizontal line of text advertises
the “international figures” who will appear in the publication, including ABC founder
Stam, along with another editor Emil Roth. Adolf Behne and Le Corbusier, who had
had work advertised in ABC, are also named. And Karel Teige, an editor at Stavba
is listed as well. Similar to the other Central and Eastern European avant-garde
magazines of the time not published in German, basic editorial information is
included in Russian, German, and French, indicating—along with the graphic
legibility of New Typographic tendencies—an ambition to be circulated and read
beyond the Russian linguistic zone.

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Cover of Izvestia ASNOVA (Moscow, 1926). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Jan Tschichold Collection,
Gift of Philip Johnson

The few examples offered above, with emphasis on a single periodical, should
evince the potentiality for mapping an extensive network of the protagonists who
were observing, sharing, commenting upon, and comparing developments at the
Bauhaus and the Vkhutemas in the 1920s. The Czech example of Stavba, too,
reminds that this exchange was not insular, and that plenty more examples can be
summoned to better grasp the extended influence and interchanges of these two

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schools of modern architecture and design. In turn, more attention to such

research will help us to better understand the legacies of both institutions.

1. The acronym for Vysshie khudozhestvenno-tekhnicheskie masterskie (Higher state artistic and technical
studios).

2. The acronym for Svobodnye gosudarstvennye khudozhestvennye masterskiye (Free state art studios).

3. Christina Lodder, “The VKhUTEMAS and the Bauhaus,” in The Avant-Garde Frontier: Russia Meets the West,
1910–1930, eds. Gail Harrison Roman and Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt (Gainsville: University Press of Florida,
1992), 214.

4. Stavba was an important Czech architectural magazine that played a seminal role in garnering collaboration
between the Bauhaus and members of a young, leftist avant-garde in Czechoslovakia. After being shown a
copy of Stavba by the architect Adolf Behne, the first Bauhaus director, Walter Gropius, wrote to Karel Teige,
one of the magazine’s editors and a leading figure of the group Devětsil, asking for assistance in recruiting work
by Czech architects for the 1923 Bauhaus “International Architecture” exhibition. For more on this connection,
and the further development of this relationship, please see my article “‘To Reach Over the Border’: An
International Conversation Between the Bauhaus and Devětsil,” in Umění/Art, Journal of the Institute of Art
History in Prague, 64, nos. 3–4 (December 2016): 291–303. In volume 2 of Stavba, from 1923, Behne provides
articles in distinct issues on both Russian and German art. Behne, apparently known by the nickname of
"Ekkehard," or "loyal guard, loyal friend," introduced a range of important figures who would come to have
some association with the Bauhaus, including László Moholy-Nagy (who joined the faculty in 1923) and El
Lissitzky (an instructor at Vkhutemas who lived in Berlin in the early 1920s). Éva Forgács, The Bauhaus Idea and
Bauhaus Politics, trans. John Bátki (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1995), 21. Behne also
included in his 1927 publication Der moderne Zweckbau two images from the Vkhutemas, of student and
faculty work.

5. Lodder, “The VKhUTEMAS and the Bauhaus,” 213. Review by N. Markovnikov, “O vystavske sovremennoi
arkhitektury” (“Concerning the Exhibition of Contemporary Architecture”), in Izvestia (8 July 1927). Reprinted in
Khazanova, et al., Iz istorii sovetskoi arkhitektury 1926-1932 Vol. 1 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Nauka, 1970), 80.

6. Many have written on the impact of technological advances in the printing industry, and specifically their impact
on the dissemination of printed matter in the early twentieth century. See, for instance, Claire Badaracco,
Trading Words: Poetry, Typography, and Illustrated Books in the Modern Literary Economy (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1995); Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art,
1909–1923 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Robin Kinross, Modern Typography: An Essay in
Critical History (London: Hyphen Press, 1992); and Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulffman, Modernism in the
Magazines : An Introduction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

7. Sima Ingberman, ABC: International Constructivist Architecture, 1922–1939 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994),
xi.

8. Christina Lodder notes that “the first description in print of the overall aim of Vkhutemas (although it was not
cited by name),” was printed in Veshch in February 1922. The statement was made in an article entitled “The
Exhibitions in Russia,” and though unsigned, was likely written by Lissitzky. Lodder 204.

9. Ingberman, ABC, 17.

10. For a nice overview of Ladovsky’s teaching at Vkhutemas, see Anna Bokov, “Space: The Pedagogy of Nikolay
Ladovsky,” Walker Art Center, https://walkerart.org/magazine/space-the-pedagogy-of-nikolay-ladovsky.

11. ABC: Beiträge zum Bauen 1, no. 2 (1924): 4. The image featured here is the same student work that appears in
Behne’s Der moderne Zweckbau (Munich, Berlin, Vienna: Drei Masken Verlag, 1926), 56-57.

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12. “The Contents of ABC in Summary,” in ABC: Beiträge zum Bauen, ed. Werner Möller (repr., Baden: Verlag Lars
Müller, 1993), 13.

13. To return to Stavba, this very image had in fact already appeared there in 1924 (vol. 3, no. 6). In a series of
articles that accompany the 1993 reprint of ABC: Beiträge zum Bauen, there is also an article dedicated to the
relationship of ABC and Stavba. See Otakar Máčel, “The New Movement: Stavba and ABC, A Comparison,” in
ABC: Beiträge zum Bauen 1993.

14. Jan Tschichold, “Die neu Gestaltung,” ABC 1, no. 2 (1926): 3. Originally published in Typographische
Mitteilungen Special issue (Oct. 1925): 193-195. Translations from this text are my own.

15. Ibid.

16. El Lissitzky, “Baukhauz.” Quoted in Lodder, “The VKhUTEMAS and the Bauhaus,” 199.

17. Ibid., 200.

18. For instance, in May 1928, Gunta Stölzl traveled to Moscow with two students (Peer Bücking and Arieh Sharon)
“as part of a reciprocal arrangement whereby students of the Vkhutemas school in Moscow had visited the
Bauhaus in the summer of 1927.” Adrian Sudhalter, with research contributions by Dara Kiese, “14 Years
Bauhaus: A Chronicle,” in Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 332. Meyer himself would travel to Moscow after being deposed
from the Bauhaus in 1930, and organize an exhibition of Bauhaus work at the State Museum for New Western
Art there in the summer of 1931.

19. Ingberman, ABC, 13.

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