Art: Superb Puritan

The Bauhaus, that pedagogic test bed of total design that started in Weimar 55 years ago and was shut down by Hitler in 1933, now seems almost as remote as William Morris' workshop or Verrocchio's studio. It has become part of the "golden legend" of modernism. Except for Josef Albers and Marcel Breuer, the chief Bauhaus teachers of art, design and architecture are dead: Kandinsky, Klee, Moholy-Nagy, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe. Even the ideal that hovered above Bauhaus practice —that social conduct could be purified and made better by all-embracing design systems—now...