The Spirit of the Bauhaus captures the enormous impact of the Bauhaus school and movement on art, design, architecture and the daily lives of generations, guided by The Spirit, main character in the story, beside Otti Berger, Gustav Bohutinsky and Ivana Tomljenović-Meller.
The Spirit of the Bauhaus by Klasja Habjan, published by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, is not a traditional comic book; it is not particularly easy to read, should not be read quickly, and is not just for fun. Instead, it demands and attracts the attention of discerning readers and makes them return to it, discover more, browse, stop at one page, and then turn back to another. The title of the book conceals an ambiguity on which the author builds the multidimensionality of the story throughout the following seventy pages. For her, The Spirit of the Bauhaus means the enormous impact of this school and movement on art, design, architecture and the daily lives of generations to come, on the one hand, while on the other, it is an actual persona, a ghost hovering over the story, observing, witnessing and empathizing. The second aspect allows the artist to insert entirely subjective threads in the historical narrative of the bauhaus and its protagonists. Thus, at one level, the book provides all the basic facts – the history of the school, its most important principles, ideas, methods, and so on – while at another, Klasja’s fiction enriches it with a sense of play, riddle and dreaming, evoking short episodes from life in and around the school, as real testimonies are combined with imagined moments, so that the reader is not sure which they are reading at any given moment. The pages and centrefolds make it feel like a comic book, or perhaps a picture book, a set of info-graphics, or a textbook. All the parts flow smoothly, meaningfully, and truthfully. The Spirit of the Bauhaus has found an excellent advocate in Klasja Habjan, who has certainly identified the key thought that best describes the spirit of this book in the words of Otti Berger: the task of the bauhaus was first and foremost to make the artist human again. — Marko Golub
Available in English and Croatian:
Msu web shop
msu@msu.hr
