‘The Whole World a Bauhaus’ Reveals a Movement’s Fault Lines

The centenary exhibition “The Whole World a Bauhaus” is touring the globe, and is now making its only U.S. stop, through April 20, at the Elmhurst Art Museum in the western suburbs of Chicago. (The Elmhurst has earned its stripes, boasting a house on its campus designed by a Bauhaus director, Mies van der Rohe.) More than 400 objects, mostly photographs, are crammed into three galleries of the small museum, and organized around eight broad and somewhat ephemeral themes (“Floating,” “Experiment,” “Encounters,” and so on).

Curated by German art historian Boris Friedewald, the show has the meticulous obsession of a deep dive into the archives. “I want to show that the diversity of the school and its products cannot be reduced to one style,” Friedewald said. But what emerges, once you come up for air, is not a retrospective on the Bauhaus but a picture of the conflicts and factions that shaped it, both within and outside the institution.