It’s possible to imagine that “Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World,” which opens today at the Whitney Museum of American Art, could have been a more visually exciting mix-and-match of European Modernism and Bauhaus experimentation, presented at the key juncture when those revolutionary ideas were transplanted to American soil. But it would be hard. The show is full of promise; and the exhibition, which has also been featured at London’s Tate Modern and at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld in Germany, is placed at the Whitney, a building designed by Marcel Breuer. Breuer, Josef Albers (1888–1976), and László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) were all three Europeans who taught together at the Bauhaus and, later, immigrated, independently, to America, where they established reputations as influential artists and educators, spreading Modernism and Bauhaus ideas.

The exhibition, organized by the Tate’s Achim Borchardt-Hume and the Whitney’s Carter Foster, is set up as a “posthumous dialogue” between Albers and Moholy-Nagy. These two abstract artists crossed paths for five years while they both were professors at the Bauhaus, but ultimately they have little in common.

Albers and Moholy-Nagy were artistically experimental Modernists who worked in various mediums, and they were also influential teachers. (The show, which includes work by their students, is representative of their broad interests.) But the artists’ differences overpower their similarities. And their uniqueness, as in most of this kind of show organized in terms of “dialogue,” is overshadowed in the exhibition by the struggle in the work to attempt to fit into or fill out the curators’ thesis regarding a simpatico relationship.

It seems that when in doubt about how or why to organize a show these days, the au courant curatorial answer is to force two artists together as if they were bosom buddies or gladiators at the Colosseum. This organizing principle, if the exhibition does not really gel, leaves viewers with no recourse than to demand either a marriage or a victor. Moholy-Nagy is a richer, more inventive and engaging artist than Albers. This neither serves, nor helps us to understand, either artist. Not only could both artists have been better represented in the exhibition, which often throws their works together for little visually apparent reason, they also could have been better served with separate retrospectives.

The Bauhaus (1919–33), the most influential art school of the 20th century, strived to unite art, industry, and technology; artist and craftsperson; painting, sculpture, photography, film, theater, architecture, and design. The Hungarian-born Moholy-Nagy, one of the strongest proponents of this concept and of embracing new materials such as plastic, helped to establish Russian Constructivism at the school. After he resigned from the Bauhaus in 1928, he founded the New Bauhaus (now the Institute of Design of the Illinois Institute of Technology) in Chicago in 1937. Moholy-Nagy published widely, and produced paintings, sculpture, and films. He worked as a set, costume, and graphic designer, and he made kinetic, motor-driven sculpture (“light-space modulators,” arguably the first installation art), as well as groundbreaking, experimental photographic images.

The strongest works in the exhibition are his. One of the high points is that of his “Light prop for an Electric Stage” (1928–30), a mobile construction in various metals, plastic, and wood. The revolving, kinetic sculpture, or machine, which methodically turns, rises, and falls, producing noises, moving shadows, and reflections, suggests a marriage of sci-fi weapon, surgical instrument, and kitchen appliance. Captivating to watch, as if it were a mechanical creature without its skin, the gleaming sculpture still feels like something sent here from the future.

The sculpture is accompanied in the show by “Light Play: Black-White-Grey” (1930), a montage film the artist made of the sculpture, in which close-up views flow into one another to create a portrait of the “machine.” The film is like the beautiful, dreamy photograms the artist made, in which odd views, angles, shapes, and framings produce abstract pictures that begin to suggest internal, cosmic, or paranormal realms.

Also engaging are Moholy-Nagy’s delicate photographs and photomontages. Like Dürer and Leonardo before him, as well as his Bauhaus contemporaries Klee, Kandinsky, and Oskar Schlemmer, Moholy-Nagy seemed to be fascinated by breaking the world down into its geometric parts and its movements and energies, and then reconstructing that world through collage. And like the Russian Constructivist Aleksandr Rodchenko, he was fascinated by the odd, at-an-angle surprise a photograph can provide. While in London, he produced photographs to illustrate the book “Eaton Portrait.” In one image, of marching boys practicing at Drill Hall School, taken from an upper window, every element is perfectly balanced in a teetering, almost Cubist, geometric structure. A similar kind of teeter-tottering balance between horizontal and vertical is experienced in the best of his abstract paintings and graphic design, in which transparencies overlap to create solid forms of light in cinematic motion.

The German-born Albers, who taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and later at Yale, is best known as a color theorist who painted a series of works titled “Homage to the Square.”Yet he was also a designer of furniture, textiles, graphic works, and stained, etched, sandblasted, and painted glass. A couple of pieces of Albers’s well-designed furniture are in the Whitney’s exhibition, as well as some of his exceptional graphic design, but most of his work in the show falls into the realm of artistic exploration or experimentation, rather than into that of poetry.

Albers was very talented in many respects, especially as an industrial designer, but as a photographer he is a tinker compared with Moholy-Nagy; and as a painter he remained a theorist whose art could not transcend its pedagogy. Albers may have been a great teacher, but his artworks are generally academic, cold, and clinical, as if they were the professor’s demonstrations of solved problems. His geometric abstractions rarely move beyond that of decorative patterns or illustrations. His color and execution are almost always just short of the mark, and his paintings do not have the pictorial tension or metaphorical layering to achieve any meaningful relationships; because of this, they lack emotional impact and visual presence.

It is also because of Albers’s mediocre work (and the weak late paintings by Moholy-Nagy that the artist did in response to the dropping of the atomic bomb) that the show loses rather than gains momentum. Certainly, this is a must-see show for anyone interested in the Bauhaus or in Modernism — and there are great, if not essential, moments here and there — but at times it can be rather tedious. Loving some of the work of Moholy-Nagy, as I do, I ran up the stairs to see this exhibition — and I left feeling rather heavy footed.

Until January 21 (945 Madison Ave. at 75th Street, 212-570-3600).