Now 100 years old, the Bauhaus still looks just as fresh today as it did when it began. It was a place to experiment and embrace a new creative freedom. Thanks to this philosophy, the Bauhaus still shapes the world around us. Trace The Story of the Bauhaus through the 100 personalities, designs, ideas and events that shaped this monumental movement. Learn about leaders Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, Anni Albers and Wassily Kandinsky; witness groundbreaking events and wild parties that would revolutionise contemporary design; and discover a range of innovative ideas and new ways of thinking.
Art historian Éva Forgács's book is an unusual take on the Bauhaus. She examines the school as shaped by the great forces of history as well as the personal dynamism of its faculty and students. The book focuses on the idea of the Bauhaus - the notion that the artist should be involved in the technological innovations of mechanization and mass production - rather than on its artefacts. Founded in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius and closed down by the Nazis in 1933, the Bauhaus had to struggle through the years of Weimar Germany not only with its political foes but also with the often-diverging personal ambitions and concepts within its own ranks. It is the inner conflicts and their solutions, the continuous modification of the original Bauhaus idea by politics within and without, that make the history of the school and Forgács's account of it dramatic.
Essays, photo-essays, interviews, manifestos, diagrams, and a play explore the varied legacies, influences, and futures of the Bauhaus. What would keep the Bauhaus up at night if it were practicing today? A century after its founding by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany, as an “experimental laboratory of the future,” who are the pioneering experimentalists who reinscribe or resist Bauhaus traditions? This book explores the varied legacies, influences, and futures of the Bauhaus. Many of the animating issues of the Bauhaus—its integration of research, teaching, and practice; its experimentation with materials; its democratization of design; its open-minded, heterogeneous approach to ideas, theories, methods, and styles—remain relevant. The contributors to Bauhaus Futures address these but go further, considering issues that design has largely ignored for the last hundred years: gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and disability. Their contributions take the form of essays, photo-essays, interviews, manifestos, diagrams, and even a play. They discuss, among other things, the Bauhaus curriculum and its contemporary offshoots; Bauhaus legacies at the MIT Media Lab, Black Mountain College, and elsewhere; the conflict between the Bauhaus ideal of humanist universalism and current approaches to design concerned with race and justice; designed objects, from the iconic to the precarious; textile and weaving work by women in the Bauhaus and the present day; and design and technology. Contributors Alice Arnold, Jeffrey Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell, Karen Kornblum Berntsen, Marshall Brown, Stuart Candy, Jessica Charlesworth, Elizabeth J. Chin, Taeyoon Choi, B. Coleman, Carl DiSalvo, Michael J. Golec, Kate Hennessy, Matthew Hockenberry, Joi Ito, Denisa Kera, N. Adriana Knouf, Silvia Lindtner, Shannon Mattern, Ramia Mazé, V. Mitch McEwen, Oliver Neumann, Paul Pangaro, Tim Parsons, Nassim Parvin, Joanne Pouzenc, Luiza Prado de O. Martin, Daniela K. Rosner, Natalie Saltiel, Trudi Lynn Smith, Carol Strohecker, Alex Taylor, Martin Thaler, Fred Turner, Andre Uhl, Jeff Watson, Robert Wiesenberger
In a fleeting fourteen year period, sandwiched between two world wars, Germany's Bauhaus school of art and design changed the face of modernity. With utopian ideals for the future, the school developed a pioneering fusion of fine art, craftsmanship, and technology to be applied across painting, sculpture, design, architecture, film, photography, textiles, ceramics, theatre, and installation. As much an intense personal community as a publicly minded collective, the Bauhaus was first founded by Walter Gropius (1883-1969), and counted Josef and Anni Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, Gunta St lzl, Marianne Brandt and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe among its members. Between its three successive locations in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin, the school fostered charismatic and creative exchange between teachers and students, all varied in their artistic styles and preferences, but united in their idealism and their interest in a "total" work of art across different practices and media. This book celebrates the adventurous innovation of the Bauhaus movement, both as a trailblazer in the development of modernism, and as a paradigm of art education, where an all-encompassing freedom of creative expression and cutting-edge ideas led to functional and beautiful creations.
"Within the space of only 14 years, the Bauhaus permanently altered the course of modern design and Walter Gropius's pedagogical approach revolutionised art schools. Interest in the Bauhaus and Gropius's methods is as lively today as ever*in conscious and unconscious borrowings from his work, or in direct criticism of his ideas. This publication is the only comprehensive account of the main pedagogical concepts behind the work of the Bauhaus. Analytical essays illuminate the various approaches of individual staff members in the Bauhaus, which included Gropius, Hannes Meyer, Mies van der Rohe, Itten, Moholy-Nagy, Albers, Kandinsky, Klee, Schlemmer and Joost Schmidt. Additional chapters investigate the pre-history of the Bauhaus plus its predecessors in matters of art-training, outlining the development of the institution from 1919 to 1933 and the reception of Bauhaus methods in the Weimar Republic, in the 'Third Reich', in both Germanys after the Second World War, and the USA*drawing on otherwise widely-dispersed writings on the Bauhaus as well as on a wide variety of other archive materials."
Few creative movements have been more influential than the Bauhaus, under the leadership of Walter Gropius. The art of the theater commanded special attention. The text in this volume is a loose collection of essays by Oskar Schlemmer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Farkas Molnár (who in an illustrated essay shares his vision of a total theatre space), with an introduction by Bauhaus leader Walter Gropius. Originally published in German in 1924, Die Bühne im Bauhaus was translated by A. S. Wensinger and published by Wesleyan in 1961. It was prepared with the full cooperation of Walter Gropius and his introduction was written specially for this edition. From Bauhaus experiments there emerged a new aesthetic of stage design and presentation, a new concept of "total theater." Its principles and practices, revolutionary in their time and far in advance of all but the most experimental stagecraft today, were largely the work of Oskar Schlemmer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and their students. Profusely illustrated and startling in its typography (the work of Moholy-Nagy), the 1924 volume quickly became a collector's item and is now virtually unobtainable. Those interested in the stage, the modern visual arts, or in the bold steps of the men of genius who broadened the horizons of aesthetic experience will appreciate that this translation is available again.
A fresh look at the influential pedagogy and practice pioneered by the Bauhaus Founded by architect Walter Gropius (1883-1969) in 1919, the Bauhaus was the 20th century's most influential school of art, architecture, and design. After the school was shuttered under pressure from the Nazis in 1933, many Bauhaus artists brought their innovative practices and teaching methods to the United States. Gropius himself accepted a position at Harvard, where he would help establish a collection of Bauhaus material that has since grown to more than 30,000 objects--the largest such collection outside Germany. Harvard in turn became an unofficial center for the Bauhaus in America. Written by established and emerging voices in the field, the scholarship presented here expands on the special link between the two institutions, while highlighting understudied aspects of the Bauhaus, such as weaving, photography, and art made by women. Accompanied by beautiful illustrations--some of never-before-published objects--this book yields fascinating insights for Bauhaus devotees and design aficionados. Distributed for the Harvard Art Museums
Nicholas Fox Weber, for thirty-three years head of the Albers Foundation, spent many years with Anni and Josef Albers, the only husband-and-wife artistic pair at the Bauhaus (she was a textile artist; he a professor and an artist, in glass, metal, wood, and photography). The Alberses told him their own stories and described life at the Bauhaus with their fellow artists and teachers, Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, as well these figures’ lesser-known wives and girlfriends. In this extraordinary group biography, Weber brilliantly brings to life the Bauhaus geniuses and the community of the pioneering art school in Germany’s Weimar and Dessau in the 1920s and early 1930s. Here are: Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, the architect who streamlined design early in his career and who saw the school as a place for designers to collaborate in an ideal setting . . . a dashing hussar, the ardent young lover of the renowned femme fatale Alma Mahler, beginning when she was the wife of composer Gustav Mahler . . . Paul Klee, the onlooker, smoking his pipe, observing Bauhaus dances as well as his colleagues’ lectures from the back of the room . . . the cook who invented recipes and threw together his limited ingredients with the same spontaneity, sense of proportion, and fascination that underscored his paintings . . . Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian-born pioneer of abstract painting, guarding a secret tragedy one could never have guessed from his lively paintings, in which he used bold colors not just for their visual vibrancy, but for their “sound” effects . . . Josef Albers, who entered the Bauhaus as a student in 1920 and was one of the seven remaining faculty members when the school was closed by the Gestapo in 1933 . . . Annelise Else Frieda Fleischmann, a Berlin heiress, an intrepid young woman, who later, as Anni Albers, made art the focal point of her existence . . . Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, imperious, decisive, often harsh, an architect who became director—the last—of the Bauhaus, and the person who guided the school’s final days after SS storm troopers raided the premises. Weber captures the life, spirit, and flair with which these geniuses lived, as well as their consuming goal of making art and architecture. A portrait infused with their fulsome embrace of life, their gift for laughter, and the powerful force of their individual artistic personalities.
The Bauhaus, the school of art and design founded in Germany in 1919 and shut down by the Nazis in 1933, brought together artists, architects and designers in an extraordinary conversation about modern art. Bauhaus 1919-1933, published to accompany a major multimedia exhibition at MoMA, is the first comprehensive treatment of the subject by MoMA since 1938 and offers a new generational perspective on the 20th century's most influential experiment in artistic education. It brings together works in a broad range of mediums, including industrial design, furniture, architecture, graphics, photography, textiles, ceramics, theatre and costume design, and painting and sculpture - many of which have rarely if ever been seen outside of Germany. Featuring about 400 colour plates and a rich range of documentary images, this publication includes two overarching images by the exhibition's curators, Leah Dickerman and Barry Bergdoll, concise interpretive essays on key objects by over twenty leading scholars, and an illustrated, narrative chronology.
