From Bauhaus to Our House: Workshops for Modernity at MoMA in New York
-
- Enlarge image
- The reconstructed director's office of Walter Gropius at the Bauhaus University in Weimar in December 1999. The room was furnished as a work of art in 1923. It lies in the main building of the university which was declared a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1996.
- (© dpa - International)
The retrospective "Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity", presented in collaboration with a consortium of the three Bauhaus collections in Germany (Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin; Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau; and Klassik Stiftung Weimar), is the first comprehensive treatment of the Bauhaus at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York since 1938 and the first major show in the United States on the subject in decades.
MoMA notes on its website that "the Bauhaus brought together artists, architects, and designers in an extraordinary conversation about the nature of art in the age of technology. Aiming to rethink the very form of modern life, the Bauhaus became the site of a dazzling array of experiments in the visual arts that have profoundly shaped our visual world today."
With a wide diversity of objects, including examples of industrial design, furniture, graphics, film, photography, book design, weaving, theater, painting, and sculpture, the exhibition highlights the school's revolutionary ideas of artistic education and production, as well as its enduring influence.
-
- Enlarge image
- "Stahlrohrmöbel", or furniture made of steel tubing, by Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1927 to 1930 in the Bauhaus Museum in Weimar, Germany, where the Bauhaus was founded in 1919.
- (© dpa - Fotoreport)
Several of the key objects in the exhibition have never been shown in the US. Representing an innovative pedagogical approach, works by Bauhaus masters and top pupils - including Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Marianne Brandt, Marcel Breuer, Lyonel Feininger, Walter Gropius, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, Lucia Moholy, Lilly Reich, Oskar Schlemmer, and Gunta Stölzl - will be complemented by little-known student work created in the school's workshops, thereby illustrating the collective nature of ideas. Other important themes explored in the exhibition and catalogue are the school's strategy of self-promotion, its connection with industrial production and commerce and the question of authorship.
The exhibition was presented at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin in summer 2009 in celebration of the 90th anniversary of the school's foundation, and the show has now traveled to New York during MoMA's 80th anniversary year, where it is on display from November 8 to January 25, 2010.
Related Links:
