Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity

The Bauhaus Masters on the roof of the Bauhaus building in Dessau, December 5, 1926

In 2011, the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted it's first major exhibition since 1938 on the subject of the Bauhaus School in Germany. The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 and shut down by the Nazis in 1933. It brought together artists, architects, and designers in an extraordinary conversation about the nature of art in the age of technology. Artists and teachers at the Bauhaus wanted to rethink the very form of modern life and the school became the site of a wide array of experiments in the visual arts that have profoundly shaped our visual world today.



The Bauhaus school and the artists that worked there are the focus of the art history course that forms the hub of our curriculum this coming summer in Germany. As we'll be discussing, the significance of the Bauhaus for the path that Modernism later took can't be overemphasized and the individuals of the Bauhaus faculty were often influential in their own careers that followed the closing of the Bauhaus by the Nazis in 1933.

The exhibition at the MOMA showed four hundred works that reflected the broad range of the school’s productions, including industrial design, furniture, architecture, graphics, photography, textiles, ceramics, theater design, painting, and sculpture, many of which had never before been exhibited in the United States. It included not only works by the school’s famous faculty and best-known students—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—but also a broad range of works by innovative but less well-known students, suggesting the collective nature of ideas. There was an excellent catalog of the show and I'll be using some parts of that book in lectures I'll give about the Bauhaus both before we leave and after we're in Germany. Plus, with visits to the Quadrat Museum in Bottrop, The Bauhaus Archive in Berlin and the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Köln planned for this year's Study Abroad in Germany program, we'll be seeing everything that was on exhibition in Manhattan and more besides.