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.

Airfare and travel to Germany

Until you have gotten an official notification to the Study Abroad program, you probably shouldn't purchase a ticket to Germany. But you can be thinking about finding your preferred route and airfare. For most of you, I recommend flying into the Düsseldorf airport (DUS). It's a relatively small international airport, easy to find your way around and provides EXCELLENT direct train travel to our final destination (Essen, Steele.)

Most of you will leave from SLC on Saturday morning. You'll probably change planes in either Chicago or Atlanta and land in Düsseldorf on Sunday morning. Usually students arrive fairly early: 7:30 or 8:30. We can't check into Grend until about noon, so there's no point in rushing things. I will come to the airport around 9:30 and collect everyone. Then we'll travel together to Steele. We'll leave for Essen-Steele at or about 10:30 am. I'll give you a lot more detail about this topic later, but this is what you need to know to make a selection for your flight.

You are not required to follow this plan. Some of you may decide to make other travel plans. If you wanted to leave a week early and spend time in England, for example, you may wind up on a very different schedule. But if you land in Düsseldorf before about 10 am on Sunday morning, I'll collect you and cover all of your local transportation costs to Steele.

Now, take a look at the map below:

You can see that there are many other possible airports that are reasonably close by. What if you wanted to arrive at an airport other than DUS? Can you do that? The answer is yes, if you plan for it and are ready for some adventure. One possibility would be to fly into the Dortmund airport: DTM. I've been out there and it's a hub airport for EasyJet. Travel to and from the Dortmund airport isn't as easy as Düsseldorf, but if you're going to save $200, $300 or $400, maybe you're ready for a little difficulty. I recommend avoiding the Weeze airport: NRN (so called because it used to be named the Niederrein Airport.) It's even further out and very hard to reach by public transit. Airfare websites will sometimes refer to Weeze as "the other" Düsseldorf airport. It's very misleading. Weeze is not near Düsseldorf. Don't be fooled.

But you might look at fares to Köln/Bonn or some of the other possibilities. If you can save enough money to cover the train ticket you'll have to buy, it might be a good idea. Also, if you are spending a week in London or another European city before our program begins, you can probably get a really cheap RyanAir or EasyJet flight to Germany and they usually fly into the smaller airports.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Düsseldorf_Airport

Begin to explore schedules and flights now. If you learn of particularly good opportunities, share them with others by way of the FB group. Now that the trip is fully enrolled, I'll put some pressure on the Study Abroad office to make final approval for the trip and allow us to move ahead with ticket purchase. If you have questions about air travel, please let me know. I'm not an expert, but I do have some experience.