P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
MoMA's Affiliation with P.S.1
Visiting P.S.1
Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity
November 8, 2009–January 25, 2010
The Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Exhibition Gallery, sixth floor
See also:
Bauhaus Lab, an ongoing series of hands-on art-making workshops led by artists, educators, and art historians
Bauhaus Lounge, a relaxing space for further exploration of Bauhaus artists
Read more about the exhibition at INSIDE/OUT, a MOMA/P.S.1 blog.
Shop for Bauhaus-related items at MoMAstore.org
This survey is MoMA’s first major exhibition since 1938 on the subject of this famous and influential school of avant-garde art. Founded in 1919 and shut down by the Nazis in 1933, 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.
The exhibition gathers over four hundred works that reflect 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 have never before been exhibited in the United States. It includes 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.
The exhibition is organized by Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, and Leah Dickerman, Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture.
Presented in cooperation with the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin; the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau; and the Klassik Stiftung Weimar.
The exhibition is made possible by HyundaiCard Company.
Major support is provided by Mrs. Stephen M. Kellen.
Additional funding is provided by Anne and Kenneth Griffin, Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley, and Robert B. Menschel.
The accompanying publication is made possible by The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art.
Related Events
Upcoming
Past
Women and the Bauhaus: Weaving/Anni Albers
The Modern Women’s Project presents a series of four discussions on female members of the Bauhaus whose important contributions have often been overlooked in earlier histories of the school. Tonight’s program, the first in the series, features Nicholas Fox Weber, Executive Director, The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, as he spotlights Anni Albers’s works and experience at the Bauhaus, including her pivotal role in the weaving workshop. Either Leah Dickerman, Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, and co-organizer of Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity, or Adrian Sudhalter, Assistant Research Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, will moderate the conversation. Following the program, Mr. Weber signs copies of his new book The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism (Knopf).
Music at the Bauhaus: A Concert
The interdisciplinary innovations in design, movement, and performance that were characteristic of the Bauhaus had a great impact on the era’s musical vanguard. Several significant composers had ties to the Bauhaus and many others were represented in Bauhaus performances, forging an entirely new musical language that incorporated the school’s unique ethos. In this concert, which accompanies the exhibition Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity, Maria Tegzes, soprano, and Geoffrey Burleson, pianist and Director of Performance Studies and Coordinator of Piano Studies, Music Department, Hunter College, City University of New York, perform selected Bauhaus musical compositions. The program includes pieces by George Antheil, Ferruccio Busoni, Paul Hindemith, Ernst Krenek, Arnold Schoenberg, and Oskar Schlemmer. Burleson also offers introductory commentary, setting the historical context for music at the Bauhaus.
Before and After 1933: The International Legacy of the Bauhaus
The legacy of the Bauhaus has been shaped by the tides of the twentieth century. After the school’s forced closing in 1933, many of its faculty and students left Germany for the Americas, Palestine, South Africa, and elsewhere. Through this diaspora, varied understandings of the Bauhaus proliferated, and over many years it served as a key symbol in intellectual and political debates around the world. In the United States, Bauhaus émigrés were influential teachers of several generations of art and architecture students, both drawing on and transforming pedagogical principles developed at the school. In both parts of divided postwar Germany, the Bauhaus played a weighty symbolic role as an emblem of the aspirations of a new German democratic state. In this one-day symposium, scholars offer new perspectives on aspects of the international legacy of the Bauhaus after 1933 through individual presentations and conversations.
SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE
Germany and the Diaspora to the East
10:00–10:05 Welcome
Glenn Lowry, Director, The Museum of Modern Art
Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art, and co-organizer of Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity
10:05–10:20 Introduction
Leah Dickerman, Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, and co-organizer of Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity
10:20–10:40 The Nazi Party’s Strategic Use of the Bauhaus
Paul Jaskot, Professor of Art History, Department of the History of Art and Architecture, DePaul University
10:40–11:00 Cold War Legacies: The Bauhaus in Divided Germany
Greg Castillo, Associate Professor of Architecture, Department of Architecture, College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley
11:00–11:20 Break
11:20–11:40 The Pale Red Bauhaus and the USSR
Juliet Koss, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Art History, Scripps College
11:40–12:00 Zionism + Bauhaus: The Politics of Architecture and Its Historiography
Alona Nitzan-Shiftan, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Technion, Israel Institute of Technology
12:00–12:30 Conversation moderated by Leah Dickerman
12:30–2:00 Lunch break
The Americas
2:00–2:15 MoMA’s 1938 Bauhaus Exhibition
Barry Bergdoll
2:15–2:35 Gropius, Mies, Moholy-Nagy: Traces of the Bauhaus in Cambridge and Chicago
Dietrich Neumann, Royce Family Professor for the History of Modern Architecture, Brown University
2:35–2:55 Black Mountain College: An American Bauhaus?
Brenda Danilowitz, Chief Curator, The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation
2:55–3:05 The Forgotten Bauhaus: The Design Laboratory, New York City, 1935–1940
Paul Makovsky, Editorial Director, Metropolis magazine
3:05–3:20 Break
3:20–3:40 Erratic Architecture: Circling around the Bauhaus in Gego's Work
Monica Amor, Assistant Professor of Art History, Maryland Institute College of Art
3:40–4:00 Hannes Meyer and the Bauhaus-Mexico Connection: Experiences, Criticism, and Influences
Raquel Franklin, Head of the Architectural Research Center, Universidad Anahuac-Mexico Norte
4:00–4:40 Debate moderated by Leah Dickerman and Barry Bergdoll
4:40–5:00 Q&A
5:00–7:00 Reception, Bartos Lobby, The Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building
Oskar Schlemmer. Bauhaus Stairway. 1932. Oil on canvas. 63 7/8 x 45" (162.3 x 114.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Philip Johnson. © 2009 Estate of Oskar Schlemmer, Munich/Germany
Related Publications
Gunta Stölzl: Bauhaus Master
Foreword by Monika Stadler. Text by Gunta Stölzl
Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops in Modernity
Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman