On Wednesday, March 11, at noon Benjamin Benus, an associate professor of art and design history at Loyola University in New Orleans who specializes in the history of twentieth-century art and design, with a focus on Central Europe in the years between the world wars, will discuss Herbert Bayer and the Bauhaus Legacy in America. The lecture complements the exhibition An Ideal Unity: The Bauhaus and Beyond, now in its final week, closing March 15. The display of photographs and prints explores the artistic breadth of this innovative school of art and design. Benus’s research examines connections between avant-garde art, scientific illustration, and data visualization during this period. This talk will be held in NOMA’s boardroom.
Read more about the history of the Bauhaus in this article from NOMA Magazine.
In 1919 German architect Walter Gropius founded an academy in Dessau, Germany, that sought to bridge the separate realms of fine art and applied art. In its fourteen years of operation, his Staatliches Bauhaus would heavily define the aesthetics of the twentieth century—in its philosophies, in its scope, and in its reach. An Ideal Unity: The Bauhaus and Beyond, on view through March 15, explores the artistic breadth of this innovative school of art and design.
A utopian experiment in equality, the Bauhaus sought to remove long-standing class distinctions by uniting craftspeople and artists on equal footing. Men and women were enrolled in the same programs, and both masters and students were recruited from diverse disciplines, nationalities, and faiths.
All incoming students took the vorkurs, or foundation course, to study materials, color theory, and formal relationships, before choosing a specialized workshop that operated on a master-and-apprentice model. Over the years, workshops included carpentry/joinery, ceramics, graphics/bookbinding, metalworking, photography, weaving, sculpture, stagecraft, stained glass, wall painting, architecture, and printing and advertising. The workshops produced items to sell, which helped financially support the institution.
Photography was an integral component of Bauhaus presentation and experimentation from its early days, though it was not added to the curriculum until 1929. Photography captured images of daily life at the Bauhaus, was used to advertise and sell Bauhaus products, and became a tool to explore new ways of seeing. László Moholy-Nagy, a Bauhaus master from 1923 to 1929 who directed the foundations course and the metal workshop, promoted the idea that the camera could produce, and not just reproduce, a photographic image. He encouraged students to push the medium’s boundaries by exploring spatial relationships and technical possibilities. These explorations included using dynamic viewpoints, framing, cropping, enlarging and minimizing, as well as negative effects and double exposure. This approach to photography was applied in other departments, particularly printing and advertising.
Moholy-Nagy created a photomontage (above) using photographic, printed, and drawn elements for this commercial advertisement, which reads “Stop! Have you been to the Schocken Department Store yet?” The minimalist approach established a clear message without sacrificing dynamism, generated by the manipulation of scale, bold typography, and the repeated position Marcel Breuer, a fellow Bauhäusler.
Breuer was known for his tubular metal chairs, seen in this worm’s-eye view by T. Lux Feininger (lower right), which captures the play of light in the Gropius-designed Bauhaus Dessau theater. The son of Lyonel Feininger, one of the first masters named by Gropius at the Bauhaus, Lux studied and worked at the Bauhaus after it moved to Dessau from 1926 to 1932, and is lauded for creating the largest photographic archive of daily life at the Bauhaus.
Gertrud Arndt also captured daily life, urban landscapes, portraits, and still lifes. A student at the Bauhaus from 1923 to 1927, she completed the foundations course under Moholy-Nagy before entering the weaving workshop. While the Bauhaus was pioneering in its acceptance of female students, there was still a strong gender bias that directed most to the weaving workshop, with a few notable exceptions. Arndt returned to the Bauhaus in 1929 when her husband Alfred became a master. During this period, she made 43 maskenselbstporträts, or masked self-portraits, in which she photographed herself as a series of female archetypes draped in lace, veils, and scarves—elements that alluded to the weaving workshop and highlighted the performative nature of gender decades before contemporary artists would employ similar investigations into gender identity.
In 1933, Adolf Hitler rose to power and the Nazi party closed the Bauhaus, which had relocated to Berlin in 1932. The party’s racist ideology and practices were at odds with the school’s inclusive and utopian mission. The theories, practices, and pedagogy of the Bauhaus spread around the world as former teachers and students returned home or fled Europe during World
War II. Though its duration was brief, the Bauhaus successfully connected masters and students, known collectively as Bauhäusler, from twenty-nine countries, each representing vastly different religious, philosophical, and political beliefs, to achieve an ideal unity between art and industry.
Supported by the A. Charlotte Mann and Joshua Mann Pailet Endowment, this exhibition will be presented in two rotations to present a broad scope of the artistic creations and fascinating characters who contributed to the Bauhaus. All of the works on view come from NOMA’s permanent collection, amassed through the generous donation of art and funds for acquisitions.
Anne C. B. Roberts, Assistant Curator