The Bauhaus And America

"After the Bauhaus's closing in 1933, many of its protagonists movd to the United States, where their acceptance had to be cultivated. In this book Margret Kentgens-Craig shows that the fame of the Bauhaus in America was the result not only of the inherent qualities of its concepts and products, but also of a unique congruence of cultural supply and demand, of a consistent flow of information, and of fine-tuned marketing. Thus the history of the American reception of the Bauhaus in the 1920s and 1930s foreshadows the paterns of fame-making that became typical of the post-World War II art world."--BOOK JACKET.

"In this book Jill Pearlman argues that Gropius did not effect changes alone and, further, that the Harvard Graduate School of Design was not merely an offshoot of the Bauhaus. - She offers a crucial missing piece to the story - and to the history of modern architecture - by focusing on Joseph Hudnut, the school's dean and founder."--BOOK JACKET.

An exploration of the Bauhaus school and its legacy in the context of the modernist period, including its wider influence on art, design, and education. Bauhaus Goes West is the story of cultural and artistic exchange between Germany and the West over a period of seventy years. It presents a view of the influential Bauhaus school in relation to the wider modernist period, distinguishing between the received idea of the Bauhaus and the documented reality. Initially, the Bauhaus was seen as an educational experiment, only later was it recognized as a style and a movement. Working from meticulous research, Alan Powers reexamines speculations about the reception and understanding of individuals connected with the Bauhaus school and what they ultimately achieved. Looking in greater detail at the theory and practice of art, design, and architecture between the arts and crafts movement and modernism, this book challenges the assumption that the 1920s represented a void of reactionary conservatism. Bauhaus Goes West offers an opportunity to recover some of the overlooked aspects of avant-garde that ran parallel with the work of the Bauhaus, such as the film-making of Francis Brugui re and Len Lye, and the development of art instruction for children under Marion Richardson and the London County Council.

When Lazlo-Moholy-Nagy, a member of the German Bauhaus, founded the Institute of Design in Chicago after World War II, a young sailor who had seen action in the Pacific enrolled. Inspired by Moholy's vision of design as a tool to change the world, Harold Cohen vowed to pursue it after Moholy's death in 1948. In the mid-1950s, Delyte Morris, the visionary and ambitious state college president in Southern Illinois, hired Cohen to do just that. Cohen's not-yet-famous friend, Buckminster Fuller, joined him in Carbondale, where their visions of a better world formed the second American Bauhaus."Shared Vision: The Second American Bauhaus" describes this unique period in design practice and education through interviews with faculty, staff, and students. It includes ample photographs and materials.

After critiquing—and infuriating—the art world with The Painted Word, award-winning author Tom Wolfe shared his less than favorable thoughts about modern architecture in From Bauhaus to Our Haus. In this examination of the strange saga of twentieth century architecture, Wolfe takes such European architects as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Bauhaus art school founder Walter Gropius to task for their glass and steel box designed buildings that have influenced—and infected—America’s cities.

A fresh look at the influential pedagogy and practice pioneered by the Bauhaus Founded by architect Walter Gropius (1883-1969) in 1919, the Bauhaus was the 20th century's most influential school of art, architecture, and design. After the school was shuttered under pressure from the Nazis in 1933, many Bauhaus artists brought their innovative practices and teaching methods to the United States. Gropius himself accepted a position at Harvard, where he would help establish a collection of Bauhaus material that has since grown to more than 30,000 objects--the largest such collection outside Germany. Harvard in turn became an unofficial center for the Bauhaus in America. Written by established and emerging voices in the field, the scholarship presented here expands on the special link between the two institutions, while highlighting understudied aspects of the Bauhaus, such as weaving, photography, and art made by women. Accompanied by beautiful illustrations--some of never-before-published objects--this book yields fascinating insights for Bauhaus devotees and design aficionados. Distributed for the Harvard Art Museums

Anni Albers was a founding member of the Bauhaus weaving workshop. Her teachers and colleagues at the Bauhaus included Itten, Kandinsky and Klee, whose intellectual study of 'primitive' art proved crucial both in raising the status of that art, and in establishing a model for the discussion of modern abstract work. Albers' own investigation of the techniques and abstract designs of ancient American weavers led her to argue that their skill was unsurpassed in the modern world, and to employ those techniques in her own work. Virginia Gardner Troy continues Albers' story beyond the Nazi closure of the Bauhaus to her emigration to America and subsequent association with the Black Mountain College, Albers was able to build up a significant collection of ancient Perivian textile art and to establish an international reputation for her own textiles. Extensively illustrated, this book offers a fascinating insight into Anni Albers' work and the history of the re-evaluation of ancient skills and techniques in weaving.