Product Description

The Bauhaus, the school of art and design founded in Germany in 1919 and shut down by the Nazis in 1933, brought together artists, architects and designers--among them Anni and Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, Lyonel Feininger, Walter Gropius, Johannes Itten, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Lilly Reich, Oskar Schlemmer, Gunta Stolzl--in an extraordinary conversation on the nature of art in the industrial age. Aiming to rethink the form of modern life, the Bauhaus became the site of a dazzling array of experiments in the visual arts that have profoundly shaped the world today. Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity, published to accompany a major multimedia exhibition, is The Museum of Modern Art's first comprehensive treatment of the subject since its famous Bauhaus exhibition of 1938, and offers a new generational perspective on the twentieth century's most influential experiment in artistic education. Organized in collaboration with the three major Bauhaus collections in Germany (the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau and the Klassic Stiftung Weimar), Bauhaus 1919-1933 examines the extraordinarily broad spectrum of the school's products, including industrial design, furniture, architecture, graphics, photography, textiles, ceramics, theater and costume design, painting and sculpture. Many of the objects discussed and illustrated here have rarely if ever been seen or published outside Germany. Featuring approximately 400 color plates, richly complemented by documentary images, Bauhaus 1919-1933 includes two overarching essays by the exhibition's curators, Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, that present new perspectives on the Bauhaus. Shorter essays by more than 20 leading scholars apply contemporary viewpoints to 30 key Bauhaus objects, and an illustrated narrative chronology provides a dynamic glimpse of the Bauhaus' lived history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3683 in Books
• Published on: 2009-12-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 328 pages

Customer Reviews

A stunningly smart and beautiful book.
The Bauhaus has always been familiar and, in some ways, "known" by architects and architectural educators. We inherit its legacy, with only cursory knowledge of the social and political context that allowed its rise, and ultimately denied its continuation. And yet, this book, which accompanies the show currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art, makes it clear that architects too frequently take only the gleanings of this school and movement--which comes to be known as a "style." Curators Leah Dickerman and Barry Bergdoll craft a brilliant historical narrative of the school and its influence. The essays are probing and extremely well-written. For those of us who pledge allegiance to the stunning textiles, typography, color studies, paintings, glass, architecture, and furniture (all of which are beautifully represented in the book), this is a welcome "rounding out" of our education.

Louise Harpman
Associate Professor of Architecture
University of Texas at Austin