HAA 176w

Bauhaus and Harvard: The Making of an Exhibition
Maria Gough, Benjamin Buchloh, Laura Muir
Thursday 12-2:45pm

In conjunction with a major exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums, this seminar introduces students to the utopian politics, experimental pedagogy, and wide-ranging aesthetic production of the Bauhaus, the most influential school of art, architecture, and design of the 20thC. Founded in Germany in 1919, in the wake of the devastation wrought by the first world war, the Bauhaus sought to reunify art and architecture—and thus remake the cultural production of everyday life—through a return to manual craft. In the mid-1920s, however, it abandoned craft in favor of a new alliance with industry in a bid to bring its design prototypes into mass production. In the final weeks of the course we will turn to the “red Bauhaus” of Hannes Meyer in Soviet Moscow in the early 1930s, and the migration of other key figures to the United States after 1933, among them the school’s founding director, the architect Walter Gropius (who joined the Harvard faculty in 1937), Lázsló Moholy-Nagy (founder of the New Bauhaus in Chicago), Mies van der Rohe (head of architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology), and Anni Albers and Josef Albers (faculty at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and subsequently Yale). / Key issues to be discussed include: the contribution of textile design to the development of modernist abstraction; the ways in which the culture and organization of the school was marked by gendered norms and assumptions; the workshop model; craft object vs. design prototype; the design of domestic vs. public space; the role and variety of lens-based technologies (photogram, photo-collage, new-vision photograph, and photo document); print media, from lithography to advertising; utopia vs. technocracy; the cosmopolitan nature of both the faculty and student body; the vagaries of financial support from the state; the school’s relation to its sole foreign counterpart, the Vkhutemas in Moscow; and the constitutive role of exile in the transfer of Bauhaus principles to foreign institutions. / Comprising some 200 objects drawn almost entirely from the collection of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, the Harvard exhibition will serve as our chief laboratory, enabling first-hand study of original textiles, furniture, homewares, architecture, typography, and photography, as well as student exercises and works of fine art. Co-taught by its curator, Laura Muir, along with HAA faculty Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and Maria Gough, the seminar will also familiarize students with the curatorial principles and practices that informed the making of the exhibition itself. / Requirements include: preparation of weekly readings; class attendance and participation; and a paper based on original research in the museum’s rich and voluminous Bauhaus collection. We are particularly interested in research papers that focus on artists in the collection whose work has been underserved by the secondary literature, especially if not exclusively women. Open to undergraduates and graduate students. Attendance at the first session is mandatory. Limited to 12.