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Bauhaus Culture From Weimar to the Cold War Kathleen James-Chakraborty |
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Provides fresh insights on the Bauhaus from a historical perspective. Offering the first comprehensive training in the visual arts grounded in abstraction, the Bauhaus was the site of a dazzling range of influential experiments in painting, architecture, photography, industrial design, and even artistic education itself. Three-quarters of a century later, the “look” of the new remains indebted to the Bauhaus and its equation of technology with modernism. Central to discussions of the relationships between art, industrialization, and politics in the twentieth century, much of the school’s later impact was derived in part from its status as one of the foremost cultural symbols of Germany’s first democracy and its public reputation as a “cathedral of socialism.” In this book, editor Kathleen James-Chakraborty and seven other scholars analyze the accomplishments and dispel the myths of the Bauhaus, placing it firmly in a historical context from before the formation of the Weimar Republic through Nazi ascendancy and World War II into the cold war. Together, they investigate its professors’ and students’ interactions with mass culture; establish the complexity of its relationship with Wilhelmine, Nazi, and postwar German politics; and challenge the claim that its architects greatly influenced American architecture in the 1930s. Their most explosive conclusions address the degree to which some aspects of Bauhaus design continued to flourish during the Third Reich before becoming one of the cold war’s most enduring emblems of artistic freedom. In doing so, Bauhaus Culture calls into question the degree to which this influential school should continue to symbolize an uncomplicated relationship between art, modern technology, and progressive politics. “Novel and instructive.” —Times Literary Supplement “A closer look at the myths and realities of what many feel was one of the most influential movements in modern art. Scholarly and comprehensive.” —Art Times “In a new collection of essays thoughtfully edited by Kathleen James-Chakraborty, it is a cultural manifestation closely linked to the political and economic vicissitudes of its times.” —Harvard Design Magazine “Captivating and sobering.” —Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians “Bauhaus Culture is a well-balanced collection. Its tight conceptual structure holds the disparate essays together fairly well. The exceedingly well-written essays area mix of new with re-published work that includes original scholarship as well as the translation and dissemination of important research.” —The Art Book Contributors: Greg Castillo, Juliet Koss, Rose-Carol Washton Long, John V. Maciuika, Wallis Miller, Winifried Nerdinger, Frederic J. Schwartz. Kathleen James-Chakraborty is associate professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of German Architecture for a Mass Audience and Erich Mendelsohn and the Architecture of German Modernism. 256 pages | 57 halftones, 2 line art | 7 x 10 | 2006 TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Illustrations Introduction 1. Wilhelmine Precedents for the Bauhaus: Hermann Muthesius, the Prussian State, and the German Werkbund 2. Henry van de Velde and Walter Gropius: Between Avoidance and Imitation 3. From Metaphysics to Material Culture: Painting and Photography at the Bauhaus 4. Architecture, Building and the Bauhaus 5. Bauhaus Theater of Human Dolls 6. Utopia for Sale: The Bauhaus and Weimar Germany’s Consumer Culture 7. Bauhaus Architecture in the Third Reich 8. From Isolationism to Internationalism: American Acceptance of the Bauhaus 9. The Bauhaus in Cold War Germany Select Bibliography |
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$25.00 Paper