32103

SoSe 19: The Bauhaus in America

Jordan Troeller

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This course explores the impact of the Bauhaus on art and culture in North America. From the arrival of Josef and Anni Albers to Black Mountain College in 1933, to Marguerite Wildenhain’s process-based ceramics in war-time California, to Hannes Meyer’s work with radical printmakers in Mexico City in the late 1940s, former Bauhaus members injected their brand of experimental, European modernism into a largely provincial and regionalist context of art making. Bauhaus artists not only challenged Abstract Expressionism as America’s first home-grown artistic style, they promoted artistic concepts that would become crucial for a later generation of artists, including repetition, seriality, collage, site-specificity, and the collapse of high and low culture. Drawing on primary texts from the period as well as theories of exile by German intellectuals in postwar America, including Bertolt Brecht, Hannah Arendt, and Theodor W. Adorno, we will consider how these artists negotiated questions of media, authorship, visibility, xenophobia, and cultural difference. ----- As much an introduction to the history of art as it is to the legacy of exile and emigration in American culture, this course welcomes students unfamiliar with the methodologies of either discipline. Looking closely at individual objects in the context of these émigré careers, students will learn how to analyze and discuss works of art, especially those that include no figural or representational context. Whenever possible, we will coordinate class sessions to view Bauhaus materials in nearby collections and exhibitions. Schließen