bauhaus
imaginista
●Edition 2: Learning From / ●Edition 1: Corresponding With / ●Edition 4: Still Undead / ●Edition 3: Moving Away
Sep. 20 2019–Jan. 12 2020
Ausstellung

bauhaus imaginista, Bern

  • Zentrum Paul Klee
  • Monument im Fruchtland 3
  • 3000 Berne
  • Switzerland

100 Jahre Bauhaus – Bern feiert seine Meister und ist Bauhaus-Zentrum der Schweiz. Ein bedeutendes Kapitel der Architektur- und Designgeschichte feiert sein 100-jähriges Jubiläum. Die Berner Johannes Itten und Paul Klee gehörten zu den ersten Bauhaus-Meistern und prägten die 1919 in Weimar gegründete Schule massgeblich mit. Obwohl sie nur 14 Jahre bestand, wirkt die legendäre Schule für Gestaltung weltweit bis in die Gegenwart fort. Mit der Ausstellung bauhaus imaginista wird erstmals die globale Rezeption des Bauhauses untersucht und eine neue Sicht auf das Bauhaus vermittelt.

Josef Albers, Variant, 1947. Hermann und Margrit Rupf-Stiftung, Kunstmuseum Bern © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / 2019, ProLitteris, Zürich.

Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Two Stones, 2019, still. Courtesy of Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam and the artist.

bauhaus imaginista verlässt zum hundertjährigen Jubiläum den nationalen Rahmen und versteht die Moderne als ein kosmopolitisches Projekt, das durch transkulturellen Austausch entstanden ist und bis heute weiterwirkt. Bauhäusler*innen unterhielten Verbindungen in die ganze Welt. Die Ausstellung bauhaus imaginista schlägt eine neue Lesart des Bauhauses als globaler Resonanzraum vor: Das Forschungs- und Ausstellungsprojekt versteht das Bauhaus als Teil einer Moderne, die aus der Begegnung und dem Austausch verschiedener Kulturen ihre Impulse bezog. Hier ist der Transfer von Ideen keine Geschichte von Einfluss und Wirkung, sondern der internationalen Verflechtung. Dabei geht die Ausstellung den länderübergreifenden Beziehungen, Korrespondenzen und Migrationsgeschichten nach, die auch nach der Schliessung des Bauhauses durch die Nationalsozialisten im Jahr 1933 andauerten.

Mit der Verortung im internationalen Kontext ähnlich gesinnter Vorhaben diskutiert die Ausstellung bauhaus imaginista auch avantgardistische Kunstschulen in Indien und Japan als Parallelgeschichten moderner Bildungsreformen. Gleichzeitig thematisiert die Ausstellung das Studium vormodernen Handwerks am Bauhaus und von Bauhäusler*innen im nord- und mittelamerikanischen Exil sowie die Politisierung der Bauhaus-Ideen im postrevolutionären Mexiko und im postkolonialen, unabhängigen Marokko und Brasilien. Die Schau verweist auf Übersetzungen von Gestaltungsansätzen des Bauhauses in China, Nigeria und in der Sowjetunion. Sie zeigt ebenso wie der innovative Gebrauch von Medien am Bauhaus Gegenwartskunst und Popkultur bis heute prägt.

Die Jubiläumsausstellung im Zentrum Paul Klee besteht aus vier Kapiteln, die in den vergangenen zwei Jahren in unterschiedlichen Formaten wie Ausstellungen, Workshops und Konferenzen in Hangzhou, Kyoto und Tokio, São Paulo, Lagos, Delhi, New York, Moskau, Rabat sowie Berlin erarbeitet wurden. Jedes Kapitel geht von einem konkreten Bauhaus-Objekt aus: dem Bauhaus-Manifest von 1919, einer Werbeanzeige von Marcel Breuer, der Zeichnung Teppich (1927) von Paul Klee und dem Reflektorischen Farblichtspiel von Kurt Schwerdtfeger. Diese Objekte sind Ausgangspunkte für spezifische Fragestellungen von bauhaus imaginista, über die transnationale Bezüge, Kontexte und Querverweise zu zeitgenössischen Debatten geschaffen werden.

Mit Arbeiten von Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Arthur Amora, Gertrud Arndt, Ruth Asawa, Kader Attia, Robyn Beeche, Lena Bergner, Lina Bo Bardi, Farid Belkahia, Susie Benally, Nandalal Bose, Mohamed Chabâa, Ahmed Cherkaoui, Lygia Clark, Alice Creischer, Muriel Cooper, Zvi Efrat, T. Lux Feininger, Luca Frei, Walter Gropius, Brion Gysin und Ian Sommerville, Trude Guermonprez, Sheila Hicks, Johannes Itten, Kenneth Josephson, Renchinchirō Kawakita, György Kepes, Paul Klee, Kurt Kranz, Otto Lindig, Elisa Martins da Silveira, Doreen Mende, Hannes Meyer, Takehiko Mizutani, László Moholy-Nagy, Max Peiffer Watenphul, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Hélio Oiticica, The Otolith Group, Nam June Paik, Lygia Pape, I. M. Pei, Margaretha Reichardt, Geraldo Sarno, Oskar Schlemmer, Kurt Schwerdtfeger, Ivan Serpa, Arieh Sharon, Rabindranath Tagore, Paulo Tavares, Lenore Tawney, Frank Tovey, Edith Tudor-Hart, Stan VanDerBeek, Andy Warhol, Marguerite Wildenhain, Margarete Willers, Iwao und Michiko Yamawakim und vielen anderen mehr.

Die Ausstellung im Zentrum Paul Klee wird kuratiert von Marion von Osten, Grant Watson und Fabienne Eggelhöfer.

Zvi Efrat, Ife-Campus, Nigeria, Film Still, photo: © Keren Kuenberg.

●Related Articles
●Article
bauhaus imaginista — and the importance of transculturality

What bauhaus imaginista has documented thus relates to a particular historical phase, one that opened a path to the renewal of the art situation in Morocco. And yet, although more recent generations of Moroccan art historians and critics often mentioned the period as a formative and unavoidable reference point, they never really deepened study of that period. It somehow remained in the shadows of other phases and realities. But cultural memory has its rhythms, and the moment arose when the years of the Casablanca Group called for attention, demanding its artistic accomplishments be better understood. In this regard, the bauhaus imaginista project came at the right moment and has had important repercussions. → more

●Article
Dry Time — Anni Albers Weaving the Threads of the Past

When the Bauhaus was formed it was meant to be the reversed image of contemporary history and society. If the outside world was a field where opposing forces, in the form of class and national struggles, raged, the Bauhaus aimed to extricate itself from these conflicts in order to establish an alternative primordial community. In this essay, Maria Stavrinaki comments on what seems to be Anni Albers’s problematic relationship to the past in general and to history in particular. Anni Albers is not a unique case though, but rather a case study, which despite its particularities, can be considered as analogical to the Bauhaus in general. → more

●Article
A Virtual Cosmopolis — Bauhaus and Kala Bhavan

The Bauhaus is renowned for its contribution to modernist architecture and design. Less known but equally significant is its pioneering role in opening up a transcultural network that created the conditions for global conversations on art and design as early as the 1920s. → more

●Article
A Migratory Life—from Dessau to Moscow to Mexico — Hannes Meyer and Lena Bergner and the Arts

In this article Marion von Osten focusses on the curatorial research involved in two of the project’s four chapters: Moving Away and Learning From. She rethinks the importance of the migratory life of the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer and Bauhaus weaver Lena Bergner, starting with Meyer’s two-year directorship of the Bauhaus Dessau, the couple’s time working in the USSR (1931–1936), and, finally, their decade-long period as exiles in Mexico, which lasted from 1939 to 1949, the year they returned to Switzerland. → more

●Article
Josef Albers and the Pre-Columbian Artisan

In his inaugural manifesto for the Staatliche Bauhaus, Walter Gropius proposed a new artistic agenda and pedagogical practice based on craft and artisanal principles. This article analyzes how prominent Bauhaus teacher and artist Josef Albers, entered into dialogue with a very specific kind of artisanal aesthetic: the pre-Columbian crafts he encountered on his many trips to Mexico. Revisiting his lecture “Truthfulness in Art” delivered in 1937, after his third trip to the country, the article studies the way in which Albers learned from the abstract tradition of pre-Columbian artisans, incorporating their knowledge into his own artistic and pedagogical practice. → more

●Article
To train not only for, but also against something! — A plea to think politically about the interdisciplinary art academy

Art colleges where the fine, applied and performing arts are taught under one roof often refer to the historical Bauhaus. Although the institution possessed no separate workshop for music, the experiments on the Bauhaus stage are regarded as prototypical for the further development of interdisciplinary art approaches later in the twentieth century. This text deals with the interdisciplinary art academy on the slide of a deregulated present. It reviews a number of developments to which we have already become accustomed. It is precisely for this reason that we should recall the opportunities offered by interdisciplinary education in both an artistic and political sense. → more

●Article
In the Footsteps of the Bauhaus — Its Reception and Impact on Brazilian Modernity

Through the strong German-speaking minority and its active work in the creation and mediation of culture in the spirit of modernity, the application of Bauhaus formal language, especially in the first phase of Brazilian modernity, has played a considerable role. It was only with the equation of German culture with National Socialism and the ensuing intolerance of German protagonists that these architectural and cultural activities were severely disrupted. In Brazil during this period, a style of modernism based on the principles of Le Corbusier finally gained acceptance. The impulses of the Bauhaus, however, which were not perceived for many years, were also reinterpreted and further developed within Brazil, although they remained occulted in comparison to the public reception of Corbusier. → more

●Article
Paul Klees bildnerische Webarchitekturen

Für die Entwicklung seiner abstrakten Bildsprache und seines Bauhaus-Unterrichtes bediente sich Paul Klee unterschiedlicher Quellen, die er im Alltag, auf seinen Reisen oder in Büchern entdeckte. Das Studium nicht-europäischen Designs von Gebäuden und Stoffen, die Fantasiearchitektur der aus Tunesien mitgebrachten Aquarelle oder die auf Papier entworfenen Stoffmuster der Weberinnen bildeten die Grundlage für Werke wie Teppich, 1927, 48. → more

●Article
The “Workshop for Popular Graphic Art” in Mexico — Bauhaus Travels to America

The global developments that led in 1942 to the appointment of Hannes Meyer, second Bauhaus director, as head of the workshop for popular graphic art, Taller de Gráfica Popular (henceforth referred to as the TGP), made it a focal point for migrating Europeans in flight from fascism. This essay aims to shed light on how the TGP was influenced by Europeans granted asylum by Mexico before and during World War Two, and, conversely, to explore the degree to which these exiled visual artists, writers, and architects’ ideas came to be influenced by their contact with artists active in the TGP. → more

●Article
Shifting, Rotating, Mirroring 
 — Lena Bergner’s Minutes of Paul Klee’s Classes

Lena Bergner developed carpet patterns applying specific methods learned from Paul Klee discernible in her finished work. The results, however, are quite unique. This is precisely what Klee sought to achieve with his classes at the Bauhaus: to point to paths of design so that the formal language is not arbitrary, without, however, prescribing predetermined outcomes. → more

●Article
The Bauhaus and Morocco

In the years when Western nations were committed in new projects of partnership, with what was then called the “Third World”, young artists and students from the Maghreb had grown up in the passionate climate of the struggle for independence, were talented, open to modernity, and eager to connect with twentieth-century international art movements, which were different in production and spirit from colonial ideology and culture. → more