The Whole World a Bauhaus
@ Elmhurst Art Museum
150 Cottage Hill Ave, Elmhurst, IL 60126
Opening Saturday, February 16th, at 1:30PM
On view through Sunday, April 21st
This internationally traveling exhibition celebrates the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus, a legendary German school that revolutionized the parameters of art, the crafts, and technology. While it existed for only 14 short years (1919-1933), its influence shaped modern thinking and artistic approaches to industrialization. Bauhaus instructors included some of the most famous Modern artists and architects including Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky, Josef and Anni Albers, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, Lily Reich, and more. Many of the influential figures and others involved at the Bauhaus left Germany and spread the school’s lessons internationally. The exhibition The Whole World a Bauhaus, titled after a quote by student and teacher Fritz Kuhr, includes art and design pieces by select instructors and students as well as photographs and documents that convey the spirit of the Bauhaus. One hundred years after its founding, the modern ideals of the school spread the globe and are still integrated in today’s interdisciplinary approaches to the arts.
The Whole World a Bauhaus is divided into eight different chapters, each focusing on an aspect of work and life at the Bauhaus during its operation: Art, Crafts, and Technology; Floating; Community; Encounters; The Total Work of Art; New Man; Radical Pedagogy; and Experiment. These sections highlight the work students did in their revolutionary workshops with industrial materials and processes, the school’s major impact on the international avant-garde, and how the students and instructors sought to rethink their world.
Opening Lecture: Margret Kentgens-Craig
Saturday, February 16, 1:30 pm
Scholar Kentgens-Craig will expand on the legacy of the legendary school and its lasting effects in the United States. Kentgens-Craig is adjunct associate professor of architecture at the NCSU College of Design and former head of the department of archives and collections at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, in Germany. She is the author of several books of the Bauhaus including The Bauhaus and America: first contacts 1919-1936 and The Bauhaus in America: the modernist émigrés and their influence on American architecture, interiors, and design, 1920-1940.
Official Website
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Tags: Elmhurst, Elmhurst Art Museum, Josef and Anni Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Breuer, Margret Kentgens-Craig, Mies van der Rohe, The Whole World A Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky
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