CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- The Harvard Art Museums present The Bauhaus and Harvard, an exhibition of nearly 200 works by more than 70 artists, drawn almost entirely from the Busch-Reisinger Museum’s extensive Bauhaus collection. The presentation coincides with the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus—the 20th century’s most influential school of art, architecture, and design—and highlights the unique connections between the school and Harvard University.
Featuring works by major artists, including Anni and Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and László Moholy-Nagy, the exhibition presents rarely seen student exercises, iconic design objects, photographs, textiles, typography, paintings, architectural drawings, studies, sculpture, and archival materials. It explores the school’s pioneering curriculum, the ways its workshops sought to revolutionize the experience of everyday life, the widespread influence of Bauhaus instruction in America, and Harvard’s own Graduate Center (1950), designed by Walter Gropius’s firm The Architects Collaborative.
The Bauhaus was founded in Weimar, Germany, in 1919 by merging the city’s schools of fine and applied arts. Inspired by medieval craft guilds, the Bauhaus was organized into workshops arranged by material. It sought to eliminate hierarchies between artists and artisans and bring them together as equal partners in creating art, design objects, and environments. In 1930, Harvard hosted the first Bauhaus exhibition in the United States and became a center for Bauhaus activity in this country when the school’s founding director, Walter Gropius, joined Harvard’s architecture department in 1937. After World War II, with the aid of Gropius and many former Bauhaus artists living in the United States, including Anni and Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Lyonel Feininger, and László Moholy-Nagy, the Busch-Reisinger Museum established a Bauhaus collection—today the largest of its kind outside Germany.
“The Busch-Reisinger Bauhaus holdings began as a ‘study collection’ and a collaboration between the museum and artists to preserve the legacy of this extraordinary school,” said Lynette Roth, Daimler Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum and Head of the Division of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Harvard Art Museums. “This incredible collection continues to grow and open up new research avenues for scholars and the centennial was the ideal time to highlight it for our broader audiences.”
The Bauhaus and Harvard is curated by Laura Muir, Research Curator in the Division of Academic and Public Programs at the Harvard Art Museums, and is on display in the museums’ Special Exhibitions Gallery from February 8 through July 28, 2019.
“This is the first major exhibition of the Busch-Reisinger Museum’s Bauhaus collection since 1971,” said Muir. “Presenting rarely seen material alongside familiar works, it emphasizes the collection’s strengths as well as its diversity. By foregrounding the Bauhaus’s famous preliminary course, collaborations within and between workshops, and the achievements of lesser-known figures, particularly female artists, it offers a fresh perspective on this historical collection, which has long played a key role in the legacy and reception of the Bauhaus in the United States.”
The Bauhaus and Harvard is organized in three sections. The first and largest is devoted to material produced at the Bauhaus in Germany. Highlights include Lyonel Feininger’s Preliminary design for the Program of the State Bauhaus in Weimar (the so-called Bauhaus manifesto), student exercises, major weavings by Anni Albers and Gunta Stölzl, Lucia Moholy’s photographs of Gropius’s Dessau buildings, and László Moholy-Nagy’s Light Prop for an Electric Stage. The second section examines the influence of Bauhaus pedagogy in the United States and features classroom exercises from three schools influenced by the Bauhaus curriculum: Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Brooklyn College in New York, and Newcomb College in New Orleans. The third section highlights the Harvard Graduate Center (now the Caspersen Student Center and its neighboring dormitories). Designed by Gropius’s Cambridge-based firm The Architects Collaborative and completed in 1950, the complex was the first example of modern architecture on Harvard’s campus and a realization of many Bauhaus ideas through its integration of art, architecture, and design. Original works and other furnishings were commissioned from leading modern artists, including some of Gropius’s former Bauhaus colleagues. Herbert Bayer’s stunning and recently conserved 20-foot mural Verdure (originally installed in the Mallory Smith Dining Room) anchors a space that also includes studies for the commissioned art and textiles designed by Anni Albers.
A complementary exhibition in the adjacent University Research Gallery features another work from Gropius’s Harvard Graduate Center. Hans Arp’s “Constellations II” presents a room-sized wall relief created by Hans Arp (1886–1966)—the work’s first public viewing in 15 years. Commissioned for the Graduate Center by Gropius, the relief was first installed in 1950 in a popular dining room in Harkness Commons (now the Caspersen Center). Heavy use of the dining room damaged the delicate surface of the relief, prompting Arp, in 1958, to rearrange the work’s individual panels above table height. Subsequent painting campaigns transformed the relief’s redwood finish to gray-blue, white, and back to natural.
With the cooperation of Harvard Law School, which transferred the relief to the Harvard Art Museums in 2017, objects conservation fellow Madeline Corona from the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies undertook a yearlong project to restore the work to its original finish for the exhibition. Hans Arp’s “Constellations II” is concurrently on display February 8 through July 28, 2019. The exhibition was curated by Melissa Venator, Stefan Engelhorn Curatorial Fellow in the Busch-Reisinger Museum (2016–19). More about the history and conservation of the relief can be read in an Index magazine article and in a forthcoming digital tool on the museums’ website.
The Bauhaus, a comprehensive digital resource launched by the Harvard Art Museums in 2016, provides public access to the more than 32,000 Bauhaus and Bauhaus-related objects in the Busch-Reisinger Museum’s collection. The online resource also shares scholarship on the Bauhaus and its legacy in the United States, including the school’s extensive ties to Harvard and the Greater Boston area. Learn more about the launch of the resource in this press release. Explore the site: hvrd.art/bauhaus
A print publication inspired by The Bauhaus and Harvard and its related programming is due out in Fall 2020.
