BOSTON, MASS.- The Bauhaus, Germany’s legendary school of art, architecture and design, was founded in Weimar by architect Walter Gropius in the spring of 1919. Gropius assembled an international group of faculty members including Josef Albers (German), Lyonel Feininger (American), Wassily Kandinsky (Russian), Paul Klee (Swiss) and László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian). The school relocated twice during its brief existence (to Dessau in 1925 and Berlin in 1932) before its closure by the National Socialists in 1933, but its aesthetic of geometric abstraction—and its stated goals of collaboration across disciplines and harmony between form and function—have had a lasting impact on the fields of architecture and industrial and graphic design.

Radical Geometries: Bauhaus Prints, 1919–33 marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus with a group of more than 60 works on paper—primarily prints but also including a number of drawings, photographs, and 10 of the 20 postcards designed by faculty and students for the first Bauhaus exhibition at Weimar in 1923. The objects on display are drawn primarily from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s collection, augmented with key loans from private collections.

The recent gift of Kandinsky’s dynamic portfolio of 12 prints Kleine Welten (“Little Worlds”)—the artist’s magnum opus in printmaking—is shown for the first time. Radical Geometries is timed to coincide with a wide range of centennial Bauhaus exhibitions across the country and the globe, including The Bauhaus and Harvard at the Harvard Art Museums.

Postwar Visions: European Photography, 1945–60
This exhibition looks at the work of European photographers who, after hostilities ended in 1945, chose to use their cameras to express their creative impulses. Some of these artists returned to Bauhaus ideas about art making that had been interrupted by the political repression of the 1930s and six long years of war. An influential center of this new work took place in Germany, where Otto Steinert, a medical doctor turned photographer, organized a group of artists who used their camera to explore the inner self through abstract imagery. They found intriguing patterns in nature and in the built environment, and they also took inspiration from mundane visual details of daily life. The exhibitions Steinert’s group, under the name “Subjective Photography,” brought international attention to their approach, and inspired photographers around the world to explore elements of abstraction in their work.

Postwar Visions: European Photography, 1945–60 investigates this rise of mid-century creativity in an assemblage of approximately 35 works. Steinert’s Luminogramm (1952), made by the light of a flashlight, captures the playful spirit of the movement. Other images in the exhibition are meditative observations of daily life, such as rain droplets streaming down a windowpane, a bicyclist gliding down a winding road, the gentle curves of a nude. The exhibition is organized into four sections—pure abstractions, still life, daily life and industrial subjects—and also features the work of Peter Keetman, Toni Schneiders, Mario Giacomelli, Nino Migliore, Sabine Weiss, Jean-Pierre Sudre and more. The photographs are drawn primarily from the MFA’s collection, with a number of significant loans from private collections.

Postwar Visions is a companion exhibition to Radical Geometries: Bauhaus Prints, 1919–33, which explores abstraction in European graphic art during the interwar period.