I was invited to MoMA today, as a member of the press, for the preview of Bauhaus 1919-1933 Workshops for Modernity, opening  November 8th, running till January 25th, 2009.   I took a lot of video footage and here’s what I decided to save (decided not to upload footage I took of the curators, Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, focusing instead, on my own experience of the Bauhaus works).

The main site for the Bauhaus exhibition is not officially published yet, but is live and has pictures of the entire collection along with an interactive timeline and a download of the entire checklist (pictures and attribution) for the entire show.

There’s also a few other related resources that MoMA is making available for this show including the Bauhaus Lab, an ongoing series of hands-on art-making workshops led by artists, educators, and art historians on subjects that were actually taught at the Bauhaus, such as color theory, graphic design, photography, drawing integral to the Bauhaus practice.   Included are two special workshops in January 2010 conducted by Ati Gropius Johansen, daughter of Walter Gropius and deciple of Joseph Albers, using Alber’s color and 3-D curriculum.

The Bauhaus Lounge, a relaxing space for further exploration of Bauhaus artists, located on the first floor of the museum, is furnished with chairs, tables and couches designed by Bauhaus faculty, and is a place you can relax and taken in the stuff you just saw.

There are also related events occurring around the exhibition such as Josef Albers Color Workshop, Learning to See: They Dynamics of Color and a very unusual workshop on Woman and The Bauhaus (you don’t hear of too many woman at the Bauhaus).

Wanted to mention some ideas that came to me while walking through Bauhaus 1919-1933 Workshops for Modernity @ MoMA.   For one thing, the chart above shows the merging of fine art and applied arts, together and the specific ordering of the classes being offered at The Bauhaus.   The idea of having a school of experimentation where new ideas can be tested in within a  multidisciplinary  team, where all are equal, is not new, but it’s fascinating how well the Bauhaus pulled it off.

In a way, I can see the Bauhaus idea of unifying all the arts as something that can be applied today, but in a different context – bringing together SEO, SEM, Web Analytics, Predictive Analysis, Usability Testing, Social Media, Word of Mouth, Traditional Media, Lead Generation, etc, all under one roof.

Bauhaus 1919-1933 Workshops for Modernity @ MoMA was organized around specific instructors, with each room of the exhibition corresponding to a specific year.   In fact, the idea of what a modern museum is sprung from the Bauhaus movement, according to Barry Bergdoll, one of the curators of this show.

And then, I got it, something that’s eluded me for most of my life, what museums like MoMA are all about – inviting the public into art and making the museum a place where the public can experiment with art – that makes a lot of sense.  Bauhaus 1919-1933 Workshops for Modernity accomplishes the task at hand by truly inviting us all to experiment and learn.

It was also pointed out that, as original as the Bauhaus was and is, Bauhaus is seen mostly as a stereotype,  much less richer than the real experience of what it was like, living in the midst of the Bauhaus (for example, many of the colors of the living/working spaces in the Bauhaus, turned out to be much richer than we’d be expected, based on stereotypes we have).