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).

I’ll be at the MOMA opening of Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity next week – which is about time, since the 70th anniversary of Bauhaus Movement is this year and there was already a major show in Berlin this summer.

Oskar Schlemmer. Bauhaus Stairway. 1932. Oil on canvas. 63 7/8 x 45″ (162.3 x 114.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Philip Johnson. © 2009 Estate of Oskar Schlemmer, Munich/Germany

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART PRESENTS MAJOR EXHIBITION CELEBRATING THE INFLUENTIAL BAUHAUS SCHOOL

Exhibition Focuses on the Historical Moment of the School and Includes Over 400 Works, with Many on View for the First Time in the United States

Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity

November 8, 2009–January 25, 2010

The Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Gallery, sixth floor

NEW YORK, November 3, 2009—The Museum of Modern Art

presents Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity from November 8, 2009, to January 25, 2010. The Bauhaus school in Germany—the most famous and influential school of avant-garde art in the twentieth century—brought together artists, architects, and designers in an extraordinary conversation about the nature of art in the modern age. Aiming to rethink the very form of contemporary life, the students and faculty of the Bauhaus made the school the venue for a dazzling array of experiments in the visual arts that had a transformative effect on the 1920s and 1930s. The effects are still felt in our contemporary visual world. The exhibition brings together over 400 works that reflect the extraordinarily broad range of the school’s production, including industrial design, furniture, architecture, graphics, photography, textiles, ceramics, theater and costume design, painting, and sculpture. It includes works by famous faculty members and well-known students including Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Marianne Brandt, Marcel Breuer, Lyonel Feininger, Walter Gropius, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, Lucia Moholy, Lilly Reich, Oskar Schlemmer, and Gunta Stölzl, as well as less well-known, but equally innovative, artists.

The exhibition is organized by Barry Bergdoll, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, and Leah Dickerman, Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, in collaboration with a cross-departmental group of MoMA colleagues, in the spirit of the Bauhaus.

Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity opens 80 years after the founding of MoMA, and 90 years after the establishment of the Bauhaus. It brings together a rich group of approximately 150 rarely seen works of art from the three German Bauhaus collections—Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, and Klassik Stiftung Weimar—and over 80 works from MoMA’s own collection to form the foundation of the exhibition. In addition, major loans come from The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation; the Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne/Centre de création industrielle; the Harvard Art Museum/Busch-Reisinger Museum; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and numerous other public and private collections in the United States and Europe.

This exhibition is the first comprehensive treatment by MoMA of the Bauhaus since 1938. That early exhibition, titled Bauhaus 1919–1928, was organized by the founder and first director of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, and designed by former Bauhaus student and instructor Herbert Bayer. It excluded the final five years of the school under Gropius’s successors, Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. For many years, the 1938 exhibition’s catalogue was the vehicle by which Americans learned about the Bauhaus. No museum was more influenced by the Bauhaus than The Museum of Modern Art itself, whose collections were organized to include an unprecedented range of mediums in both art and design. “I regard the three days which I spent at the Bauhaus in 1928 as one of the most important incidents in my own education,” recalled MoMA founding director Alfred Barr, Jr. in a letter to Gropius. MoMA’s second major Bauhaus exhibition offers an extraordinary opportunity for a new generational perspective on this influential school.

Maybe it missed me, till today, but Bauhaus movement is 90 years old – see Smashing Magazine’s 90 years of Bauhaus Celebrated.

Sounds like Berlin is where people are going to be celebrating Bauhaus but there’s actually a lot of it in New York, though I’m surprised there doesn’t appear to be a major exhibition around Bauhaus in New York right now – unless I missed something.

It just seems to me with so much of our culture in to commentary of previous art movements, and also remakes of movies, etc – you’d have expected to find MOMA  to have organized something – and they have, but it opens up on November 8th, 2009 -

Oskar Schlemmer. Bauhaus Stairway. 1932. Oil on canvas. 63 7/8 x 45″ (162.3 x 114.3 cm) © The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Philip Johnson