Exhibition today: "Sammlung Bauhaus"

Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin, today, 10 am - 17pm Uhr

"Sammlung Bauhaus - The original of the classical modernity" is the most comprehensive exhibition of its kind.

Ninety years ago, Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Weimar. It existed for only 14 years, but it became the most important school of modernity. With Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, Lyonel Feininger, Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Gerhard Marcks, Adolf Meyer, Georg Muche, László Moholy-Nagy, Hinnerk Scheper, Oskar Schlemmer, Joost Schmidt, Lothar Schreyer and Gunta Stölzl, a faculty with an international reputation worked under the direction of Walter Gropius (1919-1928), Hannes Meyer (1928-1930) and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1930-1933) at the Bauhaus.

The Bauhaus is Germany’s most successful contribution to international art and culture of modernity in the early 20th century. More than 75 years after it was closed in Berlin, the reputation of this inter-disciplinary school for architecture, design, visual and performing arts that moved to Dessau in 1925 continues to be as internationally significant as ever. The vibrancy and impact of the Bauhaus during its existence and after its dissolution in 1933 demonstrate that although the Bauhaus, as a laboratory and workshop of modernity, was destroyed by a deliberate political act, it was exactly that circumstance that enabled it to unfurl its global influence – history’s irony.

On the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the foundation of the Bauhaus and 20 years after the fall of the Berlin wall, the leading Bauhaus research institutions and museums in Germany – the Bauhaus Archive Berlin, the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau and the Klassik Stiftung Weimar – for the first time jointly present an exhibition: Bauhaus. A Conceptual Model. With well over 900 objects it will be the largest Bauhaus exhibition ever.

The exhibition recounts the story of the Bauhaus in a comprehensive presentation of the works of its masters and students as well as the most important school issues. Inter-disciplinary, experimental teaching, the concept of practice-oriented workshops, the pursuit of answers to social questions, the propagation of timeless aesthetics as well as experimentation with new techniques and materials in architecture and design were the school’s most important concerns. The exhibition Bauhaus. A Conceptual Model centres on the comprehensive significance of the Bauhaus for the development and internationalisation of modernity and goes beyond, examining its world-wide, lasting impact on architecture and design up until the present day.

While previous exhibitions on the Bauhaus were grouped according to its workshops, Bauhaus. A Conceptual Model chooses the perspective of the history of its development, embedding the objects into their respective contexts. The curators of the three participating Bauhaus institutions also pursue the issues of the further development, reception and current significance of the Bauhaus.

The presentation of the historical Bauhaus is located in the 18 ground floor galleries of the Martin-Gropius-Bau, while in the centre hall of the building the relevance of the Bauhaus will be discussed and re-positioned.

Bauhaus. A Conceptual Model is presented in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which will celebrate its 80th birthday with the exhibition Bauhaus 1919 – 1933: Workshops for Modernity directly following the Berlin presentation.