Metal workshop at Bauhaus Dessau. Image courtesy of private collection of Leipzig
This month, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation will open the first in a series of exhibitions set to mark the 2019 centenary of the founding of the Bauhaus movement. This first exhibition is ‘Craft Becomes Modern: The Bauhaus in the Making’, which runs April 13, 2017 to January 7, 2018.
‘Craft Becomes Modern: The Bauhaus in the Making’ tells the story of the Bauhaus Dessau workshops from the perspective of craft — a subject that provoked vehement arguments at the Bauhaus — and will be held in the original weaving workshop in the Bauhaus building in Dessau, Germany. At the Bauhaus, say the show’s organisers, craft “was redefined as a utopia”, offering a contrast to industrial mass production.
Bauhaus Dessau metal workshop: Foreman Alfred Schäfter with serially produced aluminium reflectors, taken around 1927-1928. Image courtesy of Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Marianne Brandt Ceiling Lamp Design © VG Bild-Kunst Bonn (for Marianne Brandt)
The processes of learning and production, not the finished product, will serve as the focus of the exhibition, examined through sketches, lesson notes, material studies, objects, photographs and documents. Looms, workbenches, tools, material samples and machines from the Bauhaus weaving, wood and metal workshops will all go on show for the first time.
The exhibition opens as a time when craft is experiencing a renaissance in the form of the do-it-yourself or “maker movement”, giving it a particular relevance in the 21st century.
Gunta Stölzl, ‘Jacquard wall hanging Five Choirs’ (detailed view), 1928. Image courtesy of St Anne’s Museum of the Hanseatic city of Lübeck
‘Craft Becomes Modern’ kicks off the ‘100 Years of Bauhaus’ program at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, marking the founding centenary of the Bauhaus in 2019. The famed school of design was founded in Weimar in 1919 and relocated to Dessau in 1925, then to Berlin, where it closed in 1933.
The Bauhaus institutions in each of those three cities are hosting centenary exhibitions in 2017, with the Dessau exhibition followed by a show in Weimar, opening in August, and a Berlin exhibition that begins in November.
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