The
bauhaus.photo exhibition has been extended until the finissage on February 26, 2020, at 6:30pm at the Goethe-Institut Washington, accompanied by a book presentation by Elizabeth Otto of her two publications
Bauhaus Women and
Haunted Bauhaus with a subsequent Q&A by Bibiana Obler of George Washington University.
bauhaus.photo: A Special Selection of Photos from the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin features a special selection of key works from the collection of more than 70,000 Bauhaus photos held by the Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung in Berlin – the largest such collection in the world. The exhibition provides an impressive insight into the many facets of Bauhaus photography and life at the Bauhaus.
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Elizabeth Otto:
Otto is an art historian and the author of
Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics and
Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt, and the coauthor of
Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective. She has coedited five books including
Bauhaus Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernism's Legendary Art School. Otto is a professor at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), where she has also served as the Executive Director of the Humanities Institute. Her work has been supported by numerous organizations including the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and the National Humanities Center.
Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective by Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rössler (Bloomsbury, 2019)
The story of the Bauhaus has usually been kept narrow, localized to its original time and place and associated with only a few famous men such as Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and László Moholy-Nagy. Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective bursts the bounds of this slim history by revealing fresh Bauhaus faces: Forty-five Bauhaus women unjustifiably forgotten by most history books. This book also widens the lens to reveal how the Bauhaus drew women from many parts of Europe and beyond, and how, through these cosmopolitan female designers, artists, and architects, it sent the Bauhaus message out into the world and to a global audience. Essential reading on the Bauhaus or for anyone interested in the too-often missed centrality of women artists to modern art and design, Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective reclaims the other half of Bauhaus history, yielding a new understanding of the radical experiments in art and life undertaken at the Bauhaus and the innovations that continue to resonate with viewers around the world today.
Haunted Bauhaus by Elizabeth Otto (MIT Press, 2019)
An investigation of the irrational and the unconventional currents swirling behind the Bauhaus's signature sleek surfaces and austere structures.
The Bauhaus (1919–1933) is widely regarded as the twentieth century's most influential art, architecture, and design school, celebrated as the archetypal movement of rational modernism and famous for bringing functional and elegant design to the masses. In Haunted Bauhaus, art historian Elizabeth Otto liberates Bauhaus history, uncovering a movement that is vastly more diverse and paradoxical than previously assumed. Otto traces the surprising trajectories of the school's engagement with occult spirituality, gender fluidity, queer identities, and radical politics. The Bauhaus, she shows us, is haunted by these untold stories.
Bibiana Obler:
Obler is associate professor of art history at George Washington University. Her book
Intimate Collaborations: Kandinsky and Münter, Arp and Taeuber investigates the role of artist couples in the emergence of abstract art, and she is working on a second,
Anti-Craft, on relations between craft and art in the late twentieth century. An exhibition she co-curated with Phyllis Rosenzweig,
Fast Fashion / Slow Art, is currently on view at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine
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