{"id":2447027,"date":"2019-07-31T21:48:00","date_gmt":"2019-08-01T03:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/?p=310537"},"modified":"2019-07-31T21:48:00","modified_gmt":"2019-08-01T03:48:00","slug":"aspen-institute-hosts-experts-for-capstone-of-year-long-bauhaus-100-celebration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/aspen-institute-hosts-experts-for-capstone-of-year-long-bauhaus-100-celebration\/","title":{"rendered":"Aspen Institute hosts experts for capstone of year-long Bauhaus 100 celebration"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
Herbert Bayer photographed in his studio in 1965.<\/strong>
Aspen Historical Society\/Aspen Illustrated News Collection<\/em><\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

Bauhaus experts are descending on Aspen this weekend, as the final major events of Aspen\u2019s yearlong Bauhaus centennial take over the Aspen Institute campus.<\/p>\n

The symposium \u201cBauhaus: The Making of Modern,\u201d running Sunday through Tuesday, is a capstone event bringing together scholars, curators and creators with the public, coming on the heels of dozens of exhibitions, workshops and lectures since Aspen\u2019s centenary celebration opened in July 2018.<\/p>\n

Every arts organization in the Roaring Fork Valley has participated as the town celebrated the German art school and movement along with the life and work of Aspen icon and Bauhaus master Herbert Bayer with lectures, art exhibitions, art-making workshops, walking tours and a festive costume ball at the Wheeler.<\/p>\n

Scholars coming to town for the conference said they are hopeful the global centennial celebration of the Bauhaus has given the public a more nuanced understanding of the school and dispelled long-held misconceptions about it.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverything associated with minimalism became associated with the Bauhaus,\u201d said Barry Bergdoll, a professor of art history at Columbia University who organized the major 2009 survey \u201cBauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity\u201d at the Museum of Modern Art.<\/p>\n

Bergdoll will give a public lecture Monday aimed at clearing up misconceptions about the Bauhaus.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Bauhaus was a school \u2014 it wasn\u2019t a style, there is no such thing as Bauhaus style,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Artists like Bayer, he noted, continued to evolve after they left the school. So defining everything Bayer ever did \u2014 including his three decades of work in Aspen after World War II \u2014 as \u201cBauhaus\u201d is reductive.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am not condemned forever to be a representation of where I went to school,\u201d Bergdoll said. \u201cI don\u2019t see going to or teaching at the Bauhaus meaning that absolutely everything that one does afterward as part of the Bauhaus or even Bauhaus-influenced.\u201d<\/p>\n

For instance, Bayer\u2019s most prominent legacy in Aspen is his architecture. Yet he never studied architecture at the Bauhaus. So, Bergdoll asked, can we call in Bauhaus architecture?<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m interested in how people who had a Bauhaus background changed in new environments,\u201d Bergdoll said. \u201cWhether it\u2019s Herbert Bayer in Colorado or Walter Gropius at Harvard or Hannes Meyer in Mexico City. \u2026 Living and working in America contributed as much to the work of Walter Gropius, Bayer and Marcel Breuer as did coming from the Bauhaus.\u201d<\/p>\n

The centennial also is giving scholars an opportunity to expand the ranks of publicly celebrated Bauahus artists. After decades of neglect by historians and curators, the women of the Bauhaus \u2014 Gunta St\u00f6lzl. Marianne Brandt and Lucia Moholy among them \u2014 are getting their due.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople who are preparing Bauhaus exhibitions, most of them are realizing that it\u2019s inadequate to tell the story of this school through five dudes,\u201d said Elizabeth Otto, professor of art history at the University of Buffalo and author of several Bauhaus books including \u201cBauhaus Women\u201d and \u201cHaunted Bauhaus,\u201d about experiments in spiritualism, religion and politics at the school.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are a lot more chances to realize how wide and diverse the Bauhaus was, and that it was both a movement and a school,\u201d Otto said.<\/p>\n

Her work unveils how Bauhaus members experimented with new religions, the occult, utopian societies and new models of gender roles and sexuality.<\/p>\n

\u201cBauhaus is seen as the most rational of all modernist movements \u2014 and, if anything, as the boring modernism \u2014 and this book is saying that\u2019s not true,\u201d she said of \u201cHaunted Bauhaus.\u201d \u201cIt was much more about creating thinkers who had open minds, open spirits, who were attuned to the world around them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Robert Weisenberger, associate curator of contemporary projects at the Clark Institute, spearheaded the Harvard Art Museums\u2019 digital archive of its extensive Bauhaus collection, itself founded in the late 1940s as the world\u2019s first Bauhaus archive. That work underscored the diversity of the Bauhaus, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was surprised by the stylistic pluralism of the place,\u201d Weisenberger said. \u201cBy how many different directions people were going simultaneously.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a college freshman, spurred by his interest in Bayer and the Bauhaus, Weisenberger made a trip to Aspen to see Bayer\u2019s local sculptures, earthworks and the Aspen Institute campus. Returning this weekend for the symposium, Weisenberger believes Aspen is pivotal to Bayer and Bauhaus studies.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt contains almost everything he did,\u201d Weisenberger said of the artist\u2019s work shaping the town\u2019s culture, preserving its architectural past and setting its design philosophy. \u201cHis interests, at that point, were increasingly environmental in scale, in environmental design and thinking beyond the traditional easel and canvas. \u2026 To understand Bayer, you have to visit Aspen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Weisenberger also underscored the idea that \u201cBauhaus\u201d is often misused as a catch-all term for minimalism.<\/p>\n

\u201cBauhaus, the word, is thrown around so much and ascribed to so many things, when in reality it was a small school that operated for a set number of years,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was a clearing house for avant-garde ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n

An element of the Bauhaus legacy that\u2019s gone largely unremarked upon during Aspen\u2019s celebration is Bauhaus members\u2019 work for the Nazi regime following the school\u2019s closure in 1933.<\/p>\n

Bayer, in the years between the Bauhaus and his move to the U.S. in 1938, contributed work to Nazi propaganda campaigns and exhibitions. This work, the subject of an essay by Timothy Brown in the Aug. 1 edition of the Aspen Times Weekly, has largely been ignored during Aspen\u2019s Bauhaus 100 celebration.<\/p>\n

Experts coming to the Institute have contended with the work of Bayer and others for the Nazis.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no reason to excise that from the record any longer,\u201d Weisenberger said. \u201cI\u2019m so struck that it\u2019s only in recent years that that\u2019s been discussed. It\u2019s not a small, incidental fact. It\u2019s quite a major one. How successful Bayer was in that role, how visible he was in that role. It\u2019s crucial to acknowledge it and grapple with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Weisenberger noted that Bayer studied, wrote about and mastered the psychological effect of visual art. He put those skills to use for commercial enterprises, including the burgeoning Aspen resort and skiing, Walter Paepcke\u2019s Container Corporation and both sides of World War II.<\/p>\n

\u201cBayer was a master propagandist,\u201d Weisenberger concluded. \u201cIn a very short time, after his arrival in the U.S., he turned around and propagandized for democracy and the Allied cause in the war. I think it\u2019s central to our understanding of him and how seductive his work might be.\u201d<\/p>\n

Otto recalled feeling betrayed when she first viewed a propaganda brochure that Bayer made for the Nazis in 1936, coinciding with the Berlin Olympics.<\/p>\n

\u201cI really judged him. I thought, \u2018How could you?\u2019 with an arrogance that you can only have if you don\u2019t really understand how complicated things were,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Otto noted that Bayer viewed himself as apolitical, that his wife and daughter were Jewish and that he used a Bauhaus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1938 as his ticket out of Germany. (That show would acquaint Bayer with Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke, who brought him to settle in Aspen in 1946.)<\/p>\n

\u201cIn hindsight, we know how much danger they were in, but they couldn\u2019t have known,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Bayer\u2019s work with the Nazis has to be evaluated in the context of the mid-1930s in Germany, Bergdoll emphasized.<\/p>\n

\u201cHistory has to be understood in real time, not with perfect moral 20\/20 rearview vision,\u201d he said. \u201cTrying to accommodate the regime coming to power, not knowing where it\u2019s going, this is the same situation we have now with the horrors of the Trump administration. \u2026 I don\u2019t think it\u2019s fair to take these people back into some kind of high court to assess them as collaborators.\u201d<\/p>\n

atravers@aspentimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Herbert Bayer photographed in his studio in 1965.Aspen Historical Society\/Aspen Illustrated News Collection Bauhaus experts are descending on Aspen this weekend, as the final major events of Aspen\u2019s yearlong Bauhaus centennial take over the Aspen Institute campus. The symposium \u201cBauhaus: The Making of Modern,\u201d running Sunday through Tuesday, is a capstone event bringing together scholars, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2447027","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-24 06:48:55","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2447027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2447027"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2447027\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2447027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2447027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2447027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}