Harvard Art Museums Launch Comprehensive Digital Bauhaus Archive
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A good three years before the official centennial, the Harvard Art Museums have launched a comprehensive digital online resource with material on the art and design of the Bauhaus School. “The Bauhaus Special Collection” (click here for access) intendeds
Harvard Art Museums Launch Comprehensive Digital Bauhaus Archive
A good three years before the official centennial, the Harvard Art Museums have launched a comprehensive digital online resource with material on the art and design of the Bauhaus School. “The Bauhaus Special Collection” (click here for access) intendeds to support “understanding of and scholarship on the 20th century’s most influential school of art and design, in addition to the school’s extensive ties to Harvard University and the greater Boston area,” as the Harvard Museums explain in a statement.The new online resource originates in The Busch-Reisinger Museum’s collection, one of the largest Bauhaus collections worldwide. 32,000 Bauhaus-related objects are being made available, including drawing, prints, painting, photography, textiles, and sculpture. Researchers can also access selected writings, notes, and other materials from the museums’ archives. Among the Bauhaus creators and theoreticians represented are founder Walter Gropius, artists Josef and Anni Albers, Marcel Breuer, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, László MoholyNagy, as well as the archives of Lyonel Feininger and less well-known protagonists, particularly American representatives of the movement. The new digital resource is part of a larger Bauhaus project which will result in a campus-wide exhibition in celebration of the school’s 100th anniversary in 2019.Founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius in the German town of Weimar, before moving into its custom built school in Dessau in 1926, Bauhaus lay the groundwork for a new understanding of design, fuelled by a utopian desire to connect the creative disciplines and integrate new media and technologies to introduce novel holistic ways of living.According to Robert Wiesenberger who developed the Special Collection, Harvard was “a key site for the reception, dissemination, and documentation of Bauhaus ideas through the work of its students, émigré faculty, and museum curators,” particularly after Gropius’s relocation to the United States fleeing Nazi persecution. From 1937 to 1952 Gropius chaired the Department of Architecture at the Graduate School of Design, accompanied by former Bauhaus student-turned-master Marcel Breuer, among others. Gropius also helped build Harvard’s Bauhaus “study collection” which benefitted greatly from his personal network and contacts. Read more
