The Bauhaus & America ─ First Contacts, 1919-1936

The Bauhaus school was founded in Weimar in 1919 by the German architect WalterGropius, moved to Dessau in 1925 and to Berlin in 1932, and was dissolved in 1933 by Ludwig Mies vander Rohe under political duress. Although it existed for a mere fourteen years and boasted fewerthan 1,300 students, its influence is felt throughout the world in numerous buildings, artworks,objects, concepts, and curricula.After the Bauhaus's closing in 1933, many of its protagonists movedto the United States, where their acceptance had to be cultivated. The key to understanding theAmerican reception of the Bauhaus is to be found not in the emigre success stories or the famous1938 Bauhaus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, but in the course of America's early contactwith the Bauhaus. In this book Margret Kentgens-Craig shows that the fame of the Bauhaus in Americawas the result not only of the inherent qualities of its concepts and products, but also of a uniquecongruence of cultural supply and demand, of a consistent flow of information, and of fine-tunedmarketing. Thus the history of the American reception of the Bauhaus in the 1920s and 1930sforeshadows the patterns of fame-making that became typical of the post-World War II art world. Thetransfer of artistic, intellectual, and pedagogical concepts from one cultural context to another isa process of transformation and integration. In presenting a case study of this process, the bookalso provides fresh insights into the German-American cultural history of the period from 1919 to1936.

Margret Kentgens-Craig is the former Head of the Department of Archives and Collections at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, Germany.