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Object Lessons from a Historic Collection

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Object Lessons from a Historic Collection Friday, March 29, 2019 10am–5pm Bauhaus 100 Object Lessons from a Historic Collection Founded in 1919 in Weimar, Germany, the Bauhaus All programming takes place in Menschel Hall was the 20th century’s most influential school of art, 10am Director’s Welcome and Introductory Remarks architecture, and design. A century later, we continue Martha Tedeschi, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director, to learn from the rich trove of student exercises, iconic Harvard Art Museums Laura Muir, Research Curator, Division of Academic and Public design objects, photographs, textiles, graphic design, Programs, Harvard Art Museums paintings, and archival materials in the Busch-Reisinger 10:15am– The Bauhaus in Germany Museum’s extensive Bauhaus collection. Established 1pm after World War II with the aid of Bauhaus founder and Color Wheels and the Bauhaus Science of Design Melissa Venator, Stefan Engelhorn Curatorial Fellow in the Harvard professor Walter Gropius, the collection is the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard Art Museums largest of its kind outside Germany. Today’s program Equilibrium, Space, and Materiality at the Bauhaus will feature new research on Bauhaus art and artists in Robin Schuldenfrei, Katja and Nicolai Tangen Lecturer in 20th Century Modernism, Courtauld Institute of Art, University Harvard collections. of London Break This symposium coincides with the exhibition The Bauhaus and Harvard, on view at the Harvard Art The Ethnographic and the Modern: The Weimar Photomontages of Marianne Brandt and Hannah Höch Museums from February 8 through July 28, 2019. Kristie La, Ph.D. candidate, Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University Otti Berger’s “Bauhaus Picture Book” Annie Bourneuf, Associate Professor, Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago Response and moderated Q&A Lynette Roth, Daimler Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum and Head, Division of Modern and Contemporary Art, Harvard Art Museums Lunch Break 2:30–5pm The Bauhaus in the United States Ruth Asawa on Paper: The Two-Dimensional Work of a Sculptor Jordan Troeller, Ph.D., Harvard University Josef Albers’s Brick Relief America for Harvard University Jeffrey Saletnik, Assistant Professor of Modern Art, Department of Art History, Indiana University Bloomington To Break the Wall: Herbert Bayer’s Harvard Murals, 1950 Robert Wiesenberger, Associate Curator of Contemporary Projects, Clark Art Institute Response and moderated Q&A Laura Muir Annie Bourneuf is an associate professor in the Department of Robin Schuldenfrei is the Katja and Nicolai Tangen Lecturer Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute in 20th Century Modernism at the Courtauld Institute of Art, of Chicago. Her book Paul Klee: The Visible and the Legible (2015) University of London. She has written widely on modernism was awarded the 2016 Robert Motherwell Book Award. She is as it intersects with theories of the object, architecture, inte- currently at work on a second book, The “Angelus Novus” and riors, and especially on the Bauhaus. Her publications include Its Interleaf. Luxury and Modernism: Architecture and the Object in Germany, 1900–1933 (2018) as well as the edited volumes Atomic Dwelling: Kristie La is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History of Anxiety, Domesticity, and Postwar Architecture (2012) and Bauhaus Art and Architecture at Harvard University. She works on modern Construct: Fashioning Identity, Discourse, and Modernism (with and contemporary art, focusing on photography in the Weimar Jeffrey Saletnik, 2009). She is currently writing a book on objects Republic, Soviet Union, and United States. Recipient of a Fulbright in exile and the displacement of design. grant, she spent the 2013–14 academic year in Berlin, research- ing propaganda exhibitions mounted by the National Socialists Jordan Troeller earned her Ph.D. in the history of art and architec- in that city between 1933 and 1937. Her work on Herbert Bayer ture at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the Bauhaus and the 1942 MoMA exhibition Road to Victory: A Procession of and its diaspora, particularly in the United States. Recent publi- Photographs of the Nation at War appeared in October. cations examine the gender politics of Marcel Breuer’s furniture (in Bauhaus Bodies, ed. Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rössler, 2019) Laura Muir is a research curator in the Division of Academic and and Anni Albers’s architectural approach to textiles (in Textile Public Programs at the Harvard Art Museums; from 2001 to 2013, Modernism, ed. Burcu Dogramaci, forthcoming). Her current book she was assistant curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum. She project considers Ruth Asawa’s sculpture in early histories of Bay specializes in European modern art and the history of photogra- Area intermediality as it intersected with domestic architecture, phy. Her exhibition and publication Lyonel Feininger: Photographs, photography, and printmaking. 1928–1939 was the first devoted to the photographic work of for- mer Bauhaus master Lyonel Feininger. She curated the 2019 The Melissa Venator is the 2016–19 Stefan Engelhorn Curatorial Bauhaus and Harvard exhibition. Fellow in the Busch-Reisinger Museum. In addition to her work on the Busch-Reisinger’s historic Bauhaus collection, she curated Lynette Roth is Daimler Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum an exhibition of the industrial art of New Objectivity artist Carl and head of the Division of Modern and Contemporary Art at Grossberg and catalogued the Busch-Reisinger’s extensive hold- the Harvard Art Museums. Her research focuses on modern and ings of photographs by Lucia Moholy. Her publications include contemporary art from German-speaking countries, with special the first English-language monograph on Grossberg (2018) and emphasis on the medium of painting, the relationship between art essays on the intersection of art and technology. She curated and politics, and the history and reception of German art in the the 2019 exhibition Hans Arp’s Constellations II at the Harvard Art United States. Recent projects include Inventur—Art in Germany, Museums. 1943–55 and Who Owns the World? Art and Politics in the Weimar Republic. Robert Wiesenberger is associate curator of contemporary proj- ects at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, Jeffrey Saletnik teaches in the Department of Art History at and a critic at the Yale School of Art. He was the 2014–16 Stefan Indiana University Bloomington. His research engages the social Engelhorn Curatorial Fellow in the Busch-Reisinger Museum at infrastructures and mechanisms that undergird cultural produc- the Harvard Art Museums, where his work focused on the muse- tion: pedagogy, emigration networks, and modes of translation. ums’ Bauhaus collection and developing the digital resource The He has published essays on Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, Bauhaus. He is co-author of Muriel Cooper (2017) and author of a John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg and co-edited Bauhaus forthcoming publication on Marcel Breuer. He received his Ph.D. Construct: Fashioning Identity, Discourse, and Modernism. He is in art history from Columbia University. completing a book-length study of Josef Albers’s teaching meth- ods while an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellow at the Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Notes This symposium and other exhibition-related programming is made possible by the M. Victor Leventritt Fund, which was established through the generosity of the wife, children, and friends of the late M. Victor Leventritt, Harvard Class of 1935. Support for The Bauhaus and Harvard exhibition is provided by endowed funds, including the Daimler Curatorship of the Busch- Reisinger Museum Fund, the Charles L. Kuhn Endowment Fund, and the Care of the Busch-Reisinger Museum Collection Fund. Modern and contemporary art programs at the Harvard Art Museums are made possible in part by generous support from the Emily Rauh Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art. Front: Installation view, Modern Painting and Sculpture: The Art of the Bauhaus, Busch-Reisinger Museum, 1951. Busch-Reisinger Museum Records (BRM 5), folder 106. Harvard Art Museums Archives, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138.
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