Main entry:

Hochman, Elaine S.

Title & Author:

Bauhaus : crucible of modernism / Elaine S. Hochman ; foreword by Dore Ashton.

Edition:

1st ed.

Publication:

New York : Fromm International, 1997.

Description:

xii, 371 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 348-358) and index.
1. Youth, war, and revolution -- 2. The beauty of efficient form: tyranny, treason, or salvation? Background to the Bauhaus -- 3. A fragile moment: Weimar, Gropius, and the Avant-Garde -- 4. Storming into Weimar: the city as relic or harbinger -- 5. A hornet's nest: tradition meets the new, changed world -- 6. "A plague bacillus": the political implications of the Bauhaus, imagined and real -- 7. The paradox of Bauhaus politics, 1920: denial and pursuit -- 8. What happened to November? The end of the revolution and its implications for the Bauhaus -- 9. From Geist to gadgets: the Bauhaus attempts to change -- 10. Victory or total destruction: the end of the Weimar Bauhaus -- 11. "Those happier shores": young Americans meet Europe -- 12. "Dessau impossible" -- 13. Dessau 1927: a critical election -- 14. Triumph of the right -- 15. Death and transfiguration -- Epilogue: the Bauhaus in America.

Summary:

The Bauhaus is the most celebrated artistic institution of our time. In the fourteen years of its existence in Weimar Germany, the Bauhaus became a center where the ideas that would dominate art in the twentieth century clashed and became defined. The ideas forged within the school literally transformed our landscape. Almost nothing we read, wear, or live in is devoid of its influence.
Yet there has been a history of the Bauhaus. For the first time, Elaine S. Hochman sets the school in the context of the turbulent times to which it was born following the collapse of Imperial Germany in 1919. The Bauhaus emerged just as radical social and political upheavals swept through Europe in the wake of World War I, a product of the convulsions of an age when the contest between ideologies was fought with the fervor of a religious war. Left was pitted against right of the streets, and these battles penetrated the walls of the Bauhaus as well. They shaped the destiny of the fledgling school and those who taught there, including some of the most illustrious names in the world of modern art - Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky.
Hochman's access to the school's archives, previously off limits to Western scholars, provides an intimate day-to-day perspective of the school which reveals a different Bauhaus than the one projected by its latter-day champions in the U.S. This is the Bauhaus of its contemporaries, for whom the political and cultural implications were often more important than aesthetics.

ISBN:

0880641754
9780880641753
0880642289 (paperback)
9780880642286 (paperback)

Subject:

Bauhaus History.
Bauhaus
Art schools Germany History.
Art Study and teaching Germany.
Écoles des Beaux-Arts Allemagne Histoire.
Art Étude et enseignement Allemagne.
Art schools
Art Study and teaching
Geschichte
Beeldende kunsten.
Germany

Form/genre:

History

Holdings:

Location: Library main 191934
Call No.: N332.G33 B36 1997
Status: Available