Group Tour
Barry Bergdoll
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
9:30 a.m.
The Museum of Modern Art
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This group tour is currently at capacity. If you would like to be added to the wait list, please email Nick Anderson at anderson@archleague.org.
Curator Barry Bergdoll will lead a tour of the exhibition Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity, the first comprehensive treatment by MoMA of the Bauhaus since 1938. The show with over 400 works examines the Bauhaus in its historical moment from 1919 to 1933—the exact years of the tumultuous tenure of the Weimar Republic—and considers it as a vibrant school rather than solely as an artistic movement.
The Bauhaus school in Germany—the most famous and influential school of avant-garde art in the twentieth century—brought together artists, architects, and designers in an extraordinary conversation about the nature of art in the modern age. Aiming to rethink the very form of contemporary life, the students and faculty of the Bauhaus made the school the venue for a dazzling array of experiments in the visual arts that had a transformative effect on the 1920s and 1930s and profoundly shaped our contemporary visual world. The exhibition brings together an extraordinarily broad range of the school’s productions, including industrial design, furniture, architecture, graphics, photography, textiles, ceramics, theater and costume design, painting, and sculpture. It includes works by famous faculty members and well-known students including Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Marianne Brandt, Marcel Breuer, Lyonel Feininger, Walter Gropius, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, Lucia Moholy, Lilly Reich, Oskar Schlemmer, and Gunta Stölzl, as well as less well-known, but equally innovative, artists.
The exhibition is organized by Barry Bergdoll, the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, and Leah Dickerman, Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, in collaboration with a cross-departmental group of MoMA colleagues, in the spirit of the Bauhaus. It is also organized in collaboration with a consortium of the three Bauhaus collections in Germany: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, and Klassik Stiftung Weimar, a partnership that has only been possible since the reunification of Germany.
Reservations are required. Due to the limited number of tickets and to facilitate fair access across our membership, reservations are limited to members only. Upper level members, including League Circle firms, are limited to two reservations. Reservations will be given on a first-come, first-served basis, beginning at 10:00 a.m., Tuesday, November 3. Reservations received before 10:00 a.m. on November 3 will not be honored. Please email anderson@archleague.org. Further program information will be given upon confirmation.
This program was made possible in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
Image: Oskar Schlemmer, Bauhaus Stairway, 1932, 63 7/8 x 45″ (162.3 x 114.3 cm), The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Philip Johnson
Thumbnail: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Armchair. 1927–30, Chromium-plated tubular steel and leather. 31 1/4 x 21 7/8 x 34 1/4″ (79.4 x 55.6 x 87 cm), Private collection. Courtesy Neue Galerie New York. Photo: Jeffrey Sturges, © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
