Description
Book SynopsisA century after the Bauhaus's founding in 1919, this book reassesses it as more than a highly influential art, architecture, and design school. In myriad ways, emerging ideas about the body in relation to health, movement, gender, and sexuality were at the heart of art and life at the school.
Bauhaus Bodies reassesses the work of both well-known Bauhaus members and those who have unjustifiably escaped scholarly scrutiny, its women in particular. In fourteen original, cutting-edge essays by established experts and emerging scholars, this book reveals how Bauhaus artists challenged traditional ideas about bodies and gender. Written to appeal to students, scholars, and the broad public,
Bauhaus Bodies will be essential reading for anyone interested in modern art, architecture, design history, and gender studies; it will define conversations and debates during the 2019 centenary of the Bauhaus's founding and beyond.
Trade Review[
Bauhaus Bodies] presents us with a picture of the Bauhaus that is anything but remote. * Journal of Design History *
Bauhaus Bodies addresses gender issues more broadly, with fourteen essays by established and newer scholars on body culture, spirituality, dance, androgyny, clothing, experimental photography, and the unsung contributions of Bauhaus wives and female wall painters. * Woman's Art Journal *
Whether for their subsequently unrecognized collaborations with husbands or their seemingly unseen service labor, women shaped Bauhaus aesthetics and are still less known than the men even today. [This] anthology examines the famous architecture and design school beyond its lily-white reputation. * Deutschlandfunk (Bloomsbury Translation) *
Dispensing with the usual focus on a monolithic school and its leaders, this collection will prove an indispensable resource for investigating the Bauhaus' immediate social impact, historical context, and far-reaching historical implications. * CHOICE *
Bauhaus Bodies provides a remarkable contribution to our understanding of the Bauhaus and its community by tackling a vital set of issues surrounding the body, gender, and sexuality in modernism. Offering cutting-edge research and exceptional insight, this collection of essays brings together wide-ranging materials across a series of topics related to the politics and cultures of the body, explicating the Bauhaus in greater depth and with compelling nuance. Illustrating the crucial role of embodied experience and new experiments in living,
Bauhaus Bodies is an indispensable guide to the school’s wider impact on society, the arts, identity, body politics, health and physical culture, movement and space, and in many other social and cultural spheres. * Robin Schuldenfrei, Katja and Nicolai Tangen Lecturer in 20th Century Modernism, The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, UK *
What role did the body play at the Bauhaus? The essays in this volume offer answers to that question by offering a panorama of perspectives, from Ise Gropius to the known and unknown female students at the school. The body and gender played definitive roles in an institution that was largely run by men and notions of 'rationalized modernism'. This is the first anthology to demonstrate how one-sided that latter perspective is, which it does by uncovering a number of previously overlooked aspects, such as the role of gymnastics in the school’s foundation course and the instrumental role played by Ise Gropius in the everyday administration of the institution. * Magdalena Droste, former Professor at the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany *
Table of ContentsList of Images Introduction: Embodying the Bauhaus
Elizabeth Otto (University at Buffalo, State University of New York, USA) Part I: The Bauhaus in Weimar and Beyond: Gendered Bodies and the Search for Utopia 1. Soft Skills and Hard Facts: A Systematic Overview of Bauhaus Women’s Presence and Roles
Patrick Rössler and Anke Blümm (Bauhaus Museum, Germany) 2. Bodies Drilled in Freedom: Nudity, Body Culture, and Classical Gymnastics at the Weimar Bauhaus
Ute Ackermann (Bauhaus Museum, Germany) 3. The Spiritual Enhancement of the Body: Johannes Itten, Gertrud Grunow, and Mazdaznan at the Early Bauhaus
Linn Burchert (Humboldt University, Germany) 4. Utopias of a New Society: Lucia Moholy, László Moholy-Nagy, and the Loheland and Schwarzerden Women’s Communes
Sandra Neugärtner (Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Science, USA) 5. Invisible Bodies and Empty Spaces: Notes on Gender at the 1923 Bauhaus Exhibition
Paul Monty Paret (University of Utah, USA) Part II: A New Unity? Technologies and Techniques of Gender 6. Clothing Bauhaus Bodies
Kathleen James-Chakraborty (University College Dublin, Ireland) 7. Paul Klee and the New Woman Dancer: Gret Palucca, Karla Grosch, and the Gendering of Constructivism
Susan Funkenstein (University of Michigan, USA) 8. Ise Gropius: “Everyone Here Calls me ‘Frau Bauhaus’!”
Mercedes Valdivieso (University of Lleida, Spain) 9. Dörte Helm, Margaret Leiteritz, and Lou Scheper–Berkenkamp: Rare Women of the Bauhaus Wall-Painting Workshop
Morgan Ridler (Montclair State University and Westchester Community College, USA) 10. Androgyny in Oskar Schlemmer’s Figural Art
Deborah Ascher Barnstone (University of Technology Sydney, Australia) Part III: Identities and Ideologies in Bauhaus Photography and New Media 11. Disorder or Subordination? On Gender Relations in Bauhaus Photographs
Burcu Dogramaci (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany) 12. Bauhaus Double Portraits
Karen Koehler (Hampshire College, USA) 13. “A School for Becoming Human”: The Socialist Humanism of Irene Blühová’s Bauhaus Photographs
Julia Secklehner (Courtauld Institute of Art in London, UK) 14. Marcel Breuer and the Theatrical Interior
Jordan Troeller (Harvard University, USA) List of Contributors Index
