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McCloskey Speaker Series 2019: Constructing And Deconstructing The Myths Of The Bauhaus

Featuring Barry Bergdoll, Meyer Schapiro professor of Art History at Columbia University and curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. 

Bergdoll will address the Bauhaus’s impact on modernist design, which reached far beyond the provincial German cities of Weimar and Dessau where the school primarily made its home.  The Bauhaus’s creative use of publications and exhibitions broadcast its philosophy and amplified its achievements. For example, its exhibition in 1923 showed off student work and harnessed a panorama of European modernism by associating works of architects from the Netherlands to the US with the work of its students and masters. Reality and myth began to fuse in the perception of the Bauhaus, when, in fact, no architectural instruction was offered until a few years later.  Bergdoll will distinguish the school from the propaganda machine and the reality from the myth.