Bauhaus Bodies Gender, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernism’s Legendary Art School
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Elizabeth Otto is a professor of modern and contemporary art history at The State University of New York at Buffalo. She has published widely on gender issues in Germany’s visual culture of the 1920s and 1930s, especially at the Bauhaus.
Patrick Rössler is a professor of communications and empirical research methods at the University of Erfurt, Germany. His research has concentrated on media effects, political communication, and the history of visual communication, including Bauhaus graphic design and advertising.
[<i>Bauhaus Bodies</i>] presents us with a picture of the Bauhaus that is anything but remote.
Journal of Design History
<i>Bauhaus Bodies</i> 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
<i>Bauhaus Bodies</i> 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, <i>Bauhaus Bodies</i> 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
A 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.
List 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
Visual Cultures and German Contexts publishes innovative research into visual culture in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, as well as in diasporic linguistic and cultural communities outside of these geographic, historical, and political borders.
The series invites scholarship by academics, curators, architects, artists, and designers across all media forms and time periods. It engages with traditional methods in visual culture analysis as well as inventive interdisciplinary approaches. It seeks to encourage a dialogue amongst scholars in traditional disciplines with those pursuing innovative interdisciplinary and intermedial research. Of particular interest are provocative perspectives on archival materials, original scholarship on emerging and established creative visual fields, investigations into time-based forms of aesthetic expression, and new readings of history through the lens of visual culture. The series offers a much-needed venue for expanding how we engage with the field of Visual Culture in general.
Proposals for monographs, edited volumes, and outstanding research studies by established as well as emerging writers from a wide range of comparative, theoretical and methodological perspectives are welcome.
Series Editors
Deborah Ascher Barnstone is Professor and Head of the school of Architecture, Design, and Planning at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is on the editorial board of The Art Journal of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand and has published widely in scholarly journals such as Journal of Architectural Education, Journal of Architecture, and New German Critique. Recent monographs are: Beyond the Bauhaus: Cultural Modernity in Breslau, 1918-1933 (2016) and The Break with the Past: Avant-garde Architecture in Germany, 1910–1925 (2018).
Thomas O. Haakenson is Associate Professor in Critical Studies and Visual Studies at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Oakland, USA. He serves as Vice President of the U.S. Fulbright Association's Chapter Advisory Board, as well as on the Advisory Board and on the Summer Workshop Program Committee for the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany. He has been published widely, including in New German Critique, Cabinet, Rutgers Art Review, German Studies Review, and the anthologies Legacies of Modernism, Spectacle, Representations of German Identity as well as Memorialization in Germany Since 1945.
Advisory Board Members
Donna West Brett, University of Sydney, Australia
Nina Lübbren, Anglia Ruskin University, UK
Patrizia C. McBride, Cornell University, USA
Elizabeth Otto, University at Buffalo SUNY, USA
Annette F. Timm, University of Calgary, Canada
James A. van Dyke, University of Missouri, USA
Randall Halle, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Christophe Kone, Williams College, USA
Paul Jaskot, Duke University, USA
Qinna Shen, Bryn Mawr College, USA
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Elizabeth Otto is a professor of modern and contemporary art history at The State University of New York at Buffalo. She has published widely on gender issues in Germany’s visual culture of the 1920s and 1930s, especially at the Bauhaus.
Patrick Rössler is a professor of communications and empirical research methods at the University of Erfurt, Germany. His research has concentrated on media effects, political communication, and the history of visual communication, including Bauhaus graphic design and advertising.