Happy Birthday Bauhaus!

The exhibition is devoted to this year's 90th Anniversary of the Founding of the Bauhaus. With Happy Birthday Bauhaus!, the gallery celebrates photography at the path-breaking art school while at the same time looking at its legacy. The comprehensive presentation brings together works by László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Peterhans, Gertrud Arndt, and Umbo, among others. It coincides with Modell Bauhaus, the official retrospective on view at the Martin Gropius Bau organized by the Bauhaus Archive Berlin, the Bauhaus Foundation Dessau, and the Foundation of Weimar Classics, in cooperation with the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Photography played an integrative role at the Bauhaus from the very beginning. With numerous examples – many of them unpublished - of this extraordinarily diverse photographic praxis, the exhibition sheds light on the quintessential aspects of Bauhaus teachings as well as on life at the Bauhaus. KICKEN BERLIN shows the medium of photography on par with other creative design media in expressing the modern way of seeing. A significant innovative stimulus to the creative development of photography at the Bauhaus stemmed from László Moholy-Nagy's premise that photography was an experimental means of "shaping light," drawing on the medium's mechanical qualities. Until 1928 Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers taught the preliminary course, the most important components of which were the three-dimensional studies of various materials such as glass and paper. Most often these objects are known to us only through photographs. Walter Peterhans's photo course, added to the curriculum in 1929, led to material studies of a completely different nature. As his own still lifes and photographs of objects show, Peterhans understood how to handle lighting and composition as brilliantly as he did developing and enlargement. Fragmented, montage-like still lifes like Karfreitagszauber (Good Friday Magic) convey, in addition to maximum objectivity, a fascination with surreal imagery. Hannes Meyer, Bauhaus director from 1928 to 1930, was already exploring the relationship between objects in space and the "essence of standardized things" in his 1924 Vitrine Co-op, which presented packages of goods as if they were architectural models. The display of merchandise touches on another central field of activity within the Bauhaus curriculum and production: advertising and typography. These were not only documented photographically but also drew on experimental techniques like the photogram in their designs – as, for example, in Heinz Loew's advertising and magazine designs. In 1926 Lucia Moholy took over the visual documentation of Walter Gropius's iconic Dessau Bauhaus building. Her congenial interior and exterior views of the workshops and studio groupings as well as of the masters' houses are emblematic of the public perception of the institution. The famous school building also provided Iwao Yamawaki with a source of inspiration, in two senses. Here the Japanese architect and student perfected his understanding of architecture and photography, working with Walter Peterhans. The "Bauhäusler" also used the camera as an instrument for investigating themselves, as for example in Gertrud Arndt's Self Portrait with Mask (1930). Arndt's work points beyond her own era toward modes of self representation practiced by contemporary artists like Cindy Sherman. The preliminary course's construction exercises were echoed in ephemeral decorations and costumes created for the legendary carnival parties, for example Lis Beyer- Volger's paper dress for the White Party in 1926. Far beyond the influence of its courses, the Bauhaus's impact spread deeply into the life of the Weimar Republic. Umbo acknowledged that his pictures would have been unthinkable without his training with Johannes Itten at the Weimar Bauhaus. The collages he created for Walter Ruttmann's film Berlin: Sinfonie einer Großstadt (Symphony of a Great City) – and particularly its central image of the Rasende Reporter (The Raging Reporter) of 1926 – provide an important connection within his work. His photographs from a trip to the US in 1952, on view at KICKEN II, attest to how Umbo carried the Bauhaus legacy into the postwar period. (Carolin Förster)