Countless New Ideas
Review of the Bauhaus year
In just a few weeks, the great Bauhaus celebration that has excited us all year will draw to a close. The anniversary ends on December 31. What can we take from it? Annemarie Jaeggi, Museum Director of the Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung in Berlin, gives her assessment, along with Claudia Perren, Director of the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, and Wolfgang Holler, Director General Museums of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar.
Annemarie Jaeggi, Director, Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung in Berlin
“Hundreds of events in Germany and abroad have opened up new perspectives during the centenary of the design school’s foundation, shedding light on its different facets and also its paradoxes. The anniversary’s decentralised organisation was aimed at encouraging that diversity, with historical, social and aesthetic interest, local and international exhibitions, and symposia and research projects that engaged critically with the ideas of the Bauhaus from a social or aesthetic perspective. The Bauhaus Archive presented its anniversary exhibition “original bauhaus” at the Berlinische Galerie, allowing us to experiment on ways to fill our future museum. At the end of the anniversary year, we face new tasks and are countless ideas the wiser.”
Claudia Perren, Director and Board Member, Bauhaus Dessau Foundation
“To me, the Bauhaus is alive and as passionately fought for now as it was in the past. It was a design school in a period of transition that operated through international networks. 100 years later, the Bauhaus anniversary has opened up many different paths to the Bauhaus, has subjected it to critical revision, debated its reception in the East and West, presented its ambivalences, continued to research its self-perception, discovered other perspectives and celebrated the school at length. As long as we engage with the Bauhaus in everyday life, in research and also in practising art, design and architecture – not only historically, but also socially – it will remain alive in the future. An anniversary is always a communal effort. I would like to thank everyone who participated in the Bauhaus anniversary and those that supported it, planned it and made it happen!”
Wolfgang Holler, Director General Museums, Klassik Stiftung Weimar
“Nobody imagined that the 2019 Bauhaus anniversary would be such a great success. The opening with the festive week at the Akademie der Künste zu Berlin, under the auspices of the Federal President, was spectacular. The major international exhibition tour “Imaginista”, which had already begun in 2018 and experienced its climax with the exhibition at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, impressively demonstrated the worldwide networking of the Bauhaus. In Weimar and Dessau, the long-awaited Bauhaus Museums were finally opened. It is already clear that they are attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors. Anyone accessing the high-quality website “bauhaus100” during the anniversary can see and read how incredibly diverse the programme is throughout Germany, while also learning how enormous the feedback has been in all the media. Bauhaus everywhere, so to speak. But the anniversary organisers were very clear from the outset that the year is not intended as uncritical celebration and should instead locate the Bauhaus in the critical field of tension of Modernity – with all its positive and negative aspects.”
