Learning From
Departing from Paul Klee’s drawing, Teppich (Carpet) of 1927, the exhibition chapter Learning From addresses the study and appropriation of cultural production from outside the modernist mainstream by focusing on non-Western sources, but also European folk traditions, the work of outsider artists and children. An engagement with premodern artefacts and practices was a constant feature of the work of teachers and students at the Bauhaus. This abiding interest continued to inform the approach of many “Bauhaus-people” following the school’s closure in 1933.
In the United States of the mid-twentieth century, exploring the local craft practices and pre-Columbian cultures of North, Central and South America helped to develop both the formal language of abstraction and new styles of weaving and fiber art based on precolonial forms and techniques. By questioning the division between the high and low arts, the Bauhaus paved the way for a broader contestation of the classical orientation of European art academies. However, while often used to deconstruct this binary, the study of non-Western art and cultural practice failed to take into account the sometimes violent and frequently illegitimate appropriation of cultural goods during and after the colonial period, as well as the social, economic and political disruption European colonialism left in its wake throughout the Americas, Africa and Asia.
Thus, while incorporating popular, indigenous and Afro-Brazilian cultures into the lexicon of Brazilian modernism acted as an effective counter model to European modernist influence, this development occurred while colonial violence perpetrated against Brazil’s indigenous population continued unabated. In postrevolutionary Mexico and postcolonial Morocco, the program of translating precolonial cultural production into the language of modernity acquired a sociopolitical dimension, as illustrated by the aesthetic strategies of El Taller de Gráfica Popular (The Workshop for Popular Graphic Art, or TGP) in Mexico and the École Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Casablanca both demonstrate. Learning From demonstrates that Bauhaus modernism was indebted to transcultural encounters, albeit within a network of asymmetrical power relations, while also revealing how, in the context of decolonization and struggles for cultural self-determination, the synthesis of premodern and modern art the Bauhaus instigated generated a set of aesthetic, cultural and economic practices that challenged and contested paternalistic Eurocentric cultural paradigms.
Learning From was realized together with the SESC Pompeia (São Paulo) and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), in cooperation with Elissa Auther, Erin Alexa Freedman (New York City), Anja Guttenberger (Berlin), Maud Houssais (Rabat) and Luiza Proença (São Paulo). French-Algerian artist Kader Attia and Brazilian architect and theorist Paulo Tavares each developed new works for this chapter.
