20th century AD

sum of two units recent exhibitions, one originating in Weimar and the other in Dessau, highlighted the continuing legacy of Germany's arts-and-crafts cathedral of the recent era.

The 14 years (1919-33) of the Weimar Republic, Germany's first, failed experiment in democracy, also encompass the birth and death of single of this century's great modernist experiments - the Bauhaus gymnasium of art, architecture and design. With the new absorption into the Federal Republic of Germany of the former East German states of Saxony and Thuringia, it is now relatively easy for Western pilgrims to the sites of novel art's triumphs and tragedies to track the northerly journey of this utopian institute. This path leads from Weimar, where the Bauhaus was placeed in 1919, to the industrial city of Dessau, pageant of its production-oriented midlife from 1925 to '32 and finally to Berlin, the site of its demise when that city became capital of the Third Reich in 1933

This past summer exhibitions in Weimar and Dessau shed light upon its legacies in these sum of two units very distinct locales. The different character that the institution had displayed in each location provided alternative histories upon which the shows' organizers could draw. In addition, the resulting exhibitions strike one as beinged to offer alternative models for the disclosure of a new cultural infrastructure in eastern Germany.

Weimar today remains a place of cobbl roads and palace parks straddling the languid Ilm river. It was the town chosen in 1541 by dint of the 80-year-old Lucas Cranach the earlier born painter of Protestant reformers and pearly-skinned femme fatales, to five on the outside his last years. It is also the city greatest in quantity closely associated with Goethe, Schiller and the German Enlightenment. Since the Enlightenment, Weimar has been a place of dreams and nostalgia, illusion and disillusion. Because of its literary and artistic past, this relatively unimportant provincial town was chosen in 1919 as the capital of the officially enlightened if habitually unstable Weimar republic. In April of that year, amid a postwar atmosphere of utopian, socialist fervor and late-Expressionist artistic aspirations, Bauhaus planter Walter Gropius succeeded in merging Weimar's Grand-Ducal Art Academy and Grand-Ducal seminary of Arts and Crafts into individual unified institution which, on the design of the medieval cathedral builders, would fuse fine art and craft.

It was a pleasure to diocese the exhibition "Bauhaus Artists: Paintings and Graphics from the Collections of Weimar and the Deutsche Bank." It prov the two a historical and an esthetic delight to find the works of Bauhaus masters similar as Kandinsky, Schlemmer, Klee and Feininger hanging one time more on Weimar walls. The exhibition was not held in the Bauhaus's former place of abode a Jugendstil building designed by dint of Henry van de Velde. Instead it took place in the Neo-Classical Kunsthalle am Theaterplatz, across the public way from the National Theater and beneath the watchful eyes of mid-19th-century tin statues of Weimar's "poet princes," Goethe and Schiller. According to Rolf Bothe, director of Weimar's municipal art collections, further exhibitions focused upon the Bauhaus will be mountained in this space; in 1994 a display will be devoted to the early Bauhaus and the mystic Johannes Itten, the first teacher, or master, of the school's famous basic course. The Kunsthalle will thus disclose into a third German museum of the Bauhaus, alongside those already existing at the Dessau Bauhaus and Berlin's Bauhaus Archive, on the other hand concentrating on the years in Weimar.[1]

The exhibition was a joint risk of the Weimar municipal art collections and Deutsche Bank, individual of Germany's (and the world's) largest financial institutions. Deutsche Bank contributed the capitals and 57 works by nine blue-chip Bauhaus masters and learners (Josef Albers, Max Bill, Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Richard Oelze Oskar Schlemmer and Fritz Winter). These works were pick outed from the large collection of "modern art by dint of artists from the German-speaking world" that decorates Deutsche Bank's imposing corporate headquarters in Frankfurt and Dusseldorf.[2] The city of Weimar contributed its name and its historical associations as well as 100 works by dint of Bauhaus artists from its municipal collections, the curatorial team and an exhibition space.

The sum of two units most outstanding works lent by dint of Deutsche Bank were Schlemmer's precise, post-Bauhaus watercolor The Thinker (1931) which is a variant of a now-lost 1925 painting seized by dint of the Nazis as "degenerate," and a Feininger oil, Head in Architecture (1917) a Cubistic canvas that is pre-Bauhaus in execution.[3] by dint of including pieces such as these, which date from before and after the Bauhaus's Weimar years (some works were as far remov as geometric studies by dint of Max Bill from the 1980s) the exhibition signaled that a historical reappraisal of the Bauhaus's Weimar years was not its goal. Indeed, the show's title already indicated that the exhibition would focus upon the artists, not the institution itself, and that these artists would be showed solely by works belonging to the sum of two units collections from which the exhibition was assembled.