Exhibition

From Arts and Crafts to the Bauhaus. Art and Design – A New Unity!

24 January 2019 - 5 May 2019

The fairy tales and myths around the Bauhaus are legion. Concepts like Bauhaus style or the “Bauhaus idea” have become bromides in current design discourse. The Bauhaus itself has become a myth, an icon of modernism, mistakenly made both its pinnacle and its starting point. The exhibition “From Arts and Crafts to the Bauhaus. Art and Design –  A New Unity!” seeks to clear up many of these myths and in the framework of the jubilee program 100 Years of Bauhaus provide a contribution to categorizing the Bauhaus in terms of design history.

To mark the centennial anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus, the exhibition at Bröhan-Museum will explore the prehistory of the Bauhaus and contextualize it within the Europe-wide emergence of modernism. It will show decisive steps in this development including the Glasgow School, Vienna Jugendstil, Deutscher Werkbund, and the Dutch group De Stijl leading up to the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau. With around 300 highlights—furniture, graphic design, metal art, ceramics, painting—from fifty years of design history, the exhibition will seek to explain this pan-European discourse on design. The exhibition will show how the Bauhaus was influenced by the concepts from this development and how difficult it was to develop an independent formal language from this wide range of positions.

Supported by: Hauptstadtkulturfonds, IKEA Stiftung and Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung. Media partners: Kulturradio vom rbb, Inforadio vom rbb, Yorck Kinogruppe, domus, H.O.M.E., Dinamix, where Berlin Magazin, Exberliner.

A catalogue will be published to accompany the Exhibition.
Free audioguides available.

Curators: Dr. Tobias Hoffmann, Dr. Anna Grosskopf
Exhibition design: Katleen Arthen
Advertising motif: Gerwin Schmidt, Munich