“I am particularly pleased that our touring exhibition 'bauhaus.photo' will now be able to make a stop in Max Liebling House in the heart of Tel Aviv’s White City, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Pleased, because the building designed by Dov Karmi in 1935/36 will be developed in the years ahead as a German-Israeli heritage preservation project and as a central venue for the modern architecture in Tel Aviv”, states Anne-Marie Jaeggi, Director of the Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung in Berlin. With a selection of 100 Bauhaus photographs from the photo collection of the Bauhaus-Archiv, which comprises over 70,000 prints, the exhibition "bauhaus.photo", shown from 12 to 31 October 2015, sheds light on the contentual and stylistic diversity of Bauhaus photography: From portrait photos and images of architecture and products to ambitious amateur photographs of daily life at the Bauhaus and perfectly arranged and retouched still lives from Walter Peterhans’s photography class. A special interest in the medium of photography and its capacity to capture life advanced by technological inventions was already present among a number of students and teachers when the Bauhaus was founded in 1919. "bauhaus.photo" therefore presents a series of Bauhaus photographs of major importance by among others Lucia Moholy, László Moholy-Nagy and T. Lux Feininger. The works alternate between photos that capture a particular moment in time, historic documents and free art photography. Photography first became a fixed part of teaching at the Bauhaus in 1929 with the introduction of Walter Peterhans’s photography class, which was affiliated to the printing andadvertising workshop.
Divided into four subject areas, the photo exhibition sheds light on the Bauhaus’s artistic diversity and swiftly reveals that there was no such thing as a homogeneous Bauhaus style: Individuality prevailed over uniformity.
The Bauhaus lives on
The energetic aura that surrounded the Bauhaus lives on in a way that we can experience today in countless photographs that document elaborately staged parties, daily life together and, last but not least, work in the Bauhaus workshops. The master of this realm was T. Lux Feininger, the youngest son of the Bauhaus master Lyonel Feininger. At just 18 years of age he was able to make his living selling his dynamic Bauhaus photos to the renowned Berlin-based photo agency DEPHOT. Alongside many unknown photographers, numerous women such as Etel Fodor-Mittag, Irene Bayer, Ivana Meller-Tomljenović, Marianne Brandt, Ise Gropius and Lotte Beese also left behind photographic records of life at the Bauhaus that go far beyond the everyday snapshots taken with the newly available Leica. It is thanks to all of these that we are now able to gain insight into what life was like at the Bauhaus and how, for many, the Bauhaus itself became an adventure.
Architecture and products
The notion of ideal architecture for the modern man was central to the Bauhaus, which wanted to design houses, flats and articles of daily use to suit his real-life circumstances. Taking material and function as a point of departure, the workshops, which saw themselves as “laboratories”, designed practical, useful objects. To document the Bauhaus product palette and architecture and for advertising purposes, Walter Gropius, the founder and first director the Bauhaus, employed the trained photographer Lucia Moholy and – as interest in the Bauhaus grew – the Bauhaus student Erich Consemüller. With the foundation of the photography class in 1929, the head of the workshop, Berlin-born photographer Walter Peterhans, more or less single-handedly assumed the responsibility for these tasks. Moholy, Consemüller and Peterhans’s photos of buildings and objects defined the public perception of the Bauhaus from the start. The photographs became a fixed feature of Bauhaus sales catalogues, the journal “bauhaus” and other Bauhaus publications. Today, these photographs still have a significant influence on the public image of the Bauhaus in newspapers, exhibitions and books.
Bauhaus portraits
The Bauhaus was founded almost a hundred years ago; the portrait photographs of the many photographers at the Bauhaus – most of them self-taught – combine formal stylistic means with subtle statementsabout the relationship between model and photographer or the photographic eras. This makes them all the more interesting for future generations. The portraits of the Bauhauslers show young, confident individuals, women and men, who have different clothes and haircuts and present themselves differently from their parents and grandparents. In the portraits, the photographers combine photographic experiments with modern stylistic idioms. Like other contemporary avant-garde photographers, many of the Bauhauslers found the portrait offered scope for self-questioning and self-affirmation. They visualised the modern “new” man, who had broken away from old conventions and who set his own standards. Their portraits are vivid documents of the age.
Peterhans’s photo class
Even before the photo class led by the Berlin-born photographer Walter Peterhans was established, there was an active interest in the medium of photography at the Bauhaus. Peterhans demanded no less than technical perfection from his students. Mathematical calculations, studies of exposure times and specifically arranged scenes were fixed features of the photography class. The surviving works of the photography class students demonstrate, like the works of the master himself, a striking quality and aesthetic. Grete Stern, Elsa Thiemann, Hajo Rose, Kurt Kranz, Lony Neumann, Werner David Feist, Eugen Batz, Albert Henning, Erich Comeriner and Naftali Avnon (Rubinstein) are among the outstanding photographers known by name who emerged from Peterhans’s class and who made their living in part from photography. A few of them kept hold of their scrupulously recorded notes and test photos and bequeathed them to the Bauhaus-Archiv.
A bilingual 144-page exhibition catalogue in English and Hebrew, which includes all 100 photographs, has been published for the exhibition. “bauhaus.photo/bauhaus.foto”, a German-English edition of the catalogue, is also available now in the Bauhaus Shop of the Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung, Berlin for € 8,90.
For further information visit Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.