The Bauhaus on the Ganges

At the Bauhaus in Dessau, you are commemorating the first Bauhaus exhibition in India 90 years ago. How did the event come about, and what was shown at it?

The exhibition of modern avant-garde art was held on the premises of the Indian Society of Oriental Art in 1922. Alongside works by Indian avant-garde artists such as Uma Prosad Mookerjee, Shanta Devi, Sunanyani Devi and Gaganendranath Tagore, works by Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Johannes Itten, Georg Muche and Wassily Kandinsky were also shown. It is not clear to what extent the origins of the exhibition can be traced back to a visit to Weimar made by Rabindranath Tagore in 1921, and his contacts with the Bauhaus are also unclear. There was of course a certain amount of enthusiasm for India at the Bauhaus in Weimar. During the period between the wars, there were many artists and intellectuals who projected their hopes onto the subcontinent.

Why was that?

For a society in which rationalization and industrialization were regarded as having led to war and destruction, and which was hoping that Eastern spirituality would offer an alternative to these fits of modernization, India was seen as a refuge. People were reading works by Rabindranath Tagore, and Indian religion and philosophy formed an important basis for Johannes Itten’s teaching work. At the same time, a new intellectual milieu was emerging in late colonial India, with the Tagore family forming its core. The naturalism prescribed by the colonial power, which had successfully driven out local art forms and pictorial traditions, was being rejected and educational reforms were also taking place, with the foundation of new art schools starting in 1900. With the return to local formal languages and craftwork methods in the workshops, many parallels can be seen between the Bauhaus’s aims in educational reform and those of Tagore’s university in Santiniketan.

What was it that interested the Bauhaus members in the Indian situation at that time?

The founding of the Bauhaus in Weimar has to be seen in the context of the First World War – after all, most of those involved had the shattering experiences of the trenches behind them, and the Weimar Republic itself was a highly explosive and polarized society. For Europeans who were tired of rationalism, India represented something to yearn for, against this background. They regarded it as still possessing a spiritual unity between body and soul, nature and spirit. Examples that might be mentioned include the Theosophical Society, the School of Wisdom in Darmstadt, the popularity of Tagore’s writings, and Rudolf Steiner. Johannes Itten’s college of art in Vienna provided a crystallization point for this scene before he moved to Weimar.

It was a matter of exploring the language of forms, as well as comparing different teaching approaches in the avant-garde colleges in Germany and India. What conclusions did the exhibition reach?

It was a sales exhibition showing works of European and Indian avant-garde art. To that extent, it was important for an international art market that was being well supplied by artists such as Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger and Wassily Kandinsky. The interesting aspect of the exhibition is that it can be seen as a crystallization point for a realm of art production that had already become transnational.

Internationalized art production is quite normal nowadays, but that was not the case back then. What effects did the exhibition have on the subsequent development of artistic languages?

For us, it was surprising to see how intensively artistic production had already been integrated into international exchanges and interactions between different positions and formal languages, even in the early twentieth century. These existing networks and international relations encountered each other at the exhibition. What became clear – and this is what the phrase ‘laboratory for the transcultural avant-garde’ means – was that this international sphere of lively cultural exchange was a decisive prerequisite for artistic production by the avant-garde. To that extent, the exhibition is also a fascinating case that encourages us to rethink art history as a kind of interlinked ‘world art history’ – away from the Eurocentric point of view that prefers to work with concepts such as ‘influences’.

What can the visitor to Dessau expect? Specifically, is the 1922 exhibition simply being reconstructed on a one to one basis, or are you also inquiring into the patterns of the global art business today?

The word ‘reconstruction’ would probably be rather misleading. Instead, we want to start with what has survived from the exhibition. We’ll be taking up approaches and concepts that are associated with the exhibition in the literature – for example, ‘transnational encounter’ and ‘co-produced Modernism’. Then we’ll try to assign these concepts to the exhibits. Visitors will be able to see historic documents, letters, photographs, and also works of art that were already shown in 1922. In this way, we are trying to convey some of the relationships and fascinating encounters that took place in Calcutta. As the Indian exhibition is also associated with a great deal of speculation, due to the state of the sources, our approach to it has also meant a certain amount of detective work. We have constantly been finding open-ended outcomes after accidental meetings within cosmopolitan networks and metropolitan cultures, and noticing surprising dialogues between different types of artistic production that the exhibition may have led to. For the curators, the exhibition has thus ultimately also involved a search process as well – but an extremely fascinating one.

Exhibition dates

The Bauhaus in Calcutta: an Encounter between Cosmopolitan Avant-Gardes
27 March to 30 June
Bauhaus Building, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Entrance € 6 / € 4 reduced rate (including permanent exhibition)
Further information: Bauhaus Dessau Foundation