Post Bauhaus Post War

A review of Bauhaus Chicago: Design in the City on feature at the Art Institute of Chicago from 23 November 2019 - 21 September 2020

The arrival of experimental Bauhaus academic László Moholy-Nagy to Chicago in the summer of 1937 marked a new moment in American design culture disseminating from the heart of the Midwest. With him, Moholy-Nagy brought the ideals and pedagogical structure inherited from his time in Germany, but foreign to all forms of the American landscape, notably American culture, the paradigm of the Bauhaus education was fated to change in its new cultural environment. The exhibition in review, Bauhaus in Chicago, on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, situates the new Bauhaus’s altered curriculum within the scope of the American legacy, showcasing the forgotten figures found at Moholy-Nagy’s Institute of Design (ID) in the mid 1940’s to early 1950’s. Ultimately, the ID saw its previously foundational structure transformed by the new American consumer—the burgeoning Post-War middle class, shifting the school’s pedagogy from experimental expressionism of the arts to mass market consumerism of the product. The new socio-economic middle-class culture was a broader, more accessible market, and was no longer afraid of modernist objects.

Spring 2020
Full text available upon request