Chicago’s Institute of Design typically receives most of the credit for continuing the influence of Germany’s Bauhaus school of art and design in America, but there was once another educational institution that exerted a profound influence.
That institution was North Carolina’s long-defunct Black Mountain College and the exhibit “Convergence/Divergence: Exploring Black Mountain College and Chicago’s New Bauhaus/Institute of Design” presents Bauhaus-inspired work by former faculty members and students through March 25 at Oakton Community College’s Koehnline Museum of Art.
“We’re trying to show the roots of Bauhaus in America by examining the two most prominent schools that were descendents of the Bauhaus,” said Michael Reid, a retired graphic artist who long made a study of the Institute of Design’s effect on abstract painting in Chicago.
The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius, with the goal of bringing together all forms of art “to serve the betterment of mankind,” Reid said. “It was a social movement as well as an artistic movement.” And one that eventually had a powerful influence on modern design, art and architecture.
It was not at all admired by the Nazis, however, who closed the school in 1933 after condemning the Bauhaus for “cultural bolshevism”—forcing its faculty and students to carry on their work around the world. In America, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy founded the New Bauhaus/Institute of Design in 1937 while Josef Albers became a leading light of the Black Mountain College art department in 1933—24 years before the school closed.
As a result of deep mutual dislike, Albers and Moholy-Nagy never taught at each other’s schools. However, significant cross-pollination did occur, thanks to shared faculty and students who studied at both institutions.
The onetime River Forest resident, who was asked last year to curate the show by the now-closed Black Mountain College Museum, said he couldn’t have been more delighted to find a Chicago museum that would agree to mount it on relatively short notice—given the prominence of the School of Design among the more than 90 pieces in the exhibit.
More Top Picks How To Reduce Eye Strain Working From Home All Day
The bulk of the exhibit is made up of work by faculty members and students who attended both schools at one time or another. A smaller portion of the show features work by faculty or students associated with one school or the other, like Albers and Moholy-Nagy and three photographers from the Institute of Design: Harry Callahan, Arthur Siegel and Aaron Siskin. Their work is particularly important because, Reid says, after the death of Moholy-Nagy and under the guidance of Siegel, the Institute of Design became the most prominent photography program in American higher education. Especially since its graduates went on to teach at or found photography programs at major universities in the 1960s and ’70s.
“The significance of Bauhaus on 20th-century art and design is unparalleled, and it continues to exert that influence,” said Reid, noting that he hopes this exhibit makes it plain just how much of an influence the Bauhaus has had on what we think of as modernism in countless areas of contemporary life.
‘Convergence/Divergence: Exploring Black Mountain College and Chicago’s New Bauhaus/Institute of Design’
When: Through March 25
Where: Koehnline Museum of Art at Oakton Community College, 1600 E. Golf Road, Des Plaines
Admission: Free
Contact: (847) 635-2633; www.oakton.edu/museum