50 Years After 50 Years of the Bauhaus


Vincent Meessen contributed to 50 Years After 50 Years of the Bauhaus, the recently released catalogue to the like-named 2018 exhibition at Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, edited by Hans D. Christ, Iris Dressler, and Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart


If something is to change regarding the structures of our institutions—and there are many reasons for this—we must also and especially begin with their success stories, and explore their fractures, contradictions, and what they conceal. The project 50 Years after 50 Years of the Bauhaus, whose title was chosen with a deliberate stutter, is an attempt at such a counter-reading. (Iris Dressler, Hans D. Christ, Preface)


In 2018, fifty years after the opening of 50 Years of the Bauhaus, the Württembergischer Kunstverein undertook a critical rereading of this exhibition. The rereading took the socio–political upheavals of the 1960s as its point of departure and considered the Bauhaus, its historical contexts, and the history(/ies) of its reception from a contemporary perspective. Hence challenging the idea of the Bauhaus as a self–contained, homogeneous system, as well as those narratives that negotiate Bauhaus and Modernism as unquestioned synonyms of progress, freedom and democracy. Instead, at issue are the ambivalences inscribed in both, as for example with regard to totalitarianism and colonialism.


Editors:Hans D. Christ, Iris Dressler, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart

Contributors: Daniel García Andújar, John Barker, Walter Benjamin, Tamar Berger, Max Bill, Hans D. Christ, Yvonne P. Doderer, Iris Dressler, Walter Gropius, Danny Hayward, Helmut Heißenbüttel, Asger Jorn, Alexander Kluge, Internationale Lettriste, Kaiwan Mehta, Mona Mahall / Asli Serbest, Mateusz Okonski, David Riff, María Salgado and others


Publishing: Spector Books, Leipzig

Distribution: Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart

688 pages, colour, hardcover, German & English

ISBN 978-3-95905-677-9


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