Memento mori or eternal Modernism? The Bauhaus at MoMA, 1938

On the occasion of the exhibition which I co-curated at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) with Leah Dickerman in 2009 for the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus (and the 80th anniversary of the founding of the museum), I delved into the museum’s archives to shed light on the political context as well as the complex logistics of the museum’s earlier Bauhaus exhibition staged in 1938. The museum’s 1938 book that accompanied that important episode in the early reception of the Bauhaus in America remained the standard work on the school and its art philosophy in the English speaking world until the publication of the English translation of Hans Maria Wingler’s monumental Bauhaus in 1969. This essay, addressing the exhibition staged in New York and the misconceptions about the Bauhaus it set in motion for many years, is based on a lecture I gave at the exhibition symposium; a version of that text was published for the first time in a book of essays published in honor of one of my professors at the University of Cambridge, Jean Michel Massing, in 2016. This is a slightly modified version for the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus, a decade later

The Synthesis of the Arts and MoMa

1948-49 were key years for the reaction of the Museum of Modern Art’s newly amalgamated Department of Architecture and Design to respond to the rising discourse on the “Synthesis of the Arts.” The response was indirect and took the form of MoMA assessing the progress of modern architecture that it had been describing and forecasting for fifteen years. The exhibition “From Le Corbusier to Niemeyer, 1929–1949” was part of a larger assessment of the fate of the international style and of the interaction between abstraction in painting and sculpture and in architectural design, a theme laid out by Alfred Barr and Hitchcock in the 1948 book Painting Toward Architecture. Niemeyer’s unbuilt Treamine House, designed with Roberto Burle Marx, was upheld as a synthesis not only of the arts but of the movements coalescing towards a postwar abstract consensus

Marcel Breuer and Postwar America

At the center of Slocum Hall, four stories below a large skylight, stands a big shaggy lens - a deep, fur-lined scoop framed by a broad rectangle eight feet high. Between stepped floor and slanted ceiling is a curved wall punctuated by a trapezoidal aperture through which you glimpse a purple-tinted fragment of face. Forehead and cheeks, a nose and two eyes: Marcel Breuer. The lens, a pavilion encasing deep embrasures, marks an exhibition of material from the archive of this leading 20th century architect. It points you toward the adjacent gallery, where more than 120 drawings and photographs reproduced at full scale document thirteen major buildings and projects by Breuer and his office. Image enlargements, wall texts and diagonally striped fields of purple, pink and blue integrate walls and artworks into a color-saturated ambiance. Marcel Breuer and Postwar America offers a new picture of postwar modernism, along with the pleasure of looking at compelling drawings and photographs culled from the archive. It results from an innovative collaboration mobilizing archives and special collections in research and teaching. The exhibition emerged from a seminar I taught with visiting professor Barry Bergdoll at the School of Architecture in fall 2010. Each of the case studies was selected, researched, and curated by one of the students in the course, supported by the Special Collections Research Center of Syracuse University Library, which holds the Marcel Breuer Papers. The Installation was designed and build by faculty members Jon Lott and Brett Snyder with a team of students and staff. The catalogue documents the outcome of these partnerships in researching, teaching, curating, designing, building, and learning from Breuer. -Jonathon Masse

Alice Thomine, Émile Vaudremer, 1829-1914. La rigueur de l’architecture publique, Paris, Picard, 2004, 382 p.

Bergdoll Barry. Alice Thomine, Émile Vaudremer, 1829-1914. La rigueur de l’architecture publique, Paris, Picard, 2004, 382 p.. In: Bulletin Monumental, tome 166, n°1, année 2008. La galerie à Paris (XIVe-XVIIe siècle) sous la direction de Monique Chatenet. pp. 81-82

Barry Bergdoll: I.M. Pei\u27s Everson Museum

Architecture Fall 2007 Lecture Series - October 3, 2007 at The Warehouse. Bergdoll is the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art and professor of modern architectural history at Columbia University. Holding a B.A. from Columbia, an M.A. from King\u27s College, Cambridge, and a Ph.D. from Columbia, his broad interests center on modern architectural history with a particular emphasis on France and Germany since 1800