Margret Kentgens-Craig: The Bauhaus and America: First Contacts, 1919-1936 (1999)

The Bauhaus school was founded in Weimar in 1919 by the German architect Walter Gropius, moved to Dessau in 1925 and to Berlin in 1932, and was dissolved in 1933 by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe under political duress. Although it existed for a mere fourteen years and boasted fewer than 1,300 students, its influence is felt throughout the world in numerous buildings, artworks, objects, concepts, and curricula.

After the Bauhaus’s closing in 1933, many of its protagonists moved to the United States, where their acceptance had to be cultivated. The key to understanding the American reception of the Bauhaus is to be found not in the émigré success stories or the famous 1938 Bauhaus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, but in the course of America’s early contact with the Bauhaus. In this book Margret Kentgens-Craig shows that the fame of the Bauhaus in America was the result not only of the inherent qualities of its concepts and products, but also of a unique congruence of cultural supply and demand, of a consistent flow of information, and of fine-tuned marketing. Thus the history of the American reception of the Bauhaus in the 1920s and 1930s foreshadows the patterns of fame-making that became typical of the post-World War II art world. The transfer of artistic, intellectual, and pedagogical concepts from one cultural context to another is a process of transformation and integration. In presenting a case study of this process, the book also provides fresh insights into the German-American cultural history of the period from 1919 to 1936.

Publisher MIT Press, 1999
ISBN 026211237X, 9780262112376
283 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-31)

Stephen Bann (ed.): The Tradition of Constructivism (1974)

“With these words the sculptors Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner pronounced the official birth of constructivist art, the most revolutionary, challenging, and enigmatic of twentieth-century artistic movements. Since the time of their ‘Realistic Manifesto’, constructivism has spread throughout the world, opposing personal, expressionistic art with abstraction and formal construction. In this book, Stephen Bann has collected the most important constructivist documents, including the writings of El Lissitzky, Theo Van Doesburg, Hans Richter, Victor Vasarely, and Charles Biederman—many of which have never before been available in English—and supplemented them with a critical introduction, a chronology of constructivism, and an invaluable bibliography of close to four hundred items. This volume is illustrated with thirty-eight constructivist prints, paintings, drawings, and sculptures, some of them are rare and previously unpublished.”

With an introduction by Stephen Bann
Publisher Viking Press, 1974
Documents of 20th-Century Art series
ISBN 0670019569, 9780670019564
334 pages

Review: Susan Compton (Slavic Review 1975).

PDF (no OCR; updated on 2012-7-15)

Walter Benjamin: Moscow Diary (1980–) [EN, ES]

The life of the German-Jewish literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is a veritable allegory of the life of letters in the twentieth century. Benjamin’s intellectual odyssey culminated in his death by suicide on the Franco-Spanish border, pursued by the Nazis, but long before he had traveled to the Soviet Union. His stunning account of that journey is unique among Benjamin’s writings for the frank, merciless way he struggles with his motives and conscience.

Perhaps the primary reason for his trip was his affection for Asja Lacis, a Latvian Bolshevik whom he had first met in Capri in 1924 and who would remain an important intellectual and erotic influence on him throughout the twenties and thirties. Asja Lacis resided in Moscow, eking out a living as a journalist, and Benjamin’s diary is, on one level, the account of his masochistic love affair with this elusive–and rather unsympathetic–object of desire. On another level, it is the story of a failed romance with the Russian Revolution; for Benjamin had journeyed to Russia not only to inform himself firsthand about Soviet society, but also to arrive at an eventual decision about joining the Communist Party. Benjamin’s diary paints the dilemma of a writer seduced by the promises of the Revolution yet unwilling to blinker himself to its human and institutional failings.

Moscow Diary is more than a record of ideological ambivalence; its literary value is considerable. Benjamin is one of the great twentieth-century physiognomists of the city, and his portrait of hibernal Moscow stands beside his brilliant evocations of Berlin, Naples, Marseilles, and Paris. Students of this particularly interesting period will find Benjamin’s eyewitness account of Moscow extraordinarily illuminating.

First published as Moskauer Tagebuch, Suhrkamp, 1980

English edition
Preface by Gershom Scholem
Translated by Richard Sieburth
Edited by and Afterword by Gary Smith
Published in October journal 35, Winter 1985, MIT Press
ISBN 0262751852
151 pages

Benjamin at Monoskop wiki

Moscow Diary (English, 1985, no OCR; updated on 2012-7-18)
Moscow Diary (English, 1985, OCR; missing Preface and Afterword; updated on 2012-7-18)
Diario de Moscú (Spanish, trans. Marisa Delgado, 1990, added on 2014-3-10)