Bauhaus Transfers: Albers / Rauschenberg
September 3 - December 15, 2019
Pincus Gallery, Second Floor
In 2019, the Palmer Museum of Art joined organizations worldwide marking the centenary of the Bauhaus, the influential school founded in Weimar, Germany, that unified fine arts, design, and architecture in its curriculum. Artist Josef Albers, a student and then instructor at the Bauhaus, fled Nazi Germany for the United States after the school was forced to close in 1933. Albers took a post as head of Black Mountain College, a new art school in North Carolina, and became a formative educator for many artists. Robert Rauschenberg attended the school in 1948–49 and considered Albers “the most important teacher” he ever had.
This exhibition paired Albers’s painting Homage to the Square (It Seems), from 1963, and Rauschenberg’s print Booster, from 1967, to explore this relationship, the dissemination of Bauhaus ideas, and its legacy in America.
The dialogue between the two works was presented in conjunction with the interdisciplinary symposium Bauhaus Transfers, organized by the Department of Architecture and the Department of German Studies at Penn State on September 19–21, 2019.
The centenary commemoration continued in the Hull Gallery of American Art with a display of works by Bauhaus faculty and students, including Anni Albers, Max Bill, and Wassily Kandinsky, in the print study drawers.
This exhibition was one in a series of American art exhibitions created through a multi-year, multi-institutional partnership formed by the Philadelphia Museum of Art as part of the Art Bridges + Terra Foundation Initiative.
