Bauhaus Goes West: Modern Art and Design in Britain and America

by Alan Powers

An exploration of the Bauhaus school and its legacy in the context of the modernist period, including its wider influence on art, design, and education. Bauhaus Goes West is the story of cultural and artistic exchange between Germany and the West over a period of seventy years. It presents a view of the influential Bauhaus school in relation to the wider modernist period, distinguishing between the received idea of the Bauhaus and the documented reality. Initially, the Bauhaus was seen as an educational experiment, only later was it recognized as a style and a movement. Working from meticulous research, Alan Powers reexamines speculations about the reception and understanding of individuals connected with the Bauhaus school and what they ultimately achieved. Looking in greater detail at the theory and practice of art, design, and architecture between the arts and crafts movement and modernism, this book challenges the assumption that the 1920s represented a void of reactionary conservatism. Bauhaus Goes West offers an opportunity to recover some of the overlooked aspects of avant-garde that ran parallel with the work of the Bauhaus, such as the film-making of Francis Brugui re and Len Lye, and the development of art instruction for children under Marion Richardson and the London County Council. 120+ color illustrations

256 pages, Hardcover

Published April 23, 2019

About the author

Alan Powers is a teacher, researcher and writer specialising in architecture and design.

Powers trained as an art historian at University of Cambridge, gaining an undergraduate degree and a PhD.

As a writer Powers has been prolific, writing reviews, magazine articles, obituaries of artists and architects as well as books. He has concentrated on 20th century British architecture and architectural conservation. He has also written books on the design of book jackets, shop fronts, book collectors, and the artist Eric Ravilious as well as monographs on Serge Chermayeff, and the British firms of Tayler and Green and of Aldington, Graig and Collinge.

Reviews

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Frustrating book. It is really a history of the Bauhaus presence and influence in the UK, with the USA chapters clearly tacked on as an afterthought; Powers knows more than almost anyone writing today about 20th century British architecture and design, and this appears to have led him into extreme defensiveness of the subjects of his passions; sadly in this case this means an unconvincing and contradictory attempt to exculpate a culture which by his own overwhelming evidence was remarkably dull, parochial and xenophobic in architecture and design during the interwar years, in the '20s especially. Yet the book is lively and useful on the obscurer byways of Bauhaus emigres in the UK, and clearly right in some of its judgements (especially his sympathy with the always attractive figure of Moholy-Nagy over Gropius or Mies); a great book on design history is in there somewhere beneath some rather tired contrarianism.

[Mary · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very disappointing by how muddled this book felt. Interesting topic, but reading it was akin to reading the instruction manual for assembling a bookcase. Unmemorable unfortunately.

[Francesca · Rating 4 out of 5]

however much bauhaus information I consume my brain just refuses to take it in, even now, after this book, I could not explain the history of bauhaus