University, March 14-15, 2008

Bauhaus Palimpsest: the Object of Discourse

March 14-15, 2008
Harvard University
Arthur M. Sackler Museum
485 Broadway, Cambridge MA
Free and open to the public

Conference mailer:
http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/users/rschul/Bauhaus_Palimpsest.pdf

The Bauhaus has proved an unwieldy, even unstable, historical
subject, couched as an idea, crucible, and-for some-pariah.
This symposium brings together scholars of art history,
architecture, and design to discuss the various strategies
through which the history of the Bauhaus has been told and,
importantly, how so-called Bauhaus objects function-in the
past or today-in light of the school's mercurial identity.
Presentations will address the practice of key Bauhaus
personalities, including Paul Klee and Lyonel Feininger, and
the work of the sculpture, weaving, metal, and other Bauhaus
workshops. Objects produced by Bauhaus masters and students
are on display in the Busch-Reisinger Museum.

Friday, March 14
6 p.m., opening lecture

Barry Bergdoll
The Museum of Modern Art
Fabrication and Authorship: New Perspectives on Making at the
Bauhaus

_________

Saturday, March 15
9:30 a.m.-6 p.m., conference

Robin Schuldenfrei
University of Illinois at Chicago
and
Jeffrey Saletnik
University of Chicago
Introductory Remarks: Provisions

Session I: Agents

Karen Koehler
Hampshire College
The Bauhaus Manifesto Postwar to Postwar: From the Street to
the Wall to the Radio to the Memoir

Greg Castillo
University of Sydney
The Soft Power of the Bauhaus: Design History as Cold War
Palimpsest

Frederic J. Schwartz
University College London
The Disappearing Bauhaus: Architecture and its Public in the
Early Federal Republic

12 p.m.-1:30 p.m. lunch

Session II: Transference

Paul Monty Paret
University of Utah
Picturing Sculpture: Allegories of Bauhaus Modernism

Annie Bourneuf
Princeton University
Paul Klee's Grids and the Ends of Reading at the Bauhaus

Laura Muir
Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University
Lyonel Feininger's Bauhaus Photographs

Session III: Object Identity

Maria Stavrinaki
Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne
The Object Vanishes: the Fate of Marcel Breuer's Chair(s)

Magdalena Droste
Brandenburgische Technische Universität Cottbus
How to Sign a Chair? Bauhaus Objects between Authorship and
Anonymity.

T'ai Smith
Maryland Institute College of Art
The Identity of Design as Intellectual Property

Alina Payne
Harvard University
Respondent

This symposium has been organized by Robin Schuldenfrei
(Harvard University Graduate School of Design and the
University of Illinois at Chicago) and Jeffrey Saletnik
(University of Chicago), with Peter Nisbet (Daimler-Benz
Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University).