Bauhaus Bodies: Gender,Sexuality,and Body Culture in Mondernism's Legendary Art School

摘要

Elizabeth Otto's Haunted Bauhaus marks this 100th anniversary year of Weimar Germany's famed design school with a fresh and impassioned defence of what the Bauhaus ideal promised and only fitfully delivered. She excavates that ideal through the lives and works of lesser-known Bauhausler, often women, whose marginal place and chronically overlooked contributions shed startling light not only on the complexities and contradictions of the Bauhaus experiment, but also on an extraordinary range of creativity. The school was indeed an experiment, Otto insists, bent on fashioning the new not only in the sleek geometries that came to define its machine-age designs, but also in its commitment to exploring new ways of living and being in the modern world. Founder Walter Gropius set the tone in his Bauhaus manifesto of 1919, wherein he heralded the school as a beacon of egalitarianism open to both men and women, and dedicated to breaking down hierarchies between instructors and students and the arts and crafts. That beacon drew talented young women and men from far and wide to live and learn as Bauhausler, ready to participate in shaping the future.