A Progressive Bauhaus Legacy: The Development of an East German Bauhaus Collection

A unique reception history of the Bauhaus, from the Weimar era through the Cold War

When the Bauhaus departed Dessau in 1932, there was no Bauhaus collection left in its wake. Apart from the files in the city archive, some works in the Anhaltische Gemaldegalerie and artworks in private hands, there were no other extant documents and objects in Dessau. Today, there are more than 50,000 objects and documents in the collection of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation–the product of an extraordinary East German effort to reconstruct an archival history for the Bauhaus undertaken in the midst of the Cold War.

A Progressive Bauhaus Legacy: The Development of an East German Bauhaus Collection tells the story of this collection from its beginnings in the 1970s and analyzes the institutional procedures and political pressures that shaped it.