Bauhaus Australia

18. November 2016

As part of a series of talks and events of the MPavilion – a unique architecture commission and design event for Melbourne – leading academics come together to launch the new project Bauhaus Australia on November 28-29 in Melbourne, Australia. The project examines the profound influences upon Australian cultural history of the forced migration of émigré and refugee modernists from Germany and central Europe. 

 

Jacobs University’s very own Prof Dr Isabel Wünsche will give the opening talk on “The Influence of the Bauhaus” as part of the launch of Bauhaus Australia: Émigrés, Refuges, and the Modernist Transformation of Education in Art, Architecture, and Design, 1930-1970. This new and exciting project will chart, for the very first time, the profound influences of modernism through education. The German Bauhaus in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin is recognized to have had a lasting influence on European modernist art, architecture and design. The impact on the emergence of Australian modernism by émigré artists settling in Australia after 1933, however, has remained under-researched. This is surprising given such modernist figures as Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, Inge King, Gerhard Herbst, Ernest Fooks, Frederick Sterne, Harry Seidlger, Karl and Gertrude Lange, who transformed Australian art, architectural and design education from the 1930s to the 1970s. It is this gap that the project aims to rectify. 

 

The Bauhaus Australia team consists of Prof Phillip Goad (University of Melbourne), Prof Andrew McNamara (Queensland University of Technology), Dr Ann Stephen (The University of Sydney), Prof Harriet Edquist (RMIT University), Prof Dr Isabel Wünsche (Jacobs University, Bremen) and Dr Wiebke Gronemeyer (Jacobs University, Bremen). Long-term goals of the project are, in 2017, to hold an international collaborative workshop in Melbourne and publish a web-based resource linking research, events, collaborating institutions, and archival collections; and in 2019, to publish a book as well as launch an exhibition program, which will tour nationally, to coincide with the Bauhaus centenary. For more information on the project, see http://mpavilion.org.