This talk is part of the 2019 Fall Museum Lecture Series, generously supported by the Sam and Belle S. Deutsch Endowment.
While secular modernism has become an overdetermined framework for understanding modern art and architecture, the spiritual strivings of many in the Bauhaus – including Walter Gropius, Lyonel Feininger, Johannes Itten, Paul Klee, Joseph Albers and Wassily Kandinsky – produced utopian frameworks that projected an ideal and often spiritual component into the visual and built environments.
In this talk, Professor of Art History Paul Ivey will explore some hitherto marginalized religious dimensions of these Bauhaus thinkers. It is presented in conjunction with the exhibition A New Unity: The Life and Afterlife of Bauhaus.
About the Presenter:
Dr. Ivey teaches Modern and Contemporary Art. He researches the built environments and compounds of alternative and esoteric American religions and communal groups. He is author of Radiance from Halcyon, A Utopian Experiment in Religion and Science, concerning a turn of the twentieth century theosophical intentional community on California’s Central Coast, and Prayers in Stone: Christian Science Architecture in the United States, 1894 – 1930.
