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Objects in exile : modern art and design across borders, 1930-1960 / Robin Schuldenfrei.

By: Publication details: Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2024.Description: 345 pages : illustrations ; 28 cmISBN:
  • 9780691232669
Subject(s):
Contents:
Introduction Dislocation, Modernism, and the Materiality of Exile
Transposition -- Chapter 1 Architecture's Material Abstraction: László Moholy-Nagy and the Industrial City
Chapter 2 Minimal Dwelling: Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and László Moholy-Nagy at Isokon in England
Contingent Conditions -- Chapter 3 Images in Exile: Lucia Moholy's Bauhaus Negatives and the Construction of a Modernist Legacy
Chapter 4 Assimilating Unease: László Moholy-Nagy and the Wartime/Postwar Chicago Bauhaus
Chapter 5 Domesticating the Grid: Ludwig Hilberseimer's Housing
Remediation -- Chapter 6 Exigencies of Materializing Vision: Josef Albers's Glass Paintings to 'Homage to the Square'
Chapter 7 Anni Albers's Design Theory and Its Objects: Typewriter Studies to Architecture's Pliable Plane
Chapter 8 Herbert Bayer's Expanded Vision and the Instrumentalizing of Design
Summary: An essential examination of how emigration and resettlement defined modernismIn the fraught years leading up to World War II, many modern artists and architects emigrated from continental Europe to the United States and Britain. The experience of exile infused their modernist ideas with new urgency and forced them to use certain materials in place of others, modify existing works, and reconsider their approach to design itself. In Objects in Exile, Robin Schuldenfrei reveals how the process of migration was crucial to the development of modernism, charting how modern art and architecture was shaped by the need to constantly face-and transcend-the materiality of things.Taking readers from the prewar era to the 1960s, Schuldenfrei explores the objects these émigrés brought with them, what they left behind, and the new works they completed in exile. She argues that modernism could only coalesce with the abandonment of national borders in a process of emigration and resettlement, and brings to life the vibrant postwar period when avant-garde ideas came together and emerged as mainstream modernism. Examining works by Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, Lucia Moholy, Herbert Bayer, Anni and Josef Albers, and others, Schuldenfrei demonstrates the social impact of art objects produced in exile.Shedding critical light on how the pressures of dislocation irrevocably altered the course of modernism, Objects in Exile shows how artists and designers, forced into exile by circumstances beyond their control, changed in unexpected ways to meet the needs and contexts of an uncertain world.
Holdings
Item type Current library Collection Call number Status Barcode
Book Book CGLAS Library Yellow 709.0402 SCH (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Available 12847

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction Dislocation, Modernism, and the Materiality of Exile

Transposition -- Chapter 1 Architecture's Material Abstraction: László Moholy-Nagy and the Industrial City

Chapter 2 Minimal Dwelling: Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and László Moholy-Nagy at Isokon in England

Contingent Conditions -- Chapter 3 Images in Exile: Lucia Moholy's Bauhaus Negatives and the Construction of a Modernist Legacy

Chapter 4 Assimilating Unease: László Moholy-Nagy and the Wartime/Postwar Chicago Bauhaus

Chapter 5 Domesticating the Grid: Ludwig Hilberseimer's Housing

Remediation -- Chapter 6 Exigencies of Materializing Vision: Josef Albers's Glass Paintings to 'Homage to the Square'

Chapter 7 Anni Albers's Design Theory and Its Objects: Typewriter Studies to Architecture's Pliable Plane

Chapter 8 Herbert Bayer's Expanded Vision and the Instrumentalizing of Design

An essential examination of how emigration and resettlement defined modernismIn the fraught years leading up to World War II, many modern artists and architects emigrated from continental Europe to the United States and Britain. The experience of exile infused their modernist ideas with new urgency and forced them to use certain materials in place of others, modify existing works, and reconsider their approach to design itself. In Objects in Exile, Robin Schuldenfrei reveals how the process of migration was crucial to the development of modernism, charting how modern art and architecture was shaped by the need to constantly face-and transcend-the materiality of things.Taking readers from the prewar era to the 1960s, Schuldenfrei explores the objects these émigrés brought with them, what they left behind, and the new works they completed in exile. She argues that modernism could only coalesce with the abandonment of national borders in a process of emigration and resettlement, and brings to life the vibrant postwar period when avant-garde ideas came together and emerged as mainstream modernism. Examining works by Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, Lucia Moholy, Herbert Bayer, Anni and Josef Albers, and others, Schuldenfrei demonstrates the social impact of art objects produced in exile.Shedding critical light on how the pressures of dislocation irrevocably altered the course of modernism, Objects in Exile shows how artists and designers, forced into exile by circumstances beyond their control, changed in unexpected ways to meet the needs and contexts of an uncertain world.