Gender, Sexuality and the Bauhaus by Elizabeth Otto

Presented in partnership with U of M School of Art ARTlab

The Bauhaus (1919-1933) is widely regarded as the twentieth century’s most influential art, architecture and design school, celebrated as the archetypal movement of rational modernism and famous for bringing functional and elegant design to the masses. It is often associated with a handful of distinguished artists, architects, and designers—notably Walter Gropius, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and László Moholy-Nagy. In this talk, art historian Elizabeth Otto enlarges this narrow focus by reclaiming the historically marginalized lives and accomplishments of many of the more than 1,200 Bauhaus teachers and students (the so-called Bauhäusler), arguing that they are central to our understanding of this movement. She delves into previously unexplored questions of gender and sexuality at the school by focussing on female Bauhäusler and those who queered the school’s aesthetics in order to disrupt gender conventions, represent gay and lesbian subjectivities and picture same-sex desire, moves that were not without risk during the Weimar Republic, a regime that criminalized homosexuality. By looking broadly at what Jack Halberstam dubs a queer way of life—one that encompasses “subcultural practices, alternative methods of alliance, forms of transgender embodiment, and those forms of representation dedicated to capturing these willfully eccentric modes of being”—this talk disrupts the narrative of a normative Bauhaus to yield a richer history that only emerges when we look at a new range of Bauhaus works and artists, and reconsider the questions that we ask of them.