Design Debates India

An ongoing exhibition that marks 100 years of the Bauhaus comprises a significant discourse on the ‘India story’, indicating how another idea of modernity, probably unique to a colonial encounter in the Indian subcontinent, with a history unfolding much on its own terms, was shaping a story of design and culture in another part of the world as the Bauhaus unfolded in Europe.

- Kaiwan Mehta 

The Württembergischer Kunstverein (WKV) in Stuttgart, Germany, opened a mammoth exhibition to mark 100 years of Bauhaus. This exhibition also marks 50 years of WKV itself, which 50 years ago, opened with one of the most popular, long-running, and most travelled show on the Bauhaus, celebrating 50 Years of the Bauhaus then. The current show presents a critical reading of the exhibition 50 years ago, the idea of the Bauhaus as a design programme and pedagogy, as well as the ideas of design and modernity and modernism it contained within it. The curators Iris Dressler and Hans Christ, of the current exhibition, 50 Years after 50 Years of Bauhaus 1968 describe the exhibition thus in their curatorial note:

“On May 4, 1968, one day after students in Paris had occupied the University of Sorbonne and announced the so–called May 68, the exhibition 50 Years of the Bauhaus was opened at the Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart. The opening was accompanied by protests against the planned closure of the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, which was founded in 1953 as a successor to the Bauhaus project.

Designed by Herbert Bayer and conceived by Hans Maria Wingler, Ludwig Grote, and the Kunstverein’s director at the time, Dieter Honisch, the exhibition was shown in eight additional museums worldwide until 1971. To this day, it is considered one of the most important postwar exhibitions on the Bauhaus and was of the highest significance in terms of cultural policy for the still-young Federal Republic: since at stake was not least the rehabilitation, at international levels, of Germany as a cultural nation in the aftermath of National Socialism.

Fifty years after the opening of 50