By Bauhaus Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernism's Legendary Art School

A century after the Bauhaus's founding in 1919, this book reassesses it as more than a highly influential art, architecture, and design school. In myriad ways, emerging ideas about the body in relation to health, movement, gender, and sexuality were at the heart of art and life at the school. Bauhaus Bodies reassesses the work of both well-known Bauhaus members and those who have unjustifiably escaped scholarly scrutiny, its women in particular. In fourteen original, cutting-edge essays by established experts and emerging scholars, this book reveals how Bauhaus artists challenged traditional ideas about bodies and gender. Written to appeal to students, scholars, and the broad public, Bauhaus Bodies will be essential reading for anyone interested in modern art, architecture, design history, and gender studies; it will define conversations and debates during the 2019 centenary of the Bauhaus's founding and beyond. Review Bauhaus Bodies provides a remarkable contribution to our understanding of the Bauhaus and its community by tackling a vital set of issues surrounding the body, gender, and sexuality in modernism. Offering cutting-edge research and exceptional insight, this collection of essays brings together wide-ranging materials across a series of topics related to the politics and cultures of the body, explicating the Bauhaus in greater depth and with compelling nuance. Illustrating the crucial role of embodied experience and new experiments in living, Bauhaus Bodies is an indispensable guide to the school's wider impact on society, the arts, identity, body politics, health and physical culture, movement and space, and in many other social and cultural spheres.Robin Schuldenfrei, Katja and Nicolai Tangen Lecturer in 20th Century Modernism, The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, UKWhat role did the body play at the Bauhaus? The essays in this volume offer answers to that question by offering a panorama of perspectives, from Ise Gropius to the known and unknown female students at the school. The body and gender played definitive roles in an institution that was largely run by men and notions of 'rationalized modernism'. This is the first anthology to demonstrate how one-sided that latter perspective is, which it does by uncovering a number of previously overlooked aspects, such as the role of gymnastics in the school's foundation course and the instrumental role played by Ise Gropius in the everyday administration of the institution.Magdalena Droste, former Professor at the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany About the Author Elizabeth Otto is Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Studies, State University of New York at Buffalo, USAPatrick Rössler is Professor of Communications and Empirical Research Methods at the University of Erfurt, Germany.