Bauhaus & Greece

On the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus in Weimar, The Athens School of Fine Arts and the State Academy of Art and Design Stuttgart are organising an international congress entitled Bauhaus and Greece: The New Idea of Synthesis in Art and Architecture. The congress will be held at the Benaki Museum and the Athens School of Fine Arts on 30 May – 1 June 2019.

Two topics will be dealt with in the three days of the meeting: The first topic is the Bauhaus reception in Greece and other countries before and after the Second World War. In the special case of Greece, the influences of modern European culture on the arts, architecture and art education during these periods will be discussed. The second topic is about other international initiatives that directly or indirectly referred to the Bauhaus or even aimed at its re-founding, such as the project of Mendelsohn, Wijdeveld and Ozenfant to create a Mediterranean Academy, the Black Mountain College in North Carolina, the New Bauhaus in Chicago, the “White City” of Tel Aviv, the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm and others.

About 65 congress participants from Greece and abroad will contribute to these topics. Invited guests from the fields of art and architectural history will address the character and significance of lesser-known aspects of Bauhaus history. Further highlights can be expected during the Athens Bauhaus anniversary. In August 1923, on the occasion of the first major Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar, two concerts with works of modern “classical” music by avant-garde composers of the time such as Ernst Krenek, Paul Hindemith, Ferruccio Busoni and Igor Stravinsky took place. It was, so to speak, a musical counterpart of the Bauhaus, on the basis of a musical paradigm that would later be branded as “degenerate”. These concerts will now be performed again in the Benaki Museum in the evening, in conclusion of each congress day. The last evening will be dedicated to the jazz music of that time, which was known to be one of the musical preferences at theBauhaus. The artistic director of the Athens Bauhaus evenings is conductor George Petrou.

The “Greek contribution” to the Athens Congress will be rounded off with a new edition of the most important interwar publication on modern Greek architecture. It is the now legendary, extremely rare volume New School Buildings, a documentation of the structures widely known as “Papandreou’s Schools ” of the second Venizelos government period (1928-1932), which Patroklos Karantinos edited in 1938. Spread across the country, these schools, where several generations of pupils were educated, are the clearest and most revealing testimony to the desire for modernisation and the intensity with which the messages of modern European architectural culture were incorporated into Greece in the 1930s. The book is published by Kapon Editions, Athens.

A three-day intensive, multi-faceted festival programme with scholarly, editorial and artistic aspects is expected, a contribution to the outstanding importance of the event.

General information about the congress: bauhaus2019.asfa.gr