Consuming the Bauhaus

The “large conglomerate of changing ideas behind the name ‘Bauhaus’” provides an ideal ground around which to explore notions of art and oppression. The closure of the original Bauhaus in 1933 was among the first of the Nazi suppressions after Hitler came to power, a fact which certainly has contributed to the subsequent canonisation of the Bauhaus as the “crucible of modernism”. In the decades following its closure we find an increasing interest in the art and design generated by the individual artists associated with the Bauhaus. The reception history of the Bauhaus, which we will trace geographically to the USA and a divided post‐war Germany, contains the repression and virtual disappearance of its utopian humanistic‐social dimensions. We suggest that the ways in which the Bauhaus has been interpreted and used “posthumously” for various political and ideological ends, both includes and implicates us when making the Bauhaus idea “usable”.