Bauhaus Goes West

Bauhaus Goes West is a story of cultural exchange over a period of some seventy years, from the influence of English and Scottish pioneers around 1900 on reforming German design, to the presence in Britain during the 1930s and beyond of Bauhaus giants as well as lesser-known figures who had connections to the school, several of them women, and especially those who remained in Britain as designers and teachers. This book provides the first reliable account of what these individuals achieved in Britain. Working from meticulous research, Powers reviews speculations about reception and understanding of the Bauhaus as an idea and a reality. In so doing, he looks in greater depth and detail than any previously at the theory and practice of art, design and architecture between the Arts and Crafts Movement and Modernism, challenging the assumption that the 1920s represented a void of reactionary conservatism. The book gives the opportunity to recover some of the overlooked aspects of a British avant-garde that ran in parallel with the work of the Bauhaus, such as the film-making of Francis Bruguière and Len Lye, and the development of art teaching for children under Marion Richardson and the LCC.  The Bauhaus was primarily an educational experiment, only later being recognised as a style or a brand. This book uses its history as a way of viewing the visual culture of Britain in relation to the long history of Modernism, and proposes a plural rather than a unified or singular way of viewing this enduringly fascinating phenomenon.