Out of the Display Case:
A writing desk in exile

// Object Talk
Thu, 23 Mar 2023, 6 pm
Bauhaus Museum Dessau
Open Stage

In the director’s room in the Dessau Bauhaus Building there is a replica of the famous desk designed in 1923 by Walter Gropius for the school building of the State Bauhaus Weimar. The desk was designed as part of a synthesis of the arts – a Gesamtkunstwerk – for the first public Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar in 1923. The original desk is today in Lincoln, Massachusetts, the American domicile of the Gropius family, who moved there in 1938. The heavy desk made of cherrywood has been subject to many removals, which is not hard to see. The glass top is missing, water and paint stains have left their marks on the cherrywood grain, and drawer knobs replace the lost keys. The centenary of the first Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar presents an opportunity to cast light on the journey made by this iconic piece of furniture. Regina Bittner (Bauhaus Dessau Foundation) invites you to trace the transatlantic peregrinations of the director’s desk.