Out of the Display Case: Talks about Objects
The First Acquistition

Thu, 23 Jan 2020
Bauhaus Museum Dessau

145,030 marks was paid by the council of the city of Dessau to the Galerie am Sachsenplatz in Leipzig in November 1976. Invoice no. 48/76 documents the first acquisition of about 100 objects, which laid the foundation for the Dessau Bauhaus collection.

This collection is anything but a traditional museum project: After 1945, the Bauhaus became a politically and ideologically highly charged phenomenon in East and West Germany. Based on the invoice for the first acquisition, Wolfgang Thöner, director of the collection of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, and Christin Müller-Wenzel, art historian from Halle (Saale), illuminate the developments in Dessau and East Germany after 1945 that led to the founding of the Dessau Bauhaus collection. The authors of the publication The Progressive Heritage of the Bauhaus. On the Origins of an East German Bauhaus Collection (edited for the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation by Wolfgang Thöner and Claudia Perren, Spector Books, 2019), will speak on the changing relationship to the Bauhaus in the Soviet Union and the GDR and the personnel networks that shaped these processes of change and made the founding of the Dessau Bauhaus collection possible.