'You must completely forget what you have learned up to now. ... Put all preconceptions out of your head. Work from your own truth' (p. 137). To a student at a design school in the Netherlands today, these 'provocative lessons' by Josef Albers, as Bauhausler Lotte Stam-Beese would recollect, may sound eerily familiar. While 2017 was the year of De Stijl centenary, 2019 was the year to pay tribute to the Bauhaus, another 'cultural treasure,'1 which the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam took up with Netherlands ?Bauhaus. Pioneers of a new world. Close to 800 pieces of furniture, photographs, typography, artworks, ceramics, textiles, and architectural drawings were exhibited. Its eponymous exhibition catalog, edited by exhibition curator Mienke Simon Thomas and design historian Yvonne Brentjens, includes twenty-one essays, intertwined with four catalog sections with a variety of the works as shown in the exhibition. The legacy of modernist design is faithfully displayed by the cover and the inside design of the catalog. The primary colored circles and squares quite literally reflect the connections between the adjacent institutions affiliated with the Bauhaus, such as De Stijl, the Deutscher Werkbund, the Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle, or the advertisement agency Co-op 2 in Amsterdam, which would for some years become a hub for Bauhaus emigres. The catalog emphasizes the circles of the 'pioneering' artists, designers, architects, and others involved with the Bauhaus. In the preface, museum director Sjarel Ex asks 'What did they undertake to spread the belief in a new, modern, industrial society?' (p. 7).
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