Wege zum Bauhaus
Oktober 2022 – Februar 2023
Museum
Animation / Video production
From late 2022 to early 2023, I collaborated with the Klassik Stiftung Weimar on video production for the “Wege zum Bauhaus” exhibition at the Museum Neues Weimar, a project closely tied to my master’s thesis. My thesis involves creating a series of short documentaries about Weimar’s cultural peak from 1860 to 1918, the focus of the museum’s current permanent exhibition. The project includes producing at least three five-minute videos combining narration based on the exhibition catalog with animations of the museum’s digitized art collection. This work, realized in partnership with the Museum Neues Weimar, allowed me to expand the foundation’s branding while maintaining its core identity. The creative process revealed unexpected insights about Weimar’s history, reshaping my original approach. Like the founders of the Bauhaus, my work evolved in ways I hadn’t anticipated, with its full significance unfolding over time.
Presentation
Museum Neues Weimar
Wege zum Bauhaus
The exhibition „Wege zum Bauhaus“ includes the works of the Weimar School of Painting and the avant-garde championed by Harry Graf Kessler, featuring artists from Claude Monet to Max Beckmann. Additionally, numerous exhibits present the functional yet elegant design of Henry van de Velde.
The „Neues Weimar“ (New Weimar) represents a pivotal and multifaceted era in the history of Weimar around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. Following its classical golden age led by Goethe and a second cultural flourishing under Franz Liszt, Weimar embarked on a significant cultural rebirth. This period, largely encompassed by the reign of Grand Duke Wilhelm Ernst, became a hub of cultural innovation that ultimately laid crucial groundwork for the establishment of the Bauhaus. This exciting new phase was primarily shaped by three influential figures: Henry van de Velde, Harry Graf Kessler, and Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.
Harry Graf Kessler
1868 — 1937
Harry Graf Kessler acted as a vital networker and promoter of modern art. As the director of the Grand Ducal Museum of Art and Applied Arts and former editor of the art magazine „Pan,“ he introduced groundbreaking exhibitions by international masters like Claude Monet and Max Beckmann to Weimar. Kessler’s apartment in Berlin became a hub for independent artists and progressive art patrons, fostering a cosmopolitan environment. His strong advocacy for artistic freedom and his vision to transform Germany into a modern art country, making Weimar its international artistic center, significantly influenced the „Neues Weimar“ movement.
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche
1846 — 1935
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche’s establishment of the Nietzsche Archive in 1896 made Weimar a central site for the cultic veneration of her brother, Friedrich Nietzsche. Through her extensive networking and the publication of his works (at times with controversial alterations), she cemented his fame. Nietzsche’s provocative writings became a guiding force for a generation of artists and intellectuals, who saw him as a radical innovator and prophet of a „new human.“ This philosophical backdrop aligned with the broader „Lebensreform“ (life reform) movement, which sought a return to more natural ways of living in response to industrialization, encompassing diverse ideas from healthy living to reform clothing.
Henry van de Velde
1863 — 1957
Henry van de Velde was a driving force behind the aesthetic renewal of „Neues Weimar“ with his „New Style.“ He sought to unify organic, simple, rational, and logical elements in design, moving beyond the exhausted historicism of the previous era. Viewing himself as an „apostle“ of this new aesthetic future, van de Velde established the „Kunstgewerbliches Seminar“ (Arts and Crafts Seminar). This innovative institution served as a laboratory where he advised local artisans and manufacturers, helping them improve their products and raising the aesthetic and technical standards of home industries. His designs for furniture, ceramics, and metalwork quickly gained national and even international recognition.
The combined efforts and progressive ideas of van de Velde, Kessler, and Förster-Nietzsche set the stage for Weimar’s future as the birthplace of the Bauhaus.
Van de Velde’s concept of connecting art and technology, along with the innovative, workshop-based teaching methods at his Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts – where students were encouraged to experiment and develop their own artistic perspectives – directly anticipated the principles of the Bauhaus, which was founded in Weimar in 1919. This era truly fostered artistic freedom and transformed Weimar into a crucial incubator for modern art and design in Germany.
Concept of History
This project aims to visually represent History, and to do so effectively, it’s crucial to first understand how history itself is perceived and constructed. This foundational understanding allows us to derive compelling visual motifs that accurately reflect its nature.
Our approach to this visualization is strictly formalist, meaning that the design must directly reflect the content. Every visual decision, from layout and typography to color and motion, will be carefully considered and theoretically justified. This ensures that the aesthetic choices are not arbitrary but are deeply rooted in our understanding of history as a dynamic, interpretive process.
„Wenn die Philosophie ihr Grau in Grau malt, dann ist eine Gestalt des Lebens alt geworden, und mit Grau in Grau lässt sie sich nicht verjüngen, sondern nur erkennen; die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechenden Dämmerung ihren Flug.“
The concept of history presented is that it’s not merely a fixed past, but a dynamic, retrospective interpretation of facts. What happened gains its true significance and meaning only when viewed from the future. This means our understanding of past events and actions is constantly reshaped, and the present decides how the past is „historicized.“
This retrospective interpretation isn’t passive; it actively shapes our perception of a „necessary“ future. Historical figures like Kessler and van de Velde, interpreting past events, believed they were enacting a predetermined future. However, contingent breaks – unexpected events like World War I – can drastically alter this perceived necessity. These breaks cause the past to assume new forms retrospectively, revealing prior „necessary“ futures as merely contingent. Just as a drawing can be seen as either a rabbit or a duck depending on the moment of recognition, so too can historical periods shift their meaning in hindsight.
For „Neues Weimar,“ the outbreak of World War I initially recast its ambitious beginnings as „errors and confusions.“ Yet, the subsequent founding of the Bauhaus provided another retrospective lens. Through this new perspective, „Neues Weimar“ was re-framed as the essential „path to the Bauhaus.“ Ultimately, the text argues that freedom lies not in a determined future, but in the ongoing, free interpretation of the past, which in turn makes new futures possible.
Video Struktur
In the case of fractals, the hermetic principle applies: “That wich is below is like that wich is above (…).” I have tried to reflect this recursive, self-similar structure in the structure of the video series. Each video begins with the question of how the chosen point of view (Nietzsche, landscape painter, Goethe, etc.) relates to the Bauhaus or modern art. Each video ends with the connection to the Bauhaus. Framed or rather sutured by a question and answer, each video contains a series of facts which gain their weight through the way they are sutured. In this, the dialectical view of history is revealed once again: the historical significance and relevance of all these facts is only their future: the founding of the Bauhaus. The individual videos function as a single narrative of the path to the Bauhaus, independent of the series. The series, in turn, can also be viewed as a whole and tells the same story, only bigger. With a historical theme, this is almost inevitable, as everything is connected to everything else. As we know, the whole is the whole.
Landscape
Landscapes inherently evoke a sense of freedom, symbolizing the boundless potential to go anywhere, yet paradoxically, their vastness also expresses humanity’s vulnerability and smallness when confronted by the overwhelming forces of nature. This motif is particularly fitting as the reception of modern art in Weimar initially began with landscape painting. Furthermore, landscapes represent Kant’s concept of the „sublime,“ which describes an experience of awe and terror when faced with something physically immense and powerful, yet simultaneously realizing our intellectual superiority and independence through reason. This paradoxical union of physical impotence and mental power—the necessity of natural forces and the freedom of our reason—mirrors the historical experience itself, where history is open to retrospective transformation, yet the present moment feels determined by both past and future. Beyond literal landscapes, this motif is indirectly explored through the use of maps and by playing with spatiality, creating visual depth and breadth through techniques like isolating elements from paintings or photos to allow other objects to appear behind them.
Ambiguous Image (Vexierbild)
The second motif, the Ambiguous Image (Vexierbild), is employed to represent the fluid transitions and retrospective transformations inherent in historical experience. Visually, this is achieved through very soft, flowing transitions between images. Each image gently dissolves into the next using blurring and masked fades, creating the illusion of a continuous, transforming video without harsh cuts. This technique aims to convey the idea that what appears to be one thing can, upon closer inspection or over time, reveal itself to be something entirely different, mirroring the way historical events are retrospectively reinterpreted. This motif directly embodies the core concept of history as a „rabbit-duck“ illusion, where the same set of facts can suddenly take on a new form and meaning depending on the viewer’s perspective and subsequent historical developments.
Corporate design
The branding for the project aligns with the Klassikstiftung Weimar’s corporate identity. A central visual element is a predominantly white, angular frame, which serves as a „visual bracket“ to create continuity while remaining adaptable. The logo is a simple, slightly modified design featuring a left-aligned line and an existing wordmark.
Primary Brand Font
For typography, the Klassikstiftung uses two distinct typefaces: an „Antiqua as a foundation identifier“ and a „Grotesque font for its individual institutions.“ As the exact original fonts could not be identified and to avoid copyright issues, Futura PT was chosen as a visual substitute for the Grotesque font, and EB Garamond was selected as the replacement for the Antiqua typeface, both visually similar to the original branding.
