Bauhaus Designers, Nazi Persecution, and the Missing Archive: Alice Glaser, Lotte Rothschild, and Richard Grune
A Modern Design History lecture by Elizabeth Otto (University at Buffalo, State University of New York)

Histories of Germany’s Bauhaus art, architecture, and design school (1919–33) usually position it exclusively as a movement in exile after the National Socialist seizure of power in 1933. Yet the vast majority of the Bauhaus’s more than 1,400 members remained in Germany and either embraced Nazism, survived it, or became its victims. In this talk, Elizabeth Otto excavates traces of the work and lives of three Bauhaus members who, because of their persecution by the Nazi government, have been lost to history. Using previously untapped archival sources—often scant materials preserved by family members and friends, including documents, photographs, and private memoirs—she reconstructs aspects of these artists’ work and lives to consider what this movement looks like when we include the art histories that violence has taken from us.

November 13 at 6pm
38 West 86th Street, BGC Lecture Hall