From Social Democratic Experiment to Postwar Avant-Gardism
Asger Jorn, The Tunisian, 1948
The project bauhaus imaginista, which takes the cosmopolitan Bauhaus as its point of departure in order to question the school’s legacy from a trans-historical and transnational perspective on the occasion of the centenary of its founding, would be negligent if it did not address the artist group referenced by its title, the Mouvement Internationale pour un Bauhaus Imaginiste (International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, or IMIB), founded in 1953 by Danish artist Asger Jorn together with a handful of French and Italian colleagues. Many of the theoretical and artistic positions advocated by the IMIB were developed dialectically in response both to the historical Bauhaus and the reconstitution of a Bauhaus-inspired pedagogical program at the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) in Ulm, the school developed by Bauhaus Dessau alumni Max Bill and sanctioned by American authorities as a project to renovate postwar Germany’s Nazi past. The legacy of the IMIB and the HfG are both central to the history of how Bauhaus ideas were refashioned in Europe after the Second World War, serving, alternately, as the ideological basis for one of the last manifestations of emancipatory European avant-garde ideas and the manifestation of interwar Functionalist design concepts, now aligned with capital markets and internationalist state power.
TEXT BY MICHAEL BAERS, IRIS STRÖBEL
