Global Humanities Junior Research and Teaching Stay at Freie Universität Berlin
June - December 2014

The Bauhaus in situ: The Place of Mass Culture in Weimar Germany, 1923–1929

Jordan Troeller's dissertation examines four works of art that are all site-specific interventions into built space. In each instance, artists trained at the Bauhaus formed an interior experience for an audience external to the hermetic, avant-garde school of design. Drawn primarily from Berlin, these audiences represented aspects of Weimar popular culture that are relatively unfamiliar in art history: industrial Wohnkultur, communist theater, mass-market publishing, and socialist worker education. Artists including Josef Albers, Marcel Breuer, Otti Berger, and Anni Albers considered such sites pivotal battlegrounds in the struggle for a democratic mass culture during the interwar period.

Jordan Troeller is a doctoral student in the History of Art and Architecture department at Harvard University. A native of California, she graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and later from the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. Her writing has appeared in Art Journal, Prefix Photo, and catalogues for exhibitions on postwar art, including most recently the Museum Brandhorst’s Reading Andy Warhol (2013). She currently lives in Berlin, where she is writing her dissertation on the role of place in the formation of a utopian mass culture at the Bauhaus. As a Global Humanities Fellow, she will develop this research in the context of debates on cosmopolitan identity during the Weimar Republic.