Habib Rahman
A Bauhaus Legacy in India

Auch wenn die progressiven Künstlerinnen und Künstler der Zwischenkriegszeit letztendlich an dem Vorhaben scheiterten, die erhoffte neue, egalitäre Gesellschaft aufzubauen, war ihr Einfluss doch nachhaltig. So brachte die internationale Avantgarde einige der wichtigsten Künstler des 20. Jahrhunderts hervor. Einige Mitglieder des Arbeitsrats nahmen derweil wichtige Stellungen im Bauhaus ein – allen voran Gropius als dessen Gründungsdirektor.

Kurt Schwerdtfeger conceived of Reflektorische Farblichtspiele in 1921 as a student at the Bauhaus Weimar, studying under Oskar Schlemmer, Johannes Itten, Paul Klee, and Joseph Hartwig. Although the work has been discussed over the years in the context of abstract film, light sculpture, visual music, and expanded cinema, it is first and foremost a work of live performance. Decades before moving image performance would make its appearance in galleries and museums as an art form—a denotation the artistic practice still struggles to attain today—Schwerdtfeger recognized it as such, perhaps due to his immersion in the all-encompassing interdisciplinary approach of the Bauhaus.

The need for a synthesis of the arts and, with this, a change of pedagogical principles, was not only present at the beginning of the twentieth century (forces that prompted the Bauhaus’s foundation), but after WWII as well, during the “Short Century” of decolonization. This second modern movement and its relation to modernism and the vernacular, the hand made, and the everyday was vividly expressed through texts and art works published in the Moroccan quarterly magazine Souffles, published beginning in the mid-1960s by a group of writers and artists in Rabat, Casablanca and Paris.