Interview with Filmmaker and Photographer Ronald Nameth
On filming Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable and the influence of the New Bauhaus

In diesem Interview mit Astrid Volpert schildert sie ihre jahrzehntelange Forschung über Bauhäusler, die in die Sowjetunion ausgewandert sind, und macht deutlich, dass weit mehr als sieben in Richtung Osten aufbrachen. Die Russlandreisenden des Bauhauses stammten aus elf Ländern und gehörten unterschiedlichen Konfessionen an. 15 Frauen und 47 Männer; 21 davon waren Mitglieder kommunistischer Parteien.

In March 1950, Pietro Maria Bardi, director of the São Paulo Art Museum (MASP, which opened in 1947), wrote to several American educational institutions requesting their curricula as an aid to developing the first design course in Brazil—the Institute of Contemporary Art (IAC), which was to be run as a part of the museum and would also be the country’s first design school. Despite being brief and objective, his missives did not fail to mention the “spirit of the Bauhaus,” explicitly linking the institute he hoped to found with a pedagogical lineage whose objectives and approach he aimed to share.

One day in September 1936, Ernestine Fantl, a curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and Lázló Moholy-Nagy stood looking at the new Penguin Pond in London Zoo. Fantl was on a research trip for an upcoming exhibition, Modern Architecture in England, that would heavily feature the striking structures Soviet émigré architect Berthold Lubetkin’s firm Tecton had built at the London and Whipsnade Zoos, among them the Penguin Pond. Realizing “that no still photograph could do justice to the pool or its denizens,” on the spot Fantl commissioned Moholy to produce a film about Tecton’s animal enclosures.