Yale Architecture Forum
Katherine Kuenzli
From Brussels to the Bauhaus: The Origins and Impact of Henry van de Velde’s Work and Writings, 1889-1914
In 2019, the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus’s founding in Weimar Germany is being celebrated around the world, but the school’s origins in the work and writings of Walter Gropius’s predecessor in Weimar, Henry van de Velde, are rarely mentioned. This talk explores the oeuvre of this influential Belgian artist, whose work as a painter, designer, architect, and theorist in Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands helped shape the origins of abstraction as an international language that originated in painting but encompassed all the visual media.
Bio:
Katherine Kuenzli is Professor of Art History at Wesleyan University. She is the author The Nabis and Intimate Modernism (Routledge, 2010) and Henry van de Velde: Designing Modernism (Yale, 2019), which received a publication grant from the Furthermore Foundation. She is now completing Henry van de Velde: Selected Essays, 1889-1914, which along with her previous book, demonstrates how ideas of internationalism and the Total Work of Art lie at the heart of modern approaches to museum display, art education, and industrial design. Essays and articles by Kuenzli have appeared in The Art Bulletin, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Art History, and Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, as well as in numerous edited volumes and exhibition catalogues. Her work has been supported by ACLS, Canadian Center for Architecture, Chateaubriand, DAAD, Dedalus, Fulbright, Getty Library, Klassik Stiftung Weimar, and NEH grants.