Crafted Design & Agents of Change: Modern European Publications from the Collection of Barbara Mackey Kaerwer

March 20 – May 31, 2012

The Kohler Art Library proudly presents a selection of early twentieth-century German and Austrian publications from the collection of Barbara Mackey Kaerwer,  a University of Wisconsin-Madison alumna and generous donor to both the Chazen Art Museum and the library.  On display are works by some of the era’s most notable artists and designers, including Koloman Moser, Wassily Kandinsky, Erich Heckel, Walter Gropius, Josef Hoffman and Dagobert Peche.   During those decades artists increasingly considered art and design agents of change, capable of improving the quality of life and society; the new visual aesthetic and formal languages they crafted represented emergent technological, economic, and social ideals.  The children’s books, political pamphlets, art and design periodicals, woodcut prints and exhibition catalogues in this show reflect a variety of ways in which avant-garde form became employed in printed materials.

This exhibit was curated by Amy Brabender, Holly Rubalcava, Eve Stano, Christy Wahl, Booth Wilson, and Jose Vergara (graduate students in Art History 856, Nationalism in the Era of the International, taught by Professor Buenger).

Image from:  Lothar Schreyer.  Kreuzigung: Spielgang Werk VII.  Hamburg: Werkstatt der Kampfbühne, 1920.