Blueprints for a Better World: Radical Art Schools and the Making of Modern Art
Available On campus OR Online
Autumn Term
On Campus: Tuesday 29th September to Tuesday 1 December 2026
OR
Online: Wednesday 7th October to Wednesday 9 December 2026
Following WWI and the revolutionary upheavals that reshaped Europe and beyond, a new generation of art schools emerged with a shared ambition: to rethink not only how art was taught, but what art could do in the world. This autumn’s Showcasing Art History lectures trace the radical experiment of modern art education across a century and three continents.
We begin in Germany in 1919, with Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus and its revolutionary curriculum of experimental, communal, and workshop-based training in every category that could help reconnect the arts to everyday life: painting and the applied arts, the performing arts, design and architecture. We then move to Lenin-founded VkhUTEMAS [Higher State Artistic and Technical Workshops], in revolutionary Moscow – “the Russian Bauhaus” – where art was reimagined as a tool of industrial and political transformation and where three main avant-garde movements were fostered: constructivism, rationalism and suprematism. Next, we move continents to focus on Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s Kala Bhavana (Hall of Art) in West Bengal. Like the Bauhaus, with which it shares the year of foundation (1919), Kala Bhavana erased hierarchies between art and craft and sought to make an art with social purpose. Blending local traditions with international artistic practices, it produced an alternative, anti-colonial modernism that was specific to local culture.
Returning to Europe, we explore Amédee Ozenfant and Fernand Léger’s Académie Moderne in Paris with its distinctive Purist pedagogy championing an art of clarity, order, and machine-age precision. The Académie was short-lived but influential, disseminating advanced Parisian artistic thought through outposts in London and New York. It was a key example, along with The Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts (Munich, 1915-1930/ NYC and Provincetown, Massachusetts 1935-58), of how art schools could foster transatlantic cultural connections, bridging European, and an incipient American, modernism. From 1933, Black Mountain College in North Carolina, USA, where former Bauhaus teachers Josef and Anni Albers had found a new home, developed an experimental and interdisciplinary pedagogy which raised an astonishing crop of avant-garde American painters and poets, and included such figures as composer John Cage and dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham among its teachers. It was forced to close its doors in 1957 but inspired several other radical educational institutions in the USA. Among them was CalArts [The California Institute of the Arts] where we focus on the transformative early years in the 1970s, when John Baldessari’s Post-Studio Art programme challenged traditional assumptions about what an art school should teach, and Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro’s Feminist Art Program at nearby CalArts Fresno offered a new model of collective, politically engaged pedagogy.
Back in Europe, our series moves to London, to Kensington’s Royal College of Arts in the 1950s and 60s, as the fulcrum of Pop Art, and to the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where Joseph Beuys brought a radically democratic, discursive and performance-based approach to his professorial tenure from 1961-72. His controversial classes blurred the boundaries between artistic practice and political activism in pursuit of an art capable of transforming society. By contrast to such fervent idealism, Goldsmiths College in New Cross, London of the 1990s became the hotbed of a generation of young artists – the YBAs [Young British Artists] – whose brash new entrepreneurial spirit helped them bypass the strictures of traditional art-world success. Our series ends with the reflections of a contemporary artist on their formation within the radical art school and its lasting impact on their work and philosophy. Throughout, we will encounter many of the most famous artists of the twentieth century, and engage closely with artworks in various media, and with fascinating archival materials: manifestoes, curricula, photographs, and correspondence. In this way, we will examine how art institutions dissolved boundaries between art and craft, individual and collective, artistic creation and social life – and how, in doing so, they became blueprints for imagining entirely different ways of being in the world.
Series conceived by Dr Matthew Holman.
Our speakers: Professor Robin Schuldenfrei, Professor Christina Lodder, Dr Emilia Terracciano, Dr Matthew Holman, Dr Lucy Bradnock, Charles Darwent, Dr Daniel Spaulding, Christopher Page.
Moderator: Dr Anne Puetz