On Friday 18th October 2019, Harriet presented a paper entitled ‘”From the tail of the class to the front row”? The impact of Bauhaus exhibition technique on Britain’ at a one-day workshop at Tate Britain. This paper drew on new research she has been carrying out as AHRC Fellow.
In the paper, Harriet analysed exhibition designer Misha Black’s claim, which he made in 1950, that after years languishing ‘at the tail of the class’, Britain had pioneered a new approach to contemporary exhibition design, bringing them to the ‘front row’. This, he said, was the recent creation of ‘informative and story-telling’ exhibitions, a form in which Britain now led the world. The archetype of this style, according to Black, was the London MARS Group Exhibition of 1938 for which László Moholy-Nagy had acted as co-ordinator, handing the role to Black on his departure for Chicago. Harriet’s paper questioned the extent to which the ‘new’ approach to exhibition design, the reproducible textual-visual spatial hybrid form used by the Ministry of Information as World War Two propaganda, could be attributed to the impact of Bauhaus ideas and ideals.
The workshop, entitled “Reconfiguring Relationships: Britain and the Bauhaus”, convened by Elizabeth Darling (Oxford Brookes), Emilie Oléron Evans (Queen Mary University of London) and Rachel Rose Smith (Independent, Tate Research), brought together scholars and curators with research interests related to connections between Britain and the Bauhaus school.
Further details are on the blog of University of Brighton’s Centre for Design History blog.