The following 1971 text by Charles Kuhn, curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum from 1930 to 1968, describes the formation of the Bauhaus collections at the Museum and is taken from the now out-of-print exhibition catalogue Concepts of the Bauhaus: The Busch-Reisinger Museum Collection (Cambridge, Mass., 1971). A more recent, fuller survey of the holdings may be found in Peter Nisbet and Emilie Norris, comps., The Busch-Reisinger Museum: History and Holdings (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), pp. 77-87.

At the close of the Second World War, systematic documentation of the history and aims of the Bauhaus appeared to be an important obligation of the Busch-Reisinger Museum. At that time, defeated Germany had neither the resources nor the will to undertake this task, although the value of such a collection to art historians, educators, industrial designers, architects and city planners was clear.

Even before the outbreak of war in 1939 many Bauhaus masters and students had emigrated to the United States. Walter Gropius, for instance, founder and first Director of the Bauhaus, had been at Harvard as a Professor of Architecture and chairman of the Department of Architecture since 1937. Joseph Albers began his long American teaching career at Black Mountain College in 1933. Lazlo Moholy-Nagy founded the "New Bauhaus" in Chicago in 1937 (eventually to be absorbed by the Illinois Institute of Technology). Mies van der Rohe at Chicago was primarily concerned with problems of professional training.

A precedent for the collection of Bauhaus work had already been set by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, although the selection of material was based primarily on artistic considerations rather than historic documentation. The presence of a university museum specializing in Germanic art and the contingent presence of Walter Gropius on the Harvard faculty made the Busch-Reisinger Museum the logical repository for such a research collection.

The idea of forming a Bauhaus collection was presented to Gropius, who received the suggestion with great enthusiasm. He immediately offered a long list of names and addresses of faculty and students formerly associated with the Bauhaus, and in the following years he gave much material as well as active support and advice to the museum. Letters to the individuals on the Gropius list began to be mailed in 1947 and the response was overwhelming. Many different ideas were expressed in the replies but there was general agreement on three points: that the project was necessary; that there was no such thing as a "Bauhaus method"; that Walter Gropius was unique in having the ability to establish a curriculum that insisted on craft discipline and yet allowed individual freedom for creation and experimentation.

From 1948 on, Bauhaus items of every description flowed into the Museum. There were class notes, student exercises, pamphlets, photographs (mostly documentary but many were examples of the art of photography), wall paper, furniture, metal and wood work, architectural designs, textiles and typography. For a brief period there were plans to devote a section of the collection to the influence of Bauhaus instruction concepts on American institution. It was soon realized that Bauhaus influence was so widespread that it would be out of the question to document it completely. Aspects of the famous introductory course were to be found in almost every American school of design or college art department.

So many individuals assisted in the development of the collection that it would be impossible to list all of their names. Special gratitude should be expressed to some of them for their extraordinary generosity, however. They are Anni and Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Hannes Beckmann, Howard Dearstyne, Julia and Lyonel Feininger, Ludwig Hilberseimer, L. Hirschfeld-Mack, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, and Gunta Stadler-Stölzl. In 1958 an important gift of paintings and drawings by Bauhaus Masters was presented to the Museum by Mrs. Lydia Dorner in memory of her husband, Alexander Dorner. Throughout the years of collecting, the interest of Walter Gropius remained high, and he continued to present gifts to the museum until a few months before his death.

In 1957, when gifts to the Research Collection had slowed considerably, Hans Maria Wingler came to Cambridge to study the Bauhaus collection at the museum aided by a Rockefeller Foundation grant to Harvard. He also spent time with former Bauhaus personnel throughout the United States. Largely through the efforts of Mr. Wingler, a Bauhaus Archive was established in Germany, and in 1960 he was appointed its first director. The formal opening of the Bauhaus Archiv, Darmstadt, took place on April 8, 1961, and the following year Wingler's monumental book, Das Bauhaus, was published. Thus through the Darmstadt archive and the Busch-Reisinger Research Collection the preservation of the historical documentation of the Bauhaus is assured for future generations of students and scholars.

No summary of the development of the Bauhaus collection at the Busch-Reisinger Museum can be complete without mention of the Lyonel Feininger Archive generously presented to the museum by Julia Feininger in 1963. This extraordinarily rich collection complements the museum's Bauhaus holdings, since Lyonel Feininger was the first master to be called by Gropius to the Bauhaus at Weimar in 1919 and retained his connection with that institution until it closed its doors in 1933.