This lavishly illustrated volume looks from both sides of the Atlantic at 80 years of photography from Chicago. At the New Bauhaus and what later became the Institute of Design, teachers like László Moholy-Nagy, György Kepes, Arthur Siegel, Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind taught an uninhibited approach to the medium which influenced generations of photographers.

"Yigal Gawze’s photographs capture the abstraction, the simplicity and the optimism of early modernism in Tel Aviv. He distils the essence of the Bauhaus to bring it alive in a modern city and concentrates on the subtle effects of natural light upon architecture, a technique that the masters of the modern movement themselves applauded." Nonie Niesewand, design editor & author

The whole world a Bauhaus? The publication accompanying the worldwide exhibition series takes the quotation of the former Bauhaus student and subsequent university teacher Fritz Kuhr as a starting point for reflections on the Bauhaus not only as a school in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin, but also in order to focus on the parallel Modernist movements in non-European regions.

Werner Graeff – painter, graphic artist, typographer, photographer and sculptor – is an important Bauhaus artist and a significant representative of Constructivism in Germany. Prompted by his friend Mies van der Rohe he wrote his moving autobiography “Hürdenlauf durch das 20. Jahrhundert” (The Obstacle Race of the 20th century), which this volume publishes for the first time with a representative selection of texts.

Hin Bredendieck (1904–1995) graduated from the Bauhaus and was a versatile designer and pioneering teacher of design. His outstanding œuvre and his worldwide network testify to the international significance of his work and ideas. This lavishly illustrated, high quality monograph introduces in detail the life and work of Hin Bredendieck.

The Swiss artist Johannes Itten (1888–1967) was not only a pioneering art theorist and a prominent teacher at the Bauhaus, but he also left an extensive and wide-ranging oeuvre which is only known in part today. The lavishly illustrated catalogue raisonné covers comprehensively and presents an appropriate appreciation of the entire range of his artistic oeuvre.

The Bauhaus master Johannes Itten is one of the prominent protagonists of early Modernism in twentieth-century art. Few people are aware of the close links between his beginnings as an artist and his experience of landscape and nature in the town of Thun and Lake Thun.

László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), painter, photographer, Bauhaus teacher and founder of the “New Bauhaus” and the “School of Design” in Chicago, is one of the most important artist personalities of the modern age. As one of the first artists to work in multiple media, who practised painting, sculpture, photography, film and design as equally valid art genres, he set standards which are still relevant today.

When the State Bauhaus opened in Weimar in 1918, the Swiss artist and art theorist Johannes Itten (1888–1967) was one of the first teachers to be appointed by Walter Gropius. With his preliminary course Itten had a considerable effect on the creative training in the Bauhaus; to this day his insights into the theory of colours set standards in art education and in the field of design.

Lyonel Feininger (1871–1956) was a painter, graphic artist and caricaturist. From 1919 he served as one of the original masters at the Bauhaus in Weimar and later in Dessau. In 1937 he emigrated to New York, where he worked  until the end of his life. In addition to his famous Expressionist images of architecture, the publication presents all the facets of his oeuvre and stations of his life based on the latest research.