Howard Dearstyne was one of the few Americans to attend the Bauhaus in Germany, a school of dynamic ideas and often contrasting views. The school was a microcosm of the passions and energies that lurched and later galvanized out of the ashes and quagmire of the First World War.  At the Bauhaus there was a search to unite the new century's technology with the arts that were evolving in the service of society on a continent looking for a new template for mankind and social order.
At the Bauhaus, Howard Dearstyne,( born in Albany New York in 1903) was surrounded by some of the greatest artists and art theorists of the 20th Century.  Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Walter Peterhans  were his friends as well as his  tutors. In 1932 after studying with the greatest living German architect, Mies van der Rohe, Dearstyne became the first American to receive a diploma from the Bauhaus. Chicago's own Bertram Goldberg (architect for Marina City) was also a student at the school that Elaine Hochman calls "The Crucible of  Modernism."
This exhibition examines Dearstyne's photographic work at the Bauhaus as well as his later experimentations in color and black and white during the 1940's, 1950's and into the 1960's.  Photographs by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Gyorgy Kepes, Walter Peterhans, Umbo, Hans Finsler, Lucia Moholy and T. Lux Feininger (shown in our alcove) provide a context for his work.