Gallery Talk: Texas - Bauhaus

PDNB Gallery profiled The German Bauhaus in 2009 with an exhibition of furniture, decorative arts and photography. This exhibition will combine photography by Bauhaus artists and three North Texas artists, who were directly and indirectly influenced by German Bauhaus modernist principles.

The three Texas women in this exhibition are Carlotta Corpron, Ida Lansky and Barbara Maples. Ms. Corpron (1901-1988) was an art, design and art history professor at Texas Women's University (then Texas State College for Women) in Denton from 1935-1968. Barbara Maples (1912-1999) was an artist and art educator in Dallas from the 1930's to 1978. Ms. Lansky (1912-1999) practiced nursing then went to school at Texas Women's University studying art and eventually Library Science.

Under Corpron's mentorship, Lansky and Maples learned the Bauhaus philosophy of using light in photography through experimentation. Corpron had the opportunity to learn under the tutelage of Laszlo Maholy-Nagy, a teacher at the original Bauhaus school and later Director of the Institute of Design in Chicago, and Gyory Kepes, Maholy-Nagy's colleague and student at the Bauhaus and colleague of Maholy-Nagy at the Institute of Design. Both were visiting artists in Denton, Maholy-Nagy at Texas Women's University (1942) and Kepes at the University of North Texas (1944).

Corpron and her students experimented with photograms, solarization, and light abstraction methods. This resulted in works of art that broadened the Bauhaus aesthetic.

Gyory Kepes will also be included in this exhibition along with his colleagues at the Bauhaus, including: Horacio Coppola, Grete Stern, Eugen Batz, Lucia Moholy, T. Lux Feininger and more.

This exhibition emphasizes the value that these two North Texas universities placed on the visual arts. In fact, Texas Women's University, where Corpron taught, had the only public, studio-based art program in Texas until 1940.

Pictured: Carlotta Corpron's "Eggs Reflected (variant), Gelatin Silver, c. 1940s"

Information from venue