Lot 637 N

The snapshot-like portrait of Walter Gropius was probably taken on the terrace of “Alberto Monte Verità”. In 1926, the banker and art patron Eduard von der Heydt had acquired the legendary mountain with its artists' colony near Ascona and had a hotel built there in the style of the “Neuen Bauen” with a view of Lake Maggiore. The location had become a fashionable meeting place for the artistic avant-garde in around 1930, with Walter Gropius, Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, Lionel Feininger, Oskar Schlemmer, Xanti Schawinsky and László Moholy-Nagy counted among its guests.
Josef Albers, who saw himself robbed of his livelihood with the closure of the Bauhaus, emigrated in 1933 with his wife Anni to the USA, and a short time later, like Xanti Schawinsky, found a position as a teacher at the Black Mountain College, which was open to the progressive ideas of the Bauhaus. Walter Gropius, with whom he had a close friendship, repeatedly tried, unsuccessfully, to bring Albers to the Graduate School of Design. Instead, he remained at Black Mountain College until 1949, partly due to the special freedoms the faculty enjoyed there.

Introduction "From the Bauhaus to Black Mountain College - Photography from a Swiss Private Collection" see lot 631