Richard Filipowski
Richard Filipowski: Art & Design Beyond the Bauhaus
Monacelli Press, 2018
In conjunction with the vintage modern dealer Larry Weinberg and the Filipowski Trust, Hostler Burrows presents Richard Filipowski: Art and Design Beyond the Bauhaus, an exhibition accompanying the newly published monograph of the same name from Monacelli Press. This is Filipowski’s second solo exhibition in New York, featuring sculpture, flat art, jewelry, and never-before-seen furniture. The exhibition runs April 4 - 25, 2018, with an opening reception and book signing on Wednesday, April 4, 6-8 pm. The book’s editor and contributor Marisa Bartolucci will be signing copies, and Larry Weinberg, also a contributor, will be present.
Richard Filipowski (1923 – 2008) was among the most gifted polymaths in the annals of American modernism. Whether in painting, sculpture, or furniture and jewelry design, he developed a lush, abstract, and amazingly coherent visual language that marks him among the most distinctive figures of midcentury art and design.
As a student at the Institute of Design (formerly the New Bauhaus) in Chicago, Filipowski quickly became a protégé of founder László Moholy-Nagy, who featured several of Filipowski's works in his seminal text Vision in Motion (1947); Filipowski was the only student Moholy-Nagy called upon to join the faculty in Chicago. After Moholy-Nagy’s death, Walter Gropius recruited the young artist and educator to develop a course in design fundamentals at Harvard, where he was dean of the architecture school. The course Filipowski developed remains a cornerstone of design pedagogy to this day. Soon after, Filipowski moved to MIT where he taught for more than three decades, until his retirement in 1988.
With a foreword by Hattula Moholy-Nagy, Richard Filipowski: Art and Design Beyond the Bauhaus is the first monograph of this master, who over the course of his career created a unique body of work in diverse media that until recently has largely been held in private collections. Through the efforts of the Filipowski family, his work is now being widely exhibited and is receiving new attention by art and design scholars – several of whom have contributed essays to the monograph – and is being introduced to an enthusiastic new generation of aficionados. This book is a rich document of a life and career that played a key role in the canon of modernism and is finally poised to enter it.
Richard Filipowski: Art and Design Beyond the Bauhaus, ed. Marisa Bartolucci, The Monacelli Press, 2018
