Practice Situations: Franz Erhard Walther and the Werkkunstschule

GERMAN STUDIES: NEW PERSPECTIVES

SPEAKER: Gregory Williams, Boston University

The 2019 centennial celebration of the founding of the Bauhaus, Germany’s legendary school of craft and fine art, has generated numerous books and exhibitions about art and design education in the first half of the twentieth century. An unanticipated effect of this welcome scholarship is that it reveals how much work remains to be done to uncover the post-1945 Bauhaus legacy of progressive forms of education in the visual arts. This lecture will explore how modes of practical training had a visible impact on the work of German artists whose careers began in the late 1950s and 1960s. A primary organization in this postwar history is the Werkkunstschule, a designation for a consortium of schools across West Germany that adopted this common name. Many of these institutions sought to restructure their programing to offer a third path between the technical training of a vocational school and the fine-art education of a traditional academy.

The lecture will begin with Franz Erhard Walther’s studies at the Werkkunstschule in Offenbach am Main, where he learned precision hand-lettering and used stencils to produce images with the practical appeal of commercial signage. It will then trace the development of his well-known First Work Set (1963-69) during Walther’s subsequent studies at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Mapping the changing, and frequently oppositional, relationships between hand and machine, gesture and repetition, technology and materiality, and craft and industry, the talk will situate Walther’s specific practice within a wider discourse on postwar pedagogical approaches in the intersecting fields of art and design.

About the speaker

Gregory Williams is Associate Professor of Contemporary and Modern Art History at Boston University. He is the author of Permission to Laugh: Humor and Politics in Contemporary German Art (University of Chicago Press, 2012), and co-editor of Labour in a Single Shot: Critical Perspectives on Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki’s Global Video Project (Amsterdam University Press, 2022) and Humor in Global Contemporary Art (Bloomsbury, 2024). His writings have appeared in periodicals, including Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, Art Journal, and October, as well as in exhibition catalogues dedicated to the work of artists such as Carol Bove, KP Brehmer, Katharina Grosse, Martin Kippenberger, Alexander Kluge, Imi Knoebel, Rosemarie Trockel, and Franz Erhard Walther. His current book project, Practical Aesthetics: The Object of Postwar Art and Design in West Germany, explores changing conceptions of art and design in relation to new forms of pedagogy in the postwar period.