ABSTRACT
This essay examines Bucharest’s first school of modern applied arts as a nexus for unexpected transnational encounters, examining how links between ostensibly “peripheral” locations and institutions can circumvent established narratives of modernism. The Academy of Decorative Arts, a private enterprise that functioned in Bucharest from 1924 to 1929, offered a wide spectrum of classes, from bookbinding and metalwork to drawing, printmaking, and interior design. Previous studies have linked the Academy with the avant-garde artist Max Herman Maxy and his visit to the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1922. However, new findings indicate that the Academy’s curriculum was the brainchild of designer Andrei Vespremie, whose contribution was erased following his emigration to Riga in 1927. An accomplished maker and pedagogue, Vespremie trained at the Schule Reimann in Berlin in the early 1920s, an innovative school of modern commercial design. This comparative study of the Academy of Decorative Arts, the Bauhaus, and the Schule Reimann aims to unsettle the relationship between the “peripheral” modernities of Eastern Europe and “central” figureheads such as the Bauhaus and to demonstrate the instability of such categories, as well their interdependence and permeability.
