Developing experience : Alexander Dorner's Exhibitions, from Weimar Republic Germany to the Cold War United States

Abstract

Following the work of German-American curator Alexander Dorner (1893-1957) from his early curatorial career in Niedersachsen to professorships in New England, this dissertation explores the intersections of Euro-American modernism and developing ideations of experience within aesthetic philosophy. Dorner's work was formulated in deep engagement with (and often intentional contradiction to) the art theory being incubated in contemporaneous art institutions, pedagogies, and practices. His written texts and museum praxis responded to emerging notions of subjectivity, restoration, and perception in the aesthetic theory of Alois Riegl and Erwin Panofsky, art restoration mandates advocated by German museum leaders such as Max Sauerlandt and Kurt Karl Eberlein, and the artistic productions of El Lissitzky and Herbert Bayer. Against shifting expressions of democracy in Weimar Germany and the mid-century United States, Dorner's polemical focus on museum experience was, in effect, an attempt to train citizens for collective but heterogeneous social life.