The goal of the research Exhibition designs of the first avant-garde (as dominant influences on the emergence and definition of museum art museums and their development) is to provide a list of the most important personalities and their inventions in the field of exhibition design and museum installations in the beginning of the 20th century, and to discuss the factors that allowed for the emergence of modern art museums (as we know them today).
As all of the key case-studies are literally lost in history (and most of them forgotten), this research aims to depict and virtually reconstruct them through available literature, photographs and drawings, and to re-actualize them as theoretical ideas. We cannot fully understand the idea behind Leger und Träger (L&T system, installation design, 1924) by Frederick Kiesler if we do not take into consideration his own theory of a new approach in architectural design, the so-called Correlation (Correalism and Biotechnique). El Lissitzky‘s Abstraktes Kabinett (The Abstract Cabinet, 1928), and Laszlo Moholy Nagy's Raum der Gegenwart (The Room of Our Time, 1930) cannot be examined in isolation from the integral plan for the restructuring of the Landesmuseum in Hanover devised by its director, the art historian Alexander Dorner and his ideas of “atmosphere rooms”. Learning about new exhibition techniques developed in Bauhaus as part of the official school curriculum cannot be entirely comprehended without consulting the “fundamentals of exhibition design” (1937) written by Herbert Bayer and some of the first fully realized architectural novelties such as Mies van der Rohe's “free plan“ and its possibilities for exhibiting modern art.
As different as they are, all of the case studies share a sincere interest in diverse ways of picturing the new modern world through a variety of visual possibilities of the “camera-eye”, total interior landscapes of art and the mass media.