Nicholas Fox Weber. The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism. Knopf, 544 pages. $40
Bauhaus is back. With the 90-year anniversary of the founding of the famed German school of art and craft and design — the school that calls to mind sharp corners and flat roofs, glass and steel and exposed materials, simple furniture and bold painting — have come the exhibitions, retrospectives, and commemorations. Among these is a book by the art historian and writer Nicholas Fox Weber that seeks to illuminate new aspects of the Bauhaus through new descriptions of its major players.
This is all to the good, for to understand the Bauhaus it is necessary to understand the people who ran it. This may seem an odd claim to make considering that one of the school’s most cherished and foundational ideals was that personality, in the slimier, egotistic sense of the word, had no place within its walls or in its work — but that, alas, was an ideal. In reality, the brief and tumultuous history of the Bauhaus’s existence (1919 to 1933) is a history of a handful of artists and craftsmen, and their philosophies and ideas, working with and against one another to create the shifting and singular styles that would irrevocably change the world’s understanding of art, architecture, and design.
Weber presents the lives of six individuals — Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Josef Albers, and Anni Albers — beginning with Gropius, a “bon vivant and womanizer” who founded the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Born into a wealthy family, Gropius was part of an architecturally inclined lineage. His great-uncle was an architect, a renowned one, who designed buildings in the neoclassical tradition of Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Gropius’s father was also an architect, and he, too, idolized Schinkel (he had his son baptized in the church where Schinkel was buried).
Young Gropius, though, was far less enamored than his forebears of the old revitalized Italian and Greek styles. He first went to work for Peter Behrens, a painter-turned-architect whose severe or at least austere buildings rejected old-world designs in favor of what he saw to be authentic (that is, innovative — not derivative or replicative) and useful (no extraneous elements and decoration). Behrens’ best-known structures are industrial, built of modern materials like steel and glass. They adumbrate those that Gropius — and the architects Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, both of whom also apprenticed with Behrens — would conceive in years to come.
In 1910, the 27-year-old Gropius wrote a 28-page paper describing his philosophy of building. In it, he pushed for the industrialization of housing — for “proven materials and reliable techniques” that would dispense with flourishes and ostentation and harness technology’s advances for the masses. He wanted low-cost, high-quality domiciles that worked for those who inhabited them. Weber doesn’t get deep into it, but such ideas were by no means unique. Behrens believed them, certainly, but so did other members of the Deutscher Werkbund, a group of artists and industrialists established in 1907 to advocate for the integration of art and industry and the consequent improvement of manufactured products. Another believer was Henry van de Velde, a Belgian painter who, like Behrens, had set aside his canvases to concentrate on architecture and design. In 1902, he had founded in Weimar the Arts and Crafts Seminar, which prefigured the Grand-Ducal School of Arts and Crafts, which, in turn, would eventually be transformed into the Bauhaus.
An ample chunk of Weber’s chapter on Gropius is dominated by Alma Mahler, which is fitting because she dominated an ample chunk of Gropius’s formative years. She was an insufferable woman. At age 17 she bequeathed her first kiss, that to the painter Gustav Klimt (who was more than twice her age), and thereby began a long career of torturing men. In 1901, she happened to be in the audience as the composer Gustav Mahler conducted the Vienna Philharmonic and was struck, thrilled, overcome by his passion; in 1902, she was married to him.
In 1910, Alma met Gropius at a sanatorium in the Tyrol, and the two promptly began a tumultuous, exhausting, and unconcealed affair. Within several years, Mahler had died and Gropius and Alma were married. By then, 1915, Gropius had achieved significant professional success and notoriety, much of it stemming from his architectural exhibitions at the major Deutcher Werkbund show in Cologne in 1914. The fighting between Germany and France had started, however, and Gropius was traveling back and forth between his home and the western front, where he was serving as a lieutenant. He was also being courted by two different parties to take over directorship of two different art schools in Weimar: the Grand-Ducal School of Arts and Crafts, formerly headed by van de Velde, and the Grand-Ducal Saxon Academy of Fine Arts, which lacked an architecture program. While ensconced in his army encampment, he began to consider the type of school he might like to run. Weber writes about these early inklings — the Bauhaus’s beginnings:
- While formulating his program, he was dealing on a daily basis with the tools of warfare — guns, cannons, the straightforward architecture of military camps — and with a cross-section of German society . . . He conjured an atmosphere of teamwork in which hardworking individuals with different areas of expertise would come up with effective as well as pleasing designs for objects and buildings, and in which mechanical methods would replace dependence on handwork.
The next several years were not easy ones: Gropius, fighting a destructive and losing battle on the front, was also fighting a destructive and losing battle at home. Alma’s emotional state seemed to shift with every letter she sent her husband — some included the loveliest, most devotional sentences and others spilled over with anger and disloyalty. Gropius was in the trenches when Alma gave birth to their daughter; a terse telegram communicated the news to him, and for weeks Alma did not answer Gropius’s letters inquiring about her and the baby’s health. Just months later, Alma began an affair with the poet Franz Werfel, and not a year after she had given birth to Gropius’s baby, she gave birth to Werfel’s.
It is a wonder that Gropius was able to hold himself together through all this, but he did, and when the fighting stopped he was ready to start work at his new collaborative school in Weimar. (He eventually ditched Alma, too.) The school would, he wrote, take inspiration from the medieval Bauhütte, where “architects, sculptors, and craftsmen of all grades — came together in a homogenous spirit and humbly contributed their independent work to the common tasks resting upon them.” Gropius met with the head of the new government in Weimar and proposed combining the city’s two art schools into one. Negotiations were brief, and by April 1919, the Staatliches Bauhaus had been founded, with Gropius at its helm.
In 1981 Tom Wolfe wrote a short book called From Bauhaus to Our House in which he went after modern architecture and pulled down its lofty pretensions in his unique way — with sharp observations and withering humor. As the title indicates, Wolfe thought the trouble started with the Bauhaus. In the book’s first pages he wrote of Gropius, the “The Silver Prince,” that his proclaimed interest “in ‘the proletariat’ or ‘socialism’ turned out to be no more than aesthetic or fashionable, somewhat like the interest of President Rafael Trujillo . . . in republicanism.” Wolfe then summarized the Bauhaus ethos:
- First, the new architecture was being created for the workers. The holiest of all goals: perfect worker housing. Second, the new architecture was to reject all things bourgeois. Since just about everyone involved, the architects as well as the Social Democratic bureaucrats, was himself bourgeois in the literal, social sense of the word, ‘bourgeois’ became an epithet that meant whatever you wanted it to mean.
This oversimplifies things — for one, the Bauhaus did not even offer architecture classes in its fledgling years. But Wolfe is not wrong: The Bauhaus, like other artistic compounds in Europe, was spawned in a postwar environment in which fundamental assumptions about society’s organization were seriously questioned; and artists and designers and musicians and writers, the avant-garde, led the interrogation. Of these, the Bauhaus group has become the most famous, and so people have come to associate the school with strident manifestos, sweeping denunciations, and crackpot theories that, imposingly manifested through modernist architecture, littered the land with ugly buildings and furnishings that more often than not had nothing to do with the originally stated, anti-bourgeois purpose. (To buy Mies van der Rohe’s iconic, modernist, anti-bourgeois Barcelona chair today will cost you a very bourgeois $4,328 — that is, that is the starting price for chrome; stainless steel chairs can be had for $6,609.)
Frequently, too, did modernist architecture cause precisely the social ills it sought to alleviate. The most obvious example is the public housing projects, ostensibly designed as cool, futuristic, noble spaces — majestic towers, intersticed with sloping, green lawns — that were supposed to confer upon their proletariat inhabitants a certain nobility but which did precisely the opposite. Disconnected from a vibrant urban street life, constructed in their monolithic, drab way, rejected by workers and populated by the unemployed, the projects bred isolation and antisocial activity: The only people who made use of their sloping, green lawns were the drug dealers. Wolfe recounts the story of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, into which millions of curative dollars were poured but which nonetheless proved hardily resistant to habitability. At a commission meeting in 1971, a task force asked residents for their suggestions for improving the place. A chant arose: “Blow it . . . up! Blow it . . . up!”
The misbegotten, decades-long American obsession with constructing ugly and dysfunctional buildings and high-rise public housing projects was, indeed, catalyzed by the theories of European modernists — theories that Frank Lloyd Wright called “the German tenement and slum solution” — among whose proponents were many of the Bauhaus faculty and students. This is, however, but a part of the Bauhaus story. Though founded by Gropius and later directed by Mies van der Rohe, the archetypal modernist architect, the Bauhaus was dominated not by architects but by painters.
Paul klee is one. He was on holiday in Switzerland in 1920 when he received from Gropius a direct telegram: “Dear Paul Klee: We are unanimous in asking you to come and join us as a painter at the Bauhaus — Gropius, Feininger, Engelmann, Marcks, Itten, Klemm” (the signatories included one architect, one sculptor — and four painters). Days later, meeting with Gropius in Weimar, Klee learned that he would be the master of bookbindery, to which news, Weber tells us, he “replied that, other than his love of reading, he had no reason to be involved with this particular craft. Gropius, as always, had a diplomatic sally. ‘Don’t worry, none of our formmeisters are experts in what they do. That’s what the craftsmen are there for. You would teach theory.’”
Gropius’s reference to formmeisters refers to the particular Bauhaus curriculum, which was workshop-based. An artisan, the handwerkmeister, taught students the materials and techniques while an artist, the formmeister, taught design. Michael J. Lewis, writing in the New Criterion, describes the system:
- Emphasis was placed on hands-on learning, along the lines laid out a century earlier by the German educator Friedrich Froebel, the inventor of the Kindergarten who also created its famous “gifts,” a sequence of increasingly complex blocks that acquainted children with tools for perceiving the world, and in which intellectual and tactile learning were simultaneous and inseparable. Transferred to adult students, the principle was the same, with the idea that the abstract lessons learned in one craft might be transferred readily to another, abolishing traditional divisions between artistic media.
Thus did painters, the majority of the faculty, find themselves filling odd-seeming roles. According to Lewis:
- The assignments that the Bauhaus thrust upon its painters still beggar belief — Klee taught bookbinding and Albers cabinetry; only in the Italian Renaissance, with its belief in disegno, do we find anything like this will to overthrow the guild-enforced walls that divide artistic media and segregate fine art from the applied arts.
This approach seemed to suit Klee, who was still afforded significant time in which to paint, for him a major inducement (along with the steady salary) to join the Bauhaus faculty in the first place. But he was also an enthusiastic teacher. In workshops on crafts as different as glasswork and weaving, Klee lectured on form with verve and apparent enjoyment (although he didn’t really enjoy the bookbinding course, which was ended in 1922). He returned often to the theme of natural growth, of art as an analogous type of natural birth — art as a vivacious, dynamic thing that was part of the world and adhered to its laws. “Follow the ways of natural creation,” he told his students, “the becoming, the functioning of forms. That is the best school. Then, perhaps, starting from nature, you will achieve formations of your own, and one day you may even become like nature yourself and start creating.”
His talks could be rambling and arcane, but he left many of his students deeply inspired. Weber quotes Marianne Heymann, who attended the Bauhaus and years later recalled the weaving class she took with Klee: “‘While his words fell haltingly, we students experienced an inner transformation.’ The teaching was ‘intimidating, intoxicating . . . . The absoluteness that Klee opened our eyes to had the initial effect of overwhelming and inhibiting us.’” Weber writes that “In the state of being induced by Klee’s teaching, the students experienced annihilation and resurrection.”
Annihilation and resurrection were fundamental to the Bauhaus; its faculty members were invested in destroying what they believed outdated, dishonest design and the arbitrary and apocryphal separation of art from daily life in order to replace it with something wholly new. They disagreed on the finer points of this idea but were passionately united on the broader ones. Wassily Kandinsky, a friend of Klee’s, hired to the Bauhaus staff in 1922, fit the mold. Since he had, at age thirty, abandoned his job as a law professor and pursued painting, Kandinsky had been in constant conflict with the art establishment. He had founded “the Phalanx” group in 1901 to push for new artistic methods and in 1911 had published Concerning the Spiritual in Art, a book that called for a spiritual, nonmaterial revolt in painting. As a teacher at the Bauhaus in the early 1920s, Kandinsky encouraged his pupils to become comfortable with the abstract, with lines that functioned as rhythm, not representation. Weber describes Kandinsky’s teaching philosophy: “Color and forms, liberated from their former obligation to reproduce known subject matter, should flourish, he believed, in all the Bauhaus workshops. Every metal, wood, ceramics, or glass offered the chance to evoke wonder.”
The life of the Bauhaus coincided exactly with that of the Weimar Republic, the troubled government born when, in 1919, a German national assembly convened in a local Weimar theater and declared the country a democracy. Gropius actually designed a plaque to commemorate the event. Today, it remains attached to the front of the Deutsches Nationaltheater.
Fourteen years later, both the school and the state would succumb to Adolph Hitler and the Nazis. In his book about the Bauhaus, Frank Whitford writes that the school’s brief existence “was shaped by the pressures against which the new Republic also struggled to survive” — pressures that included money troubles and the ominous rise of a new, conservative politics. On April 11, 1933, several months after Hitler was sworn in as Germany’s chancellor (a ceremony which had effectively ended the German parliamentary democracy) police raided the Bauhaus to search for “illegal propaganda materials.” They arrested 15 students and nailed shut the school’s door.
The Bauhaus did not mark the beginning of modernism, but it was the first time that so many disparate modernist approaches were institutionalized. The school’s legacies are many. The products, for one. The New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl has written about the Bauhaus student Marcel Breuer that “The late furniture sculptor and theoretician Scott Burton declared that Breuer’s club chair, designed in 1925, is at least as important a work of modern art as the ‘Demoiselles d’Avignon.’ Once you have entertained that idea, it’s hard to shake.” (Burton may be overstating the importance of a particular tubular seat — but still, hard to shake.) There is also the Bauhaus’s curriculum, especially the preliminary course, Vorkurs, in which instruction in technique is entirely abstract, without reference to other art, and which remains widely replicated in art schools today. And there is, too, the camaraderie that the Bauhaus engendered between its faculty members, despite the occasional tiff and tirade.
Among its legacies, though, are some indisputably negative ones. They emerge out of the seminal Bauhaus conviction that art — and theories about art — are inextricable from daily living. When the design of a cabinet is believed to be directly and absolutely related to the design of a society, the problems begin. Tom Wolfe identified many such problems, as have others, and there isn’t the space or need to rehash them all here. But it’s worth noting one that Weber’s own book reveals.
In its last section, Weber writes about the post-Bauhaus lives of the Bauhauslers. He knew the Alberses well and depicts them in their later years as ruthless in excommunicating and ostracizing former friends who had somehow run afoul of Bauhaus precepts — for such apostasy as, for example, designing a building with cornices. Weber seems unbothered by this tendency, but his readers may well be. He writes:
- The Alberses’ views seem harsh to many people, but they were fundamental to the credo that unified the cast of characters of this book. Gropius had created the Bauhaus with the idea that the purpose of art and design is the improvement of human life. That goal was what counted; the personal advancement of the individual creators did not. And strong opinions were a given. . . . Passion allowed no compromise.
Difficult to think of much good arising from such an uncompromising, all-encompassing view of art. That the Bauhaus grew up in the desperation of post-World War I Germany, that so many of its students and teachers barely escaped imprisonment by the imperious Nazis — that so many others did not — makes the Bauhaus absolutism all the weirder and sadder.
