The Bauhaus Group

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  Anni’s mother had given her a butter curler. In the luxurious Berlin household in which Anni had grown up, family members never entered the kitchen, which was strictly reserved for staff, but when dinner was laid out on the heavy, carved Biedermeier table in the ornament-laden dining room, butter balls were part of the landscape, and Anni knew how they were made. Preparing for dinner that evening in Dessau, she carefully used the clever metal implement to scrape off paper-thin sheets of butter and form them into graceful, delicate forms resembling flower blossoms. It was the sort of process and manipulation of materials she prized, and which she often discussed in explaining her textile and printmaking work. Like weaving, the making of butter balls required the careful stretching and pulling of a simple substance with the correct tool, to achieve a transformation. The resemblance of the result to a flower was at odds with her usual concept of nonrepresentational design, but it amused her in this rare instance.

  Mies and his imperious female companion arrived. They had not even removed their coats or uttered a word of greeting before Reich, glancing at the table, exclaimed, “Butter balls! Here at the Bauhaus! At the Bauhaus I should think you’d just have a good solid block of butter!”

  Josef and Anni Albers with Wassily Kandinsky on the grounds of the Dessau masters’ houses, ca. 1928. After the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, the masters and their wives were thrilled to live in the new houses Walter Gropius had designed for them. Josef Albers and Wassily Kandinsky often took walks in the woods together.

  It was a sting Anni Albers remembered word for word half a century later. But the significance of Lilly Reich’s remark was not just its nastiness. The incident involving the form of butter on the dining room table exemplified the way that every detail of how we live, every aesthetic choice, affects the quality of daily human experience. That idea, as well as the significance of individual personalities, was, I was beginning to see, the crux of the Bauhaus.

  Walter Gropius

  Alma Mahler, 1909

  Walter Gropius, in the uniform of a cavalry officer, during World War I

  The loveliest girl in Vienna

  Was Alma, the smartest as well

  Once you picked her up on your antenna

  You’d never be free of her spell

  Her lovers were many and varied

  From the day she began her beguine

  There were three famous ones whom she married

  And God knows how many between

  The first one she married was

  Mahler Whose buddies all knew him as Gustav

  And each time he saw her he’d holler

  “Ach, that is the fräulein I moost hav”

  Their marriage, however, was murder

  He’d scream to the heavens above

  “I’m writing ‘Das Lied von der Erde’

  And she only wants to make love!”

  While married to Gus, she met

  Gropius And soon she was swinging with

  Walter Gus died, and her teardrops were copious

  She cried all the way to the altar

  But he would work late at the Bauhaus

  And only come home now and then

  She said, “What am I running, a chow house

  It’s time to change partners again”

  While married to Walt she’d met Werfel

  And he too was caught in her net

  He married her, but he was careful

  ’Cause Alma was no Bernadette

  And that is the story of Alma

  Who knew how to receive and to give

  The body that reached her embalma

  Was one that had known how to live

  —TOM LEHRER, “ALMA,” 1965

  1

  When thirty-six-year-old Walter Gropius conceived the Bauhaus, it was to provide the larger world with sensible designs in which form followed function, and ornament and fluff were eradicated. His private life was topsy-turvy, his personal relationships stormy. He intended to create a visual environment as simple and balanced as his emotional situation was tumultuous.

  Gropius preached anonymity and a sense of service as the fundaments of his pioneering art school. In this community of workshops, students and masters would work hand in hand, as had the humble stonemasons and woodcarvers who built the Gothic cathedrals. Modesty and dedication to a shared purpose were to rule. Human conduct was to be as straightforward as the tubular steel and tough textile fibers that would now be utilized openly—exposed and celebrated, rather than concealed or adorned with a deceptiveness demanded by previous generations. Gropius’s personal existence might be an imbroglio, but the setting and props of the society he envisioned would be built on precepts of grace and honesty.

  Gropius’s complex life was set in chic spas and glamorous metropolises far removed from the quiet and historic city of Weimar, where he was starting the Bauhaus. Gropius had long been a bon vivant and a womanizer, but never before had his cavorting caused him such trouble. Now his marriage to one of the most demanding femmes fatales of the twentieth century had him in turmoil. While promulgating the alliance of art and industry at the Bauhaus, the patrician architect was also dealing with the decline of his marriage to Alma Mahler. Mahler was as duplicitous as she was beguiling; Gropius had recently discovered that he was not, as he had previously believed, the father of his wife’s newborn son.

  The young artists for whom the first Bauhaus brochure, with Gropius’s brief manifesto on the virtues and potentials of their labors, had been a summons to this radically different art school—and who now sat riveted as he confidently charted the future and mapped that new relationship between art and industry—had no idea that their smiling leader, declaring his mission with such assuredness, was distraught. But when the former Adolf Georg Walter Gropius—name trimming was a Bauhaus norm—arrived in Weimar in 1919, he was in the midst of the agonizing on-again, off again phase that often precedes divorce.

  Had the students known, they might have recognized that the way he handled his situation demonstrated the strength he would need to keep the Bauhaus going. One of the reasons he could start a new and extraordinary school in a repressive milieu and then guide it to a position of lasting worldwide influence in spite of constant, merciless opposition, both from outside and from within, is that he was a master juggler who could manage complex, tortuous developments with unwavering mettle and calm. Anyone who could cope with Alma could run the Bauhaus. And she was just one of many challenges this steely, tenacious man had already faced squarely and survived.

  BORN TO AN AFFLUENT Berlin family on May 18, 1883, “Walty” was christened in a Gothic-style church because his father deified the famed nineteenth-century neoclassical architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who was buried in the church cemetery. Walter Gropius, Sr., then thirty-three years old, was a mid-rank building official for the government; he dreamed that his newborn son would become an architect of Schinkel’s skill and renown.

  In earlier generations, the family had prospered in the field of silk weaving. Our Gropius’s great-grandfather, whose business success enabled him to co-own a theater for the pleasure of it, had commissioned Schinkel to make its proscenium and stage curtains. In the next generation, Gropius’s great-uncle was the successful architect Martin Gropius, internationally recognized for his work in Schinkel’s style. Walter’s father was an architect in the same vein, but minus the drive or consequent success; his son deemed him “withdrawn and timid … without sufficient self-reliance, so therefore he never penetrated to the first rank.”1 Walter Senior’s failures as a designer of buildings had, by the time his namesake was born, reduced him to the rank of a minor municipal employee.

  Walter Junior would compensate in spades for his father’s professional setbacks, and more so for his father’s bourgeois lifestyle. Walter Senior lived unadventurously in a long-term marriage to the daughter of a district councilor who descended from French Huguenots; the couple kept to a straight and narrow path from which they appear never to have st
rayed. Their son would help change the appearance of buildings worldwide and be a Don Juan.

  In his childhood, however, Walty was timid. He got in trouble at school for speaking too little and answering questions too slowly. Shy to the point of being unsociable, he first gave a hint of his colorful future when, wearing a topcoat indoors, he passed his gymnasium examinations by reciting his own translation of Sappho’s “Ode to Aphrodite,” garnering great praise from his professors. His father toasted him with champagne at a celebration dinner at Kempinski’s, Berlin’s most fashionable restaurant.

  Walty’s family members included wealthy landowners, on whose vast estates—one of eleven thousand acres—he spent idyllic summer holidays. But with all of his opportunities for pleasure, he was a dour and solitary adolescent. It is as if he were charging his batteries for the flair with which he would live as a man.

  EVEN AS HE KEPT to himself, Walter Gropius, Jr., acceded to his father’s goal and strategy for his future. To become an architect, the first step was Technical School in Munich, following which he became an apprentice for a large reputable firm. Then, at twenty-one, Gropius enlisted in the Fifteenth Hussar Regiment.

  It was a digression from architecture, but it was also a deliberate step up in the German class system, which would have bearing on his architectural career. Gropius’s relatives had money; they were not, however, aristocrats. A bourgeois surrounded by other young men whose titles and “von”s made him an outsider, he befriended another soldier who had a sense of not belonging: a Jewish doctor with the surname Lehman. A letter he wrote to his mother showed both an open-mindedness rare for his milieu and inherent prejudice. Gropius described Lehman as “a very nice person. Inexperienced, naïve, and clumsy, he is not at all ostentatious or profligate. I have not discovered any Jewish trait in him. He is the best-educated man in the regiment.”2 Gropius, however, was mainly determined to be at home with the upper echelon.

  The reclusive adolescent began to transform himself into a worldly gentleman. He became an expert horseman, jumping more than a meter from a standstill; his commanding general applauded him. He was also developing an eye for the ladies, even if he did not yet act on it. On a Christmas furlough in Hamburg, close to where he was billeted, he attended a musical evening about which he wrote his father, “Very beautiful girls, but all cold Hanseatic blood.”3 As his connoisseurship of the opposite sex grew, he became eager to make a good impression and chalked up considerable expenses with the tailor and the shoemaker. The bills, along with his casino costs and charges at the saddler’s, sparked tension with his parents. The Gropiuses came from comfortable families, but their own means were limited, and they considered their son a spendthrift.

  Fortunately, the military had instilled its rigor as well as a fondness for pleasure, and when Gropius returned to Berlin to attend the Konigliche Technische Hochschule, he assumed an intense course load that required up to twelve hours a day in class. Rich relatives had him design buildings on their estates, and some family friends commissioned a house. His future seemed assured. And when he wasn’t working, he was learning how to hunt, drink, and smoke, under the tutelage of a prosperous uncle.

  Then Gropius inherited a windfall of money from a great-aunt. Once his financial situation changed, so did everything else in his life. Although he had nearly finished his program at the Hochschule, he dropped out without bothering to take the final examination. Gropius was beginning to evince the traits that would drive him, a decade later, to start up the radical art school in Weimar: a brave disregard for traditional education and its metrics, and an intrepidity that facilitated and required risks. Just when his contemporaries were settling down, Gropius took off for a year in Spain to “push forward from the beaten path into unknown regions, in order to know myself better.”4 With a male traveling companion of his own age, he swooned to Gregorian chants sung by the monks in a monastery near Burgos, feasted his eyes on Coca Castle—which, with its many pinnacles and towers, seemed like something from a fairy tale—devoured the wonders of Avila with its spectacular Roman ruins and eleventh-century cathedral, and furthered his studies of the opposite sex.

  Walter Gropius, 1905, as a student at the Munich Technical School. He was determined to outdo his father in the same field.

  The women in Avila were in a league of their own, remarkable especially for their bold features, which to him overpowered what he now considered the inherent weakness of those “beautiful girls” he had previously admired in the north. But other categories of Spanish women interested him as well. Much as he liked the blond and blue-eyed Basques, he also admired those with jet-black hair, which contrasted so dramatically with their pale skin and deep crimson lips. His attraction to more than one type of woman at a time would be a central element of his life as the director of the Bauhaus.

  WHILE HE WAS BECOMING increasingly aware of females his own age, Gropius was cementing his relationship to his mother. Manon Gropius was a woman of sharp opinions, and she doted on her son, for whom she had no end of ambition. She was eager to know what was happening in his life, and he let her in on a surprising amount. He wrote Manon that in Madrid he had donned his best clothes just because they made him feel worldly while he took evening strolls to admire the exquisite ladies. One night he met two Cuban women whom he decided were the most alluring females in all of Madrid; he found them “so ravishingly beautiful in figure and face that my breath stood still.” One of them “was also intelligent and amiable, a rare combination.” Although the twenty-four-year-old assured his mother that his heart was “not yet broken in two—so don’t worry,” it would be soon enough.5 He would also break a few hearts himself, while navigating treacherous seas with Manon, whose reactions to his choices in women as well as to his architecture would always matter greatly to him.

  Entrance of the Fagus factory, designed by Gropius and Adolf Meyer in 1911. This remarkable building helped establish a new vocabulary of architectural forms and materials.

  In Madrid, Gropius bought art he thought he could sell at a profit back in Germany, and he also enlarged his circle of influential acquaintances. Among them was Karl Ernst Osthaus, founder of the Folkwang Museum in Hagen, an avatar of modernism. Osthaus had the idea that Gropius should return to Berlin and work for the architect Peter Behrens. He wrote Behrens a letter recommending the young man; that turn of events changed Gropius’s life.

  In his AEG Turbine Factory (1908–9), Behrens introduced an unprecedented use of steel and glass into architecture. Young Gropius worked on the project and on Behrens’s boldly modern factories for the Krupp empire in Germany’s Ruhr region. He became excited by the possibilities of this new building style for industry, imagining its being used not just for manufacturing plants but also for prefabricated mass housing. Gropius suffered all of the usual problems endemic to apprenticeship—Behrens was a notorious bully—but by the time he left Behrens’s practice to start out on his own in 1910, he had a new aesthetic outlook. Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier would also apprentice in Behrens’s office and have similar experiences: both the confrontation with authority and the transformative exposure to a fresh concept of architecture.

  In his first year on his own, Gropius, with fellow architect Adolf Mayer, designed a factory for the Fagus shoe-last company. Behrens’s style was clearly evident, but so, for the first time, was Gropius’s magical touch. The Fagus factory is a crisp and handsome block that ennobles the idea of sheer simplicity. It used large rectangular panes of glass divided by trim steel mullions; the corners look as if a completely transparent wrapping has been stretched taut at right angles around an invisible support.

  The building seems to be made of air and light as well as of steel and concrete and glass. In the glazed corner staircase, the passage of daylight through the ample windows onto the stairs is palpable, and the straightforward, efficient stairs sing out in their vigorous up-down movement. The bold entrance block is a tour de force. Comprising seven tough bands of bricks stacked one on top of a
nother, their mass punctuated only by a modest overhang and a large circular clock that epitomize elegant understatement, the entryway blends classical simplicity with unprecedented forthrightness.

  Twenty-seven-year-old Walter Gropius was developing ideas on how good design and the latest technology could benefit society at large. To spell out his program and try to put it into effect, in April 1910 he wrote a memorandum of twenty-eight typewritten pages, which he gave to a prominent Berlin industrialist, Emil Rathenau. The dream Gropius codified for Rathenau was a construction company that “sees as its aim the industrialization of the building of houses, in order to provide the indisputable benefits of industrial production methods, best materials and workmanship, and low cost.” It would be an uphill battle to offer as much for the masses, since, he explained, “instead of good proportions and practical simplicity, pomposity and false romanticism have become the trend of our time.”6 Gropius decried as “unbearable” all that was “ostentatious” and “purely superficial,” favoring instead “good material, solid workmanship, distinction, and simplicity.” He imagined using uniform plans and components in a range of settings to assure large groups of people the chance to live in houses with “clear and open spatial arrangements,” where construction would be based on “the selection and application of proven materials and reliable techniques,” achieving “excellence, to be guaranteed for many years.”7 Salubrious living conditions, he insisted, should be available for people at every level of society.

  2

  While developing his idealistic agenda for re-forming the world around him, the handsome twenty-seven-year-old had moved from the solitary pleasures of horsemanship and gambling in his hussar’s uniform to doing more than simply observe women. On June 4, 1910, at a sanatorium in the Tyrol, he encountered Alma Mahler for the first time. This fetching woman with a pouf of jet-black hair had a way of looking at him that was charged with electricity; Gropius had never before experienced anything like it.