The Bauhaus Group

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  When the personal slander didn’t succeed in toppling Gropius, Carl wrote a pamphlet in which he called the Bauhaus a “Cathedral of Socialism.” Knowing it would destroy the school, at least in its current form, if read by the right officials in the Weimar government, Carl published it when Gropius was away on vacation. When Gropius returned, he managed, just in time, to get hold of every possible copy of the offensive publication and keep it from circulating. But Carl Schlemmer had to leave the Bauhaus, and even Oskar, though beloved by Gropius and others, had an uncertain fate simply because he was the traitor’s brother. Lily Hildebrandt urged Gropius to hire the painter Willi Baumeister to replace Oskar, but Gropius would have none of it. Baumeister, he said, was a second-rate artist by comparison.

  It’s little wonder that, even while he was still on holiday at the Baltic Sea at the start of September, a desperate Lyonel Feininger wrote Julia, “Tell me honestly how many people there are at the Bauhaus who really know what they want, or who are strong enough to produce something on their own through patient work?”145

  During a visit she made in December 1922, Alma, who now returned to Weimar with increased frequency, was appalled by the posters around town addressing “German men and women” and summoning them to assemblies to protest the “degenerates” and “cultural Bolsheviks” who were destroying Weimar’s academy. Alma appreciated the irony of the accusation, given that the Kandinskys “had escaped from the real Bolsheviks” and that “Frau Kandinsky would literally faint at the sight of a red flag.”146 The atmosphere of the school was becoming more and more corrosive.

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  In 1923, Johannes Itten resigned. For Gropius, this was a victory and a great relief. By then he had met the artist László Moholy-Nagy, whom he brought to the school to replace his rival. That same year, Josef Albers, a little-known art teacher and printmaker from Westphalia, was the first student to complete his Bauhaus course. He became a “young master,” and along with Moholy-Nagy and the painter Georg Muche began to teach the “Vorkurs.” Gropius’s power base was getting stronger.

  During this period of internal change at the school, the Thuringian Legislative Assembly, known as the Landtag, insisted that Gropius organize a comprehensive exhibition to give evidence of what had been achieved in the four years since the Bauhaus had opened. He was against the idea, saying he needed more time if he was going to prove the success of his experiment, but the Landtag gave him no choice.

  Once resigned to the necessity of the show, Gropius gave it his all. He wrote the authorities who had jurisdiction over any revisions to the former Academy of Fine Art to propose that he remodel its vestibule as the exhibition entrance. In this large, empty space, Gropius planned to install a rotating color wheel and a prism to illustrate color mixing and refraction. With Oskar Schlemmer in charge of execution, the old-fashioned light fixtures would be replaced with spheres and cubes, made of different types of glass—mirrored, frosted, milky, and opalescent—illuminated by colored light-bulbs. Gropius envisioned these radical changes as a diplomatic gesture that would “bridge the differences between the Academy and the Bauhaus by the interests we share” and would “demonstrate Goethe’s ideas on the correlation of art and science.”147

  WALTER GROPIUS WENT ON the lecture circuit to raise money for the exhibition. On May 28, 1923, ten days after his fortieth birthday, he was in Hannover, giving his standard talk on “the unity of art, technology, and economy,” when his eyes fell upon two sisters sitting in the front row. One of them had the same sort of looks with which the young Greta Garbo would later captivate film audiences. She had Garbo’s thin lips, straight nose, large bright eyes, flawless skin, and piercing gaze. Gropius was bowled over; he felt he was giving his lecture to her alone, especially since, from the moment he began speaking, she stared at him with a visible attraction and responded as if his every word were changing her life.

  A nephew of Gropius who lived in Hannover was able to tell him that the two sisters in the front row had the last name Frank; one was Ilse and the other Hertha. Gropius, however, had no way of identifying which was the one who had made him furious with himself for not having arranged to meet her after his lecture; he could not stop imagining how they would have spent the evening. His solution was to write a letter to both Frank sisters. He proposed a rendezvous when he passed through Hannover on his way home from Cologne a week later.

  They agreed, and Gropius learned that the sister who had caught his eye was named Ilse. Twenty-six years old, she was the oldest of three girls whose parents had died years earlier. She worked in an avant-garde bookshop and was living with a man, both choices indicative of her fierce independence and strong willpower. Her lover was her cousin Hermann, whom she planned to marry that summer.

  As usual, what someone else would have considered to be an insurmountable obstacle struck Gropius merely as a challenge. By June, Ilse Frank had become one more woman who succumbed to his charm. She wrote saying she knew how busy he was with the Bauhaus exhibition; regardless, she was desperate to be with him where he lived, and wanted him to know she would have four days off from the bookshop toward the end of the following week. He telegraphed back that she should spend all of them with him in Weimar.

  FOLLOWING THOSE FOUR DAYS, Frank and Gropius began to organize further encounters. They also discussed marriage. She, however, had neither told Hermann about her lover nor canceled her wedding. The elaborate celebration planned for her aunt’s house in Munich was only a few days away.

  Gropius wrote her, “I am not a man who can wait! I storm through life and whoever cannot keep pace will remain by the wayside. I want to create with my spirit and with my body; yes—also with my body; and life is short and needs to be grasped.” They had, he explained to Frank, “a holy bond” as a result of their “blessed nights” together. She needed to realize just how “hard and unrelenting” he was. His final entreaty was the same advice he gave students who were considering joining the Bauhaus: “Make a clean break, liberate yourself …I believe in you!”148

  Ilse followed his bidding. She advised Hermann, and put a halt to the fast-approaching marriage festivities. At the same time, she shortened her name. By dropping the “l” and becoming Ise, which had a more modern, streamlined ring, the future Mrs. Gropius took on a new persona.

  Walter and Ise Gropius shortly after their marriage on October 16, 1923. Following many tumultuous love affairs, the Bauhaus director briefly thought he had found stability

  Gropius was reinvigorated. He wrote Ise, “My great work is now saved by you; you gave wings to my feet.”149 With that energy, he would make the Bauhaus exhibition, and the week of events that coincided with its opening, one of the most remarkable cultural events of the 1920s.

  WALTER GROPIUS gave the Bauhaus exhibition the central theme of “Art and Technics, a New Unity.”

  The young Herbert Bayer designed the boldly abstract announcement card that was the summons to the show. It utilized as few words as possible and was set in a new straightforward sans serif typeface. Alongside the text was a complete human profile—chin, mouth, nose, and forehead—made up of nothing more than three vertical rectangles and a single horizontal dash in a perfectly proportioned steplike arrangement. A square made the eye. Never before had a person’s visage been evoked in such engineer-perfect shorthand. The announcement assured that even in advance of the actual show one anticipated something unprecedented. It declared the joy of inventiveness, as did the postcards Bayer—as well as Klee, Kandinsky, Feininger, and other artists, each in his own vibrant style—made with the basic information and dates (see color plates 3 and 13). The excitement they generated was warranted. When the show opened on August 15, the former Weimar academy had been completely transformed.

  Gropius had managed to find sufficient funding under nearly impossible conditions. Besides lecturing all over Germany, he had obtained support from family, friends, clients, and any business-people who had a few marks to spare. Money was so tight that the Bauhaus h
ad had to let go of its janitors, but the masters’ wives scrubbed the floors, and everything was sparkling clean.

  Entrance to the 1923 Bauhaus Exhibition. Herbert Bayer’s graphics set the tone for the startling modernism of the show awaiting the public inside.

  Visitors were greeted by powerful graphics over the entrance door. Theword “Ausstellung” (“Exhibition”) was written vertically in bold, squared-off lettering, white on a solid black vertical rectangle, with a brilliant white band adjacent to it: all designed by Bayer. This was the beginning of his role as one of the most influential graphic artists of the twentieth century. In America, after World War II, Bayer would be hired by Walter Paepecke, who founded the Aspen Skiing Company and Aspen Institute in Colorado. There the Bauhaus-trained artist would make posters promoting winter sports and become known all over the world. He also created many other well-known graphics and logos.

  He would keep silent, however, about his work for the Nazi Party. In 1936, Bayer designed a brochure that extolled the glories of life in the Third Reich and of Hitler’s impact, and that accompanied an exhibition for tourists visiting the Berlin Olympics. The brochure was conceived to advertise Hitler’s achievements at a time when skepticism about the Third Reich was growing following Germany’s invasion of the demilitarized Rhineland. Bayer’s brochure included the Heinkel airplane factory, designed by Gropius’s former associate Herbert Rimpl; the building combined Bauhaus modernism with references to traditional architecture in the cottagelike workers’ houses. Throughout the brochure, Bayer linked the old and the new to advertise Germany as a holiday destination. Later in life, when asked about it, Bayer would discuss only its use of duotone technique and other formal elements. Nevertheless, his involvement in Nazi propaganda would color many people’s vision of the Bauhaus.

  AFTER BEING WELCOMED by Bayer’s signage, the public entered a vestibule filled with different colors of light and saw the extraordinary achievements of the four years since the school had opened its doors. The new art triumphed on every surface and in every open space. There wasn’t a single alcove, staircase, or classroom that was not put to use to show murals, reliefs, and design work. Each workshop presented the products that had been developed there, and the classrooms were used to display theoretical studies and materials from the preliminary course.

  The nearby State Museum of Weimar was turned over to an exhibition of Bauhaus painting and sculpture; it included many works that would eventually be ranked as masterpieces of modernism but that were at the time simply “faculty work.” And a model house, the “Haus am Horn,” had been constructed in the neighborhood where many faculty members lived. It had been built as an exemplar of Bauhaus style and was furnished entirely with products of the school’s workshops.

  The work on view throughout the main building and in the museum show extolled straight lines, right angles, and perfect circles, clean and pure, in a profusion never seen before. The geometric shapes glistened in chrome in lamps and tea balls and serving vessels, and pulsed in vibrant yellows and reds and blues in paintings so rhythmic as to seem audible. Oils and watercolors by Paul Klee presented his unique visions of birds and stars and other natural forms in abundance. Wassily Kandinsky’s canvases combined intellectual rigor and spiritual mystery. The art was immensely varied, yet it was linked by its consuming energy, its look of faith, and its pioneering use of abstract form.

  The display of the weaving workshop included some hangings that were the textile equivalent of oil paintings. These singular objects, mounted on the wall, serving no practical purpose, were revolutionary in their brazen simplicity. In addition, there were swatches of materials to be fabricated industrially and used as draperies, upholstery, and carpeting. Remarkable for their absence of floral or botanical subject matter, the new textiles celebrated raw materials. Twine, silk, hemp, and even metallic thread were interlaced in interesting ways, serving as the source of aesthetic delight as well as practical effectiveness.

  The work on the wall that stood out above all the others was an austere, minimalist composition by the woman I came to know as Anni Albers. Annelise Fleischmann, as she was at the time, was a rich young woman—her mother’s family, the Ullsteins, were Europe’s most prominent publishing family—who had arrived from Berlin the previous year. This quiet twenty-three-year-old, as socially timid as she was bold in her art, was not known to many people. She had not even wanted to join the weaving workshop and initially had hoped for carpentry or wall painting, thinking textiles to be “too sissy,” the equivalent of needlepoint. But weaving was where most, although not all, women went, and Fleischmann suffered from a physical disability that, while she never acknowledged or discussed it, made certain Bauhaus tasks impossible for her. Now, even if working in thread was not her first choice, she had done something unprecedented. A few gray, black, and white rectangular blocks and bands made a bold new sort of visual art. Fleischmann’s piece encouraged meditation; its gravity mixed with an evident lightness of touch gave it an intoxicating power associated more with music than with the visual arts. While most of the products of the weaving workshop were suitable for commercial production, advancing Gropius’s goal of design for industry, this one-off suggested that craft and art could be the same thing. (See color plate 24.)

  In the glass workshop, Josef Albers—the artist Fleischmann would ultimately marry—also revealed new possibilities for right angles and solid blocks of color. A young man from a very different background—she was Jewish; he was Catholic, the son of a carpenter/electrician/plumber/jack-of-all-trades in the smoky industrial Ruhr Valley—Albers, who was thirty-two when he arrived at the Bauhaus in 1920, and who until then had been a schoolteacher in his hometown, was so penniless that, in order to get funding to attend the Bauhaus, he had had to promise the regional teaching authorities back in Westphalia that he would return after his time in Weimar so that they could reap the direct benefits of what they had sponsored. At first, because Albers lacked sufficient funds for art supplies, he had spent a lot of time at the Weimar city dump hacking up bottle fragments and other detritus with a pickax to use in his glass assemblages. These vibrant and playful objects that were on view in the 1923 show gave spiritual power to junk; so did a carefully conceived, leaded stained-glass window in which checkerboard patterns counterbalanced large squares, pink rectangles sparkled with small white squares inside them, suggesting openings, and lattice patterns played against broad expanses of gray, purple, and deep red. In keeping with the tenets of the Bauhaus, Albers’s work could be used in buildings—he had already done some large windows for Gropius’s Sommerfeld House—but, like Fleischmann’s weaving, it triumphed as pure art, as independent of practical purpose as a Renaissance Madonna.

  There was also an exhibition of recent architecture being done all over the world. This included seven illustrations by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier showing his proposed city for three million inhabitants. This innovative if shocking scheme, intended for Paris, represented a new form of urbanism that required razing entire neighborhoods in order to build skyscrapers that would be spaced around large open areas to allow access to the sky and would be linked by an efficient transportation system.

  Like the displays in the school, the show of paintings at the Weimar Museum was evidence of a revolution. The work unabashedly celebrated beauty in places where it had not previously been recognized. Lyonel Feininger’s cityscapes imbued tough urban forms—train viaducts, narrow streets, the spaces between anonymous warehouse buildings—with charm and lightness, refracting their shapes as if through a prism. Kandinsky’s abstractions were orchestrated of pure circular forms orbiting around one another, straight lines flying off, and waves and zigzags moving to and fro, all in an intentional cacophony of colors; these unusual canvases exploded with energy: they were as powerful as atomic fusion and at the same time delicate and graceful. Klee’s images of opera singers, underwater gardens, and purely imaginary architectural mélanges were somewhere between the known world an
d a dreamlike fantasy, deft and professional in execution while childlike in spirit. László Moholy-Nagy’s precise paintings of overlapping geometric forms and his sculptures of shimmering nickel, steel, chrome, and copper all appeared to move at breakneck speed. Oskar Schlemmer’s rendering of human forms, both painted and sculpted, reduced the body to a combination of abstract shapes, making it seem very much of the future while simultaneously imbuing it with the nobility and panache of the knights of ancient legends.

  Not everything was of equal caliber, however. Even though Johannes Itten had recently left the Bauhaus, his work was a major element in this show; his paintings of awkwardly formed, robotic, puffed-up children, with the artist’s name painted in large letters on a scrolling ribbon overhead (contradicting the Bauhaus ideal of artistic anonymity), were clumsy as well as cloying. Gerhardt Marcks’s sculptures of mothers and babies, though sweet, lacked the artistic merit that would have been needed to make their sentimentality effective. Georg Muche’s interior scenes were competent exercises in a late cubist style, but there was nothing exceptional about them; likewise, Lothar Schreyer’s figures seemed to be the art of a follower rather than of a truly original talent. The Bauhaus tried to present itself as a community, but there was no way of getting around the reality that it had greater and lesser lights.