THE UNUSUAL OBJECTS MADE as studies for the Vorkurs resemble the products that would be commonplace in children’s art classes seventy years later. But in the early 1920s, those who did not grasp their revolutionary intention considered them outrageous. There were towers of tin cans receding in size, with metal bands and wires wrapped around them, and mixtures of straw, wood shavings, and brush. There were also patchwork collages of fabrics, wallpaper samples with buttons on them, and drawings that showed the structure of wood or demonstrated color mixing. These myriad objects were all evidence of a desire to look at the essence of things, to understand materials and optics, and to explore the nature of construction.
The carpentry workshop featured severely geometric children’s toys cut out of wood and lacquered in bright colors. There was also a baby’s cradle that prompted some of the good people of Weimar to accuse the Bauhaus of promoting child abuse. Made with two tubular steel wheel shapes joined at the bottom by a rod of the same material to create the base for two wooden planks, opening at angles and joined as if at the point of a triangle to form the baby’s bed, this more than any other object would attract the ire of the Bauhaus’s opponents, who did not make the claim of cruelty in jest. But most of the furniture, however unusual, inspired less controversy. Marcel Breuer and Eric Dieckmann had pared down the structure of beds, tables, and chairs so that they were as simple and honest as possible, without an iota of decoration. The same Josef Albers whose pieces were in the glass workshop had made a conference table and shelves in which smooth planks of contrasting woods were arranged rhythmically, imbuing the efficient and practical with an unprecedented jazziness.
The pottery workshop showed cocoa pots and canisters and coffee sets intended for mass production. Of timeless simplicity, these vessels offered proof that Bauhaus modernism had a leanness that, even in its novel expression, was connected directly to human need in a way that was universal and dated back to the birth of civilization.
The glistening, fantastically simple objects in the metal workshop were especially eye-catching. Dynamic lamps, ashtrays, and pitchers had been made by the innovative Marianne Brandt, one of the few women who had found a venue other than weaving. A desk lamp designed by K. Jucker and W. Wagenfeld featured a spherical glass base, a tubular glass shaft, a half globe of milk glass as its shade, and wiring contained in a silver tube inside the glass one. It represented a courageous new design approach, and although no one could have anticipated it, it would in time become a modern classic. From the versatile Josef Albers came fruit bowls made from nothing more than three wooden balls as the feet, a sphere of clear glass as the base, and a metal rim to keep the fruit in place. It was a rare use of frankly industrial forms for a domestic container.
The wall painting at the Bauhaus was another remarkable element of that 1923 show. From floor to ceiling there were spheres and rippling waves and bold sequences of smokestack-like columns. This decoration incorporated the utilitarian radiators as if they were design elements rather than something to be avoided. That acknowledgment of what a previous generation would have covered up embodied the spirit of the Bauhaus: honesty about what is needed in life, and the promulgation of the idea that anything can be made part of a total visual symphony. The hiding of reality and concealment of the functional that for centuries had been common practice in design for the middle and upper classes was toppled. And the need for gratuitous decoration referring to the natural world was made irrelevant by the rich possibilities of pure abstraction.
THE HAUS AM HORN was a square within a square. The large central square was the living room; almost one and a half times as high as the rest of the structure, it let light in through clerestory windows. The lower structure that enveloped it contained a well-equipped kitchen, a dining room, separate master bedrooms for the husband and wife, a room for the children, bathrooms, and storage spaces. The details put to the test the idea of incorporating into everyday living a lot of the breakthrough concepts on view in the Bauhaus exhibition. The cabinets, beds, desks, and chairs were all constructed without adornment. There was no window trim, and the radiators were exposed, as were the drainpipes. The message was one of total honesty, although to many viewers it also conveyed unforgiving coldness.
The Haus am Horn was designed by Georg Muche, but since Muche was a painter, not an architect, Gropius, as well as Adolf Meyer, had worked on many of the technical details. Gropius, as usual, was the one who articulated the objectives of the project for the general public. He declared that the Haus am Horn would provide “the greatest comfort with the greatest economy by the application of the best craftsmanship and the best distribution of space in form, size, and articulation.”150
Haus am Horn, Weimar, 1923. Inside and out, this unusual dwelling embodied a new aesthetic.
Gropius had also procured the financing—from Adolf Sommerfeld, the Berlin lumber merchant for whom he had built a very different sort of house a few years earlier. Sommerfeld’s own house was sheathed in logs. While aspects of it bore the imprint of modernism, it fit in with the grand country-house style one expected for a rich man’s private residence. The wealthy merchant would never have lived in anything like the Haus am Horn, which was made of steel and concrete. But he was the sort of patron willing to pay for work that had no connection to his personal taste.
The reigning force at Haus am Horn was practicality. Gropius declared, “In each room, function is important. … Each room has its definite character which suits its purpose.”151 The furniture and cabinetry, much of it made by Marcel Breuer, who was still a student, used unadorned planks and slabs of lemonwood and walnut, everything pared down and minimal, so that even the knobs were utterly plain and round, matched to the cabinets and drawers they were used to open. What might otherwise have seemed stark or antiseptic was animated by a rhythmic juxtaposition of forms and playfulness in the use of light and dark woods. Light fixtures designed by Moholy-Nagy and made in the metal workshop further energized the rooms. Even if the house looked like a barrack from the outside, the inside had an esprit and cheerfulness that made clear that Bauhaus design enhanced pleasure in everyday living.
Gropius’s uphill battle to garner public approval for the school was beginning to pay off; the Landtag had done well to insist on the exhibition. Dr. Edwin Redslob, the national art director of Germany, made a public statement declaring that the Haus am Horn would have “far-reaching cultural and economic consequences.” Redslob was the rare government official who had the foresight to see the worth of the Bauhaus at a time when so many of his colleagues perceived it as a threat. His endorsement was a lifeline. It helped the school retain its governmental support and a degree of financial security. It mattered greatly that this national figure commended this new domestic design, “which organically unites several small rooms around a large one,” as “bringing about a complete change in form as well as in manner of living. … The plight in which we find ourselves as a nation necessitates our being the first of all nations to solve the new problem of building. These plans clearly go far toward blazing a new trail.”152
THE EXHIBITION THAT GROPIUS had hoped to postpone managed, at least for a brief period, to enhance the luster of the Bauhaus nationally and even internationally. This was in part because of Bauhaus Week, a program of activities he organized that also began on August 15. Events included lectures by Gropius on the unity of art and industry, by Kandinsky on synthetic art, and by the Dutch architect J. J. P. Oud on recent advances in building design in Holland. Hindemith and Stravinsky both appeared in Weimar for performances of their work. That one lively week in summertime was euphoric from start to finish. There was a festival at which a fantastic array of paper lanterns were strung overhead, and a fireworks performance where the vibrant explosions were yet another form of impeccably crafted abstraction. A light show made incorporeal glows the essence of art. The Bauhaus jazz band performed its intensely animated music at a dance, and Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet, which he had developed mor
e than a decade earlier, was given a stellar production. Those who saw it at the Bauhaus would never forget its mix of playfulness and profundity or its simultaneous activation of all the senses.
From the moment the ballet began, the extraordinary figures against brilliant abstract backdrops appeared to be working their way toward a dramatic climax. Wordless gestures, musical progression, and changes in scenery conveyed a feeling of expectation. Two males and one female danced twelve scenes in eighteen different costumes made of rigid, vibrantly colored papier-mâché. Sometimes encased in a metallic coating, the costumes gave the impression that the human body was composed of symmetrical geometric forms. The male outfits included one made of pointed ovoids like teardrops, another of puffy striped trousers formed like those of the Michelin tire man. The woman changed from a skirt like stacked soccer balls to one like an open Chinese parasol to a tutu that resembled a reversed champagne coupe. In the first act, these unusually shaped humanoids flounced around gaily in a burlesque against a lemon-yellow set. In act two, they became more deliberately organized, enacting a festive ritual in a setting that was entirely pink. Finally, in the third act, they performed on an all-black stage, becoming dreamlike characters of the night. The fantastic trio had taken the enraptured audience from a lively bounce to a consuming ambiguity and mysteriousness.
WHAT GROPIUS HAD MANAGED to achieve in just four years in Weimar becomes apparent in the 1936 autobiography of Igor Stravinsky. Rather than write a full account of his life to date, the forty-three-year-old composer deliberately recalled the few selected events that he considered the most significant of all his experiences. Stravinsky writes that he had been invited to Weimar in August 1923 as part of the program that accompanied the “very fine exhibition” there.153 His Histoire du Soldat was to be performed during Bauhaus Week; it had been previously presented on only one other occasion, in Frankfurt, at a concert of modern music organized a few months earlier by Paul Hindemith.
The journey Stravinsky and his future wife, Vera, endured to get to Weimar was harrowing—typical of what one could expect in Germany in those years. Although Stravinsky was married to his cousin, Katerina Nossenko, whom he had known ever since they were young children, he had recently met Vera de Bosset, who was married to the painter and stage designer Serge Sudeikin, and while Stravinsky makes no mention of Vera’s presence on the trip (he remained married to Katerina until her death in 1939, only marrying Vera the following year), we know she was with him because of a reference to the journey to Weimar in her diary. On this first major outing together, the illicit couple started out from Paris on August 15 for Stravinsky’s performance on August 19. He could only get train tickets to Griesheim, a village near Frankfurt that was on the demarcation line of the part of the Rhineland then controlled by the French, who had reoccupied the Ruhr and the Rhineland the previous January. The rail station in the village was manned by African soldiers, who faced Stravinsky with fixed bayonets. They told him that it was too late at night for him and Vera to reach Frankfurt itself, or even to get a phone call through, and that they would have to stay in the crowded waiting room.
Stravinsky, who was used to first-class hotels, immediately set out to look for any sort of hostelry where they would at least have a bed. The soldiers stopped him with the warning that he might be mistaken “for a vagrant” and shot. The composer had no choice but to stay squeezed between other people on a bench, “counting the hours till dawn.”154 At 7 a.m., a child guided him and Vera through soaking rain to the tram, which took them to Frankfurt’s central station so they could continue to Weimar.
The trip was worth the effort. The way the members of the Bauhaus appreciated Soldat was one of the joys of the composer’s life. Here were people for whom the marvelous energy and playfulness of that great work, its feeling of insouciance mixed with gravitas, corresponded completely with their own interests. Not only that, but Stravinsky met Ferruccio Busoni, a composer he greatly admired but who, Stravinsky had been told, was “an irreconcilable opponent of my music.”155 Stravinsky considered Busoni “a very great musician” and was therefore delighted when he and Vera sat with Busoni and his wife, Gerda, at the performance of Soldat at the National Theater in Weimar—Gropius had organized the most important concerts there—and observed Busoni enjoying Soldat. Both Busonis, Stravinsky would tell Ernest Ansermet, “wept hot tears …so moved were they by the performance.”156
After the performance, Busoni, in spite of his fundamental opposition to work like Stravinsky’s, commented, “One had become a child again. One forgot music and literature, one was simply moved. There’s something which achieved its aim. But let us take care not to imitate it!”157 Because Stravinsky had never before met Busoni, and would never do so again—the Italian composer died the following year—that experience became fixed in Stravinsky’s memory as a key element of his visit to the Bauhaus.
The following night, the Stravinskys had dinner and spent the evening with Wassily and Nina Kandinsky, and with Hermann Scherchen, who had conducted Soldat. Sixteen years later, Scherchen’s role in that performance would be held against him by the Nazis, but in 1923 the atmosphere was euphoric.
NOT EVERYONE APPROVED of the Bauhaus exhibition, the Haus am Horn, or the events of Bauhaus Week. The Bauhaus had its loyalists in high places, especially Redslob, but there was vehement opposition to it all over Germany. Newspaper headlines of the period included “The Collapse of Weimar Art,” “Staatliche Rubbish,” “Swindle-Propaganda,” and “The Menace of Weimar.”
The main issue was that an unknowing press and public assumed that because Gropius had started the school under a socialist regime—the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar had been politically to the left—the Bauhaus was a hotbed of radical politics. Since Gropius knew that ignorant observers would think as much, he had prohibited political activity there, but as the local government became increasingly rightist, the hatred mounted.
The situation became so bad that the school’s business manager ended up writing Gropius that “the attitude shown by superior officials is malevolent, obtuse, and so inflexible as constantly to endanger the growth of the institution.” He warned that the “open animosity” of the latest government was threatening the school’s survival. Even in the artistic community, where one might have hoped for more enlighted attitudes, there were prominent people who saw no reason for the Bauhaus to exist. Karel Teige, a well-regarded critic and artist who was a leading figure in the Czech avant-garde, writing in Stavba (Building), the most important architectural periodical in Czechoslovakia, asked, “If Gropius wants his school to fight against dilettantism in the arts, … why does he suppose a knowledge of the crafts to be essential for industrial manufacture?” Teige was typical of many influential naysayers in his view that “craftsmanship and industry have a fundamentally different approach. … Today, the crafts are nothing but a luxury, supported by the bourgeoisie with their individualism and snobbery and their purely decorative point of view. Like any other art school, the Bauhaus is incapable of improving industrial production.” Teige questioned every major premise of Bauhaus education, declaring, “The architects at the Bauhaus propose to paint mural compositions on the walls of their rooms, but a wall is not a picture and a pictorial composition is no solution to the problems of space.”158 On the other hand, the distinguished Swiss architecture historian Siegfried Giedion, in an article for the Zurich newspaper Das Werk, wrote—in September 1923, while the exhibition was still on though Bauhaus Week was over—”The Bauhaus at Weimar …is assured of respect. … It pursues with unusual energy the search for the new principles which will have to be found if ever the creative urge in humanity is to be reconciled with industrial methods of production.” Giedion made his readers aware of the difficult situation of this noble cause: “The Bauhaus is conducting this search with scant support in an impoverished Germany, hampered by the cheap derision and malicious attacks of the reactionaries, and even by personal differences within its own group.” He commended G
ropius’s institution for “reviving art” and tearing down “the barriers between individual arts” as well as recognizing and emphasizing “the common root of all the arts.”159 To those with open eyes and open minds, what was taking place in Weimar was a miracle.
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During the final stages of preparation for the Bauhaus exhibition in early August, Ise Frank moved to Weimar to begin her life with Walter Gropius. The attack from Carl Schlemmer had had an impact, however. To avoid further opprobrium from the citizenry of Weimar, the Bauhaus’s director did not want to be seen living with a woman to whom he was not married. The knowledge that Ise had just canceled her wedding to someone else on Gropius’s behalf was scandalous enough. Ise Frank moved in with Paul and Lily Klee, whose reputations were beyond reproach.
Meanwhile, Lily Hildebrandt had announced her plan to come to town for the opening. Gropius had her stay in a summer resort some distance from the town center. They saw each other in public only at the last event of Bauhaus Week, the great masked ball on August 19, and no one else knew them behind their disguises. The following morning, Ise Frank and Walter Gropius snuck away for a vacation in Verona and Venice.
Ise and Walter were married on October 16, 1923, at a civil ceremony in Weimar. The witnesses were Wassily and Nina Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Shortly thereafter, they went to Paris, on what was in effect their honeymoon but was mainly a trip to visit Le Corbusier, who considered Gropius one of his few colleagues of merit. The Swiss architect met them at Deux Magots, a café that was only a short walk from the small seventh-floor walkup apartment where he was living with his Monegasque girlfriend, Yvonne Gallis. The Gropiuses went with Le Corbusier to see the house he had recently built for Amédée Ozenfant, which had a large and well-lit painting studio as its core, and the Maison La Roche, a villa for a Swiss banker that was mainly intended to present the owner’s collection of paintings by Braque, Picasso, Léger, Ozenfant, and Le Corbusier himself. These two groundbreaking exemplars of Le Corbusier’s use of the latest technology in domestic habitation made a great impact on Gropius. Le Corbusier had a sense of visual rhythm that set him apart, but he shared Gropius’s desire for the connection of art and industry, and for the importance of giving equal attention to every aspect of visual experience, from the design of ashtrays to the layout of closet interiors to the choice of one’s shoes to the construction of building façades. What we see and touch affects how we feel and who we are.
The Bauhaus Group Page 11