Modell Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model. 1919-2009

bauhaus a conceptual model

bauhaus a conceptual model

Editor: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin/Museum

B

für Gestaltung, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, and Klassik Stiftung Weimar

C

2 T em p late

In Cooperation With: The Museum of Modern Art, New York Publisher: Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern Occasion: Ninetieth anniversary of the Bauhaus Sponsor: Kulturstiftung des Bundes

A

bauhaus a conceptual model

1

Mo

del

3 re fe re nce Point

B

C A

Catalogue

047 Klaus-Jürgen Winkler Building an Ideal Community Plan for a Bauhaus Housing Settlement by Walter Determann

051 Kathleen James-Chakraborty Expressionism and Experiment The Sommerfeld House

261 Oliver Kossack Bitte nicht machmachen (Please Do Not Impersonate)

265 Günther Uecker The Dance Re: Oskar Schlemmer, Metalltanz

269 Rolf Sachsse An Allegorical Magic of Things and Consummate Technique The Photographer Walter Peterhans

273

275 Otto Piene For Moholy Zero, Light Sculptures, and Light Spaces

063 Michael Siebenbrodt A Sculptural Worldview in Color, Light, and Sound Johannes Itten’s Tower of Fire

067 Ulrich Herrmann Practice, Program, Rationale Johannes Itten and the Preliminary Course at the Weimar Bauhaus

071 Ute Ackermann Creating Order for “Life Artists” Gertrud Grunow’s Class in Harmonization Theory at the Weimar Bauhaus

279 Peter Stasny The Workshop as Laboratory Joost Schmidt’s Influence on Teaching and Design

283 Achim Heine Hommage à Joseph Pohl Update Wardrobe on Rollers for Bachelors

287 Anja Schädlich Encounter with Oneself Lucia Moholy’s Self-Portrait

291 Elizabeth Otto On the “Beautiful” and “Strong” Sexes at the Bauhaus Marianne Brandt, Gender, and Photomontage

077 María Ocón Fernández Politics and Abstraction The Monument to the Victims of the March Putsch Designed by Walter Gropius

081 Ingrid Radewaldt Simple Form for the Necessities of Life The Weaving Workshop at the Bauhaus in Weimar

085 Klaus Weber The Artists of Our Time New European Graphics

089 Ai Weiwei Bamboo Chair, homage to the African Chair by Marcel Breuer and Gunta Stölzl

297 Wolfgang Thöner “Design   for a Socialist City” On the Teaching of Urban Planning at the Bauhaus

301 Claude Lichtenstein Modern Wallpaper for Every Room Joost Schmidt’s Title Page for the Bauhaus Wallpaper Catalogue

305 Gerda Wendermann Surrealism at the Bauhaus Hans Thiemann’s Painting Menagerie

309

097 Peter Nisbet An Icon between Radical and Conventional László Moholy-Nagy, Nickel Construction

101

103 Annegret Hoberg A Ringing Cosmos Wassily Kandinsky’s Small Worlds

107 Paul Paret Sculpture and the Rhetoric of Architecture Otto Werner’s Architectural Sculpture

315 Ulrike Brandi Table Lamp by Kandem

319 Dieter Bankert Mutations Dessau’s Mies van der Rohe Gap

323 Ken Tadashi Oshima Complexities of the Collage Iwao Yamawaki’s The Attack on the Bauhaus

327

331 Regina Bittner The Bauhaus on the Market On the Difficult Relationship between the Bauhaus and Consumer Culture

337 Patrick Rössler Escape into the Public Sphere The Exhibition as an Instrument of Self-Presentation at the Bauhaus

343 Rainer K. Wick Selective Appropriation Remarks on the Reception of Bauhaus Pedagogy in Germany

355 Justus H. Ulbricht “Timeless   Gothic” Instead of “Dentist-Style   with Housing Cubes” The National Socialist Opposition to the Bauhaus

362 Ulrike Bestgen and Werner Möller Vice Versa—Art or the People?

364 Philipp Oswalt The Bauhaus Today

115 Barry Bergdoll 119 Bernhard Schulz Wonderful Furniture Sheer Glass Wrapping for a New Peter Keler’s Cradle Architectural Expression Mies van der Rohe’s Entry Honeycomb for the Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse Competition

123 Mechthild Lobisch and Nina Wiedemeyer Merely Light-hearted, or Subversive? A Bookbinding by Anny Wottitz

127 Magdalena Droste The Head as a Successful Design Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus Head

131

133 Torsten Blume Figures In Artificial Space Oskar Schlemmer’s Grotesque Figure 1

137 Joachim Krausse “Relation instead of Mass” Spatial Constructions in the Teaching of Moholy-Nagy

141 Constanze Hofstaetter Synesthesia and Kinetics Kurt Schmidt’s Form-Color Organ

145 Kai-Uwe Hemken “We’re   Here! We’re Ready! And We Will Succeed!” Processes of Self-Discovery of a Public and Official Avant-Garde

149 Karin Wilhelm Typing and Standardization for a Modern Atrium House The Haus Am Horn in Weimar

153 Peter Müller Mental Space in a Material World Ideal and Reality in the Weimar Director’s Office

157 Hubert Kittel From Bauhaus Pottery to Laboratory for Industrial Product Development

161 Lutz Schöbe “Liberated   Combing” at Modernism’s Vanity Table The Lady’s Dressing Table by Marcel Breuer

165 Walter Scheiffele The Lamp on the Director’s Desk

169

171 Peter Hahn A Cheerful Moment The Gropius Portfolio of May 18, 1924

177 Anja Baumhoff The Will to Advertise An Early Design by Herbert Bayer

181 Heidi Specker Landhaus Lemke Re: Marianne Brandt, Tea Infuser

185 Peter Bernhard Constructivism and “Essence   Research” in Design The Bauhaus Chess Set

193

195 Monika Markgraf Function and Color in the Bauhaus Building in Dessau

199 Robin Rehm The Paradigm of the New Building The Dessau Masters’ Houses

203 Gerda Breuer Design for a New Lifestyle Marcel Breuer’s Club Chair B 3

1926

111 Bart Lootsma Equivocal Icon The Competition Design for the Chicago Tribune Tower by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer

1932

295

311 Lilian Tone Memorial and Manifesto Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus Stairway

1933

1920

075

1922

059 Luca Di Blasi Avant-Garde and Cult Lothar Schreyer and the Ambiguity of Modernity

1930

259

1919

255 Jeff Wall Morning Cleaning, Mies van der Rohe Foundation, Barcelona

055 Charles Werner Haxthausen An Architectonics of Light Lyonel Feininger’s Viaduct

1921

239 Andreas Schwarting “A New and Better World” The Dessau-Törten Housing Estate and the Rationalization of Residential Development

251 Wolfgang Joop Reduced Necessity Lis Volger’s Bauhaus Dress

045

1923

237

247 Christoph Ingenhoven The Courage to be Simple Hannes Meyer’s Trade Union School in Bernau

041 Osamu Okuda Klee’s Architectural Fantasies and the Bauhaus Idea The Painting Architecture with window

1924

233 Florian Illies The Bauhaus Books as Aesthetic Program The Avant-Garde in a Format of 23 x 18

243 Oliver Barker Albers’s Preliminary Course Function and Material

037 Jürgen Fitschen Expression of Original Questions of Being The Sculptor Gerhard Marcks

1925

229 Mercedes Valdivieso “Tell   me how you celebrate, and I’ll tell you who you are.” (Oskar Schlemmer) Bauhaus Festivities in Dessau

221 Annie Bourneuf A Speculative Tapestry Gunta Stölzl’s Slit Tapestry Red-Green

033 Jörg U. Lensing Our Game, Our Party, Our Work Weimar Bauhaus 1919

027

191

225 Laura Muir The Dynamics of Bauhaus Life T. Lux Feininger’s Sports at the Bauhaus

217 Christine Hopfengart Poetry and Thoroughness Paul Klee’s Teachings at the Bauhaus

215

029 Magdalena Bushart It Began with a Misunderstanding Feininger’s Cathedral and the Bauhaus Manifesto

023 Christoph Wagner Bauhaus Before the Bauhaus? Johannes Itten’s Painting The Encounter

093 Brenda Danilowitz “Quite   charming, if a bit brutal.” Josef Albers’s Glass Assemblage

211 Floris M. Neusüss and Renate Heyne László Moholy-Nagy as the Lodestar of a New Art Form A “Photogrammed” Self-Portrait

Essays

351 Klaus von Beyme The Bauhaus: Internationalization and Globalization

Appendix 366 Index of Names 367 Bibliography 373 Photo Credits

347 Gabriele Diana Grawe Teaching at Black Mountain College and the New Bauhaus The Separation of Art and Design

Contents

Contents

Catalogue

207 Raquel Franklin Radical Architecture for a Vital Youth Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer’s Entry for the Petersschule Competition

1929

013 Annemarie Jaeggi Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model

1931

008 Greetings from the Sponsors A Word of Greeting from the Kulturstiftung des Bundes

1928

007 Foreword Annemarie Jaeggi Philipp Oswalt Hellmut Seemann

006 Lender Acknowledgments

1927

Forewords

6

7 Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model

Foreword

The exhibition primarily features artworks from the permanent collections of the three organizing institutions:

With this catalogue, the editors, curators, and authors have attempted to provide fresh perspectives on the Bauhaus. At the center of interest are the richness of the school’s concepts and contents, its delight in experimentation, the spectrum of its training, the interdisciplinary work undertaken there, and the character of its communal life; at the same time, the claims and realities of the Bauhaus model are also examined. A selection of sixtyeight representative objects organized in roughly chronological order from 1919 to 1933 serves to demonstrate the ways in which the Bauhaus succeeded, in its brief existence, in uniting so many contrasting voices and in negotiating a condition of constant change. Discussing this selection of objects (some well-known, others relatively unfamiliar, even to Bauhaus connoisseurs) are authors representing a wide range of disciplines. Among the writers are creative personalities, including artists, designers, fashion designers, and architects, who comment on a variety of Bauhaus objects. Finally, specialized essays examine the wide-ranging complex of questions concerning the afterlife and significance of the Bauhaus, extending our perspective of the historic school right up to the present. The editors wish to express their deepest gratitude to all the contributing authors.

Annemarie Jaeggi, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin Philipp Oswalt, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau Hellmut Seemann, Klassik Stiftung Weimar

Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin/Museum für Gestaltung Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau Klassik Stiftung Weimar We wish to thank the following institutions for their generous loans: Kunstmuseum Bern Johannes-Itten-Stiftung, Bern Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern The Anni and Josef Albers Foundation, Bethany, CT Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kunst­gewerbemuseum Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie Gerhard-Marcks-Haus, Bremen Sammlung Herzogenrath, Bremen Harvard University Art Museums,­Busch-Reisinger Museum, C ­ ambridge, MA HOCHTIEF Aktiengesellschaft, Essen Sammlung Hoh, Fürth Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Gera Stiftung Moritzburg, Kunstmuseum des Landes SachsenAnhalt, Halle an der Saale Museum für Kunst und Kultur­geschichte der Hansestadt Lübeck The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY Sammlung Lore und Joost Siedhoff, Potsdam Kulturhistorisches Museum Rostock Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, ­Archiv der Moderne Freundeskreis der Bauhaus-­Universität Weimar e. V. Karl Peter Röhl Stiftung, Weimar Thüringisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Weimar Von der Heydt-Museum Wuppertal Kunsthaus Zürich

C 6 M 0 Y 100 K 0

Lender Acknowledgments

Like no other institution, the Bauhaus (which was founded in Weimar in 1919 and relocated first to Dessau in 1925, then to Berlin in 1932, where it was closed down in 1933) emblematizes twentieth-century German modernism. Although there is no such thing as a Bauhaus style per se, the school’s products are still regarded in the early twenty­first century as constituting blueprints for an alternative to the historical reality that plunged first Germany, then Europe, and finally the world, into unparalleled catastrophe. Against the backdrop formed by this historical constellation, it seemed inevitable that the Bauhaus, its protagonists and students, its designs and aims, would retain its symbolic potency in contemporary Germany, that it would continue to substantially shape this nation’s identity, its self-understanding. With justice, many of those well versed in the history of the Bauhaus have criticized the inflation of the school’s profile to the level of a “better Germany.” But the extraordinary ferocity of the epochal conflict between enlightened modernism and aggressive reaction that raged throughout the twentieth century, and in Germany in particular, makes any sober historical consideration of the Bauhaus virtually impossible. Now, ninety years after the school’s founding, Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model acknowledges this historical context and invites viewers to take a fresh look at the facts. The term “model” is used in a double sense, first to refer to something exemplary, an ideal to be emulated, and secondly as projective, as design-oriented in more concrete terms. And it is precisely this double meaning of the term “model” that is taken up as the theme of the exhibition Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model. Twenty years after the reunification of the two Germanys, the Martin-Gropius­Bau—designed by a great uncle of Bauhaus founder ­Walter Gropius—seems a highly appropriate setting for this presentation. Here, in the immediate vicinity of the Nazis’ Gestapo headquarters (now the “Topography of Terror” museum) and of the former site of the Berlin Wall which divided Germany for decades, visitors are offered a comprehensive overview of the historic Bauhaus and of its sustained impact on the development of the modern manmade environment. Today, the cultural heritage of the Bauhaus is safeguarded by three institutions, each located in one of the towns

where the historic school resided. Only Germany’s unification in 1990 made it possible for these three institutes— the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, and the Klassik Stiftung Weimar—to genuinely fulfill this task. The three institutes have joined forces to organize Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model, an exhibition which for the first time provides a wide-ranging survey of the school’s activities, and one which fully considers all of the relevant aspects and each of the three locations. After showing in Berlin, the exhibition will be seen in a modified form at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Not unlike the school itself, this exhibition will make its way throughout the world. We would like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to all those who have made this enormous project possible: to our colleagues, to lenders of display objects, to our partners and sponsors. A glance at the publisher’s page of the present catalogue makes clear the impossibility of mentioning everyone by name. One sole exception, however, will serve to validate the rule. Without the support of the German federal government, the organizers would have been compelled to abandon their ambitious plans. Even during the early stages, the Kulturstiftung des Bundes chose to lend its support to this exhibition, freeing up the necessary funding base. At no other location, finally, could this exhibition have been presented so effectively than at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, which is maintained by the government, and whose director, Gereon Sievernich, graciously supported exhibition preparations in such an exemplary manner. Berlin/Dessau/Weimar, May 2009

A Word of Greeting Hortensia Völckers, Member of the Executive Board/­Art Director, ­Kulturstiftung des Bundes Alexander Farenholtz, Member of the Executive Board/Administrative Director, Kulturstiftung des Bundes The name “Bauhaus” has practically become a synonym for modernism, an international symbol of a stylistic movement that originated in Germany. “The Bauhaus” may safely be regarded as one of the most internationally successful achievements of German culture in the twentieth century. For the first time ever, the exhibition Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model traces the history and development of the Staatliches Bauhaus at its three historical locations in Germany—Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin—and brings the results together in a single venue, the MartinGropius-Bau in Berlin. The exhibition thus offers an unprecedented comprehensive look at the Bauhaus “phenomenon” as a whole. There can be no doubt that the Bauhaus made history. Today, ninety years after it was founded, we recognize that the Bauhaus left traces that were a precursor to the future, traces that still have meaning and offer orientation in the present day, even within the context of critical assessments. Yet the “model” character of the Bauhaus suggested by the title of the exhibition is not limited to its historical role as the birthplace of a new formal language meant to unite industrial production processes with creative craftsmanship and design. The historical Bauhaus has also remained a model particularly in Germany in the sense that it failed to establish a permanent place as an institution. From the very outset, the Bauhaus and its protagonists encountered resistance ranging from skepticism to blunt rejection. Bauhaus artists, teachers, and students were forced to fight for recognition and to compensate for numerous disappointments with their immense, often seemingly exaggerated enthusiasm. This is also an aspect of the “Bauhaus model” from Germany, which offers exemplary material for the study of the glory and the misery of innovative currents in art. The closing of the Bauhaus in 1933 after only fourteen years of existence is eloquent, albeit negative, evidence of the social and political impact of the Bauhaus movement, which the National Socialists sought to destroy by forcing it to dissolve itself. Yet the Bauhaus philosophy of uniting

9

Greetings from the Sponsors Heinrich Haasis President, Deutscher Sparkassen- und Giroverbandes

artistic, scientific, and technical principles with new ways of life and concepts of art education was exposed as fragile even before then. Although the Bauhaus is now inscribed in cultural memory as a success story of German culture, one must keep in mind that this is largely attributable to its perpetuation abroad. The Germans banished the Bauhaus in its historical form from their history and have struggled, in both parts of Germany, to afford it an appropriate, ideologically untainted place in German history. Yet the ideas that originated at the Bauhaus have proven viable and capable of development in the international context. For the German people, who look back today upon sixty years of history since the founding of two separate German states after the end of World War II and twenty years since reunification, the persistent aura of fascination and admiration that surrounds the Bauhaus is a blessing of history which they may rightly regard as a precious gift. The Kulturstiftung des Bundes is sponsoring this exhibition in the knowledge that it gives the Bauhaus back to the German people as a part of their shared history—a history whose dynamic progress through social rejection, ideological overloading, essential international recognition, reappropriation, and finally progressive development of the German cultural heritage has unexpectedly, and perhaps undeservedly, turned out for the best, as it would appear today. Viewed from this perspective, the “Bauhaus model” is also an important building block in the German “House of Memory,” which should open its doors to all who have contributed to its stability from outside its walls. The fact that the Museum of Modern Art is a partner in this project and will present the exhibition in New York following the showing in Berlin is a further tribute to the international significance of the Bauhaus. On behalf­of everyone involved in the exhibition, we wish to thank the directors of the institutions devoted to Bauhaus research­ and preservation of the Bauhaus legacy in Germany: ­A nnemarie Jaeggi from the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Philipp Oswalt from the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, and Hellmut Seemann from the Klassik Stiftung Weimar. We wish the exhibition Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model the best of success and its visitors a wealth of new insights and ­interesting inspirations.

C 4 M 0 Y 100 K 0

8

For the first time, ninety years after the founding of the most successful art academy of the twentieth century, the exhibition Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model brings together the works and the achievements of the masters and students active at the three Bauhaus locations of Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin. The Klassik Stiftung Weimar, the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, and the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin have joined forces to appoint a curatorial team that has assembled the largest and most comprehensive Bauhaus exhibition to date. The team has brought together more than nine hundred treasures from their respective collections to form a presentation focused on the historical development of the Bauhaus from 1919 to 1933. Artists such as Lyonel Feininger, Johannes Itten, Paul Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky were active at the school as masters from its early years. The exhibition’s highpoint is formed by works by these artists dating from the early 1920s. Student works, too, illustrate the delight in experimentation found at the school, as well as its determination to implement innovative design ideas. From the very beginning, the Bauhaus investigated the impact of creativity and design on the larger society. That the school lives on in our collective memory and continues to have such an impact on contemporary society is demonstrated by the presence in contemporary architecture of the formal language developed at the school and by the fresh and timeless effect of Bauhaus design. The school’s international fame continues unabated as well: beginning in November of 2009, the Museum of Modern Art in New York will celebrate the anniversary of its founding eighty years ago with the exhibition Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity. The sponsorship by the Sparkassen Kulturfonds of the Deutscher Sparkassen- und Giroverbandes of the exhibition Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model in the Martin-GropiusBau continues many years of support for the Bauhaus on the part of the Sparkassen Finanzgruppe. In particular, we supported the restoration of the Haus Am Horn of 1923, designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, a project undertaken in 1999, when Weimar was European Capital of Culture. Moreover, the group is the principal sponsor of the Bauhaus Year 2009, and is sponsoring exhibitions in Weimar, Erfurt, Jena, and Apolda. As the principal sponsor of the exhibition Bauhaus:

­A Conceptual Model, we wish this undertaking the greatest­success. We hope that it encounters the positive resonance among visitors that it so richly merits, and that it leads to the continued productive focusing and concentration of the creative forces of the Bauhaus. Dr. Herbert Lütkestratkötter Chairman of the Executive Board, HOCHTIEF AG Form follows function. With its revolutionary methods and unforgettable works, the Bauhaus gave concrete shape to this abstract idea. Though the Bauhaus as a fixed institution existed for a mere fourteen years, it was enough time to establish a new approach to art. Nor has the unified method of the Bauhaus, with its multifaceted formal language, lost any of its timeliness today: ninety years after the founding of the Bauhaus, its style is as contemporary as on day one. In this anniversary year, the exhibition Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model looks back at the origins of the Bauhaus. It broadens our view through an outstanding retrospective that places artists and artistic creations, motifs and messages, technology and aesthetics in a larger context. The exhibition also provides numerous connections to the present day, highlighting the influence and development of the Bauhaus. There are a wealth of opportunities for visitors to the exhibition to discover familiar and unfamiliar things. We are delighted to be the main sponsor for this sort of artistic detective work. HOCHTIEF, an international provider of construction services, has been closely tied to the Bauhaus for many years. Like the Bauhaus artists who viewed a building as the strongest agent of change, we are taking new paths. In our more than one hundred and thirty years of history as a company, we have built forward-looking buildings across the world, executing new creations by such prominent architects as Helmut Jahn, Lord Norman Foster, and Zaha Hadid. We have promoted the art of the Bauhaus in a variety of ways. We undertook the complete restoration of the ­Kandinsky-Klee House in Dessau in the 1990s. We have also supported numerous exhibitions, not least through loans of works from our own Bauhaus collection. Our aim is to preserve the art of the Bauhaus and to make it accessible for future generations. We are privileged to be able to make another contribution to the constructive examination of the Bauhaus.

Mo

de

l

A

Annemarie Jaeggi Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model In recent years, the Bauhaus has experienced unprecedented levels of attention. This renewed interest is perceptible in the swiftly rising volume of publications on the theme, and is mirrored in the attendance figures for the three Bauhaus institutions, located in Berlin, Dessau, and Weimar, as well as in the number of hits on the Internet and in the print media when the search word “Bauhaus” is entered. But it is not solely a question of unadulterated ­acclaim, for critical rejection is also involved. The spectrum of responses extends from scholarly investigations ­to artistic statements, from a renaissance of the values it embodied to the most trivialized reception of a purportedly “Bauhaus style.” More markedly than in the past, interest in the Bauhaus is also manifest abroad, where it is often regarded (and in ways progressively detached from its function as a school) as being representative of modernism as a whole and as standing for an entire epoch. The question of how the Bauhaus (a design academy that existed for a mere fourteen years and probably had no more than twelve hundred and fifty students in all) was able to attain such historical significance and to elicit such a sustained resonance has been posed repeatedly and has been explored from the most multifarious points of view. It cannot be answered simply, for we are concerned here with a complex set of materials that can by no means be reduced to the multifaceted history of the school itself, whose founding coincided with that of the Weimar Republic in 1919, and whose closure fell together with the demise of Germany’s first democracy. Like the latter, the Bauhaus was ultimately subject to the pressure applied by the National Socialists, who forced the school’s closure on three occasions and compelled it to move twice: in 1925 from Weimar to Dessau, and in 1932 from Dessau to Berlin. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the third and last director of the Bauhaus, sought the “origins of the extraordinary influence” exercised “throughout the world” by the school he led “in the circumstance . . . that it was an idea. Such a resonance cannot be achieved through organization, nor through propaganda. Only the idea has force to disseminate itself so widely.” But what was the primary idea of the Bauhaus? Was it not instead a question of a complex of ideas, a conception of the avant-garde movement, one raising claims to an ideal character? And how did this idea disseminate itself? Did not the very organizational and propaganda activities explicitly ruled out as factors by Mies van der Rohe instead constitute the necessary structure and the medium by

means of which this idea was demonstrated and promulgated in the first place? Can an idea and its medium of transmission even be detached from one another in this way at all? Does each not attain its effectiveness solely in conjunction with and by means of the other? Model • Answers to these questions may be discovered— if one approaches the Bauhaus as a conceptual model. In this context, the term “model” should be understood in two different ways: first, in the broadest sense, as an ideal, prototype, and model, exemplar and image, measure and standard, guideline and reference object. Secondly, a model can also be a means for concretizing circumstances, relationships, and structures (whether verbal or visual), hence rendering them comprehensible. Underlying all models is the capacity to function regulatively and to provide definitions. Throughout its entire existence—which is to say, under all three directorships, namely those of Walter Gropius (1919– 28), Hannes Meyer (1928–30), and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1930–33)—the Bauhaus conceived of itself as exemplary, albeit with varying emphases: not simply as representing the inauguration of a new type of school, but also as the spearhead for an up-to-date art and architecture, as a laboratory for the development of exemplary prototypes for industry, and not least as a force for societal change, one that aspired to shape a modern type of human individual and his environment. The ideal-typical character of the Bauhaus is made explicit by its name. In Weimar in 1919, when Walter ­Gropius founded the Bauhaus by consolidating the Academy of­ Fine Arts and the School of Applied Arts, he did not choose a name that alluded to this act of reform, i.e. the unification of “higher” and “lower” art, as did Bruno Paul, for example, in 1924 with the naming of the Vereinigte Staatsschulen für freie und angewandte Kunst (United State Schools for Free and Applied Art) in Berlin. Instead, Gropius invented an incisive and highly memorable word that would strikingly encapsulate the programmatic aims of the school while providing it with a unique selling point (as we would say today). From the very beginning, the word “Bauhaus” was used as a trademark: Bauhaus Evenings, Bauhaus Teas, and Bauhaus Festivals were organized; the relaxed “Bauhaus Dance” was danced to music­performed by the Bauhaus Band; Bauhaus products, Bauhaus books, and Bauhaus buildings were prepended with the distinguishing name as a verbal seal of quality. With the creation of

13

Portrait of Walter Gropius in front of his design for the Chicago Tribune Tower (photo: The Associated Press), 1928, gelatin silver print, 23 x 17.4 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Paul Klee, Idee und Struktur des Staatlichen Bauhauses, 1922, pen and ink on paper, 25 x 21.1 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin Walter Gropius, diagram for the structure of teaching at the Bauhaus, 1922, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin (published in: Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar 1919–1923, 1923)

a Bauhaus stamp, which also served as a signet (in particular the Bauhaus head, designed by Oskar Schlemmer in late 1921 and employed in a number of variants right up until the school’s closure in 1933), the Bauhaus had at its disposal a powerful trademark, one that was also displayed in a simplified form on its products—whether punched in or as a knob. Small wonder, then, that as early as the late 1920s, the advertising and fashion industries appropriated the exceedingly efficacious label “Bauhaus style” for anything and everything that appeared modern and functional in the broadest sense—and in contradiction to the school’s self-image, which to be sure saw itself as trendsetting, but by no means wanted to create a signature style. Claims to a leadership role on the part of the Bauhaus as an exemplary school emerge most clearly from its programs, most powerfully the first one issued in 1919. With respect to its fundamental ideas, it was energized by the debates on art school reform that had raged since the turn of the century. In this regard, Gropius was exceedingly well-informed, as documented by a large number of texts and programs on pedagogical reform originally in his possession (today in the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin). As early as 1915–16, when Gropius was on the short list of those under consideration to succeed Henry van de Velde for the directorship of the Weimar School of Applied Arts, he composed a memorandum concerning its reorganization. It contained a core idea of the later Bauhaus: that of a working collective of “architects, sculptors, and craftsmen of all ranks” based on the prototype of the medieval mason’s guild. Returning from World War I in late 1918, Gropius became associated in Berlin with the Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Workers’ Council for Art), a group of radical artists who strove for direct political participation on the model of the workers’ and soldiers’ councils. Here, Gropius introduced his notion of a working collective and contributed to an educational concept (an activity that coincided with his negotiations for taking over the Weimar art schools) for which Otto Bartning would assume responsibility. This “exemplary curriculum” was designed to serve as a guideline for the necessary reformation of all the art schools in the new German Volksstaat (people’s state), and it served as a foundation for Gropius. The first Bauhaus program of 1919, which comprised a manifesto alongside an outline of the school’s subjects, is the reform-pedagogical, artistic, and at the same time linguistic presentation of the idea—advocated by the ­Arbeitsrat für Kunst—of an all-encompassing art that was to be sustained by the people. Its appearance and declamatory style, too, correspond stylistically to the group’s pamphlets. “The ultimate goal of all artistic activity is the building!” reads the first sentence of the manifesto, which

C 0 M 2 Y 100 K 0

14

concludes with the expressionistic and emphatic words: “Let us desire, conceive, and create the new building of the future together. It will combine architecture, sculpture, and painting in a single form, and will one day rise towards the heavens from the hands of a million workers as the crystalline symbol of a new and coming faith.” Lyonel Feininger’s title illustration shows a Gothic cathedral with three towers, which symbolizes the building of the future— not as a concretely intended building project, but instead as a metaphor for the Gesamtkunstwerk, for the total work of art consisting of architecture and painting and sculpture, and for the absorption of the individual by the society, the nation, by humanity. As various Bauhäusler would later report, it was this mixture of a visionary artists’ manifesto and a reformed program of studies that accounted for the special attraction that drew people to Weimar. A great vision for the future, then, was bound up with a real course of studies, providing students simultaneously with a group identity within the community and a pioneering role within society. Yet the program also led to disappointment for some students, since the spectrum of listed studies did not yet exist, nor was instruction in building actually offered, although this subject had been presented as central to the program as a whole. Gropius’s understanding of architecture as a “total work of art” represented instead a “distant goal” (as we read in the program), one that would have to be worked toward collectively. It was a question of an idea whose implementation was to have proceeded in a processual fashion, just like the continuous revision of its exemplary program. During the reorientation of the Bauhaus’s content initiated by Gropius in 1922–23, which led away from the individual work of art and toward the preparation of prototypes for the industrial manufacture of everyday objects, he developed a diagram representing the curriculum in a form that was at once more incisive and more memorable. Replacing the romantic emblem of the Gothic cathedral, which had reinforced the program and manifesto of 1919 as an ambiguous metaphor, was an unequivocal schema. Clarified in the form of a series of concentric circles is the sequence of teaching areas, leading to the essential core, instruction in building, found at the center. In order to reach this goal, students would be required to successfully traverse the segments, each clearly set off from the next, one by one, leading eventually from the outside to the interior. But here, too, it was by no means a question of recapitulating any actually existing program of studies, but instead of a representation that had been reduced to an abstract essence with an affirmative character. Clustered in the schema and concentrated to the point of graphic visual expression and general validity were only

15

Marianne Brandt, ceiling lamp with small aluminum reflector, 1926, matte-brushed aluminum, reflector diameter 19 cm, BauhausArchiv Berlin Marianne Brandt, ceiling lamp with aluminum reflector (ME 85b), 1926, matte-brushed aluminum, reflector diameter 29 cm, BauhausArchiv Berlin Marianne Brandt, ceiling lamp with wide aluminum reflector, 1926, matte-brushed aluminum, reflector diameter 40.5 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

the essential aspects; it visualizes a principle whose abbre­ viated formulation endows it with ideological force. Paul Klee responded to this regulatory structure with an ironically sharpened pen, transforming the schema into an artistic and individualistic presentation. Not only does it reflect a higher degree of realism with respect to the program of studies, it also exploits a symbolic visual language to arrive at an ambiguous statement: radiating outward from the diagram’s center and surrounded by the broad, ring-shaped layer of the obligatory preliminary course is a seven-pronged star containing the areas Bau (building) and Bühne (stage)—presumably interpretable as the unification of the visual arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture with the performing arts of theater, dance, and music. The prongs not only represent the workshops/ craftmanship/mastery of materials, but are also the formgiving and radiating portions of the star which extend into the areas of the supplementary subjects, diffusing their light there. Interpenetration and overlapping, interrelation and simultaneity characterize this synthetic vision, while Gropius’s schema visualizes the analytical and temporal sequence of a consecutive structure. Klee allows a dotted line (thus, in effect, invisible) to traverse the entire circle from a small base below the circle to its upper edge, where it emerges again, draped now with two pennants, and also present in a three-dimensionally reversed reading of the image. The Bauhaus is caricatured as a star, which is to say as a self-illuminating celestial body, and moreover in the form of a globe, and is then seen as a model—as a detached, autonomous world that revolves around itself and has an impact on its exterior through two pennants entitled “propaganda” and “publishing.” PAradigm, Prototype, Exemplar • Under all three of

its directorships, it was primarily in the realm of product design that the Bauhaus sought to play an exemplary role. This claim pertains in particular to those workshop designs produced beginning in 1922 with the turn from individual handicraft work in favor of “typic individual pieces” which, it was hoped, would be “taken up as guidelines for the forms of both artisanal and industrial manufacture” (position paper dated February 3, 1922, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin). Ironically, the early prototypes—which were developed at Weimar, but could only be produced in larger numbers beginning with the Dessau period (for example Marianne Brandt’s tea infuser or the so-called Bauhaus lamps, designed by Wilhelm Wagenfeld and Carl Jacob Jucker)— are today regarded as design icons, although they were produced only with a significant amount of manual work, which made them correspondingly expensive. Only after the move from Weimar to Dessau were designs generated that were ready for serial production (by

C 0 M 4 Y 100 K 0

16

other firms, for example), not least with the more immediate necessity of furnishing the Bauhaus building, erected in 1925–26. This development was based on a restructuring of the workshops aimed at operating them both as teaching workshops for training novices and as testing and model workshops for advanced students. They were also assigned a third function, namely as production workshops for smaller series, which could be manufactured with the school’s own resources. Among these was Marianne­Brandt’s press-formed sheet aluminum lampshade. Beginning in 1925, Gropius designated the workshops as “laboratories”—he conceived of them as a kind of research facility where product development would take place on an industrial model. Accordingly, this meant that the workshops played an exceptional role within the Bauhaus building in architectonic terms as well: they constituted the real core of the facility, and with their multistory glass curtain wall, corresponded in appearance to a factory building. With the new building, dedicated with great fanfare in late 1926, Walter Gropius brought off an architectural coup, not only providing the Bauhaus with optimal working conditions, but with an architecturally powerful source of identity as well. The press (including, for example, the popular magazine Blätter für Alle) praised the building as a “prototype of a modern functional building” whose innovative architecture was henceforth equated with the significance of the school. This sentiment was reflected among the Bauhaus students too, whose photographs and snapshots with the building set as a backdrop have permanently shaped our image of the free and rambunctious artistic life enjoyed at the school. In certain self-portraits, a number of students depicted themselves as Bauhäusler in the truest sense by employing double exposures to superimpose their own features against views of the building. Speaking in favor of the 1925 decision to move the Bauhaus to Dessau was not just the unique opportunity to erect a building especially for the new location. Even more importantly, Gropius was motivated by the desire to recruit suitable partners in this highly industrialized city for collaborative enterprises. Yet the synergetic implementation of “art and technology,” in particular in relation to the Junkers factory, with its specialization in aircraft manufacture, never came to pass: the perspectives of the industrial engineer were too far distant from the expectations of the Bauhäusler. Clearly, Gropius had expected too much with regard to the goal of having the workshops function as the school’s laboratories—at least with regard to the likelihood that the Bauhaus models, understood as prototypes, would attain practical realization through industry. In early 1928, when Gropius astonished everyone by resigning his position as director in order to devote himself

(as he himself explained it) entirely to his architectural practice, the Bauhaus—at least seen from the outside— appeared to have reached the summit of its development. The school had an internationally regarded modern building, a world-renowned teaching staff, a course of studies that had been reformed in an exemplary manner, and beginning in 1927, a newly established program in architecture as well. Moreover, the Bauhaus could take credit for an impressive menu of contemporary prototypes and exemplary designs. Yet even as this model image was cultivated via public relations activities and in Bauhaus publications, the reality betrayed noticeable cracks. Politically, Gropius was exposed to growing pressure to convert words into deeds regarding the school’s laboratory work and the income that was to have been generated thereby. At the same time, an increasingly conspicuous economic recession threatened to impose drastic budget cuts on ­the Bauhaus. Appointed to succeed Gropius was Swiss architect Hannes Meyer, who had arrived at the Bauhaus already in 1927 as head of the newly established Baulehre (instruction in architecture). His strongly praxis-oriented practice, which integrated advanced students in real building tasks, represented a commendable course of instruction. In contrast to Gropius, Meyer was an advocate of strict functionalism, and rejected all forms of excess, whether artistic or content-related. The refined simplicity and technical elegance associated not just with Gropius’s own architecture, but with the products of the school in general under his direction, were now exposed to explicit critique. The basis of Meyer’s planning activities were functional analysis and construction, and his working method was based on the collective efforts of a team. The ideal of the Gesamt­ kunstwerk was opposed now by Meyer’s “aggregation of all life-giving powers.” The watchword at the Bauhaus was no longer “Art and technology—a new unity,” but instead “Popular needs in place of luxury.” Not least under the pressures of the financial situation, the Bauhaus workshops under Meyer were completely reorganized. The results of his reforms were to have been greater efficiency, enhanced effectiveness, and a decidedly social orientation. At the same time, he reduced the production ­of prototypes to a manageable number of standardized designs. Emerging in just a few months was a new product palette with a totally changed image, and hence a decisive break with the Bauhaus under Gropius. This change was at its most conspicuous in the area of furniture design: prevailing now were simple and economical materials such as pale, domestic woods and an experimental approach to materials like plywood (also in conjunction with tubular steel) and cast aluminum. A striking tendency could be seen toward the practical, the

17

Portrait of Hannes Meyer (photo: Judit Kárász [?]), ca. 1930, gelatin silver print, 11.9 x 13.2 cm, BauhausArchiv Berlin

handy, the lightweight, toward the production of chairs and tables that could be disassembled or folded, and the mobility of formerly heavy items of furniture like cabinets. On the whole, the products of the Bauhaus Volks­ wohnung (People’s Apartment) convey an impression of austerity and Spartan severity. Among Meyer’s achievements was a far greater success than previously when it came to working together with industry (the Kandem Lamp, the Bauhaus wallpapers), although these were initiated from outside the Bauhaus. This design work is exemplary precisely because in this case, the Bauhaus no longer attempted to produce according to its own self-defined standards, but instead to function as a partner of industry vis-à-vis design questions, that is, it adopted a service provision role. After two years, the reconfiguration of the Bauhaus under Hannes Meyer came to an abrupt end when he was dismissed without notice on trivial grounds. The school’s increasing politicization was a thorn in the mayor’s side, and eventually, the opposition to Meyer within the Bauhaus as well as external lobbying against him by Gropius and other former Bauhäusler achieved the desired goal. In the middle of the reform process, his exit put an end to an era of uncommonly enthusiastic experimentation. Inaugurated in 1930 with the entrance of the third and final director Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was a new direction, defined by a new concentration on the Bauhaus as a school. With authoritarian harshness, he intervened in the school’s political situation, not shrinking back from disciplinary means such as expulsion in order to establish order. The new structural changes too were drastic in nature: in the multifunctionality of the workshops, Mies perceived an “unfortunate amalgamation of education and production.” Productive activities were therefore abandoned. During this period, so strongly conditioned by the world economic crisis, income from licensing agreements assumed an existential significance for the Bauhaus, compelling a stronger orientation to results and a relative neglect of methodical design instruction. Mies tightened up the instruction plan in ways that went even further than Meyer’s changes—not simply in response to the pressures of the financial situation, but on the basis of conviction as well. In order to establish a master school for architects, he sacrificed one of the essential components of Bauhaus pedagogy, eliminating the formerly obligatory attendance of the Vorkurs, or preliminary course, for new enrollees. That which sounded like the swan song of the Bauhaus was instead a complete reorientation, one tailored entirely to instruction in architecture and to Mies as a charismatic teacher—both of which exercised a powerful appeal on students. For him, the original goal of the Bauhaus—including the Gesamt­

kunstwerk to which Gropius had been so dedicated—continued to have validity. Under Mies, it was no longer the concrete building project that stood at the center of concern, but instead the assignment of abstract tasks, most of them related to the single family home. In this context, it was his own architecture that served as a model for students. Observable under Mies’s leadership (and despite the unjustified and exaggerated formulation of a “Mies Bauhaus”) is a shift from the exemplary character of a “program for educating individuals” under Gropius, or the social demands raised by Meyer, in favor of a “model architecture.” In Dessau too, the National Socialists announced a battle against the Bauhaus, and during the election campaign of 1931 not only called for the school’s closure, but for the demolition of the Bauhaus building. Ultimately, they would put an end to the Bauhaus the next year, although they did leave the school building untouched. The Bauhaus would enjoy only a brief and unassuming existence as a private school at a third and final location (a former telephone factory at the edge of Berlin) before finally yielding to National Socialist pressures and dissolving itself.

C 0 M 7 Y 100 K 0

18

Reference Object • During its existence, the Bauhaus generated polarizations, and the National Socialists were not alone among its opponents, although they were indeed among the school’s most acrimonious and potent antagonists. The circumstance that the existence of the Bauhaus coincided with that of the Weimar Republic, and that its fall coincided with the political victory of the National Socialist Party has stigmatized the school and all too often allowed us to forget that we are dealing here with a perpetually contested institution, whether in the public sphere or among specialists. One reason for this was the school’s demonstrative claim to a future-oriented potency, one that would have a direct impact on society. The Bauhaus was constantly oriented toward the public through appeals, declarations of solidarity, memoranda, publications, exhibitions, and festivals, and hence perpetually drew attention to itself in a way that even those well-disposed toward the Bauhaus, for example, Hans Poelzig, perceived as being “too much commotion.” The Bauhaus members were to be measured against their own highly visible attitude as part of the avant-garde, which never quite matched their understanding of themselves as an ideal-typical institution. Model and reality are never congruent. Moreover, the Bauhaus claimed the right to pursue detours and to accumulate valuable experience in the form of unsuccessful attempts in order to derive course corrections from these. The often exaggerated character or incisive reductiveness of its communications (also an outcome of its claims to preeminence) made the Bauhaus simultaneously an object­

19

Portrait of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (photo: Werner Rohde), 1934, gelatin silver print, 32.2 x 16.2 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

B

Template

“Bauhaus” plastic bucket from the firm of Bauhaus AG (photo: Hans Maria Wingler), 1967, BauhausArchiv Berlin

Dr. Annemarie Jaeggi (born 1956), art historian, is Director of the Bau­haus-Archiv Berlin.

C 0 M 9 Y 100 K 0

20

of identification as well as a target, one moreover that seemed to stand for modernism as a whole. Ironically, it is thanks precisely to this ambivalent role that with regard to its significance and popularity, the Bauhaus has always emerged victorious—and all the more decisively in times of repression or rejection. The Bauhäusler themselves have labored mightily in the cause of the mythification and global popularization of the Bauhaus, but have been equally consistent in opposing its consequential trivialization. But the escalating exploitation of the Bauhaus name beginning in the period after World War II, its application to an in the meantime unsurveyable spectrum of enterprises and commodities, very few of them having any plausible connection to the school itself, can no longer be stemmed. Has the increasing independence of the Bauhaus name ultimately made the school a victim of its own stylization, an immortal but increasingly contentless reference object? Will it be successful in converting this form of attention, too, into a source of strength? Observable in contemporary art, architecture, and design alongside the trivialization of the Bauhaus name is a process of confrontation with a classical modernism whose normative role is not only being critically interrogated, but is also perceived increasingly as something to be emulated. After a period of “anything goes,” we find a renewed search for ethical values. Morality has again become an indispensable factor, and will again be associated with the principles of the Bauhaus—not as a return to functionalism, but instead as an instance of an exemplary attitude.

The Encounter | Johannes Itten | 1:4.97

original Title: Die Begegnung year of execution: 1916 Material: oil on canvas format: 105 x 80 cm loaned by: Kunsthaus Zürich, 1964/5

The Encounter Johannes Itten

gradations of chromatic colors to end in the middle in a whitish gray and the palest pastel yellow. In this painting, the totality of the colors almost seems to be combined with the axiomatic claim of a model, as if Itten wanted to situate himself with his own color system in a long tradition of color theory that includes Aristotle, Franciscus Aguilonius, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Philipp Otto Runge, or Adolf Hölzel. A few years later at the Bauhaus as part of the almanac Utopia, Itten did in fact publish a “color globe in seven gradations from light to dark and twelve hues” that was spread out to form a color star. Due to the constant movement between different locations and contexts that took Itten within just a few years from the Stuttgart Akademie, to Vienna and his contacts with the Vienna art scene, and finally to the Weimar Bauhaus, this historical constellation contains the danger of an anachronistic overlapping of the different stages. Therefore, the question of the historical context of the picture The Encounter should be examined more carefully. When writing in 1962 about his preliminary course at the Bauhaus, Itten noted that Walter Gropius, through the intervention of Alma Mahler, had visited him in his private art school in Vienna in 1919, “to look at the abstract pictures and the works of my students. On leaving, he said: ‘I don’t understand your pictures and the works of your students, but if you want to come to Weimar I would be very pleased.’” The historico-critical analysis of the sources confirms by and large this version of the events. If Gropius is to be believed, then it appears to be another of the many paradoxes in the history of the Bauhaus that at the beginning of 1919, the first Bauhaus director still didn’t “understand” the painterly geometric abstraction that, only a few years later, would play such a crucial role in the identity of the Bauhaus. Alma Mahler’s attitude to Itten’s abstract pictures, however, was quite different. In a letter from 1917 to Erika Tietze-Conrad, Alma Mahler, still strongly affected by works such as The Encounter, noted enthusiastically: “We didn’t go wrong with Itten. He’s a marvelous chap. I was in his studio and saw his earliest works and the most recent, and there is such a consistency to the whole that I shall no longer be persuaded otherwise. Itten as a person may have faltered—but not the artist.” It seems to have been during a summer visit to Alma Mahler in 1918 that the friendship was cemented—not least due to their common interests in theosophy. Against this background, Alma Mahler brought Itten and Gropius together with the following words that have been passed down by Itten: “If you want to have any success with this idea of the Bauhaus, then you have to appoint Itten.” Accordingly, the painting The Encounter should indeed be understood as one of the exemplary key works concerning “the encounter” with Gropius on Itten’s path to the Bauhaus. Itten’s art-theoretical diary entries allow a more precise classification and understanding of the work The Encounter. A preparatory study from May 20, 1916, is directly linked to a traumatic biographical event: the suicide of his Stuttgart girlfriend Hildegard “Hilde” Wendland in the spring of 1916. It was probably this event that Alma Mahler hints at when in 1917, looking back on this, she mentions that Itten “as a person may have fal­ tered.” In the first version of the painting Auferstehung (Resurrection), Itten gave this event a moving epitaph with a combination of figurative and abstract formal elements. This picture, which has only survived in photographs, is inscribed with the date April 1, 1916. The Encounter was made about seven weeks later. In the title, the biographical reference that could still be made out in the diary entry has entirely disappeared. Compared with the “Embrace” and the “Heavenly Kiss with Hilde,” the title The Encounter is more

24

A few years before his appointment at the Bauhaus, first in Stuttgart, then in Vienna, Johannes Itten made a series of abstract paintings that might be considered as models of Bauhaus painting avant la lettre: Horizontal–Vertikal from 1915, Tiefenstufen (Gradients) from 1915, The Encounter from 1916, Das Entzweite (The Divided), and Die Kreise (The Circle) from 1916. If the use of the term “avant-garde” to describe utopian designs of aesthetic principles in the period before their establishment was ever valid, then, with a view to the Bauhaus, it fits well to this group of works by Johannes Itten. These paintings are characterized by an abstract geometric style, in which rectangular and circular or spiral shapes are combined with paradigmatic color constellations. In each of these paintings, Itten appears to test in an exemplary way fundamental principles of the form and color system of his abstract pictorial vocabulary: rectangle, square, circle, spiral, gradations of light and dark, and color contrasts. Each of these pictures has an exemplary character, without Itten having added further variations or even series to this form and color canon. In the painting The Encounter, a horizontal structure of stripes of bright chromatic colors, which traverses the color scale from yellow via orange, red, green up to purple and blue, is flanked on both sides by vertical stripes of metallic colors—silver, gold, brass, and bronze. Toward the center, this orthogonal structure of colored stripes breaks dynamically into a double spiral. In a rhythmic arrangement, gradations of light and dark interlock with

Bauhaus Before the Bauhaus? Johannes Itten’s Painting The Encounter Christoph Wagner C 0 M 13 Y 100 K 0

Johannes Itten, draft sketch of May 20, 1916 (Diary III, p. 60), Johannes-Itten-Stiftung, Kunst­museum Bern

Johannes Itten in a painter’s frock with a golden-section compass and color star, Weimar 1920–21 (photo: Paul Stockmar), JohannesItten-Stiftung, Kunstmuseum Bern

Johannes Itten, Auferstehung (Resurrection) (first version), 1916, lost

25

Johannes Itten (at the piano) and Oskar Schlemmer in Itten’s Stutt­ gart studio, 1915, Johannes-IttenStiftung, Kunstmuseum Bern

Rotzler 1978. Wagner 2002. Wagner 2005b. Wagner 2009a.

Kurt Schwitters, Anna Blume

Establishment of the Arbeiterwohlfahrt (Workers’ Welfare Organization) to alleviate hardship in the aftermath of World War I

The great Futurist exhibition in Milan

The rationing of staple foods leads to malnutrition-related illnesses, particularly among children. Famine is prevented by food distribution programs and donations from abroad.

Wagner 2009b.

Hermann Hesse, Demian

Establishment of the German Communist Party (KPD)

POLITICS

CULTURE 

Foundation of the architect’s association Die Gläserne Kette (The Glass Chain). The membership includes Bruno Taut, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius.

Introduction of civilian airmail in Germany along the Berlin–Weimar route

MODERN LIFE

Prof. Dr. Christoph Wagner (born 1964) is an art historian at the Uni­versity of Regensburg.

1919

Bothe 1994a.

The Weimar Constitution comes into effect on August 11.

Bogner/Badura-Triska 1988.

Murder of KPD leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht by the Freikorps

Bern et al. 1984.

Election of Socialist Friedrich Ebert as President of the German Reich

Badura-Triska 1990.

Richard Oswald, Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others), one of the first films dealing with homosexuality

John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown make the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic.

Literature

C 0 M 16 Y 100 K 0

26

generalizing. However, the connection shows clearly that Itten’s painting The Encounter should not be understood as merely an abstract experiment in form and color. In Itten’s pictorial vocabulary, the color spiral clearly has a symbolic function with a metaphysical background—one that he went on to explore further through his esoteric speculations. In his preparatory drawing, Itten made a precise plan of the composition and the color scheme of The Encounter. Without doubt, his ideas about the rhythm, contrast, and balance of the colors draw heavily on Adolf Hölzel’s theory of contrasting colors, which would have been still fresh in his mind from his studies in Stuttgart. Itten remained committed to the basic principles of Hölzel’s theory of contrasts until the end of his life. Under these impressions, added to which were encounters in the Hölzel circle with Ida Kerkovius, Oskar Schlemmer, or Willi Baumeister among others, Itten began with an astonishing rigor to carry out the transition from his prior “Cézannism” to the geometric abstraction of paintings such as The Encounter. A photograph taken in 1915 on the occasion of Schlemmer’s visit to Itten’s Stuttgart studio shows Itten playing the piano under one of his earliest chessboard compositions, which was doubtless directly inspired by Hölzel’s classes. The scene depicted here has a programmatic content. Itten is shown as an artist who is attempting, on the model of music, to push the limits of painting in order to create analytically resolved, “pure” proportions and harmonic color constellations. Before his arrival at the Bauhaus, Itten’s artistic studies in Vienna would also have drawn inspiration from the twelve-tone method of musical composition developed by Josef Matthias Hauer. A curious contradiction concerning Johannes Itten’s artistic development is that during his three years at the Weimar Bauhaus—between October 1919 and October 1922—he no longer made a single painting in an abstract geometric style. The few pictures made in this period, such as the Kinderbild (Portrait of a Child) from 1921–22, returned to a figurative, objective approach. Only in his sculptural works of this period such as the Tower of Fire, also called “Tower of Light,” or in single prints did Itten develop the abstract geometric potential of his art. During his time at the Bauhaus, philosophical and conceptual problems concerning the artistic creation of a “new man” seem to have become more important than the propagation of a particular “Bauhaus style” in painting. Only at the beginning of the 1950s, three decades later and at a considerable distance to the Bauhaus, did Itten return to abstract geometric compositions in his paintings, after a body of work that had been dominated by figuration. He partly even drew on his own early compositions such as Horizontal-Vertikal from 1915, which he then varied from memory.

Walter Gropius assumes directorship of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar.

“This   is more than a lost war. A world has come to an end. We must search for a radical solution to our problems.” Walter Gropius 1918

The German Nationalist movement issues polemics against the Bauhaus.

“The   ultimate aim of ­all artistic activity is the building!” Walter Gropius 1919

101

C 0 M 18 Y 100 K 0

CITATION

EVENTS

TEACHING

Students

1919 106

year of execution: 1919

Original Title: Kathedrale

paper, double leaf printed on both sides, letterpress print

Material: zinc etching from a woodcut on grayish-green

loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 6806

format: 32 x 19.8 cm

Cathedral, Title Page of the Bauhaus Manifesto and Program of the Staatliches Bauhaus, April 1919 Lyonel Feininger

Cathedral, Title Page | Lyonel Feininger | 1:0.633

Johannes Itten begins teaching his preliminary course.

readings and could therefore hope for the widest possible agreement. Nevertheless, the historical model is still present: in Feininger’s woodcut. Here, we see a church with buttresses; the three naves of different heights rise up from a hilly ground. Towering over these in the center is a vast steeple as well as two smaller steeples on either side. At the top of each spire is a star, whose rays connect diagonally, thus framing the building and apparently bringing the disconnected elements of the building together under a collective formal law and into a collective movement. Rays also emanate from the church itself, resulting in a dense mesh of diagonals. The whole looks like a dialogue between the light beams emanating from the building and the blazing stars. The layout shows that Feininger’s Cathedral and Gropius’s Bauhaus manifesto should be understood as a unity. Just as the text has no title, the woodcut has no caption; it is not even enclosed in a border. The immediacy with which the image addresses the viewer is echoed in the immediacy of the text’s appeal. Text and image—at least this seems to be the case—complement one another, all the more so since a few details in the image can be interpreted as the faithful translation of particular phrases: for instance, the different parts of the building, which refer to the “composite character of a building,” or the stars, which could describe art’s Lichtmomente (this term—literally “light moments”—means “moments of inspiration”). Together they establish the context for the proper understanding of the Program of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar. Nevertheless, the woodcut should not be seen as an illustration of the Bauhaus manifesto. Feininger had been working with the “church” motif for many years. Starting in 1913 he used it to test his own formal language developed in a dialogue with Cubist and Futurist painting. During World War I the crystalline structure of his work expressed his growing sense of alienation from the world. He saw the depiction of architecture as a timeless alternative to the present. As he confessed to the poet Adolf Knoblauch in 1917, he was struggling to create “diamond hard, imperishable visions full of inner beauty.” Knoblauch, on the other hand, saw a deep religiosity in this attitude: “God spoke to you in your fear and greatest need, and you raise yourself up to him through the glorification of his humblest churches . . . And then at times the darkness would be split by an immense radiance, extending from your hands avid of creation to the infinite depths of the heavens as if our being would burst from a force beyond all comprehension.” Although Feininger did not explicitly confirm this interpretation, he did acknowledge the reference to the symbolic character of these motifs: “The church, the mill, the bridge, the house—and the cemetery— have filled me since childhood with profound devotional feelings. They all have a symbolic function. However, only since this war have I understood why I must depict them again and again.” What the prospectus presents as a unity, therefore, is the result of two radically different perspectives. While in the Cathedral, Feininger celebrated his own artistic position with its combination of an introspective devotional attitude and a withdrawal from reality, Gropius searched in the same image for confirmation of the importance of craft training at the Bauhaus and the revaluation of architecture as a crucial part of educational reform. This explains why Feininger, who was appointed by Gropius as the first new teacher at the Bauhaus after a triumphant exhibition at the gallery Der Sturm in 1917 and their collective engagement in the Arbeitsrat in May 1919, soon felt put on the defensive. At the end of May, he confided his annoyance to his wife Julia, “Gropius sees the craft—

It Began with a Misunderstanding Feininger’s Cathedral and the Bauhaus Manifesto Magdalena Bushart

Walter Gropius, Bauhaus manifesto and Program of the Staatliches Bauhaus, April 1919, letterpress print, 32 x 19.8 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin C 0 M 20 Y 100 K 0

30

Lyonel Feininger’s woodcut Cathedral stands for the expectations as much as the misunderstandings that led to the founding of the Bauhaus. It was made for the title page of a prospectus in which, in April 1919, Walter Gropius sketched his vision for the renewal of art and introduced the Program of the Staatliches Bauhaus. The manifesto begins abruptly with the sentence: “The ultimate aim of all creative activity is the building!” In times of great architecture, Gropius explained in the text, the fine arts were “indispensable” components of architecture, and it was therefore necessary to return to this distribution of tasks. Gropius wanted to see the basis for such a Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) in craft, which, unlike art, could be taught and learned; he describes the artist as an “exalted craftsman.” Finally, at the end of this short text comes the challenge: “Let us desire, conceive, and create the new building of the future together. It will combine architecture, sculpture, and painting in a single form, and will one day rise towards the heavens from the hands of a million workers as the crystalline symbol of a new and coming faith.” The manner in which Gropius imagined the implementation of these goals is explained by the subsequent program: craft training, organization into workshops, collective projects of all students and teachers with the long-term aim of turning this “kindred spirit” into a “unified work of art” (Einheitskunstwerk). The idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk that Gropius refers to in the manifesto and program is derived from the Romantic period. In the years before World War I, this idea was reinvigorated by the architect Bruno Taut, and after 1918 disseminated by the Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Workers’ Council for Art) that Taut had founded. The protagonists of the Arbeitsrat, however, all had quite different expectations concerning the future architecture that should be constructed collectively by painters, sculptors, and architects. Taut was primarily interested in the aesthetic effect resulting from the interaction of the different art forms; he dreamt of a building whose task would consist entirely of satisfying desires—whether of a religious or a social nature. The art critic Adolf Behne, director of the Arbeitsrat and a convinced socialist, on the other hand, saw the Gesamtkunstwerk in political terms. He hoped that the collaboration among artists and craftsmen would bring about a new sense of community and eventually contribute to the abolition of class division. Gropius, for his part, attached particular importance to the leading role of “all-encompassing architecture,” which was supposed to provide the framework for the other arts, and he equally emphasized the importance of craft as an indispensable condition of all artistic activity. Nevertheless, despite these differences, there was general agreement that the historical model for the future Gesamtkunstwerk should be the Gothic cathedral. There is hardly a contribution to this debate that does not attest to this model: an absolute, pure work of art emerging from the medieval guilds in which artists and craftsmen collaborated, and which was borne by the religious feelings of a whole people. Even Gropius made a reference to the “miracle of the Gothic cathedral” when he presented an early version of the Bauhaus manifesto in an Arbeitsrat publication in the spring of 1919. Here, as the “ultimate aim of art,” he named the “creative conception of the cathedral of the future, which will again be everything in one form, architecture and sculpture and painting.” Therefore, it is all the more astonishing that such references should be missing from the prospectus that he wrote shortly afterward. Looking back, Gropius now speaks vaguely of “once,” and looks forward to the “new architecture of the future, that will be everything in one form.” Clearly he is attempting to find a wording that would allow a number of

31

Our Game. Our Party. Our Work | Rudolf Lutz | 1:0.55

Literature Behne 1980. Gropius 1919. Gropius 1980. Hahn 1998. Knoblauch/Feininger 1917. Ness 1975. Taut 1913. Taut 1919.

original Title: Unser Spiel. Unser Fest. Unsere Arbeit year of execution: 1919 Material: ink and colored tissue paper on cardboard format: 32.6 x 59.7 cm loaned by: Klassik Stiftung Weimar, KK 10282

Our Game. Our Party. Our Work Rudolf Lutz

Prof. Dr. Magdalena Bushart is a professor with the Institute for History and Art History of the Technical University of Berlin.

C 0 M 22 Y 100 K 0

32

I the spirit—in art.” Even if he continued to feel a sense of deep loyalty to the Bauhaus founder, he increasingly withdrew from the work of building up the school, focusing on his responsibilities in the printing workshop. Their collaboration finally came to an end in 1922, when Gropius issued the new principle of the unity between art and technology. “I see a new Gropi,” wrote Feininger, “and he is not very much to my taste.” Other colleagues from the Arbeitsrat also saw their hopes in the Bauhaus disappointed. For Bruno Taut, the new school was not utopian enough, for Adolf Behne, it was not political enough; both greatly mistrusted the dominance of the craft aspect. The first “total work of art” that was produced under the Bauhaus director, the Sommerfeld House (1920–21), then gave good cause for disappointment. Even if its depiction on the program for the topping out ceremony recalled Feininger’s Cathedral, the result was far from the lofty plans of the Bauhaus manifesto: a building with conventional ground plan and conventional interior design, in which sculpture and painting were merely a decorative addition.

35

In 1921, Lothar Schreyer and Oskar Schlemmer, the second shaven-headed master, take up the vacant positions of the “old” professors, who isolate themselves further in a separate art school in the same building. Schlemmer, who is friends with a dancer couple in Stuttgart, with whom, with his brother Carl, he put together a ballet, which later—also thanks to the Bauhaus publications— becomes known as the Triadic Ballet. He—who would have liked to become dancer, actor, musician, takes advantage of the free atmosphere at the Bauhaus to assemble his theater. He—who is later given the Bauhaus stage by Gropius at the new building in Dessau, will appear here as musical clown, will be master of ceremonies at the costume parties and choreographer of the “Bauhaus dances.” The students in 1919? Roughly two hundred “old” Weimar students of fine and applied art—including numerous blue-blooded daughters. But since the fall, new students from all parts of the German Reich and beyond, attracted by Gropius’s manifesto. These “apprentices” want to study “modern art” or architecture in Weimar, to later become “journeymen” with a thorough training in the craft of a well-designed new, great architecture. . . .

Our Game, Our Party, Our Work Weimar Bauhaus 1919 Jörg U. Lensing

Portrait of Rudolf Lutz wearing a Dadaist costume (photo: anonymous), 1921–22, photograph, 15.2 x 9.1 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

C 0 M 24 Y 100 K 0

34

A note on the studio door of the Bauhaus master Johannes Itten? Or on the notice board? A note for a “convivial evening” in Itten’s studio! Or a declaration of war on the old: the art for the rich? The young Bauhaus, emerging from the revolutionary activities in Germany in the after­ math of 1918, finds itself with three “modern” artists—the self-appointed masters—in the former arts and crafts school, the Grossherzoglich-Sächsische Kunstgewerbeschule, together with the old professors and art students of the former fine arts academy, the Grossherzoglich-Sächsische Hochschule für bildende Kunst. Lyonel Feininger’s Cathedral illustrating the cover of Walter Gropius’s April manifesto is programmatic: the Bauhaus, the idea of the medieval guilds updated to the modern period, put on a serious footing by the Henry van de Velde building in Weimar and the security of an art school establishment. 1919—what new spirit is blowing through Weimar? The Empire is lost and with it the duchies and principalities. There is still no state of Thuringia, but numerous towns— including the free state Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. The worker and soldier councils emerging from the revolution of 1918 have already faced a massive backlash of Conservatives, German-nationalists, and bourgeois Social Democrats, strengthened in Weimar by the old officialdom of the state capital Weimar. From February to the end of September, the Weimar National Theater—a few minutes by foot from the Bauhaus—has become the seat of the National Assembly which will give the new Republic a constitution, heavily guarded by the Reichswehr (“Maercker troops”) and Prussian security police. The Republic is born on November 9, 1918, although it still lacks the constitution to be decided in Weimar. At the end of 1919, it becomes the “tolerably democratic Weimar Republic.” The Golden Twenties are calling. . . . 1919—still five years before Weimar no longer wants its Bauhaus, before the National Socialists and Conservatives, with the abstention of the Social Democrats, finally vote against Gropius and his idea of an experimental art school in the city council. It is still a few years before the external struggles also become internal struggles and the power constellations decide against the “cathedral of socialism” and for “Art and technology—a new unity.” It is still four to five years before the departure of the first Bauhaus “journeymen” and the first generation of masters—including Johannes Itten—feel forced out by the new appointments. The masters? In the beginning: Walter Gropius, Lyonel Feininger, Gerhard Marcks, and of course Itten. Alongside these, the “old” art professors, who, after Gropius’s harsh criticism of their studio works shown in June 1919, strongly and openly reject the new director, his worker and art council ideas, and his “masters.” Itten, the master of the preliminary course, the man who, starting in October, teaches the eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty-year-olds the fundamentals of looking, and how to deal with color and form, is a “modern.” He rejects the traditional meat dishes of Thuringia in favor of a vegetarian Mazdaznan diet. This young, rather esoteric-looking monk with a shaven head and his own personal studio aura is already a controversial figure among the “apprentices,” particularly the older students. Some feel violated by his strict schoolmasterly style. Others worship him, and later also become followers of Mazdaznan. A few shaven-headed monks even design cowls. Are these curious art-monks tolerated in Weimar? Do they feel at home?

Rudolf Lutz, Utopia, ca. 1922, ­collage, 29.2 x 21.1 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Weimar Bauhaus artists in the doorway (photo: anonymous), 1921–23, gelatin silver print, 11.1 x 8.2 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Lyonel Feininger, postcard for the lantern festival on June 21, 1922, lithograph, 9.6 x 14.1 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Woman with Infant | Gerhard Marcks | 1:4.367

original Title: Frau mit Säugling year of execution: 1919 Material: limewood, gold plate format: 50 x 49.5 x 13 cm loaned by: Gerhard-Marcks-Stiftung, Bremen photo: Hartwig Klappert, 2009

Jörg U. Lensing (born 1960) is a composer and director. He holds a professorship for sound design at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Dortmund and is Artistic Director of the Theaters der Klänge in Dusseldorf.

Woman with Infant Gerhard Marcks C 0 M 27 Y 100 K 0

36

Those who stay after the upheavals of the years 1919–20 are the nucleus of the program­ matically­ordained greater parties, greater works, and greater games. It is still four years before the first great exhibition with parties and theater evenings. There is still time before the costume parties that attract a large international public. The students of the first year at the Weimar Bauhaus get to know each other. Among them also the students of the 1900s such as Kurt Schmidt or Georg Teltscher, who in 1924–25 will be in the first year to graduate, thus assuring themselves a place in posterity. The Bauhaus publishes the ideas and results of the first years, including numerous painted fantasies for a new theater. What influences lead to a “mechanical ballet,” to the later formal games with moving geometrical and colored objects? What process leads to blue, red, yellow in circles, triangles, and squares? Let’s look at the design of the note Our Game. Our Party. Our Work. A convivial or an antagonistic evening in Itten’s studio? On the walls the first works. 1919—still a small circle. There are many discussions. Everything is in a process of becoming, and everyone wants a say. Those who don’t want this among the students head south to Italy, France, Spain. Those who don’t want this among the old professors start intrigues against Gropius and his three masters with the rest of the citizenry in local pubs. There must have been music at these studio parties. No need to engage musicians. The apprentices play for themselves, of course! Hence, the unusual line-ups. Why not accordion and snare drum with trumpet and cello? Or a “wild” rhythm with pounding chairs, starter pistol, harmonica, and rhythm spoons on the tabletop? This later becomes a jazz band playing engagements throughout the whole German Reich as a dance combo: the Bauhaus Band. In 1919: Gropius, Itten and his preliminary course, Marcks, and Feininger—here we have the nucleus of the later great success of this institution, which in the end only existed for fourteen years in three places, under three directors. Many of the nameless apprentices of these first years contributed significantly to the success of this idea, one that combines the desire to do something new with the idea of a collective, the idea of an applied art for a broader class spectrum. What was painted, formed, and built in the first Bauhaus year, is not so well known. The works made later—based on this—much more. Did this help the generation of 1919? A few—whose names are still associated with the Bauhaus—certainly. A few not at all, since the works that they made at the Bauhaus were held up to public derision after 1933 as examples of “degenerate art.” A few were forgotten, but their ideas and student works live on, not least due to the determined promotional efforts of Walter Gropius.

39

Expression of Original Questions of Being The Sculptor Gerhard Marcks Jürgen Fitschen

Gerhard Marcks, Stehender Junge (Boy Standing), ca. 1924, brass, height 68 cm, Kulturhistorisches Museum Rostock

C 0 M 29 Y 100 K 0

38

In later years, when he had already developed his mature style, the sculptor Gerhard Marcks confessed that he had once occasionally paid tribute to “other gods,” which in fact provides quite a fitting description of his early work, which is characterized by a fairly wide-ranging formal language. Marcks grew up in Berlin in constant contact with the sculpture of the departing nineteenth and the incoming twentieth century. In 1907, through his acquaintance with the older Richard Scheibe, he was introduced to sculpture, which he then continued to develop in an autodidactic way. His first works show the influence of Georg Kolbe as well as a keen interest in the naturalistic animal sculptures of August Gaul. Even if Marcks later occasionally came back to the animal as a subject, his fascination for the human form had a formative and determining effect on his work. His first success came early on with commissions secured for him by Walter Gropius at the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne. Afterward, Marcks served in World War I, fell seriously ill, and was finally discharged in 1916. After a protracted convalescence, it was already clear that Marcks was interested in a new way of working. The years in which he was active at the Berlin Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Art) (1918) and as master of form in the famous Bauhaus pottery workshop in Dornburg, Thuringia, belonged to a period in which many sculptors were driven by the desire for a new kind of sculpture beyond the traditional schools. After being appointed to the Weimar Bauhaus by Gropius, and thus finding himself in relative personal security in the otherwise troubled and turbulent 1920s, Marcks set about a series of experiments drawing on a range of influences. It is in this period that Marcks’s wood sculptures, which are now particularly scarce, were made. At first, wood played a role for totally practical reasons: it was cheap and easy to obtain and could be adequately worked with almost anywhere. However, at the time, there was also a general interest in the sculpture of the German Late Middle Ages. Admiration for what were viewed as the ethical qualities of the craft traditions behind the sculptures of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries led to a general reevaluation of wood sculpture. This was born largely from vague social and romantic ideas and expressed the enormous skepticism of the war generation concerning the inhospitable conditions in the aftermath of the war. In the works made during this period, Marcks achieved a level of abstraction that he would never repeat. Although he was often associated with late Expressionism, the artist himself tended to distance himself from this movement. In 1921 he wrote to Richard Fromme: “The combination of the objective and architecture, life and eternity is my idea. As far as I’m concerned, it cannot be ‘objective’ enough—unlike the Expressionists—and I think that this is the bridge over which the pure layman also finds his way to art.” Once Marcks had decided upon wood as a sculptural material, the preparatory drawings also changed. It seems that even as he was drawing from the model, Marcks was already thinking about how he would arrange the figure in the most general summarizing forms. The advantage of wood over other sculptural materials consisted in the possibility of arranging the slanting (descending and ascending) forms easily and simply in space. This corresponded to his intention of no longer making traditional standing figures but to produce an artistic transcription of human states and emotions through the positioning of the figure and the arrangement of individual parts alone. Drawings and wood figures such as Woman with Infant clearly show how Marcks intended to go about his task—for example, by totally exploiting the limitations of the surface of

Architecture with window | Paul Klee | 1:2.689

Literature Busch 1977, p. 249. Fitschen 2001, pp. 53–64. Rudloff 1989, pp. 28–53.

original Title: Architectur m. d. Fenster year of execution: 1919 Material: oil paint and pen on paper and wood format: 50 x 41.5 cm loaned by: Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, B7

Architecture with window Paul Klee

Dr. Jürgen Fitschen (born 1965), an art historian, is Director of the Gerhard-Marcks-Haus in Bremen.

C 0 M 31 Y 100 K 0

40

the relief (even “squeezing” the figure in, to some extent)—and how he attempted to give expression to ideas of affection and rejection, birth and death using simple formal means. This led him to subjects that could adequately express the original questions of being. Throughout the history of art, this has always included the motif of mother and child. In Marcks’s case, the interest in this subject was undoubtedly also inspired by the birth of his first two children, Herbert and Brigitte, although it primarily has a symbolic significance and appears frequently in the first decades of the twentieth century—not only in Marcks’s work. His treatment of this theme is documented in numerous studies. The relief Woman with Infant was made in 1919 and remained in the possession of the artist until at least 1933. After his departure from the Bauhaus during the move to Dessau and his appointment at the Kunstgewerbeschule Burg Giebichenstein in Halle an der Saale, he took it with him to Halle. Here it remained in private hands even after Marcks’s forced dismissal by the Nazis from his post in Halle and his return to Berlin. After the end of World War II, it was saved from destruction by the painter Albert Ebert, and shortly afterward acquired by Charles Crodel, who was a close friend of Gerhard Marcks and active until the end of 1951 at Burg Giebichenstein. Crodel finally gave it back to the artist. After the founding of the Gerhard-Marcks-Stiftung in 1969, it found a new home in the Gerhard-Marcks-Haus in Bremen as a gift of the artist.

exhibition­in the Berlin gallery Der Sturm: “Only now is art propelled again toward the balanced totality of the seed, with everything arising anew from its very foundations, slowly, with imperturbable purity—all the way to the resplendent architecture of the cathedral.” It is understandable, then, that Behne (as he wrote in his 1919 book Die Wie­ derkehr der Kunst [The Return of Art]), had discovered “in the paintings of the Cubists,” in particular those of Klee, “a greater hope that the aim, unity, will be attained, and in the art form that is called upon to lead, namely architecture.” In 1919–20, Klee responded to such hopes with a variety of paintings containing architectural fantasies suggestive of the utopian architectural projects that were especially popular in the Arbeitsrat für Kunst. The brick constructions often integrated by Klee into such images, as in Architecture with window, were almost ironically opposed to the reality of the immediate postwar situation: in the second publication of the Arbeitsrat, Behne wrote: “Coal shortages, and hence brick shortages, lack of cement, lack of glass. Shortages are the only thing in abundant supply.” Remarkable too is the fact that Klee often gave his imaginary buildings bright coloration, anticipating the polychromy architecture that would be realized in Magdeburg by Bruno Taut in the early 1920s. Seen in this historical context, Klee’s choice of this image for the Bauhaus catalogue of 1923 becomes comprehensible. Apparently, the painting was a kind of legitimation of Klee’s presence in the Bauhaus faculty. In 1922, Gropius, together with Fred Forbat, designed a Bauhaus housing colony, its buildings consisting of elementary forms like squares, triangles, and rectangles, and generating combinations by varying these forms. The Cubist Klee anticipated such building methods in his imagery, an exemplary instance of this being Architecture with window. According to Klaus-Jürgen Winkler, Gropius’s idea of the “modular building system” marked the “turning point from the architect’s early Romantic period toward the rational industrial age.” Between 1919 and 1922, incidentally, Klee was intensively preoccupied with the window motif, an interest often explained in connection with the window paintings of Robert Delaunay and with Romantic conceptions of the image as a view through a window. The oil painting Das Fenster (The Window; 1922, 140), begun by Klee already in 1920 and completed two years later, marks the transition from the Cubist-style compositions to the so-called square painting, composed of colored rectangular fields, which Klee produced beginning in 1923, and whose later architectonic correlate is found in the glass façade of the Dessau Bauhaus building. By publishing the picture Architecture with window in the exhibition catalogue, Klee presumably also wanted to assert his position as a “productive artist,” as he referred to himself, that is to say, as a market-oriented painter. Otherwise, he would not have singled out this painting, which had already been acquired by Koehler, a well-known collector. A private gallery of sorts, Koehler’s apartment served during the early 1920s as a kind of informal center of the Berlin art scene. Conversely, the program of the Bauhaus aspired to put an end to the isolation of modern art as commodities to be exhibited and collected, instead integrating it into the larger society. Later, around 1927–28, Klee returned to the brick constructions in lectures delivered at the Dessau Bauhaus. He introduced the concept of “facture” in the framework of his “teaching of division”: “Facture is: when a unity of articulated division coincides with a treatment of the hand, for example stone by stone; . . . with us creators, it is as a rule question of

Klee’s Architectural Fantasies and the Bauhaus Idea The Painting Architecture with window Osamu Okuda

43

Paul Klee, Das Fenster (The Window), 1922, oil on cardboard, 57.8 x 38.7 cm, Kazumasa Katsuta, Gallery K. AG, Switzerland

C 0 M 33 Y 100 K 0

42

For a publication accompanying the Bauhaus exhibition which took place in Weimar in 1923 from August 15 to September 30, Paul Klee chose to set the oil painting Architecture with window alongside his latest work, Schauspieler (Actor; 1923, 27). Klee’s intention in juxtaposing these works, with their themes of the theater and architecture, has been elucidated in detail by a number of authors in connection with his stance toward the program of the Bauhaus. This article examines Architecture with window in the historical context of the “Räterevolution” (November Revolution) in Munich and of the early period of the Weimar Bauhaus. It is clear that in choosing this work, Klee was reflecting on his activities as an instructor at the Bauhaus, whose ultimate aim (as stated in the founding manifesto of 1919) was “the building.” Although he produced numerous other works on architectural themes during the early 1920s, Klee seems to have accorded special priority to reproducing this painting (which had not been previously exhibited or published) at the moment when the school mounted its first presentation addressed to a general public. The motive for Klee’s retrospectively oriented strategy was probably connected to the fact that the picture had been executed at a decisive historical moment, and one moreover indirectly related to the establishment of the Bauhaus. In the spring of 1919, Klee had been culturally and politically active in Munich as a member of the Council of Visual Artists and the Action Committee of Revolutionary Artists. After the defeat of the Bavarian Soviet Republic, he fled to Switzerland on June 11, where he spent the summer. Only after his return to Munich was it “time to get back to work again,” as he wrote in a letter to his sister. The painting Architecture with window was probably executed at this time. Klee sold it in September of the same year for the impressive sum of fifteen hundred German marks to the Berlin art collector Bernhard Koehler, a patron of the Blaue Reiter group. Produced just a few months after the Bauhaus was founded, this work reflected openly on contemporary discussions of the new role of architecture, an urgent cultural-political concern beginning in late 1918, in particular in the Berlin Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Workers’ Council for Art). In May of 1919, recalling the failed November Revolution in Munich, Klee wrote in a letter to Alfred Kubin: “We would have been able to transmit the results of our inventive activities to the mass of the people. This new art could have permeated handicraft technique, generating a great efflorescence. For the academies no longer existed, just schools for craftsmen.” As Otto Karl Werckmeister has assumed, it is likely that when writing this letter, Klee was already familiar with the founding manifesto of the Bauhaus, which was published in April 1919. In it, Walter Gropius emphasized “craftmanship”: “architects, painters, sculptors, we must all return to crafts.” With the words “a great efflorescence,” Klee was probably thinking of the “great building” referred to in the following sentence from the manifesto “the ultimate if also distant aim of the Bauhaus is the unified work of art: the great building . . .” Interestingly, the idea of a future art of building was often linked to notions of vegetal growth. Gropius, for example, who led the Arbeitsrat für Kunst beginning in March of 1919, concluded the article “Der neue Baugedanke” (“The New Idea of Building”) published in April 1919, with the words: “Lord of art, which builds on desert gardens, causing wonders to tower up into the heavens.” And Adolf Behne, then active alongside Gropius as secretary of the Arbeitsrat, wrote in 1917 in a review of a Klee

C 0 M 36 Y 100 K 0

Osamu Okuda (born 1951) is an academic consultant at the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. Klee 1927–28.

Saarbrücken 2006.

Werckmeister 1989.

Winkler 1993.

The Reichstag election makes the SPD (Socialists) Germany’s strongest party.

Gropius 1919.

Women’s suffrage is achieved in the United States.

Robert Wiene, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Behne 1919.

1920

Founding of the NSDAP (Nazi Party) at the Hofbräuhaus in Munich

Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier found the journal L’Esprit nouveau.

The first jazz LPs appear on the German market.

Spectral analysis provides initial evidence concerning the atmospheres of stars.

Baumgartner 2006.

World War I is formally ended by the Treaty of Versailles between the German Reich and the Allies.

Erich Mendelsohn, Einstein Tower

The so-called Bubikopf (Eton crop) hairstyle comes into fashion.

Arbeitsrat für Kunst 1920.

POLITICS

CULTURE 

MODERN LIFE

44 manufacture[:]­of the trace of small artisanal actions of the hand, of the trace generated by the handicraft treatment.” In view of the growing marginalization of fine art at the Dessau Bauhaus, with its orientation toward industry and modern technology, Klee’s commitment here to “manufacture” resembles an ironic recourse to the school’s founding manifesto, at whose center stood the self-assertion of the producing artist. Literature

C 0 M 38 Y 100 K 0

Max Krehan and Gerhard Marcks become heads of the ceramics workshop in Dornburg.

Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer are appointed masters.

Establishment of a course for women

Georg Muche becomes master of form for the sculpture workshop and the bookbindery.

Bauhaus Housing Settlement, Draft Plan | Walter Determann | 1: 2.764

“Building!   is the demand of the hour, building in the spiritual as well as in the material sense, the two being indivisible. . . . Minds gifted with clarity and foresight must free the countless busily occupied individuals from their boundless isolation and gather them together on the strength of the idea to new communities of labor and living.” Walter Gropius 1920

The first Bauhaus evenings take place. Reading by Else Lasker-Schüler, lecture by Bruno Taut, concerts with music by Johann Sebastian Bach, Max Reger, and others.

59

CITATION

EVENTS

TEACHING

Students

1920 78

year of execution: 1920

Material: opaque paint on tracing paper

scale: 1 : 1000

format: 66 x 50 cm

loaned by: Klassik Stiftung Weimar, L 1515/gift of Determann

Draft Plan for a Bauhaus Housing Settlement in Weimar, Layout Walter Determann

49

everyday life. The preparatory school for children, a swimming pool, and a large estate with administrative buildings are located inside the gate in the entrance area. The entire urban architectural composition is dominated by an axis along which the dining and communal building that marks the boundary of the entrance area is situated. Behind it is the trapezoid-shaped open-air theater, which could also serve as a sports arena. The central monument, the “Bauhaus Symbol,” stands on the stage terrace—a crystal on a heptagonal pedestal. Its flamelike rays fan outward in several directions. Smaller triangular prisms in four fountains echo the theme of “glass” in a different spatial hierarchy. The light towers add the final touch to the treatment of this theme. The architectural highlight is the “Administration, Festival, and Exhibition Building” which, with its three-part tower architecture and folded-roof landscape, frames the space and was to appear in vivid yellow. The residential development consists of four-family houses that form staggered rows along the edges of the trapezoidal courtyard, as well as block-style guest and housing units for unmarried residents in the northern section. The workshops are located behind the family homes in an angular arrangement. The metal casting shop and the kilns for glass and clay goods occupy prominent positions near the entrance in the eastern block. The central heating plant and an indoor swimming pool are positioned across from them. The shapes of the roofs in the model exhibit Expressionist features composed of pointed and triangular folds as well as voluminous mansard roofs. The community is conceived as

Building an Ideal Community Plan for a Bauhaus Housing Settlement by Walter Determann Klaus-Jürgen Winkler

Model of a Bauhaus settlement in Weimar (photo: anonymous), 1920, photograph, 13 x 18 cm, Klassik Stiftung Weimar

C 0 M 40 Y 100 K 0

48

This plan for a Bauhaus housing settlement drafted during the latter half of 1920, and supplemented by drawings, a large model, and a three-dimensional building study, is characteristic of the early Bauhaus years and may be regarded as a first contribution to the concept of the “large building”—the “cathedral of the future”—propagated as a goal in the Bauhaus program. It is a student project, however, and its fresh, conceptual approach is unburdened by formal constraints and articulated in an unprofessional style. Director Walter Gropius had called upon Bauhaus students and teachers to develop ideas on the subject. The response to his appeal is not documented, and only this proposal has survived. The study, in which considerable effort was evidently invested in presentation, was surely discussed at the time. Although its impact was presumably negligible, it does reflect a current of thought that was probably influenced by the Expressionist movement that emerged during the postwar crisis and by the unique aspects of the new beginning to which the Bauhaus program was devoted. Walter Determann, a master student at the Grossherzoglich-Sächsischen Kunsthochschule (Grand Ducal-Saxon Academy of Fine Arts), encountered a new situation that offered him an opportunity to pursue new directions in his training as an artist after World War I and the founding of the Bauhaus. He shifted his attention from landscape painting to building and practical design and attended the first course in architecture for Bauhaus students at the Staatliche Baugewerkenschule Weimar (State Architecture School), where he became acquainted with basic principles of architectural design. He formed a small working group for whose accomplishments he received an award from Gropius in 1919. In this context he was concerned with furniture design for a mass audience: modular elements for a live-in kitchen, models for cupboards, tables, and chairs, colorful and rustic, designed in a dignified bourgeois style. The next major exercise was to draft plans for a Bauhaus settlement located on a site known as “Am Horn,” east of Weimar’s Ilm park, which he chose in consultation with Gropius Architects. He positioned log-cabin-type block buildings in a loosely structured arrangement. In keeping with medieval concepts, these buildings were to accommodate working and living groups under separate hipped roofs. This first idea for the Bauhaus settlement concept fell short of professional standards. Gropius expressed dissatisfaction with the results achieved to date and called for new proposals for a future Bauhaus settlement in the fall of 1920. Walter Determann once again set about to draft plans, this time for a plot of land south of Weimar called the Belvederer Berg, and took up a planning idea expressed by Walter Gropius in a letter to Ernst Hardt, director of the Deutsches Nationaltheater in Weimar, as early as April 1914: “I imagine a large community taking shape around the Belvederer Berg, with a center consisting of houses for the people, theaters, a music hall and, finally, a church building.” If his hope was to create a large urban satellite, Determann’s plan was relatively modest. He confined the complex to a developed area comprising about nineteen hectares and housing for some three hundred and thirty people which would be literally framed like a tableau in the shape of a hexagonal coat of arms. The location on the Belvederer Berg was an abstraction from topographic reality; only the orientation of the gate leading to Buchfahrt suggests an area to the south. The plan is a wholly theatrical interpretation of the ideal of a self-sufficient, monastery-style Bauhaus community. The gateway to the outside world opens on the narrow side; a wall with light towers at its corners encloses the whole. Consideration is given to many important functions of

Walter Determann, draft plan for a Bauhaus housing settlement in Weimar, administration, festival and exhibition building, two views, 1920, 1920, watercolor and ink over

graphite on paper, 62.7 x 79.5 cm, Klassik Stiftung Weimar, gift of Determann

Sommerfeld House | Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer | 1:1.045

Literature Jaeggi 2003. Meyer/Goetz-Hardt 1975. Milan 1997. Pehnt 1998. Siebenbrodt 2000. Weimar 1972. Winkler 1993. Winkler 1994. Winkler 2003.

year of execution: 1920–21 (construction), 1922 (photo) Material: gelatin silver print, photograph of the entrance façade format: 17.8 x 23.9 cm loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 6155/2

Sommerfeld House, Berlin, Entrance Façade Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer

Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Klaus-Jürgen Winkler (born 1943) is an architect and a professor emeritus of architectural preservation and architectural history at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. C 0 M 42 Y 100 K 0

50

a unified whole; building structures and the surfaces of the public squares are furnished with ornamental structures that complement the ground plan to form a complete figure. This work is, after all, a color drawing by a gifted painter, and its symmetrical composition and graphic character reflect the influence of a uniform concept of order. Even the print is rendered in an Expressionist style. Determann was guided by several different ideas which combined the symbolic with ­the functional. At the heart of the complex stands the Bauhaus Symbol, a radiant crystal. Here, he was inspired by Scheerbart’s enthusiasm for glass, which Bruno Taut expressed with his Glass Pavilion at the Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne in 1914. As a building material, glass, which Gropius described as the material of the future as opposed to wood, advanced to become the symbol of the Bauhaus. Yet it was surely not the buil­ ding material alone, but rather the vision of a new spirit of clarity and purity, that is expressed with such pathos, in keeping with the Bauhaus program, which foresaw the cathedral as the most radiant work of the community. In the formal terms of architectural design, Determann sought to incorporate medieval principles of proportion—triangulation and circle geometry—as demonstrated in the plan for the façades. In doing so, he constructed the corner points in the elevation of the building masses, as if obliged to subject everything to a spiritual order. Here, we recognize the influence of theories advanced by Walter ­Gropius, and especially by Adolf Meyer, which also played a role in general architectural theory after the turn of the century—theories taught by Johannes Lauweriks and adopted as tools or design by both Petrus Berlage and Peter Behrens. The idea of a community with a theater and a sports arena originated in ancient Greece, but it is expressed here in a modern interpretation within the context of the reform movement. It is quite probable that Determann was inspired in part by Henry van de Velde’s design for the huge Nietzsche­ monument near Weimar (1911–12). Van de Velde’s architecture, with its freely formed building volumes and massive, sculptured roofs, also presumably served as a model for a number of architectural forms. And Determann could likewise draw from the sound architectural theories taught by master architect Ernst Schumann at the Baugewerkeschule in Weimar, with which he had become acquainted somewhat earlier. Thus this design combines many influences from the intellectual world of the early Bauhaus period and concentrates them in a visionary concept that was surely no more than an exercise. Adolf Meyer also worked on a plan for the Belvederer Berg with a group of students, but no drawings for that project have survived. Real planning for the “Am Horn” area did not actually get underway until 1922, when the Bauhaus-Siedlungsgenossenschaft (Bauhaus Housing Settlement Society) was founded. In the troubled economic situation of the postwar years, however, it was impossible to raise the necessary funds for realization of such a project. Only the experimental Haus Am Horn remains as a reminder of efforts to plan a community in Weimar, which began with such a spirit of euphoria. Following this brief flirt with architecture, which came to an end soon afterward, Determann decided to pursue a career as a painter.

porch and the corrugated profile of the stained glass windows set into the bay above it make only small nods toward contemporary fashion. The choice of material, unusual for the Berlin suburbs, was as much a matter of necessity as aesthetics. The client Adolf Sommerfeld, who was involved in both the lumber and the construction business, supplied the material. “Wood,” Gropius declared in 1920, “is the material of the present.” The Sommerfeld House, which was destroyed in World War II, was neither a radical departure from Gropius’s earlier work nor, as the comfortable if not necessarily luxurious villa of a successful industrialist, the fulfillment of a socialist dream. Like Gropius and Meyer’s administration building for the model factory at the Werkbund Exhibition held in Cologne in 1914, the house was infused with admiration for Frank Lloyd Wright, whose Wasmuth portfolio the architects frequently consulted while designing it. Its Prairie Style horizontality is considerably exaggerated in the classic photograph, taken from a very low angle from which the height of the roof is imperceptible. Instead the image emphasizes the overhangs of the porch roof, the first floor (supported on projecting beams), and especially the roof. While Wright himself seldom built them, timber houses were clearly recognized in Berlin as specifically American. An earlier example, Alfred Messel’s villa in the suburb of Wannsee for Ferdinand Springer of 1901, was closely modeled on the Shingle Style work of an earlier generation of innovative American architects, most notably Henry Hobson Richardson. For Gropius, whose prewar factories had been infused by an admiration for the primitivism of American industrial architecture, the log cabin was an appropriate point of departure for a new German architecture, one that returned to essentials without quoting outmoded historical sources. Two further aspects of the house are intertwined with his aspirations for the Bauhaus. Although the commission was entrusted to his private architectural firm, the Sommerfeld House became the first laboratory for the integration of arts and crafts posited in the Bauhaus manifesto. Here talented artists trained as craftsmen, thus gaining the “base in handicrafts” “essential to every artist,” in which Gropius had declared that “the original source of creativity lies.” Dörte Helm and Marcel Breuer designed furnishings, while Joost Schmidt contributed decorative paneling to the front doors and the stair hall, and Josef Albers designed the stained glass windows that filled the bay over the front door. In these last two cases, abstract ornament clearly influenced by Theo van Doesburg’s presence in Weimar as well as Johannes Itten’s preliminary course filled carefully delineated spaces. De Stijl and Constructivism were beginning by this time to challenge Expressionism as the dominant aesthetic at the school, although the reverence for the machine that would be introduced in 1923 is still entirely absent in these purely geometrical exercises. Often ignored in discussions of the Bauhaus is the degree to which Gropius intended private patronage to help support his experimental school. Like arts and crafts reformers of the previous generation such as Hermann Muthesius, Josef Maria Olbrich, and Henry van de Velde, he argued that design education would benefit the local economy, not least by making its goods more competitive in the national and international marketplace. He also believed that industrialists would underwrite the school’s activities, thus diminishing its dependence upon state subsidies and, by extension, partisan politics. This constituted a major break with the way in which design education had been heretofore funded in Germany, where, as with professional training in art and architecture, it had been supported by local governments—often, as in Darmstadt and Weimar, at the instigation of individual

52

The Sommerfeld House in the Berlin suburb of Dahlem, designed in 1920 and completed the following year, remains the canonical example of the impact upon Walter Gropius of the climate of Expressionist architectural experiment in which the Bauhaus was born. As the first building Gropius and his partner Adolf Meyer erected after Gropius became director of the new school, it contained the first hint of the possible appearance of the “single form” that he concluded in the Bauhaus manifesto of 1919 would “rise towards the heavens from the hands of a million workers as the crystalline symbol of a new and coming faith.” It dates to the period when Gropius participated in Die Gläserne Kette (The Glass Chain). This group of architects exchanged letters, often accompanied by highly fantastical drawings, like those they had exhibited at the Ausstellung für unbekannte Architekten (Exhibition for Unknown Architects), organized by the Arbeitsrat für Kunst, of which Gropius was a founding member, in Berlin in 1919. The exhibit marked the crest of the wave of German Expressionist architecture; its association with the Arbeitsrat, a workers’ council for artists established in the immediate aftermath of the November Revolution, ensured the association of its typically crystalline forms with left-wing politics. The challenges for the architects who dabbled in Expressionism included how to imbue actual buildings with the spirit of their extremely imaginative drawings and how to build at all in a climate of economic scarcity. The graphic representation of the Sommerfeld House which accompanied the announcement of the festival for its topping out ceremony, held in December 1920, is more Expressionist than the building it describes; the artist has resorted to framing the building in inventive atmospheric effects in order to establish the appropriate tone. As shown in photographs, however, the triangular piers flanking the

Expressionism and Experiment The Sommerfeld House Kathleen James-Chakraborty C 0 M 44 Y 100 K 0

Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer, Sommerfeld House, Berlin, 1920–21, photograph of the garden side, 1922, 18.0 x 23.9 cm, BauhausArchiv Berlin

Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer (plan), Carl Fieger (drawing), vestibule in the Sommerfeld House, Berlin, 1920, charcoal and pastel chalk on paper, 33.7 x 21.9 cm, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau

53

Program for the topping out ceremony for the Sommerfeld House, Berlin, 1920, lithograph, 76 x 26.3 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Viaduct | Lyonel Feininger | 1:5.245

Literature Franciscono 1971. Gropius 1920. Isaacs 1983–84. Pehnt 1998.

original Title: Viadukt year of execution: 1920 Material: oil on canvas format: 110.9 x 85.7 cm loaned by: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 259.1944 P&S, acquired with the legacy of Lillie P. Bliss

Viaduct Lyonel Feininger

Prof. Dr. Kathleen JamesChakraborty (born 1960), an art historian, is Head of the School of Art History and Cultural Policy at University College in Dublin. C 0 M 47 Y 100 K 0

54

princes. Gropius was not alone in this regard. Another Expressionist monument designed in 1920 on the outskirts of Berlin, Erich Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower in Potsdam, an observatory and laboratory for relativity-related research, was financed through a similar mix of public and private money. Sommerfeld (1886–1964) was typical of the men who supported the Weimar Republic’s privatized cultural infrastructure and the modern architecture in which it was typically housed. Although he declined to build the commercial center Gropius also designed for him in 1920, he commissioned a four-family house for his staff from the firm as well as his own villa. He donated the money with which the Haus Am Horn was constructed in Weimar in 1923 and with which Gropius in 1925 established Bauhaus GmbH to produce products designed at the school, and he was involved in the development in the Berlin suburb of Zehlendorf of Onkel Toms Hütte, a housing estate designed in part by Bruno Taut. His wife Renée accompanied the Gropiuses on a study tour to the United States in 1928, which he helped fund. A Jew, he left Berlin in 1933 for Palestine, where he was temporarily nearly penniless, and England, but then returned after the war to assist in the city’s rebuilding. The Sommerfeld House provided Gropius with a convenient opportunity to engage Wright and American primitivism—by no means the same thing, even from the perspective of Berlin—as well as contemporary German Expressionism. It also served as a place to experiment with how newer, specifically European forms of abstraction could be integrated into architecture. Finally, it accomplished all this while housing one of the Bauhaus’s most supportive patrons in a fitting showcase of his taste for modern art and architecture.

An Architectonics of Light Lyonel Feininger’s Viaduct Charles Werner Haxthausen

57

Lyonel Feininger, Marine, 1919, oil on canvas, 63 x 75 cm, Sammlung Alfred Hoh, Fürth

C 0 M 49 Y 100 K 0

56

he found in Cubism that “which I had already, entirely intuitively, striven after for years.” Yet, in the same letter Feininger suggested that if his manner of painting must have a name, then better “Prism-ism” than “Cubism,” and this term reveals the centrality of the experience of light in his version of the style. In Viaduct, negative, light-filled spaces take on the solidity of architecture; one can no longer speak of solids and voids. This can be seen most vividly in the treatment of the blue-green shapes between the arches: while clearly denoting the sky, they appear not as a ground seen through the viaduct, but as discrete solid shapes that seem to fill the spaces between the vertical supports. Each of these shapes is of a slightly different hue, which disrupts our sense of continuum in the sky; further, they are modulated, the color growing more saturated as it moves toward the left of each shape, as if they were convex volumes. Above the viaduct the light assumes the form of a broad foreshortened plane that slices into the walls of the buildings on the periphery. There are further spatial oddities here that give this rigorous construction an air of the fantastic. In violation of normal spatial syntax, for example, the dark area of the lower section of the painting, partially illuminated only by a faint shaft of light from a small archway, seems, against all spatial logic, further recessed than does the luminous sky. In 1904, Paul Cézanne wrote to Émile Bernard that light does not exist for the painter; that he only interprets color sensations as light. For Feininger, however, light does exist, as a diaphanous substance apart from objects; its permeation of space assumes material form; it fills space as a crystalline presence. This is Feininger’s unique optic. Henri Matisse’s paintings from the Atelier rouge (1911) up to 1916 convey a similar experience of light as a space-filling substance, but for the French painter, it is analogous to the water in one of his goldfish bowls; for Feininger, it is a prism through which we perceive the world. The critic Theodor Däubler dubbed Feininger klarster Kristalliker, the most lucid of crystallists, among the Cubists. At this time the crystalline was a powerful idea within Expressionist architecture, most notably for Bruno Taut and his circle, Die Gläserne Kette (The Glass Chain). Gropius, too, embraced the image in his writings of these years, as in the Bauhaus manifesto, which he concluded with the exhortation to “create the new building of the future together. It will combine architecture, sculpture, and painting in a single form, and will one day rise towards the heavens from the hands of a million workers as the crystalline symbol of a new and coming faith.” The great synthesis of painting, sculpture, and architecture was never realized; the crystalline symbol remained a vision. By the time of its 1923 exhibition, the Bauhaus had embraced a new vision of synthesis, “Art and technology—a new unity,” a motto that Feininger passionately rejected as betraying a profound misjudgment about the nature of art. Meanwhile, the crystalline remained pervasive in his easel painting, in which, as in Viaduct, there was indeed a kind of synthesis of painting with architecture, but one in which the latter was “entirely subordinated to my formal requirements . . . avoiding all actuality.”

On March 13, 1919, Lyonel Feininger, then living in the Berlin suburb of Zehlendorf, wrote to his painter friend Alfred Kubin, expressing his fatigue with the city. He longed to get away to a nice small town and thought Weimar, which he knew well, would be ideal. A few weeks later Feininger got his wish: when Walter Gropius received approval to establish the Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar, he made Feininger his first faculty appointment. Even before Feininger began teaching in the graphics workshop, Gropius charged him with creating the illustration for the title page for the Bauhaus manifesto, which was printed and distributed widely at the end of April. Feininger’s famous woodcut, a visionary image of a radiant Gothic cathedral in Cubist style, exemplifies what might seem to be an apparent contradiction in his art. At the time, he was the preeminent Cubist painter in Germany, yet his motifs were overwhelmingly of quaint old small towns and villages—Zirchow and Gelmeroda, with their medieval churches, were particular favorites, motifs he returned to many times. Yet, years later, Feininger objected when the New York gallerist Curt Valentin wanted to title an exhibition of his pictures “Old Architecture.” The title would be misleading, Feininger wrote, because “whatever architecture I have ever painted was certainly never an accurate portrayal, but entirely subordinated to my formal requirements and avoiding all actuality.” In the Bauhaus manifesto, Gropius spoke of his hope that, by being reintegrated with architecture in “a unified art work” (Einheitskunstwerk), as in the era of the Gothic cathedral, painting and sculpture would again be filled with that “architectonic spirit” that they had ostensibly lost in isolation from it. Yet Feininger’s art, even as easel painting, already manifested that spirit in abundance before he arrived at the Bauhaus. The critic Adolf Behne, who was both personally and professionally close to Gropius, considered Feininger second only to Paul Klee as the leading living exponent of “architectonic” painting in Germany. Moreover, he saw this architectonic vision as more evident in Cubist painting than it was in contemporary architecture; for Behne it was Cubist painting above all that marked the return of the “urge to unity” that had motivated the Gothic and Romanticism. Viaduct splendidly exemplifies Feininger’s painting during these early years of the Bauhaus, and it was one of two paintings by him illustrated in the book that accompanied the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition. The motif is of the enormous viaduct in Arcueil, to the south of Paris, originally built by the Romans and, after falling into decay in the Middle Ages, rebuilt and augmented over the centuries. Feininger first sketched it in 1906, the year before he took up painting. The following year he wrote to his wife Julia that “it is almost impossible to get away from accustomed reality. What one sees must undergo an inner transformation, must be crystallized.” In this case, that process of “inner transformation” was a slow evolution, extending over years: the motif appeared in various drawings, prints, and paintings, including the whimsically grotesque Carnival in Arcueil (1911), finally achieving its most abstract form in this picture of 1920, painted in Weimar when Feininger’s direct experience of the motif was far removed in time and space. Here any trace of the picturesque local atmosphere of Arcueil has been purged in favor of an abstract experience of light, form, color, and space. When he referred to crystallization in 1907 Feininger certainly did not yet envision his later Cubist style—he did not encounter Cubism until 1911 in Paris at the Salon des Indépendants. In March 1913 he wrote his American friend Alfred Vance Churchill that

Woman’s House of Death | Lothar Schreyer | 1:8.683

Literature Behne 1919, pp. 22–24. Däubler 1919. Hess 1961, pp. 42, 52, 56. Luckhardt 1989, pp. 64–65, 112–13. Ness 1974, pp. 54, 55, 62.

58

Weimar 1923, p. 181.

original Title: Totenhaus der Frau year of execution: ca. 1920 Material: tempera on paper format: 198.3 x 63 cm loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, permanent loan from the Schreyer family, NLS708

Draft Version of Woman’s House of Death Lothar Schreyer C 0 M 51 Y 100 K 0

Prof. Dr. Charles Werner Haxthausen (born 1941) is an art historian at Williams College in Williamstown, MA.

artist was metaphysically doped, so to speak, which would mean that his results are not worthy of recognition. That is hardly convincing. Instead, I wish to demonstrate first of all that Schreyer was indeed a modern artist, and secondly that the forms of expression he developed in his stage and religious art were consistently modern. I refer in this context to Jacques Rancière’s definition of modernity. In his book entitled The Politics of Aesthet­ ics: The Distribution of the Sensible, he rejects the widespread tendency to view artistic autonomy (in the sense of non-referential, self-sufficient reflection by the artist on his own artistic resources or media) as opposed to the self-dissolution of art in social or political commitment advocated by the avant-garde. In his view, both have always (since about 1800) been part of the modern “aesthetic regime of the arts.” This is particularly evident in modern theater. On the one hand, the break in the mimetic thread that joined the stage and the world had become increasingly radical (Maurice Maeterlinck, Vsevolod E. Meyerhold, Edward Gordon Craig, Adolphe Appia, and others). Yet this break also went hand in hand with what Rancière refers to as the “archetypal ethical model.” The bond between the stage and the audience was no longer created in accordance with the mimetic economy of displayed passions and passions stirred up by the performance but now relied “on the materiality of setting and plot,” on the “ways in which the assembled bodies become conscious of their latent power through their presence on the stage.” If modern aesthetics alternated between anti-mimetic autonomy and artifice, on the one hand, and the formation of an “archetypal ethical” spirit of community, on the other, then Schreyer was indeed a radical modernist. During World War I, he abandoned mimesis entirely (the artist creates form in accordance with his “inner experience,” without regard for natural or cultural form), and he kept pace with formal developments in avant-garde theater and art in general. His production of the play entitled Sancta Susanna exhibited a tendency toward rigorous stylization, abstraction, artifice, marionette-style de-individualization and dehumanization of characters—all of this accompanied by Herwarth Walden’s highly experimental music. In Schreyer’s case, this radical approach to form went hand in hand with an obsession with the idea of unity—the unity of the inner and outer self, the unity of the actors among themselves, the unity of actors and audience, and the unity of the arts in the total theatrical work of art. In this way, Schreyer systematically negated all of the differences that make theater what it is and which postmodern theater sought to bring to light. To the extent that Schreyer strove to achieve nothing less than the creation of a religious community, one might well speak of the concentration of political, “archetypal ethical” aspects in service of religious, cultic goals. Ironically, the aspect of political community gradually disappeared in this process of developing a more radical communal unity. Schreyer proceeded to establish unity by systematically excluding all critical differences. The performance of Sancta Susanna at the Sturm-Bühne in Berlin was not open to the public. The tendency toward esoteric isolation from potentially critical viewers, and thus from all corrective influences, grew stronger at the Hamburg Kampfbühne, where no public performances were presented and both viewers and performers were subject to rigorous selection. Viewed from this perspective, the full-body masks, the most striking feature of Schreyer’s “works of theater art,” appear as a symbol of the longing for total protection against an injurious difference—in that the actor’s entire body is concealed from the eyes of the audience and viewers remain

Avant-Garde and Cult Lothar Schreyer and the Ambiguity of Modernity Luca Di Blasi

Lothar Schreyer, Erde (Earth) (body mask for the stage play Mann), 1920 (print 1922–23), colored lithograph, 31.3 x 24.3 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin C 0 M 53 Y 100 K 0

60

Lothar Schreyer, the first master at the Bauhaus stage workshop, had two coffins built, painted, and lettered in the early 1920s: the Totenhaus der Frau (Woman’s House of Death) and the Totenhaus des Mannes (Man’s House of Death). They were meant to serve as caskets for Schreyer and his wife but were actually used to bury his parents instead. Consequently, we would have no evidence of their existence except for sketches and a photograph if a two-meter-high tempera model for the Woman’s House of Death had not been discovered unexpectedly in 2006. This “portrait of a dead woman” is surely one of the most cryptic and baffling works ever produced by a Bauhaus artist. The image portrays an androidlike female figure standing on a sphere carrying a tiny human being in its belly. The figure is composed of basic geometric forms. The most prominent feature of the elongated middle section of the body is a Saint Peter’s cross on which the woman may be leaning. Similarly, her male counterpart in the Man’s House of Death evidently holds a scepter or sword in his hands. Much of what can be seen between the breasts and the stumps of the woman’s feet is puzzling. There is no anatomical explanation for the two large ovals, unless they are interpreted as the upper segments of spread thighs. The woman’s vagina would then represent the gateway to an esoteric level of meaning. The female figure appears suddenly more appealingly proportioned and feminine; her gaze assumes an erotic, challenging character. The mother and the lover, the two female archetypes Schreyer often drew during this period, are interwoven in the manner of a visual puzzle. The long beam of the black cross now appears to penetrate and thus to mark the position of the female genitals, which are located almost precisely in the center of the picture, thereby emphasizing the importance of this point. But the beam is profoundly ambiguous. As a killing, aborting, sacrificing object—which calls to mind Schreyer’s interest in the subject of infant death—the inverted Saint Peter’s cross would symbolize death (on the cross) or appear as a satanic symbol, thus approaching the symbolism of the Rose Cross (the link between life and death), in which Schreyer also showed a certain interest during the period in question. The small human being could then be interpreted as the upper crosspiece of the cross and thus, from a Christian point of view, as the conversion of the inverted satanic cross to a double cross, the symbol of crucifixion and resurrection. The connotations of mother and lover would then be joined by that of the Mother of God, another figure of importance to Schreyer during that period. Thus the Woman’s House of Death appears to unite and reconcile an entire inventory of oppositions with which Schreyer was occupied at the time. Yet one fundamental point of irritation remains unresolved—and is not even addressed, in fact—by this approach: that of the strange combination of Cubist abstraction and “atavistic role assignments,” or perhaps more accurately of art and religion in the field of conflict between avant-garde art and esoteric-mystical religious thought, between modern form and seemingly anti-modern themes, that emerges and dominates in the Houses of Death and in Schreyer’s entire oeuvre to that point. This conflict is easiest to resolve simply by denying Schreyer’s modernity. In Bernd Vogelsang’s view, Schreyer’s ethical, religious, and metaphysical intentions and inspirations conflict with the radical formal and aesthetic character of his oeuvre and negate its modernity. Vogelsang defines abstraction not as the process of creating form but as a kind of “metaphysical mimesis.” Yet such a critical view amounts to an impossible aesthet­ ics of conviction—how can one gaze into the artist’s soul?—or to the accusation that the

61

Lothar Schreyer, Maria im Mond (St. Mary in the Moon) (figurine for the stage play Mondspiel), 1923, colored lithograph, 39.8 x 29.8 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Tower of Fire | Johannes Itten | 1:22.514

Literature Benjamin 1963. Rancière 2006. Rebentisch 2006. Vogelsang 1994. Weber 2005.

original Title: Turm des Feuers year of execution: 1920 Material: wood, pewter, lead glass and other materials reconstruction: 1995–96, by Michael Siebenbrodt, Glas-Kraus company, Weimar, and Rainer Zöllner format: 403 x 133.5 x 133.5 cm photo: Hartwig Klappert, 2008 loaned by: Klassik Stiftung Weimar

Tower of Fire Johannes Itten

Dr. Luca Di Blasi (born 1967), a philosopher, is an academic assistant to the director at the ­ICI Kulturlabor in Berlin.

C 0 M 56 Y 100 K 0

62

invisible to the performers. It is interesting to note that Schreyer referred to his full-body masks as “dance shields,” as if the point were to defend the stage performers against the audience. The paradox is that they also separated actors and viewers in the most radical manner possible. Viewed in this context, the Houses of Death may be seen as the goal and end point of a progression from the archetypal ethical community to esoteric isolation. Inverting the supposed development of art from a religious value to an exhibition value, art has been subsumed by religion here and has withdrawn in self-contentment from the gaze of the viewer. Released from the constraints of art in this way, the “archetypal ethical” longing for community does not disappear but was modified and articulated during the following years in Schreyer’s inclination toward toxic hybrid forms of religion and politics. In this sense, Schreyer’s development is symptomatic of the ambiguity of modernity.

Spiritual in Art. Georg Muche and Lothar Schreyer were also close to these conceptions. Even Walter Gropius, through his wife Alma and the frequent contacts with Itten, was familiar with the latter’s views when on June 18, 1919, as Bauhaus director, he wrote: “I’m very pleased about our collaboration and think constantly about the implementation of your and my ideas.” In November 1919, as soon as he had taken up his post at the Weimar Bauhaus, Itten began work on the most important art project of his Bauhaus years, the Tower of Fire, as he called it in 1964. In the 1920s, Itten referred to this monument as “Architekturplastik” (“architectural sculpture”), “bell tower,” “glass tower,” or “tower of light.” By June 1920, it had been produced by the stained glass workshop Ernst Kraus in Weimar and assembled in front of Itten’s studio in the Tempelherrenhaus in the Park an der Ilm. Probably during his emigration to Holland in 1938, the subsequently dismantled tower went missing and was immediately considered as lost. Nevertheless, two original photographs from 1920, taken from different angles, have survived, as well as numerous sketches for ideas and designs in Itten’s diaries VIII and IX 1918–20 (but no working drawings). This material formed the basis for the reconstruction in 1995–96 by myself, the set designer Rainer Zöllner, and the stained glass workshop Ernst Kraus. The tower is based on a spiral motif—one that appeared repeatedly in Itten’s spiral pictures from 1916. In one of the first sketches, Itten drew a spiral that was intended to be hung from a central pole. Attached in vertical order to this structural element were a sphere and two cuboid elements enclosed in a spiral. A similar utopian construction appears in the Monument to the Third International for Petrograd by Vladimir Tatlin, a tower-shaped, three-hundred-meter-high congress hall, which, in 1919, was assembled as a model after the 1917 design. Itten had long been interested in the concept of the tower as the symbol of cosmological notions of the world. This is witnessed by Christian Louis Herre’s Forschungsergebnisse zum Münster in Freiburg (Research Findings of the Freiburg Münster) to be found in Itten’s library with its astrological analyses of cathedral architecture. Another inspiration may also have been the excavation results of the great ziggurat in Babylon, with its cube and spiral forms, which were published in 1918 by Robert Koldewey. Likewise Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s famous painting from 1563, The Tower of Babel, was known to Itten from the Kunst­ historisches Museum in Vienna. Other important spiral towers are the minaret of the Great Mosque of Samarra in Iraq from 852 as well as Francesco Borromini’s spiral-shaped lantern of the church of Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza in Rome from 1652, while in 1865 Gustave Doré integrated an ideal spiral tower into his Bible illustration The Confusion of Tongues. In 1920 Johannes Itten prepared his tower project with numerous sketches. Particularly instructive is the diary sheet VIII/51, describing the tower’s complex intellectual genesis (still without stained glass elements). Itten sketched a twelve-terraced tower over a base, which is labeled from bottom to the top: “crystal/minerals, plants, animals, man.” The fifth to the eighth levels are fitted with twelve bells, while five globes of light were meant to be added at the top. On the left, he noted another set of relations: “fired clay/stone” for the four lower cubes, “metal” for the four middle, and “glass” for the four upper, to finally note a third idea on the far left: “Better. . . . Show the twelve images of the zodiac in the vertical.” A further entry mentions “four elements/four temperaments.” On the diary sheet IX/193, Itten describes a “Farbklang” (“color harmony”) ascending from the bottom

64

Johannes Itten had already become interested in the teachings of Mazdaznan in 1912 during his studies in Bern, an interest that was deepened in 1916 through contact with Georg Muche. In his Vienna period, between 1917 and 1919, with the encouragement of Alma Mahler, Itten went on to study world religions and philosophies of life, particularly theosophy, and in 1916 he came into contact with the anthroposophic teachings of Rudolf Steiner; his interest in astrological aspects began in 1919. Finally, an interest in Eastern philosophy is documented through his contact with the Indian Nobel Prize winner for literature Rabindranath Tagore in Weimar in 1920, which led to the first foreign exhibition of the Bauhaus in Calcutta in 1922. Christoph Wagner has pointed out that it was Itten who anchored the universalistic utopia of the philosophical artist in the intellectual life of the Bauhaus, and that Itten attempted to reconcile his reflections on the theory and philosophy of art through a comprehensive Weltanschauung, or worldview. Itten’s commitment to the figure of the reflective artist went so far as to include breathing, nutritional, and sexual teachings. Hence, the material artwork took second place to reflections on a general worldview. However, in his esoteric and theosophical interests, Itten was by no means alone. This is shown clearly by Wassily Kandinsky’s 1912 text Concerning the

A Sculptural Worldview in Color, Light, and Sound Johannes Itten’s Tower of Fire Michael Siebenbrodt C 0 M 58 Y 100 K 0

Johannes Itten, draft sketch for Tower of Fire (single sheets from the diary), 1919, pencil on paper, drawing on both sides, 27.8 x 21.3 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

65

The Tower of Fire in front of the Tempelherrenhaus, 1921, photograph, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Contrast Study | Moses Mirkin | 1:3.839

Literature Bothe 1994. Bothe 1994a. Siebenbrodt 2000. Wagner 2005.

original Title: Kontraststudie mit verschiedenen Materialien year of execution: ca. 1922 Material: metal elements, saw blade, leather and glass mounted on wood reconstruction: 1967, by Alfred Arndt format: 88 x 30 x 22 cm loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 3809 photo: Hartwig Klappert, 2008

Contrast Study with Diverse Materials Moses Mirkin

Michael Siebenbrodt (born 1951), an architect, is a curator at the Bauhaus-Museum of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar.

C 0 M 60 Y 100 K 0

66

to the top as “black, r [red], y [yellow], green, white,” while in the diary sheet IX/195 next to the sketch of the tower with stained glass elements he noted: “The brain, four-sided pyramids / cerebrum : cerebellum = 1:3 / cerebellum words – cerebrum images / polarities.” Finally in several designs, Itten deals with the mathematical model, the formula for the cubes that results from the quartering of the lengths of the edges, a scale of 1:0.79 for subsequent cubes. For the reconstruction, the authors decided on an initial edge length of 1.33 meters, which resulted in an overall height of 4.03 meters, and for a zoning of materials and colors from the bottom to the top with the first four cubes painted grey (“stone”), the next four cased in metal (“metal”), and the final four painted white (“glass”). The forty-eight stained glass elements in four color ranges were interpreted as an adaptation of Itten’s contemporaneously published color sphere. In addition, a total of twelve Burmese temple bells were added to the third, fourth, and fifth levels, four on each. After a discussion about twelvetone music, we finally settled on the “classical” triad. The function and financing behind Itten’s large-scale project has still not been entirely clarified. It seems reasonable to interpret the piece as a light signal for the Weimar Republic and the Weimar Airport, which, with the Allies’ consent, made possible the only regular air traffic between the Reich capital of Berlin and the seat of the National Assembly in Weimar. The idea of a tower of light was promptly taken up by Walter Determann with his project for a Bauhaus housing settlement in Weimar in 1920. He suggested four massive towers that should fill classical Weimar with the light of the avant-garde. Towers of light and glass went hand in hand with the social and artistic upheavals following World War I. Bruno Taut’s Glass Pavilion at the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne was the realization of a visionary, crystalline glass architecture. Lyonel Feininger’s cover for the 1919 Bauhaus manifesto, the “Cathedral of the Future,” can also be interpreted as a “tower of light,” as can Walther Klemm’s “Crystal Tower in a Storm,” which was used as the invitation to the Weimar’s Fiftieth Music Convention in 1920. The theme was also treated by numerous Bauhaus students such as Nicolai Vassiliev with his Spiral-Turm (Spiral Tower) from Itten’s preliminary course around 1920, Otto Lindig with his ceramic ­Lichttempel (Light Temple) from 1920–21, or Theobald Emil Müller-Hummel, who in 1919–20 carved a Stele mit kosmischer Vision (Stele with Cosmic Vision) from an airplane propeller as a sign of hope for a peaceful future. Finally, Walter Gropius took up the idea of a soaring crystalline form in his monument to the victims of the Kapp Putsch in Weimar in 1921–22, which after its partial destruction and reconstruction, can be now be seen as one of the few large-scale Cubist sculptures in Weimar’s main cemetery.

inserted, ending in a spiral. Eventually, the students made drawings of these material studies, paying special attention to the contrasts in the materials and the movement.” Mirkin’s material study combines a broad range of materials—wood and leather, metal and glass—with their contrasting qualities and forms, and their rhythmic contrasts: leather/ lead = organic, supple, light/metallic, rigid, heavy; glass cylinder/saw blade = brittle, fragile, curved/elastic, flexible, spiky; wood/metal = textured/smooth, flat/pointed, sheet/ cylinder/spiral. It is easy to grasp the ascending rhythm of the piece: the diagonal base, the ironic cylinder that opens toward the top (but which also slightly pierces the basis below), ending in a spiral (the saw blade), which is intercepted by the glass(!) cylinder. In addition, Mirkin’s study brings together other pairs of contrasts emphasized by Itten in his teaching: large/small, long/short, broad/narrow, thick/thin, black/white, many/few, straight/bent, sharp/blunt, horizontal/vertical, diagonal/circular, high/low, surface/line, surface/body, line/body, smooth/rough, hard/soft, still/moving, light/heavy, transparent/ opaque, constant/interrupted. It therefore fulfilled Itten’s expectations for his preliminary course of an “expressive arrangement of forms.” As he noted: “Every object has a more or less obvious property as its main characteristic . . . linear or planar, bulky, voluminous . . . colored, uncolored, rhythmic, non-rhythmic, structural . . . But always, for psycho-physiological reasons [of perception], this main characteristic must be clear and the main exponent of the expressive arrangement of forms.” This “property” should focus the perception and make the perceived something that can be (re)felt, and hence also produce individual physical and sensual experiences and feelings. This was absolutely essential for Itten when it was a matter of conveying to the learners for “their future artistic careers . . . the basic laws of creativity.” He noted: “While teaching forms of artistic representation, what was important for me was that the various temperaments and gifts [of the students] felt individually addressed. Only in this way can the creative atmosphere arise that is conducive to original works.” Around 1900, this “creative atmosphere” was the movement for reform in European education and the German movement for progressive art education. In 1905, teachers of

68

“The aim of the preliminary course is to unleash the creative powers of the learners, to teach them to understand the materials of nature and to recognize the principles of creation. . . . [The learners] must combine and arrange the different materials in such a way as to make their relationship visible through intimate connections. Such experiments are the strange forms that often leave visitors feeling perplexed. Because they are not familiar with our course, they have difficulty interpreting these compositions made of wood, glass, wire, wool, and other materials.” Johannes Itten’s description from 1922 probably still holds true for many observers today when faced with the Contrast Study with Various Materials by Moses Mirkin, which was made in Itten’s preliminary course in the winter semester of 1921–22. Alfred Arndt, who studied with Mirkin at the Bauhaus and also attended Itten’s preliminary course (and in 1967 reconstructed Mirkin’s study), gives a more detailed account: “Around the middle of the semester [1921–22] we worked on the material studies rough/smooth, sharp/blunt, soft/hard etc. . . . Itten suggested that, during our walks, we search for material in junk piles, refuse dumps, trash cans, and scrap yards, which should then be used to construct forms (sculptures) that would clearly demonstrate the essential and opposing properties of each material. . . . On day X everyone arrived with their sculptures. The works were all very different. The girls brought small, delicate things, approximately hand-sized. A few lads had pieces that were a meter high. These were often real piles of scrap that were sooty and rusted. A few brought in single parts such as blocks of wood, stove pipes, wire, glass, etc., and assembled them in class. As always, Itten left the students to decide which were the best works. For all the students, the clear winner was Mirkin, a Pole. I can still see the ‘horse’ in front of me now. It was a piece of wood that was partly smooth, partly rough, and on top was an old kerosene lamp cylinder, through which a rusty saw had been

Practice, Program, Rationale Johannes Itten and the Preliminary Course at the Weimar Bauhaus Ulrich Herrmann C 0 M 62 Y 100 K 0

Rudolf Lutz, Plastische Studie im Würfelcharakter (Cubic Sculptural Study), 1920–21, plaster, 24 x 15.5 x 13.5 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Margit Téry-Adler, Kompositionsstudie: Silberdistel (Composition Study: Silver Thistle), ca. 1920, colored paper collage on silver paper, mounted on cardboard, 42.6 x 31.1 cm, Klassik Stiftung Weimar

Friedl Dicker, Tiger, Hell-DunkelTierstudie (Tiger, Light-and-Dark Animal Study), ca. 1920, charcoal on tracing paper, 30.6 x 41.2 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

69

Werner Graeff, Freie Rhythmusstudie (Free Rhythm Study), 1921, black opaque paint, 56 x 73.5 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Color Wheel | Alfred Arndt | 1:2.69

Literature Arndt 1971. Bothe 1994. Hartlaub 1922. Itten 1978. Lehrervereinigung 1901. Lottig 1920. Richter 1909. Scharrelmann 1913. Skiera 2003. Weber 1994. Wick 1994. Wolgast 1903. Zentralinstitut für Erziehung und Unterricht in Berlin 1929.

year of execution: ca. 1921 Material: watercolor, ink, pencil and silver paper collaged on handmade paper format: 46.7 x 46 cm loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 1074

Color Wheel Used in Gertrud Grunow’s Class Alfred Arndt

Prof. Dr. Ulrich Herrmann (born 1939), an educator and historian, is a professor emeritus at the Universities of Tübingen and Potsdam.

C 0 M 64 Y 100 K 0

70

the Bundes für Schulreform, a Hamburg-based organization for school reform, presented themselves in their journal on youth education Der Säemann. Monatsschrift für Jugend­ bildung und Jugendkunde as a “teachers’ association for the fostering of artistic education in Hamburg.” Like Itten, who had said “the task of my pedagogical efforts [was] man himself as something to be constructed, something capable of development,” the German school reform movement was concerned with releasing, fostering, and developing the “creative powers” of the child, as was programmatically announced at the first Art Educators Day in Dresden in 1901. In children’s drawings, the “genius in the child” had been discovered, which was also the title of a book in 1922 by Gustav F. Hartlaub. The Weimar Bauhaus wanted to be neither an art academy nor a school of arts and crafts in the traditional sense. At first, however, Walter Gropius was only able to realize his basic plan—“the unification of all artistic disciplines” and the “great building”—in the workshops. Architecture, town planning, and the accompanying scientific and engineering disciplines such as structural design and analysis only became part of the regular syllabus in Dessau in 1927. Gropius’s founding program of 1919 hid the internal conflict of the Weimar years, which finally led to Itten’s departure in 1923. This had nothing to do with personal rivalry. As a result of his “preliminary course” (which, after the winter of 1920–21, became mandatory on Saturday mornings, alternating each semester with Georg Muche, next to Paul Klee’s and Wassily Kandinsky’s classes), Itten had a strong influence on all Bauhaus students. His previous training and teaching experience meant that he was a vital presence during the first years at the Weimar Bauhaus. Moreover, Gropius already had his hands full trying to keep the Bauhaus going in difficult circumstances. Itten—although, like all masters, also a master of form in many workshops—saw free expression and the analysis of Old Masters as fundamental to a proper understanding of artistic form in his preliminary course —especially since the “apprentices” mostly came without prior training—and not as preparation for the workshops, which were primarily concerned with the design of utilitarian objects or the Zweckform (purposive form). Gropius, however, wanted a training in craft and commercial contracts for the workshops right from the beginning. The conflict had already been anticipated in Gropius’s program where he wrote that “the indispensable basis for all creative work [is] a thorough training in craft” and “the school is the servant of the workshop, and it will one day be absorbed in it.” Ultimately, Itten’s ideas concerning art education could never be fully reconciled with this. Nevertheless, important aspects of his preliminary course such as the almost playful introduction to creative work that resulted from direct contact with different materials, without the need for previous knowledge or specific skills, also survived into the Dessau years in the preliminary course transformed by László Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers.

“Humanity today is particularly strongly out of balance. This inevitably leads to chaos, the demise of a culture, and to our own demise. Each man blames his fellow men for the disturbance to this balance. At the same time, he is not conscious and does not feel that this lack of balance, this disorder of the soul, the body, and the spirit is to be found in himself and that he must make an effort to put back in order the disturbance to his own balance.” Gertrud Grunow, no date In the period around 1900, there was a vogue for strategies of salvation. In an increasingly industrialized and alienated world, these strategies promised greater control over one’s own personal happiness. Reform movements and esoteric teachings, from vegetarianism to anthroposophy, promised a return to harmony and inner order. A particular area of focus was the analysis of human behavior and its effects on individual life. Salvation was seen as the result of a conscious act of human will. Alongside pseudo-religious theories, the psychology of the soul emerged in the border regions of the humanities and the sciences as a new subject of research and a therapy-providing phenomenon. The music educator and singing instructor Gertrud Grunow also believed strongly in the existence of spiritual laws that are inherent to man and which he must become conscious of. Her claim to put man literally “back in order,” in the sense of healing, is not, however, fully accounted for by the job title of singing instructor and music educator. The course in harmonization theory that she taught at the Bauhaus from 1919 to 1923 should therefore be situated in an area between psychology and “modernity’s quasi-religious concepts of a re-structuring of the world.” (Achim Preis) Harmonization theory was based on the theory of synesthesia: the link between the different phenomena of the senses suggested by, for example, the “audibility” of colors. For artists and intellectuals such as Rudolf Steiner, Arnold Schoenberg, Wassily Kandinsky, Josef Matthias Hauer, and Johannes Itten, the synesthetic experience was considered as an extrasensory experience of the spiritual world. Besides the idea of synesthesia, harmonization theory was also based on the body in movement. An important influence was the eurhythmics of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze. Gertrud Grunow visited one of his summer courses in 1908. Jaques-Dalcroze had developed a method of learning and experiencing music through movement, which—unlike traditional music education—attached great importance to body awareness and hearing. The aim was to develop the ability to give expression to music as movement in space. The method, wrote Gertrud Grunow, “attempts to create harmony and to train the spirit further through physical exercises, puts the muscles at the service of the will, and cultivates the nerve centers. . . . The value of the method as a whole lies in the purely rhythmic quality; it serves individual musicians as much as dancers, painters, sculptors, poets— anybody capable of becoming a Lebenskünstler (life artist), whose being is life and force, the creation of the highest balance and harmony.” Theoretical questions concerning voice training and observations made in class strengthened Grunow’s assumption that sounds relate to movement. According to Grunow, a tone achieves its most harmonic and fullest vibrancy when one assumes a certain posture that corresponds to this tone, and which seems to be specific for each tone. The attribution of sounds to colors and postures is described by the principle of Grunowian harmonization theory.

Creating Order for “Life Artists” Gertrud Grunow’s Class in Harmonization Theory at the Weimar Bauhaus Ute Ackermann

Max Peiffer Watenphul, Porträt Gertrud Grunow (Portrait of Gertrud Grunow), 1920, watercolor over pencil on paper, 52.6 x 45.5 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin C 0 M 67 Y 100 K 0

72

These theories were possibly already known to Walter Gropius in 1919 since, like Gertrud Grunow, he took part in the 1. Kongress für Ästhetik und Kunstwissenschaft (First Congress of Aesthetics and Art Theory) in Berlin in 1913. In the fall of 1919, Grunow accepted an invitation from the publisher Eugen Diederichs to Jena, where she reported on her findings at the Volkshaus. At the Bauhaus in Weimar she spoke about “the education of man through the eye and the ear” and was invited by Gropius to his school as an assistant teacher in the winter semester 1919–20. It was Johannes Itten who was particularly interested—although, initially extremely critically—in Grunow’s theory. He took lessons with her himself and finally also recommended her to his students. Itten’s conception of the fundamental importance of rhythm for creative work, which goes back to Adolf Hölzel,­found echoes in Grunow’s teaching method. According to an account by Eugen Diederichs, the harmonization exercises originally took place in groups but, at the Bauhaus, took place instead on an individual basis. Particularly the students of the preliminary course were encouraged to participate, because it was thought that this would make the choice of a workshop easier. With Grunow’s method, one seemed to want to give a quasi-scientific basis to a decision, which was otherwise only based on the individual’s aptitude or talent for a particular craft. Gropius also seemed to be thinking along these lines, when in 1922 he gave the harmonization theory a fixed place in the Bauhaus statutes, and wrote that although the “[Bauhaus] idea is a spiritual and not a technical one . . . all the resources of technology and knowledge are needed to give it a visible form.” Gertrud Grunow’s work was also to be incorporated into the teaching schedule. Although she is not included in the circular plan published in 1922, she is mentioned in the statutes. Gertrud Grunow arranged her method around a circle with twelve initially uncolored points, which should be felt intuitively in their static spatial quality. In a clockwise movement from one to twelve, the body stretched to its full height by turning around its own axis. In the circle, the southernmost point (one, the starting point) corresponded to a crouching position with the feet turned sharply outward and the arms raised at shoulder height with the palms facing upward. At the end point (twelve), the body reached its upright position, with feet turned sharply outward, the arms raised sideways at shoulder height, and the palms facing upward. The chromatic scale from C to H corresponded to the twelve positions of the circle. The relationship between pose and tone was empirically investigated by Grunow. This system was now allocated twelve colors. Gertrud Grunow considered the color circle that evolved through experiences in her classes as a supra-individual system. This also began at position one in the south, which was allocated white, then following in clockwise direction were the colors terracotta, blue, magenta (position four, west), bluegreen, green, silver (position seven, north), red, grey, violet (position ten, east), brown and yellow (position twelve). In this system, ever-new connections and correspondences—for example, with material qualities, musical instruments, or body parts—could be discovered and classified. Thus blue corresponded to clay, magenta porcelain, and brown iron. In practical terms, the students in Grunow’s classes were asked, as she wrote, “to imagine a particular colored globe and then, entering into this, to feel it with one’s hands, or to attune oneself to a note struck on the piano. The way is at first irrational and then increasingly rational.” Gertrud Grunow regularly provided written reports about the development of her students for the council of masters and had some influence on their admission into the different­

73

A student of Gertrud Grunow’s during concentration exercises, before 1920, photographs, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Grunow 2004. Grunow/Radrizzani 2004. Preis 2001.

In April, German reparations payments are set at 132 billion gold marks.

POLITICS

Ute Ackermann is an art historian who lives in Weimar.

CULTURE 

MODERN LIFE

The German Reich suffers from a shortage of approximately one million apartments.

The first Olympic Games for women at Monte Carlo

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, design of a high-rise building for Friedrichstrasse in Berlin

Frank Lloyd Wright, Peacock Chair and Imperial Hotel

Albert Einstein receives a Nobel Prize for physics.

Wahl 2001, p. 188.

1921

Grunow 1938.

unemployed

Grunow 1923.

Founding of the Chinese Communist Party

Grunow 1908.

Germany’s first screening of a sound film takes place in Berlin.

Inauguration of the first European street exclusively for automobiles, the kilometer-long racecourse AVUS (automobile traffic and practice street) in Berlin.

Literature

C 0 M 69 Y 100 K 0

74

workshops. In 1923 she published her essay “Der Aufbau der lebendigen Form, durch Farbe, Form und Ton” (The Construction of Living Form through Color, Form, and Tone) in the Bauhaus book that appeared on the occasion of the Bauhaus exhibition. However, her work increasingly came under the focus of public criticism. Defamatory articles, in which she was suspected of the use of a banned form of hypnosis, were capable of seriously threatening the Bauhaus, which was, in any case, under constant fire. In October 1923, the council of masters decided that the harmonization theory had had no recognizable effect and should therefore be discontinued. Gertrud Grunow left the Bauhaus in the spring of 1924.

0.35 mil.

C 0 M 71 Y 100 K 0

“I  welcome the fact that so many variously oriented powers work together at our Bauhaus. I also affirm the mutual struggle between these powers provided its effect is manifested as achievement.” Paul Klee 1921

Lothar Schreyer becomes head of the theater workshop.

Walter Gropius receives a commission to remodel the Stadt­ theater in Jena.

44

CITATION

EVENTS

TEACHING

Students

1921 64

year of execution: 1921

format: 45.5 x 78 x 52.5 cm

Material: plaster, tinted

scale: 1 : 10

loaned by: Klassik Stiftung Weimar, N 3/84

photo: Hartwig Klappert, 2008

Working Model of the Monument to the March Victims in Weimar Walter Gropius

Johannes Itten and Georg Muche introduce Mazdaznan teachings to the Bauhaus.

“The   Bauhaus must . . . completely reintegrate creative work in the sense that alongside the theoretical teaching of form, equal attention is granted to all real things.” Walter Gropius 1921

Monument to the March Victims | Walter Gropius | 1:2.838

The bylaws of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar are published, with teachers referred ­to as “masters,” and students as “apprentices” and “journeymen.”

intellectual­upheaval, artists found latitude for new concepts of monument art which brought about a turn toward abstraction and toward universal utopian ideas. As art director, Gropius conceived and realized this work entirely in keeping with the concept of the working community expressed in the Bauhaus program of 1919 as a joint project involving his own architecture firm and the Bauhaus workshops. In response to the appeal by the Trade Union Federation and the Monument Commission to the artists of Weimar and the Bauhaus to propose designs for the planned monument to the victims of the March uprising at the city’s South Cemetery, Gropius submitted a model and a preliminary layout drawing. The exhibition of submitted proposals at the Städtische Museum Weimar on December 1, 1920, triggered animated public discussion. Based on the idea for his first draft design, from which the schematic layout drawing was derived, Gropius designed the monument as a politically cryptic symbol of a “lightning bolt” that “rises from the floor of the grave as a symbol of the living spirit.” He conceived it as the “final grave” in a long, continuous “chain of brothers’ graves.” Accordingly, the design of the gravesite, which was conceived for seven of the nine victims (the remaining two were buried in a different cemetery), shows six small graves next to a larger seventh grave. As he imagined it, “the symbol, the gravestone, and the wall” would be sculpted “in smooth limestone hewn with sharp edges”—in natural stone, in other words. Although other proposals were submitted (by Johannes Itten and Gerhard Marcks, among others), public attention was focused on the plans drafted by Walter Gropius and Josef Heise, a Weimar sculptor. Heise’s figurative monument designs entitled Opfer (Victims) and Lodernde Flamme (Blazing Flame), which expressed the concept of death and resurrection, stood in contrast to Gropius’s abstract monument design, which soon came to be known as the “Blitz” (lightning bolt). The author of a review printed in the workers’ newspaper Das Volk in December 1920 responded primarily to Gropius’s proposal. He recognized the political character of the “Blitz” and emphasized the “novelty of the idea” as a positive feature. On a more critical note, however, he suggested that it was not likely to stir the emotions of its viewers. A dispute over monuments and art emerged from these two differing views, with the Trade Union Federation and the Monument Commission on the one side and the Weimar city government on the other. The debates focused less on the issue of material and more on the matter of its abstract form and location—that is, on the visibility and accessibility of the monument. These concerns were motivated not only by aesthetic considerations but by political interests as well. The development of this work can be illustrated with reference to three projects realized at Gropius’s firm and in the Bauhaus workshops between January 1921 and August 1922. The plaster model produced in the Bauhaus stone sculpture workshop, which corresponded to the schematic layout drawing submitted by Gropius in 1920, was the subject of a new presentation and further discussion. The plaster model was exhibited anonymously along with Heise’s designs at a meeting of the general assembly of the Trade Union Federation in mid-January 1921. The delegates eventually voted unanimously in favor of the Bauhaus proposal. In the official explanation, it was noted that Gropius had abandoned “traditional forms of long standing.” A journalist writing in April 1921 in Das Volk emphasized the political character of the work. Gropius, he wrote, had “masterfully and accurately described” the two “poles,” the attack on the Republic and the resistance of the proletariat, in his design.

78

A jagged, wedge-shaped form rises upward from an object composed of several irregular sections without a base. This non-figurative structure marks the end of a trapezoidshaped complex consisting of reclining and upright elements. While the space enclosed in this way can be defined as open terrain, the parts lying side by side serve merely as connecting links between the beginning and the end of the ensemble. The sculpture’s extension into space is not accompanied by any spatial framing of its component parts, which are held together only by a steeply sloping wall on its rear side. Thus the completely free-standing sculpture can be viewed from close-up or from a distance. It protrudes from the ensemble toward the left and, placed on a slightly elevated footing, asserts its presence as a solitary form. The working model produced in 1921, which represents a work that lies between sculpture and architecture, offers no clues whatsoever about its location or content or about the artist or the client. Neither the small open area nor the large upright form that dominates the entire ensemble is typical of the site for which it was planned, the cemetery in Weimar. The monument derives its political character less from its setting than from its purpose, which was to commemorate the victims of the March putsch of 1920, and from the client, the Weimar Gewerkschaftskartell (Trade Union Federation). What sets this work apart is that, despite its abstract form, it can be interpreted as a political grave monument. This is attributable above all to the historical context in which the work was realized. Not long after the Staatliches Bauhaus was founded in 1919, Walter Gropius, its founder and first director, began working on a design for the monument. It was to honor the memory of the nine workers who were killed during the Kapp Putsch in Weimar. With this first commissioned work for the Bauhaus in Weimar, Gropius created an object of extraordinary political significance, as evidenced by its destruction by the National Socialists and its reconstruction after 1945. With this abstract form, which is embodied primarily in the expressive character of the upright section, Gropius departed from the tradition of allegorical, figurative monument design. His formal and conceptual approach must be viewed against the background of post-1918 political and intellectual currents. In this atmosphere of revolutionary and

Politics and Abstraction The Monument to the Victims of the March Putsch Designed by Walter Gropius María Ocón Fernández C 0 M 73 Y 100 K 0

Walter Gropius (plan), Adolf Meyer (drawing), Monument to the March Victims in Weimar, 1922, watercolor over pencil drawing on drawing paper, 20.2 x 30 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Farkás Molnar, Monument to the March Victims, 1922, lithograph, 29.7 x 46.2 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

79

Büro Walter Gropius, layout for the Monument to the March Victims, ink and colored pencil on paper, 29 x 27.4 cm, Stadtarchiv Weimar

Wall Hanging | Max Peiffer Watenphul | 1:5.48

Literature Behr 1967, pp. 459–64. Clarenbach 1969. Fuhrmeister 2001, pp. 23–120. Nerdinger 1985, pp. 46–47. Schubert 1976, pp. 199–230. Schuster 1993, pp. 115–27. Volk 1920. Volk 1921. Winkler 1993, pp. 63–74. Winkler/Van Bergeijk 2004.

year of execution: ca. 1921 Material: slit tapestry, wool and hemp format: 137 x 76 cm loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 589, gift of Johannes Itten

Wall Hanging Max Peiffer Watenphul

Dr. María Ocón Fernández (born 1968), an art historian, is a lecturer at the Free University, Berlin.

C 0 M 76 Y 100 K 0

80

Yet this interpretation would appear more relevant to a construction drawing produced in 1921. The drawing, which was part of the documentation submitted for approval in early January 1921, shows the ground plan and a cross-section of the monument. It corresponds to the situation at the original location at the old cemetery in Weimar. But several changes in the arrangement of the individual elements had already been made, all of which were devoted to achieving a homogeneous design and spatial setting for the gravesite and the “Blitz.” In this drawing, the large gravesite, which is depicted statically in the first layout drawing and the working model, evokes an impression of dynamic motion created by the incorporation of triangles and irregular rectangles. This creates a link between the two ends of the monument, which is further strengthened by the inclusion of a pointed gravestone, the so-called double pyramid. The monument design is also improved by the rotation of the upper part of the upright section—the inward-facing “Blitz,” as it is depicted on the August 1922 version of the layout for the finished monument. This change also established a closer relationship among the individual parts of the monument. With the monument now assuming a homogeneous sculptural form, the rear side—left over from the previous, more architectural design—was eliminated, as it no longer served any purpose. The open, empty space—now integrated into the composition as a whole—engages the viewer more effectively. The layout of 1922 corresponds to the new location, a corner plot at the new cemetery in Weimar, where the monument stands today. Approval for construction at the site was granted in April 1921, although the city refused to cover the costs of the project. The work was performed by the Soziale Weimarer Bauhütte (Weimar Social Building Association), which built the monument out of artificial stone (cast concrete, to be exact) as a cost-cutting measure. Construction work was completed on December 5, 1921, and the monument, its garden setting still unfinished and still lacking an inscription, was officially dedicated on May 1, 1922. A dedication brochure, designed by Gropius with a red cover bearing a single charcoal drawing by Farkas Molnár, was published in honor of the occasion.

83

this blending­of formal instruction and workshop activity—which was encouraged by the Bauhaus—over into the weaving workshop. Women were often deliberately encouraged to choose this less prestigious workshop, and Peiffer Watenphul was one of the few men who opted for it. Another male weaving student was Friedrich Wilhelm Bogler, from whom a woven shawl with frugal color accents on an elaborately designed field has survived. Peiffer Watenphul wove his piece using the tapestry technique, which, though relatively easy to learn, demands considerable manual skill and planning, especially when, as in his case, the weaver works without a preliminary design on cardboard. This “free textile form study” shows that students were encouraged through Itten’s preliminary course to pursue new technical approaches and to set aside traditional ideas about the form and content of classic tapestry in favor of new concepts of form and color, while adhering to the principles of weaving technique. In a letter to Wingler written in 1960, Itten mentioned that this tapestry was “probably the first Bauhaus product realized in this technique.” That is not quite true, however, for Gunta Stölzl had woven her first tapestry at the Bauhaus during the summer holidays in 1920. A comparison of the two works reveals the significant difference between them. Whereas Gunta Stölzl’s piece is brilliantly woven with an abundance of colors and different complex forms, some of them representational, Peiffer Watenphul used only a few basic geometric forms, which evoke the impression of simplicity and clarity in the tapestry. Itten quite rightly emphasized the close relationship between the tapestry and his course: “The wall hanging in tapestry technique is a composition in a square configuration with accents of color and proportion. The triangle was added as a contrasting form.” Both tapestries exhibit fundamental characteristics of early Bauhaus works—lively expressiveness, on the one hand, and a clearly constructed composition, on the other. An example of the first stylistic approach is the upholstery on the African Chair by Gunta Stölzl. The second is exemplified by an early tapestry by Margarete Köhler. Both currents coexisted for some time, as evidenced, for example by Stölzl’s Slit Tapestry Red-Green of 1927–28, yet constructed patterns such as stripes and rectangles soon came to dominate in the design of utilitarian articles.

Simple Form for the Necessities of Life The Weaving Workshop at the Bauhaus in Weimar Ingrid Radewaldt

Ida Kerkovius, design for a floor or wall carpet, 1920–21, opaque paint, ink, pencil, pastel chalk on paper, mounted on cardboard, 36.6 x 26.8 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin C 0 M 78 Y 100 K 0

82

One of the most striking examples of early woven articles produced at the Bauhaus is the slit tapestry wall hanging woven by Max Peiffer Watenphul during his tenure as a guest student at the Bauhaus in Weimar circa 1921. By this time, Peiffer Watenphul (b. 1896) had already completed his studies in law and earned a doctoral degree, but had come to Weimar with the hope of becoming a painter. Walter Gropius assigned him a studio of his own and gave him permission to work in any of the workshops in Weimar, including the weaving shop. Yet he produced only one tapestry there. In a letter from 1960 to Hans Maria Wingler, director of the Bauhaus-Archiv, he wrote: “With regard to the carpet, I wove it myself on the upright loom at the Bauhaus one day—without a plan, because I didn’t care for all of the fashionable designs that were being created there. The carpet had a very successful showing at the first Bauhaus exhibition and is illustrated in the first Bauhaus book. It was then decided to have a copy of the carpet woven by a Bauhaus student. One of the carpets was sold (to a buyer in the U.S., I think). One was given to Itten as a Christmas present. I don’t know whether that was the original or the copy.” It has not been determined when the copy was made or where it is today. Nor do we know for certain whether the exhibited item is the original. Peiffer Watenphul offered no information about the date of origin, but it is certain that he finished it before the summer of 1922, as he worked outside of Weimar thereafter. The fact that the work was published in 1923 is a clear indication that Gropius greatly admired it as well. Peiffer Watenphul’s slit tapestry exhibits strikingly fresh colors—vivid pink accompanied by red, yellow, and orange—which are softened somewhat by wool-white, gray, grayish-green, and black. The field is divided into horizontal stripes of differing width in which variations on shapes of squares and rectangles and changes in the color effect are explored. The dominant element is a striped triangle located nearly in the center, which echoes the colors of the tapestry. Today, the tapestry is hung with the tip of the triangle pointing upward, whereas it is illustrated in the Bauhaus catalogue of 1923 with its base toward the top. Stood on its head, it still retains its balance, a principle later emphasized by Paul Klee and encountered in many works by Bauhaus artists. More than nearly any other individual work, this clearly structured piece illustrates many of the principles of the early Bauhaus. And the personality of the artist Max Peiffer Watenphul is also characteristic of the students of the early Bauhaus years. He had met Paul Klee before 1919, and Klee had recommended Johannes Itten, who had just recently been appointed to the Bauhaus faculty, as his teacher. He began taking classes under Itten in late 1920 and remained a student until the summer of 1922, when he was granted special status as an “unusually gifted student” who devoted himself primarily to painting. The award of such a special status was possible for outstanding talents only during the earliest Bauhaus years, as students were normally required to serve as apprentices in one of the workshops after completing the preliminary course and were not permitted to change from one workshop to another. Early surviving works by Peiffer Watenphul show evidence of his struggle to develop a formal language of his own. They include exercises in rhythmic form, some with a textile character, as well as “naïve-primitive paintings” and works modeled on the art of Alexej von Jawlensky, whom he met in 1922. His versatility and openness to new ideas is also evident in his work for the preliminary course, in which he sometimes worked with textile materials instead of with a paintbrush or charcoal. Peiffer Watenphul carried

Benita Koch-Otte, wall hanging squares, 1922–24, half-tapestry, linen binding, wool, and cotton, 159 x 110 cm, Klassik Stiftung Weimar

Gunta Stölzl, wall hanging with stripes, 1923–25 (copy by Helene Börner, 1925), linen binding, wool, and synthetic silk, 204 x 125 cm, Klassik Stiftung Weimar

Hedwig Jungnick, bulk fabric, 1921–23, linen and rep binding, wool, cotton, and synthetic silk, ­249 x 164 cm, Klassik Stiftung Weimar

Title Page, Bauhaus Prints | Lyonel Feininger | 1:2.667

Literature Berlin et al. 1998. Stölzl 1997. Stadler/Aloni 2009. Weimar et al. 1994.

original Title: Bauhaus-Drucke: Neue Europäische Graphik occasion: title page for the first portfolio, with works by the masters of the Staatliches Bauhaus in ­Weimar year of execution: 1921 Material: lithograph format: 56.4 x 45 cm editor: Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar, Potsdam: Müller & Co. Verlag loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 1986

Prof. Dr. Ingrid Radewaldt is a textile designer and art historian who lives in Hamburg.

C 0 M 80 Y 100 K 0

84

On the whole, Itten’s preliminary course and its rigorous series of exercises exerted a significant influence on textile design. In a collage realized in 1920, Gunta Stölzl also experimented with squares in different shades of red, which she arranged in a tensionfilled configuration. This idea was the inspiration for many carpets and textile designs, including several by Gertrud Arndt, who designed a carpet composed of contrasting color squares for Gropius’s office. Specific colors were often assigned to basic forms: red to the square, blue to the circle, and yellow to the triangle. Yet Itten did not adhere con­ sistently to this color scheme. Benita Otte was also inspired by this interplay of colored basic forms. In 1923, she wove a smooth children’s carpet whose unconventional geo­ metric design responded to children’s preferences for colors and forms. Arranged on a light-colored background, the colored forms have the appearance of toys scattered over the carpet. This carpet attracted considerable attention among visitors to the exhibition, much like Peiffer Watenphul’s tapestry, which was woven a second time for sale. His work might also be imagined as a tapestry for a child’s room and was perhaps selected for Itten, to whom a son was born in 1920. Similar to those in Peiffer Watenphul’s tapestry, the black-and-white stripes in many carpets appeared as repeating patterns in roll goods during the early Bauhaus years. They gave curtain fabrics and blankets a clear, simplified design that was increasingly favored by Gropius during those years and which Oskar Schlemmer advocated as well: “In view of the troubled economic situation, perhaps it is our duty to serve as pioneers of simplicity, to find a simple form for the necessities of life that is decent and dignified nonetheless.”

Bauhaus Prints New European Graphics Title Page of First Portfolio Lyonel Feininger

the present,­we have called upon all of the most important painters and printmakers of Europe for a collective action. In five periodically appearing portfolios, we want to demonstrate what is essential to them, and hence also the full range of today’s painting, its spiritual height, and its ethical breadth. We are offering the German public a work that has never been offered before in this form at a reasonable price. This has only become possible through the willingness of each artist to make a sacrifice. And these are no mere leftovers, but unique works. This is because the contributors know how much is at stake for us, and that we are not attracted by business but by a profit that should set the Bauhaus aglow.” The hopes and expectations concerning the Bauhaus prints were high. Perhaps the euphoria of the beginning led to an underestimation of the potential problems. Indeed, it soon became clear that the enterprise could not be realized either in the planned form or in the original timeframe. Even if all the portfolios carry the year 1921 on the title page, the project eventually ran on until the end of 1924. Profits also remained below expecta­ tions. At the height of inflation, the costs of producing these lavish portfolios could hardly be calculated, let alone selling them at a profit. The Potsdam publishers Müller & Co., who took over distribution, complained about sluggish sales and subscribers angered by the constant delays. Four of the planned five portfolios eventually appeared. Among these, the first with works by the Bauhaus masters as well as the third and the fifth portfolios dedicated to German contemporaries created the least difficulties. Considerably more complicated was the production of the other two; and it is not without a certain irony that the main problems began for the New European Graphics with the portfolios of the European neighbors. According to the original concept, the second portfolio should be reserved for the artists of the “Romanic” countries, the fourth those of the “Slavic” countries. However, the fourth portfolio, which eventually appeared at the beginning of 1924, brought together a surprising constellation of Italian and Russian artists, while the second—ultimately never completed—portfolio was supposed to have been entirely given over to painters from France. Ideally, this legendary French portfolio would have contained works by Georges Braque, Othon Coubine, Robert Delaunay, André Derain, Albert Gleizes, Juan Gris, CharlesÉdouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier), Fernand Léger, Jacques Lipchitz, Louis Marcoussis, Henri Matisse, Amédée Ozenfant, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Léopold Survage, and others, thereby offering an impressive panorama of new artistic tendencies in France. At the same time, it would have formed an essential counterweight to the German artists, who were ultimately disproportionally represented in the New European Graphics. Production was repeatedly delayed because of difficulties contacting the French artists for political and bureaucratic reasons. By the fall of 1924, four of the artists—Coubine, Léger, Marcoussis, and Survage—had already submitted works. The last efforts to finally complete the portfolio were abandoned with the closure of the Weimar Bauhaus. What were the selection criteria for the edition? Which names would represent the new in European art? The participation of the Bauhaus masters was self-evident. Just as self-­evident was the inclusion of figures such as Picasso, Delaunay, Matisse, or Chagall, without whom a collection of this ambition could not be taken seriously. The same applied to artists such as Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckmann, or Kurt Schwitters,

86

With the edition of Bauhaus Prints, the Bauhaus began, in its third year, an undertaking that was as ambitious as it was unusual. With the title New European Graphics, this edition was designed to offer a comprehensive view of contemporary European art, presented in an exemplary way in the medium of printmaking. At the same time, it was intended to serve the profile of the Bauhaus as part of an international network of the avant-garde. The “sixty important artists of Germany, Russia, France, Italy, representing the new spirit” mentioned in a circular letter in the fall of 1921, were all asked to contribute a graphic work to the Bauhaus in order to show, “how the artists of our time support the ideas of the Bauhaus and are prepared to make a sacrifice for our cause through the gift of a work.” The propagandistic role of this undertaking was underlined in the prospectus to the edition: “For the many, who are still not acquainted, or have not been able to become acquainted with the work of the Bauhaus, this edition should provide an introduction.” Accordingly, the series was inaugurated with a portfolio of the artists currently teaching at the Bauhaus: Lyonel Feininger, Johannes Itten, Paul Klee, Gerhard Marcks, Georg Muche, Oskar Schlemmer, and Lothar Schreyer. The achievements of the Bauhaus workshops were also to be demonstrated—here represented by the printing workshop supervised by Lyonel Feininger and the lithographer Carl Zaubitzer as well as Otto Dorfner’s bookbinding workshop. Feininger took over the organization of the project. He thus became responsible for the supervision of the printing of all the lithographs, etchings, woodcuts, and linocuts, each in an edition of one hundred and ten, as well as the design of the portfolios, from the cover paper to the design. According to Feininger, he did this “for the honor of our cause.” Not unimportantly, the sale of the portfolios was also supposed to provide cash for the school’s chronically empty coffers: printmaking as a form of self-help. As Gropius wrote in a first draft for the text of the prospectus: “Since we can expect nothing from the administrators, profiteers, and parasites of materialism, we must help ourselves. . . . For

The Artists of Our Time New European Graphics Klaus Weber C 0 M 82 Y 100 K 0

Marc Chagall, Self-Portrait with His Wife, 1922, from the fourth portfolio entitled Italienische und Russische Künstler, etching and drypoint, 17.3 x 14.5 cm, BauhausArchiv Berlin

Fernand Léger, Le déjeuner (The Lunch), 1921, planned for inclusion in the second portfolio entitled Französische Künstler, lithograph, 21.2 x 28.3 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Max Beckmann, Ringkampf (Wrestling Match), 1921, from the fifth portfolio entitled Deutsche Künstler, drypoint, 20.7 x 14.5 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

87

Wassily Kandinsky, Komposition (Composition), 1922, from the fourth portfolio entitled Italienische und Russische Künstler, colored lithograph, 27.6 x 23.9 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

African Chair | Marcel Breuer and Gunta Stölzl | 1:8.655

Literature Berlin 1999b. Wingler 1965.

original Title: Afrikanischer Stuhl year of execution: 1921 Material: oak and cherry, painted with water-based paints, hemp, wool, cotton, silk format: 179.4 x 65 x 67.1 cm loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 2004/33, acquired with the support of the Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung photo: Hartwig Klappert, 2008

African Chair Marcel Breuer and Gunta Stölzl

Dr. Klaus Weber, an art historian, is a curator at the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.

C 0 M 84 Y 100 K 0

88

who represented the German tendencies from Expressionism to Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity),­to the spectrum of Italian art from Umberto Boccioni’s Futurism to Giorgio de Chirico’s Neoclassicism, and the Russian contributions from Alexander Archipenko to Mikhail Larionov. The inclusion of a few less prominent contributions by German artists can be explained by the Bauhaus’s contacts to the Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Workers’ Council for Art) and the Novembergruppe (November Group). In the choice of artists, a crucial role was doubtless played by Herwarth Walden, who was closely involved with the Bauhaus during this period. He helped to arrange contacts with artists and galleries, and the exhibition program of his Berlin gallery Der Sturm—the German platform for the international avant-garde—included almost all the names that are now found in the Bauhaus portfolios. “All the most important painters” should be represented in these portfolios. In view of this universal claim, there were some striking absences. The omission of the central figures of the Russian avant-garde, for instance, such as Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky, is difficult to explain, as is the absence of the De Stijl artists. Even if, in the latter case, a role was played by the acute tensions between Walter Gropius and Theo van Doesburg, who in the spring of 1921 had relocated his activities to Weimar, the total exclusion of the Dutch remains a riddle. Some inconsistencies in the attribution of the artists to the portfolios of the different countries also reveal a fundamental flaw in the overall concept. In view of the close network of the avant-garde that resulted from frequent international exchange, the classification of the portfolios according to nationality would seem to make little sense. Accordingly, it has reasonably been asked why “the fragment of the French portfolio includes, besides Léger as the only Frenchman, the Pole Marcoussis, the Czech Coubine, and the Russian Survage, while the emigrants Archipenko, Chagall, Goncharova, Jawlensky, Kandinsky, and Larionov . . . are treated as representatives of Russian art.” By the time Kandinsky’s color lithograph from 1922 appeared two years later among the works of Russian and Italian artists, he had long been counted among the masters at the Bauhaus, as had his Hungarian colleague László Moholy-Nagy, who is not represented in the portfolios—perhaps his contribution was planned for the abandoned “Slavic” portfolio. The Europe of the artists was more flexible than the Europe of national borders. The epochal project of the New European Graphics was to remain an impressive fragment. Nevertheless, Hans Maria Wingler is correct when he remarks, “no similar collected edition has appeared that can compete with it in terms of artistic concentration.”

90

91

C 0 M 87 Y 100 K 0

Bamboo Chair, homage to the African Chair by Marcel Breuer and Gunta Stölzl Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei, Bamboo Chair, homage to the African Chair by Marcel Breuer and Gunta Stölzl, 2009, bamboo, 198.3 x 69 x 69.5 cm, collection of the artist, produced by the artist for the Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model project

Shards in Screens | Josef Albers | 1:1.773

Ai Weiwei is one of China’s leading conceptual artists; he is known in Europe mainly through the works he exhibited at documenta 12. At the instigation of the Stiftung Bauhaus­Dessau, he took up the so-called African Chair, a collaborative work of Marcel­ Breuer and Gunta Stölzl whose name reflects its exotic appearance. Produced now ­in ­bamboo as an instance of “cultural crossover” is his Chinese variant of this item of ­furniture, which dates from the early phase of the Bauhaus.

92

original Title: Scherben im Gitterbild year of execution: ca. 1921 Material: colored glass, wire, and metal in a sheet-metal frame format: 37.5 x 29.8 cm loaned by: The Anni and Josef Albers Foundation, Bethany, CT

Shards in Screens Josef Albers C 0 M 89 Y 100 K 0

Ai Weiwei (born 1957) is an artist, designer, and curator who lives in Beijing.

95

assemblages or compositions. Such results I mounted beginning as dilletant [sic] on tin sheets or wire screens.” This forthright acknowledgement of the work’s materials and process describes accurately and quite matter-of-factly the obviously handmade nature of Shards in Screens, one of Albers’s very first attempts. Albers’s self-identification as a dilettante (even in this new medium) in 1921, on the other hand, is less straightforward. Growing up he had learned a range of construction techniques and tricks from his father—a leading builder, craftsman, and professional painter in Bottrop; and as both teacher and artist he had, by this time, a canny understanding of composition, design, and color. These experiences underpin any qualities that might at first seem tentative in this early assemblage of colored glass. Albers used a sturdy piece of heavy metal grille (Gitter) as an armature for pieces of colored glass held in place by the combination of putty (his substitute for Schwarzlot, the black soldering lead of traditional stained glass) and thin strands of wire with which he tied the individual pieces to the grille. There is no attempt to disguise the elements that

“Quite   charming, if a bit brutal.” Josef Albers’s Glass Assemblage Brenda Danilowitz

Josef Albers, glass window in Sommerfeld House, Berlin, 1921, photograph, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

C 0 M 91 Y 100 K 0

94

This work is Josef Albers’s earliest known glass assemblage, probably made in 1921 soon after he entered the glass workshop at the Bauhaus in Weimar. The glass assemblages were the basis for Albers’s two huge architectural glass pieces from the Weimar years. Both were created for Gropius-designed houses: the Sommerfeld (1921) and Otte (1922– 23) houses in Berlin’s suburbs. Both windows were destroyed in World War II and are recorded only in contemporary photographs. This small panel is a perfect example of art’s alchemy: how the artist’s imagination and hand can transform humble, unbeautiful, everyday cast-off materials into a compellingly beautiful, glowing object. For Albers the attraction of the glass workshop probably derived from his Catholic roots and his affinity with the widespread imagery of glass as an embodiment of a spiritual ideal. These preoccupations, characteristic of the times, dovetailed with the idealistic fervor surrounding the launching of the Bauhaus in 1919. Gropius’s now famous call for painting, sculpture, and architecture to unite in a “new building of the future . . . [which] will one day rise towards the heavens . . . as the crystalline symbol of a new and coming faith” harnessed the symbolism of glass to a yearning for a new beginning. In 1920, ­Gropius wrote: “For the longed for materials of the distant future—pure glass—we will ­only be ready when the spirit of the building has once again seized the entire Volk as it ­did at the time of the Gothic cathedrals.” Besides the inspiration of medieval stained glass, Albers was also familiar with modern examples. He had met the renowned Dutch stained glass artist Johan Thorn Prikker ­in 1916 at the Handwerker und Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Handicrafts and Applied Arts) in Essen. He probably also knew of, and may even have seen, Bruno Taut’s Glass Pavilion, that perfect union of Expressionist imagery and industrial modernity, at the Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne in the summer of 1914. In 1917, Albers, then an elementary school teacher in his hometown of Bottrop, became directly involved with the medium when he designed an expressionistic stained glass window for the town’s newly built St. Michael’s Church. In a lengthy correspondence with the leading Berlin stained glass firm, Puhl & Wagner, Gottfried Heinersdorff, Albers demonstrated a clear vision of the effects he was aiming for. He described himself as an autodidact in the techniques of stained glass, but he quickly developed a fine grasp of the basic methods and limitations of the medium. All of this must have played a role in Albers’s determination to be assigned to the glass workshop in Weimar. The workshop, established in October 1920 around the time that Albers arrived in Weimar, was scarcely a thriving enterprise: although Johannes Itten was at first the master of form, the appointment of a local glass artisan as master craftsman had not worked out. For a brief period Carl Schlemmer held the position, but by October 1922 Paul Klee had replaced Itten, and Albers had been named master craftsman. Scarcely an expert himself, Albers was placed in command of the workshop without anyone to turn to for technical guidance. Moreover, as inflation soared there was little money for materials, and Albers would later famously describe how he scoured local junk heaps for broken glass. He also begged samples from Berlin glassmaking firms—both his former collaborators Puhl & Wagner, Gottfried Heinersdorff and the firm of Ludwig Grosse. In 1972, toward the end of his life, Albers recalled his working process: “I ordered and juxtaposed such shards to related size, shape, color, and arrived at various groupings,

Nickel Construction | LÁszlÓ Moholy-Nagy | 1:1.768

Literature Albers 1972. Albers/Heinersdorff n. d. Pehnt 1971.

original Title: Nickel-Konstruktion year of execution: 1921 Material: nickel-plated iron format: 35.9 x 17.5 x 23.8 cm loaned by: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 17.1956 P&S, gift of Mrs. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy

Nickel Construction László Moholy-Nagy

Brenda Danilowitz, an art historian, is Chief Curator at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, CT.

C 0 M 93 Y 100 K 0

96

hold the construction together; no attempt to create the illusion of a seamless surface. On the contrary, the surface is visibly held together by the web of thin spidery wires. Albers developed an assortment of low-tech ways to modify the stern geometry of the rectangular format and to filter light through the transparent glass. Cutting into the surrounding sheet metal, he created an irregular geometric profile and anchored the composition with devices like the strategically placed small red squares of glass close to the perimeter. Setting a red, circular, glass bottle base into the sheet metal at the top right, he made a virtue of the rough-cut metal circle to create a pattern of pointed teeth that echoes the two inner circles of the molded relief of this piece of glass. Together with the half-circle of green ­at left and the approximate one of yellow below, the red piece sets up a revolving motion in counterpoint to the stable rectilinear geometry of the whole. Seen from the front, the wire grille creates the ghost of a grid which appears to be embedded in the glass. Like the sheet metal, but to a different end, the grille is cut away in places, either completely to remove a section of the grid, or partially, with the residual ends acknowledging their own reduction. These calculated interruptions both put into question the grid’s authority and allow variations of light penetration, thus modulating the color into areas of brightness and relative quiet. Finally, by overlapping sections of the dominant grid with a second (and in some places a third) grid system, in the form of a fine wire screen, Albers extended his play with the notion of the grid: the wavering lines of the fine mesh continue to undermine the certainty of the base armature. And with an economy that would become a hallmark of Albers’s method, where they are applied, the minor screens modulate the color even further. When Gottfried Heinersdorff visited Weimar in 1923, he reported on the amateurish nature of the glass workshop’s production. But he conceded that Albers’s assemblages of discarded and broken glass were “quite interesting and inspirational . . . and quite charming, if a bit brutal.” And in a tacit endorsement of the Bauhaus ideals, the maven of architectural glass fabrication concluded: “Without a doubt, the people here who have not been burdened by tradition and by studies in craft are able to create artistically more important and more interesting works than our assistants.”

change and could stand for what impressed Gropius. Its forms are clean, crisp, and clear, and its material modern and industrial. Its three-dimensionality could have appealed to the founder of a school that saw the ultimate goal of all creativity in “construction” and “building,” especially when we learn, from Sybil, that Moholy may have considered this simply a model for later translation into something more monumental. Its seeming abstraction signals the radical reorientation of art that Gropius sought. The small-scale object could appeal as an experimental exercise in shapes and form (it can be read as a meditation on the variety of the curve), one that could relate productively to the kind of art education that Gropius was instituting. The choice of metal as material connects neatly with Gropius’s decision to put Moholy in charge of the metal workshop, and its shiny, reflective surface (perhaps now enhanced by a replating that was undertaken around 1939) anticipates both Moholy’s concentration on lighting devices in his leadership of that workshop, and his fundamental theoretical interest in light as a medium. But closer inspection complicates this easy linkage. In several ways, the sculpture is surely more conservative than might be expected. Is there perhaps not a representational echo? Does the work not remind us of the top of a submarine, with its curved hull, conning tower, and radio aerial strung down at an angle from the mast (surely a common image immediately after a world war in which the U-boats had played a key military role)? The allusion is not far-fetched for an artist who by his own admission based one of his 1920 “abstract” paintings on the outline of the cable repair car of the Berlin tramway system, and devoted other works at the same time to the theme of cycling (another mode of transportation). And is the piece not surprisingly conventional in its composition, with ­a solid foundation of stacked forms, along with a pervasive overall symmetry and containment? Even the one asymmetrical element, the spiral wire, does not break the frame of the horizontal base and the vertical strut. Overall, the work hardly lives up to the artist’s own retrospective assessment (in his posthumously published book Vision in Motion) of its place in the evolutionary history of the medium, as “the completely perforated, completely broken-through piece of sculpture” demanding both technical knowledge and “a mind that works abstractly: a freeing ­of material from its weight.” Perhaps the piece makes better sense when seen in the immediate context of another sculptural work that was also shown at the 1922 Sturm exhibition, Holzplastik (Wood Sculpture), now lost but known from the catalogue illustration. With forms derived from Moholy’s contemporaneous “Light Architecture” paintings, this piece directly echoes the composition of Nickel Construction. Paralleling the metal spiral, the diagonally placed, curved wood segment joins the vertical and horizontal members. But the wood is textured and roughly cut. It is an emphatic, almost handmade contrast to the machined, smooth, and reflective surfaces of Nickel Construction, a comparison dramatically heightened by the similarity of form. This pedagogical demonstration of material contrast would surely have appealed to Gropius, the director of the Bauhaus—where the preliminary course was devoted to just this kind of analysis. The juxtaposition of the organic (wood) and the industrial (metal) replays a tension often seen in Moholy’s paintings around 1920, many of which allude to agriculture (fields) and the urban (bridges) simultaneously. Two further sculptures were shown in 1922, both also now lost, which may have articulated the same polarity. Kreiskopfplastik (Circle Head

98

It is February 1922 in Berlin, and Walter Gropius—so the story goes—is taken by the art critic and cultural journalist Adolf Behne to visit the current exhibition at Herwarth Walden’s legendary Der Sturm gallery. On view is the first solo presentation by László Moholy-Nagy. Alongside abstract oils and works on paper, there are a number of reliefs and other three-dimensional works, including Nickelplastik mit Spirale (Nickel Sculpture with Spiral)—to give it the original full name as listed in the catalogue. Almost immediately, Nickel Construction begins to acquire iconic status. In that same year, it is illustrated in an issue of MA from May 1, 1922, and in the pioneering Buch neuer Künstler (Book of New Artists) published by the artist and Lajos Kassák. Moholy-Nagy shows it in the first public Bauhaus exhibition of summer 1923, and illustrates it in his influential Bauhaus book From Material to Architecture. Its standing is further confirmed when the artist’s widow Sybil donates it in 1956 to New York’s Museum of Modern Art, that central repository of canonical works by Bauhaus masters. And it is the experience of this and the other works (not to mention the experience of the man himself) which plants the seed that, a year later, on February 13, 1923, leads Gropius to invite Moholy-Nagy to join the Bauhaus faculty and thereby to mark the definitive transition of the school from its Expressionist and individualistic beginnings to its characteristic focus on geometry, rationality, the mechanical, and the social. Superficially, it is not difficult to see how this sculpture could be emblematic of this

An Icon between Radical and Conventional László Moholy-Nagy, Nickel Construction Peter Nisbet C 0 M 96 Y 100 K 0

László Moholy-Nagy, Konstruktion Z 1 (Construction Z 1), 1922–23, oil over pencil drawing on canvas, 75.5 x 96.5 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

99

László Moholy-Nagy, Holzplastik (Wood Sculpture), 1922, lost

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror)

Literature Botar 2006. Moholy-Nagy 1929. Moholy-Nagy 1947. Moholy-Nagy 1956.

The “March on Rome” and the beginning of fascism in Italy

1922 unemployed

Founding of the Soviet Union

POLITICS

Peter Nisbet, an art historian, is senior lecturer at Harvard University and the Daimler Benz Curator of the Busch Reisinger Museum at Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, MA.

CULTURE 

MODERN LIFE

Architectural competition by the Chicago Tribune newspaper. The contributions of Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer set new standards for steel frame construction.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, design for a glass skyscraper: although it remains unbuilt, the project non­etheless becomes a prototype for modern high-rise design by virtue of ­its radical form.

Howard Carter discovers the tomb of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun.

James Joyce, Ulysses. The Irish writer’s central novel appears in complete form in 1922, albeit in a version censored for obscenity.

Niels Bohr completes a theoretical description of the Periodic Table of the elements.

Man Ray invents the “rayogramm,” a procedure for producing photographic images without a camera.

Passuth 1985.

C 0 M 98 Y 100 K 0

100

Sculpture) and Radplastik (Wheel Sculpture) were perhaps another programmatic pair, contrasting the organic (“Head”) with the mechanical (“Wheel”) on the basis of identical form (the circle). Nickel Construction gains further significance when set alongside another lost sculptural work by Moholy, Material-Konstruktion in Glas und Nickel (Material Construction in Glass and Nickel), shown in the artist’s 1923 solo show at Der Sturm and known from a documentary photograph. This radical work deploys many of the same compositional elements as Nickel Construction and uses similar materials, but with a key difference: the elements are dispersed across a wide ground, more a horizontal relief or an architectural model than a sculptural statement. This de-centered work deploying reflectivity, overlapping, and transparency is centrifugal, while Nickel Construction is centripetal; the one tending toward an experimentation with sculpture in an expanded field, the other toward traditional objecthood. Significantly, Moholy-Nagy later illustrated this pair together on a single page spread of From Material to Architecture. Moreover, when Moholy-Nagy ­displayed Nickel Construction at the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition, he set it in implicit comparison with another sculpture, now also lost, that similarly dispersed vertical rectangular forms discontinuously across a horizontal plane, re-enacting the dialectic evoked here. Given all this, Nickel Construction is a curious icon, especially when it is noted that sculpture was actually a rare medium for Moholy until much later in his career. Up until the Sturm exhibition he had barely experimented with the genre at all, and even afterward it was to be almost a decade before he returned emphatically to the three-dimensional object with his Light-Space Modulator (also known as Light Prop; completed 1930)—and even that was concealed in a box. The reputation of Nickel Construction may have been accidentally enhanced by being the sole survivor of this early engagement with an ­unfamiliar medium, but it has also suffered from the loss of the network of related and dialectically opposed works, which make up the richest framework for understanding what the work achieves and what it does not.

0.2 mil.

C 0 M 100 Y 100 K 0

Congress of the Constructivist International at Weimar

“Itten   wants to train the artisan to regard introspection and reflection about his work as more important than the work itself. . . . Gropius wants capable and efficient individuals who mature through praxis in friction with reality.” Oskar Schlemmer 1922

Founding of the Bauhaus-Siedlungsgenossenschaft (Housing Settlement Society)

Organization of instruction. This year, “building” as the final stage of the training process remains unrealized.

48

CITATION

EVENTS

TEACHING

Students

1922 Appointment of Wassily Kandinsky to the Bauhaus

71

year of execution: 1922

original Title: portfolio Kleine Welten

Material: parchment portfolio, sheet containing commentaries, twelve prints

loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 258/1–14

format: 46.2 x 35.3 cm

Small Worlds Wassily Kandinsky

Founding of the KURI group (constructive, utilitarian, rational, international)

Small Worlds | Wassily Kandinsky | 1:2.185

“Increasingly,   the activities of the Bauhaus workshops could conceivably lead to the production of typical unique exemplars which would then be taken up by the handicraft trades and industry as guideposts for their forms.” Walter Gropius 1922

Premiere performance of the Triadic Ballet ­in Stuttgart. Oskar Schlemmer unifies experimental design with space, time, bodies, gesture, and movement.

Theo van Doesburg offers a course in Weimar.

A Ringing Cosmos Wassily Kandinsky’s Small Worlds Annegret Hoberg C 2 M 100 Y 98 K 0

104

The print portfolio entitled Small Worlds is the most important portfolio work in Wassily Kandinsky’s oeuvre. It was published by the Propyläen-Verlag of Berlin in December 1922, some months after Kandinsky accepted Walter Gropius’s invitation to join the Bauhaus faculty in June of that year. The portfolio was printed in an edition of two hundred and fifty copies and contains twelve prints, four lithographs (I–IV), four woodcuts (V–VIII), and four etchings (IX–XII). Kandinsky later commented on the printing process in a letter to Galka Scheyer in May 1932: “I did all of the plates and stones myself; all of the prints were made under my constant supervision—some of them at the Bauhaus (etchings, black woodcuts), others at an excellent printing shop in Weimar (lithographs, colors in the woodcuts). The bookbinder was the famous Prof. Dorfner of Weimar. In short, all of the work was first-rate.” Kandinsky wrote a foreword for the portfolio, which was carefully typeset, printed, and added as a loose-leaf insert. In this text he explained the three “groups” comprising the traditional printmaking techniques of the woodcut, the etching, and the lithograph, and went on to comment on the distribution of colors in the portfolio, which also reveals a certain numerical pattern. Of the twelve prints, six are colored—four colored lithographs and two colored woodcuts—and the other six are black and white—two woodcuts and the four etchings. Most important, however, is Kandinsky’s statement that each of the three printmaking techniques had been selected “on the basis of the qualities for which it was best suited.” What he meant was that the twelve prints were executed using the technique that was most appropriate to them. The designs composed of boldly outlined squares, circles, segments, and line bridges were realized with the oldest of the three methods, the frame-filling woodcut technique, which produces striking fields and contours and reveals the “mild” imprint on the paper even in the clearly defined high-relief of the printing block. He rendered the fine webs of lines in his drawings in the more recent gravure technique of the etching, with its strong linear structure, about which Kandinsky wrote the following remarks in his Bauhaus book Point and Line to Plane published four years later (1926): “Of the several types of etching, the drypoint technique is preferred by many today, as it fits well with the hectic atmosphere and has the cutting character of precision at the same time. The ground can remain completely white, and the dots and lines are deeply and sharply embedded in that white. The needle works with certainty and the strongest resolve and bores with lust into the plate. The point appears as a negative made with a short, precise stab into the plate.” And for the more painterly designs, he chose the easiest and newest of the printmaking techniques—the lithograph, which enables the artist to exploit all creative possibilities as he works on a special greased paper that is laid on the stone and leaves an image that appears as a positive in the print. As Kandinsky later wrote, “This comparison of the three techniques should clearly show that the lithographic technique simply had to be discovered last, actually not until ‘today’—such ease cannot be achieved without effort. And on the other hand, the ease of creation and the ease of correction are qualities that are especially appropriate to the present day. This present day is merely a springboard to ‘tomorrow’ and can only be appreciated as such with inner tranquility.” It is not by chance that most of the other prints made by Kandinsky during his Bauhaus years were executed in this most recent “democratic” printmaking technique, with which an unusually large number of prints can be made at relatively low cost. Examples include

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

Wassily Kandinsky, Kleine Welten I (Small Worlds I), 1922, colored lithograph, 24.7 x 21.8 cm Kleine Welten II,1922, colored lithograph, 25.4 x 21.1 cm Kleine Welten III, 1922, colored lithograph, 27.8 x 23 cm

Kleine Welten IV, 1922, colored lithograph, 26.7 x 25.6 cm Kleine Welten V, 1922, colored lithograph (called a woodcut by Kandinsky), 27.5 x 23.5 cm Kleine Welten VI, 1922, woodcut, 22.5 x 23.4 cm

Kleine Welten VII, 1922, colored lithograph (called a woodcut by Kandinsky), 22.1 x 23.3 cm Kleine Welten VIII, 1922, woodcut, 27.2 x 23.3 cm Kleine Welten IX, 1922, drypoint etching, 23.9 x 20 cm

Kleine Welten X, 1922, drypoint etching, 23.9 x 20 cm Kleine Welten XI, 1922, drypoint etching, 23.8 x 19.9 cm Kleine Welten XII, 1922, drypoint etching, 23.7 x 19.7 cm

105

Architectural Sculpture | Otto Werner | 1:5.456

Literature Friedel/Hoberg 2008. Kandinsky 1926. Munich/Bonn 2008. Roethel 1970. Schreyer 2008.

original Title: Bauplastik year of execution: 1922 Material: Dorla shell limestone format: height 128 cm loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 12736 hoto: Hartwig Klappert, 2008

Architectural Sculpture Otto Werner

Dr. Annegret Hoberg is an art historian with the Cultural Department of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich.

C 4 M 100 Y 96 K 0

106

the colored lithograph for the fourth portfolio of the Bauhaus Prints (Italian and Russian artists), which was issued even before Small Worlds in 1922, and his postcard for the Bauhaus exhibition of 1923, which was produced along with twenty lithographic postcards by different artists, among them Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Gerhard Marcks, László Moholy-Nagy, and Oskar Schlemmer. Kandinsky also used this technique for the last of his prints for the Bauhaus, Lithographie No. I, Lithographie No. II, and Lithographie No. III of 1925. All three of these works were printed at the graphic printing shop operated at the Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar from 1919 to 1925. This workshop, supervised by Lyonel Feininger, was not reestablished following the move to Dessau. Oriented toward manual craftsmanship, the printing shop gave way to new priorities focused on design and industrial production. Kandinsky’s Small Worlds of 1922 reveal various facets of the process of clarification and systematization of his aesthetic vocabulary. They reach back to the expressive, symbolic codes of the prewar years and anticipate the progressive solidification of his abstract geometric forms. In the medium of the etching in particular, he came very near to his first series of etchings done in 1913–14, although the technique used in those works quite obviously responded to one of the most important tendencies of his mature prewar years, namely his search for “absolute” abstraction. “And the beginnings of the quest for elementary forms simply had to lead to the thinnest line, which, viewed abstractly among all lines, is an ‘absolute’ sound,” he wrote in Point and Line to Plane in a summary of his thoughts on the etching. In the mostly colored woodcuts and lithographs of the Small Worlds group, Kandinsky combined vividly animated objective remnants of landscape, architecture, and other motifs from his personal iconography developed during the Blaue Reiter and Russian periods with clear geometric forms such as circles, spheres, chessboard patterns as well as recurring diagonals and connecting tangents. This intermediate position of the Small Worlds at a point of transition can also be observed in comparison with Kandinsky’s three Bauhaus lithographs of 1925, all of which feature precise geometric lines and fields. Yet in addition to the established geometric characteristics of his forms, their diversity and complexity is also evident both here and in his paintings from the same period. Overlapping elements often form multiple centers, as in Komposition VIII of 1923 and Gelb-Rot-Blau (Yellow-Red-Blue) of 1925, or appear in highly concentrated form as in Einige Kreise (Some Circles) of 1926. The geometric, autonomous, or “absolute” forms in his works always seem charged with meaning and are presented as active bodies operating in a vast, cosmic-looking pictorial space. Every work in the print portfolio of 1922 is a floating microcosm, a small world in its own right, as Kandinsky obviously meant to express with his title: Small Worlds.

109

The very title of Werner’s work, Architectural Sculpture, reflects the frustrated ambition of the early Bauhaus to reunify the arts and crafts under architecture as part of the imagined return to the great building. Werner’s sculpture is an independent modernist object, a demonstration piece intended for no particular site or architectural project. Despite his title and the rhetoric of the Bauhaus program, Architectural Sculpture remains disconnected from any rooted function and exemplifies the “homeless” condition of autonomous modern art, the “salon art” that Gropius had hoped the Bauhaus would overcome. By 1922, the year of Werner’s sculpture, Gropius had already begun to reevaluate the Bauhaus workshop structure. No longer expecting major architectural commissions, Gropius emphasized the need for the workshops to justify themselves by designing and producing marketable objects. The initial suggestions for the stone sculpture workshop made by the master craftsman Josef Hartwig in September 1922 included “small sculptures (wax casts) . . . gravestones, garden benches, fireplaces, fountains, urns etc.” Even these modest ambitions, however, were mostly unfulfilled. More importantly, Gropius began to insist the Bauhaus acknowledge the conditions of industrial capitalism and embrace principles of functional design and utilitarian production. The axiom from the original Bauhaus program that “there is no essential difference between the artist and the craftsman” now was recast to include the engineer and the machine, an idea that soon would be codified in Gropius’s 1923 proclamation of “Art and technology—a new unity.” This new functionalist program at the Bauhaus would seem to demote Werner’s limestone carving and relegate such objects to the past. For despite its

Sculpture and the Rhetoric of Architecture Otto Werner’s Architectural Sculpture Paul Paret

Karl Peter Röhl, Totemartige Plastik (Totem-Style Sculpture), ca. 1920, carved wood, colored, height 89 cm, Klassik Stiftung Weimar C 7 M 100 Y 93 K 0

108

Otto Werner’s limestone Architectural Sculpture, a complex, four-sided fusion of figurative and architectonic elements, is one of the few surviving objects from the Bauhaus stone sculpture workshop. Werner (1892–1964) made the sculpture as his “journeyman piece,” which was part of the craft training system that was central to the workshop model of the early Bauhaus and its concept of artistic reform. For decades Werner’s sculpture was known mainly from the book Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar 1919–1933, published on the occasion of the pivotal 1923 Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar, where Architectural Sculpture was displayed in a gallery of student work. The 1923 exhibition catalogue reproduces Werner’s Architectural Sculpture individually and in a well-known photograph of the stone sculpture workshop, where it stands on a dark marble block amidst an array of figurative and abstract sculptures in plaster and stone that document both the variety and limitations of sculpture at the early Bauhaus. Placed near the center of the room, Werner’s sculpture marks the diagonal intersection between, on the one hand, Schlemmer’s tall figurative relief in the back left and his Abstract Figure in the right foreground, and on the other, between the rectilinear sculptures stretching from Kurt Schwerdtfeger’s identically titled Architectural Sculp­ ture in the left foreground to the geometric constructions in the back right. Displayed at an angle that reveals its multifaceted synthesis of architectonic structures, geometry, and the human figure, Werner’s Architectural Sculpture functions in the photograph as the visual crux between the competing stylistic tendencies of the stone sculpture workshop. In 1922 when Werner carved Architectural Sculpture, the Bauhaus sculpture workshops were in crisis. Like the other early Bauhaus workshops, the stone sculpture and wood carving workshops were established with the ambition expressed in Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus manifesto that “the ultimate aim of all creative activity is the building.” Sculpture was not to exist independently as free art—what Gropius disparaged in the manifesto as “salon art” that had lost its “architectonic spirit”—but rather was to contribute to a larger architectural totality. The grand architectural projects that Gropius initially hoped for did not, however, materialize. (A rare exception was the house designed by Gropius and Adolf Meyer for the timber magnate Adolf Sommerfeld in Berlin, an all-wood structure for which the student Joost Schmidt, who would later lead a much-transformed sculpture workshop in Dessau, made a series of decorative carvings.) From the beginnings of the Bauhaus, the sculpture program had been characterized by instability. Separate workshops for wood and stone sculpture were set up in the fall of 1919 under the leadership of the academic sculptor Richard Engelmann (a holdover from the Weimar Kunstakademie), followed in late 1920 by Johannes Itten as master of form for the stone sculpture workshop and Georg Muche for the wood carving workshop. Oskar Schlemmer became master of form for the two workshops in 1921 and 1922, respectively, and would lead both until 1925. After arriving at the Bauhaus in 1921, Schlemmer noted privately that “what the students actually produce in the way of art or handcrafted objects can only be called meager. Almost shockingly so.” The sculpture workshops, he reported during a faculty meeting the following year, are held back by the “lack of applied commissions.” Gropius, too, ­complained about the stone and wood carving workshops, noting in 1923 that “up to ­now little has been achieved there.”

The stone sculpture workshop in Weimar, 1923, photograph, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Theobald Emil Müller-Hummel, Stele mit kosmischer Vision (Stele with Cosmic Vision), 1919–20, carved wood (aircraft propeller), colored, with brass fittings, height 91.4 cm, Klassik Stiftung Weimar, loan from J.-A. Müller

Chicago tribune Tower | Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer | 1:5.4

Literature Behne 1923. Dessau 1988. Krauss 1985. Siebenbrodt 2000. Wahl 2001. Weber 1994b. Weimar 1923.

year of execution: 1922 Material: ink, washed, on thin paper, mounted on cardboard format: 135 x 71.5 cm loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 3751/1

Dr. Paul Paret is an art historian at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, UT.

C 9 M 100 Y 91 K 0

110

tightly controlled geometric construction, Werner’s Architectural Sculpture is fundamentally ornamental and could have little role within the emerging program of Neues Bauen (New Building) that called for an architecture stripped of applied decoration. Just how the sculpture workshops might contribute to the 1923 exhibition remained a problem. Despite Gropius’s shift of emphasis, Schlemmer, as the head of the sculpture workshops, clung persistently to the early Bauhaus ideal of integrating art and architecture. In a proposal for the 1923 exhibition, Schlemmer wrote of the need “to raise painting and sculpture to the functions that they had in the great ages: part of architecture as space and wall-creation.” Schlemmer created an elaborate set of reliefs and painted murals in the Bauhaus workshop building and set the program for the reliefs Joost Schmidt made in the vestibule of the Bauhaus main building. (Both sets of works were later destroyed.) These architectural works from the sculpture workshop, however, were ridiculed by advocates of the New Building like the critic Adolf Behne, who in a critique that might equally well have been applied to Werner’s Architectural Sculpture called for both art and architecture “rigorously to avoid all decoration” regardless of style. Following the 1923 exhibition, no similar works of architectural sculpture were pursued at the Bauhaus and the viability and continued need for the stone and wood carving workshops was called into question by Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, and others. Soon they would be reconfigured as part of an experimental sculpture or plastic arts workshop at the Bauhaus Dessau under the leadership of Joost Schmidt, now elevated to the position of “junior master.” Werner himself had left the Bauhaus even before the 1923 exhibition. The minutes of a meeting from May 1923 report, “Journeyman Werner has a false understanding of the Bauhaus. He comes to the workshop only if he needs something. With the agreement of both masters [Schlemmer and the master craftsman, Josef Hartwig] Werner will be removed from the student list.” Werner later set up an independent studio in Weimar, although little is known of his subsequent career. His Architectural Sculpture, however, remains a key work for understanding the situation of sculpture at the early Bauhaus. With its fusion of figurative and architectonic forms and its title’s declaration of both the desire for and absence of architectural collaboration, Werner’s Architectural Sculpture embodies the ambitions as well as failures of the sculpture program at the early Bauhaus.

Entry for the Competition for the Design of an Office Building for the Chicago Tribune Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer

The competition came to symbolize the heroic struggle of the modernist movement. As late as the 1949 film The Fountainhead, viewers saw Gary Cooper in the role of Howard Roark, his face filled with bitterness, viewing plans which strongly resemble those by Max Taut, Walter Gropius, and Adolf Meyer. They bear the handwritten inscription “NOT BUILT.” Roark’s rival, Peter Keating, prefers an eclectic style. Many years later, in 1950, Gropius explained in retrospect: “In 1922, when I designed the Chicago Tribune high-rise, I wanted to erect a building that avoided using any historical style, but which instead expressed the modern age with modern means; in this case with a reinforced concrete frame which would clearly express the building’s function.” The accuracy of this statement must however be called into question, as it seems to have been influenced by the design’s subsequent reception. In the 1950s, moreover, Gropius could no longer recall that in 1925, he had still presented the building in Internationale Architektur as being planned in “iron, glass, and terracotta.” The debate concerning the legitimacy of the modernist style in relation to eclecticism will not be enumerated again here. Today, the question is instead why this particular design by Gropius and Meyer came increasingly to serve as a prototype for other architects. And to such a degree that it has come to belong to the core canon of modernist architecture— even though Saarinen’s design has not. Today, the design by Gropius and Meyer for the Chicago Tribune Tower appears almost as an anonymous instance of that which came at some point (in the 1950s or 1960s?) to be regarded as the typical modern high-rise. By which I mean: as though it had no author. ­It could be a building for a model railway by the Faller firm. Today, the photographs of the model would be associated more specifically with the “special models” of the Viennese insurance executive Peter Fritz, which were discovered by artist Oliver Croy in a trash bag in a junk shop in 1992, after Fritz’s death. In Melbourne and New York, I recently passed by posters advertising similarly low, elegantly composed skyscrapers. Today, nearly ninety years after the original design, this architectural idiom, with its freely positioned balconies, remains an icon of “modern living.” That the design suggests apartments rather than offices is primarily due to the balconies, which (as nearly every publication on the Chicago Tribune Tower emphasizes) lack any function. Winfried Nerdinger makes reference to the fact that, in the wake of Max Berg, the high-rise debate in Germany was mainly concerned with “alleviating housing shortages.” A number of publications mention that the design by Gropius and Meyer dates from a decisive phase in the development of the Bauhaus, specifically the period when Walter Gropius and Johannes Itten were becoming progressively estranged. As director of the school, Gropius steered things increasingly in the direction of industry, leaving the school’s origins in Expressionism behind. It is tempting to interpret the combination of the objective core of the Chicago Tribune design with its intuitively positioned balconies as symptomatic of Gropius’s inner struggle. We lack solid documentation for this interpretation—such as statements by Gropius himself or others who were directly involved. Nonetheless, it is apparent that at this point, Gropius and Meyer were still unable to opt unreservedly for a radically objective and functionalist conception. Does it not seem disrespectful or at least superficial to speak this way about one of the most celebrated architectural designs of the past century? Perhaps. But it may instead be that this approach permits us to identify the special quality which allowed it to become

112

The design by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer for an office and administration building for the Chicago Tribune was conceived in 1922. The context was an international competition announced by the Tribune on the occasion of the sixty-fifth jubilee. For decades already, European architects had drawn inspiration from developments in the United States, and the competition represented an initial opportunity to come to terms with the­specifically American task of designing a skyscraper. Many Europeans submitted designs, although the names of such well-known figures as Erich Mendelsohn, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier—whom one might have expected to participate— were absent. Among the two hundred and sixty-five submissions from twenty-six different countries were thirty-seven from Germany, where debates about skyscrapers had been particularly intense, especially around the time of the 1921 competition for a high-rise building on Friedrichstrasse in Berlin. In Chicago, the winners were the Americans John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood, whose Neo-Gothic building was erected in 1925. The decision sparked passionate debate, instigated by critics who had preferred the modernist design of Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen.

Internationale Architektur exhibition, Weimar, 1923, photograph, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Archiv der Moderne

C 11 M 100 Y 89 K 0

Equivocal Icon The Competition Design for the Chicago Tribune Tower by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer Bart Lootsma

113

Honeycomb | Ludwig Mies van der Rohe | 1:5.6

Literature Cohen 1995. Gropius 1925a. Isaacs 1983–84, vol. 2. Nerdinger 1985. Solomonson 2001.

For the ideas competition for a “High-Rise ­B uilding at the Friedrichstrasse Railway Station” original Title: Wabe (revised entry) year of execution: 1922 Material: large photograph with drawn elements format: 140 x 100 cm loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 8283

Honeycomb Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Prof. Bart Lootsma (born 1957) is a historian, critic, curator, and a professor of architectural history at the Leopold Franzens University in Innsbruck. C 13 M 100 Y 87 K 0

114

one of the canonical projects of the twentieth century. And it is precisely superficiality that plays an important role here, for the design itself is little more than an empty shell, one for which floor plans were never published. To be sure, we see an interesting asymmetrical volumetric conception, but it is far from clear what it actually means in functional terms. The drawings make an impression of flatness. As can be seen in the photograph, the model was even pasted over with paper. Certainly, mention is continually made of the projecting platforms of the balconies, so reminiscent of the architecture of De Stijl, although they could also be regarded as a direct homage to Frank Lloyd Wright, whose buildings were presented quite graphically in the Wasmuth edition of 1911. We do not know how Gropius arrived at these balconies. Winfried Nerdinger refers to them as a “decorative auxiliary” that endow the monotonous architectural mass with a pleasing rhythm. Remaining purely speculative is the view that the influence of Theo van Doesburg (who began offering his own courses in the vicinity of the Bauhaus around this time) was decisive. Both Van Doesburg’s pioneering designs for the exhibition in the Galerie de l’effort moderne in Paris as well as Gerrit Rietveld’s Schröder House date from 1923. Similar projecting forms, albeit involving roof overhangs, can be found elsewhere in Gropius’s oeuvre only in the designs for the redesign of the Stadttheater in Jena, for the Rauth House in Berlin, with its clearly evident dependence on Wright, as well as for exhibition and storage buildings for the agricultural machinery manufacturer Gebr. Kappe & Co. in Alfeld an der Leine, all realized between 1922 and 1924. We also find overhanging roofs presented without comment as appendices to the “individual rooms” of the “life-size building blocks” at the Bauhaus exhibition of 1923. In this period, there were even more architects whose designs involved horizontally cantilevered elements. A number of designs with projecting balconies were submitted for the Chicago Tribune Tower competition as well, those for instance by Dutch architects Bernard Bijvoet and Johannes Duiker, as well as by D. F. Slothouwer. Clearly, it is in particular the balconies which distinguish these projects from the more objective contributions, for example the extremely reductive designs of Max Taut und Ludwig Hilberseimer. Another element that endows Gropius’s Chicago Tribune Tower with minimal depth is its recessed entryway, which although positioned asymmetrically nonetheless possesses a certain incidental, subtle monumentality—to the extent that monumentality can ever be either subtle or incidental. But this entry area indicates that Gropius and Meyer had not yet attained full clarity concerning their path toward modernism. From a contemporary perspective, however, namely one that postdates Postmodernism, these equivocal references appear differently. One searches desperately for the historical sources of inspiration for this design, and one even seems to have found them—or then again, perhaps not. But it is only as a consequence of such a search for origins, of such an analytical disassembly, that the design comes to assume the appearance of a collage of contradictions. And is it not conceivable that precisely these equivocal references, these as yet logically unresolved functionalist details, are responsible—in all of their superficiality—for the inspiring force that emanates from this design? And hence the inspiration for that which Americans refer to today as “decent architecture”? The very inspiring force, moreover, which made possible this prototype’s global diffusion?

Sheer Glass Wrapping for a New Architectural Expression Mies van der Rohe’s Entry Honeycomb for the Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse Competition Barry Bergdoll

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, revised entry entitled Wabe (Honeycomb) for the ideas competition for a “High-Rise Building at the Friedrichstrasse Railway Station,” elevation, 1922, charcoal and C 15 M 100 Y 85 K 0

116

walls, this impression is completely destroyed; the constructive thought, the necessary basis of artistic form giving, is annihilated and frequently smothered by a meaningless and trivial jumble of forms. At very best one remains impressed by the sheer magnitude, and yet these buildings could have been more than just manifestations of our technical skill. This would mean, however, that one would have to give up the attempt to solve a new task with traditional forms; rather one should attempt to give form to the new task out of the nature of this task,” Mies noted in a retrospective manifesto on the skyscraper a few months later when he published images of his project in Taut’s Frühlicht. Rethinking American skyscrapers for this specific Berlin site, Mies imagined, as Walter Curt Behrendt later explained to an American audience in the AIA Journal, a completely different approach from that frequent in Chicago and New York, where back courtyards or light wells introduced light. “German architects have recognized that it is not appropriate to group skyscrapers around central courts, as has been done in America . . . The arrangement is that of wings projecting outward from the center of the block, permitting plenty of light and air to enter all the rooms.” The facetted planes of Mies’s complex plan had practical advantages, even as he sought to create an overall gestalt for a complex floor plan. In perspective the building would read as one great crystal, immediately legible, a vast surface to be played upon by reflections rather than shadows, as the effects of masonry moldings and ornaments so important to American skyscraper designers from Sullivan to Burnham, were replaced by glass, which casts no shadows and changes continually from transparent to translucent to opaque with moving weather, changing light, and ambulant observers. Mies underscored this effect of what Rosemarie Bletter has called “dark transparency” by rendering the effects in large elevation drawings with black charcoal. At the same time as he turned to this most traditional form of rendering, he explored also in a series of at least three photomontages the distant views of the building in situ, inserting his prismatic composition into photographs of Friedrichstrasse both looking north and south from different vantage points. One of these is even taken from in front of the famed late-nineteenth-century passage, the Kaisersgalerie, whose form is evoked by the Y-shaped passageways that Mies imagines as providing circulation in each of the three prow-shaped towers that cluster around a centrally planned service core at the very heart of the building. With its multiple entries and passages, Mies’s Friedrichstrasse tower would have been a veritable city district, connecting in a dense web to the adjacent streets, quais, and to the train station, at once an urban beacon on its key site where the Friedrichstrasse enters the commercial center of the city and an urban destination with its unprecedented provision of large-scale office space. Excluded from the official publication of the projects from the competition, Mies now turned directly to publicizing and exhibiting his work, setting the stage for an intense period over the next few years that would result in a series of manifesto projects on the full palette of modern building materials: a second glass skyscraper (1922), a concrete country house (1923), a concrete office building (1923), and a brick country house in 1924. In 1919, Mies had been rejected as too conservative when he attempted to exhibit with the Arbeitsrat für Kunst in the Ausstellung für unbekannte Architekten (Exhibition for Unknown Architects). Now he was given pride of place in the great exhibition that Gropius and his colleagues organized four years later to show off the work of the Bauhaus at Weimar.

In 1922, Ludwig Mies made a spectacular entry into the discourse of ideas and images that made Berlin galleries and periodicals a focal point of the European architectural debate even as the fragile economy of the young Weimar Republic made building commissions few and far between. Two entirely glazed towers appeared that year in the Grosse Berliner Kunstaustellung, including one reworking an earlier proposal in response to the open competition for proposals for Berlin’s first skyscraper adjacent to the newly renovated Friedrichstrasse station. The thirty-five-year-old Mies—who had designed nothing but private houses in the handful of years since he had left Peter Behrens’s office in 1910—made a bid to engage in the hefty debate on the form of the postwar European metropolis and to join in current Hochhaus-mania in Germany. Mies’s triangular twentystory office building—two of whose three dramatic, prowlike angles would face Friedrichstrasse, another the Spree, on one of the capital’s most emblematic sites—shared qualities with many other submissions that drew on the imagery of crystalline architecture, a theme of regeneration launched in Expressionist circles that Mies had largely observed from a distance at the movement’s height in 1919–20. With a veritable symbol of a dawning new era that could rival Feininger’s cover of the Bauhaus manifesto, Mies was seeking to make a name for himself, even as he restyled himself Mies van der Rohe, with a transformative symbol for Berlin, a monument clad entirely in the anti-heroic material of glass. Mies continued for months after the competition was closed to refine the imagery of his complex but immediately graspable volume, whose faceted surfaces of uninterrupted glass would oscillate between effects of transparency and reflection. In 1896, Louis Sullivan had famously declared that the architect’s task, faced with the quest for tall buildings, was to find artistic expression for unprecedented secular height, to create buildings which were “every inch a proud and soaring thing.” Mies took this to heart, disguising the sheer bulk of his building in a dramatic chiaroscuro drawing with a deliberately low vantage point for the perspective to transform a contour building that filled out the triangular site into the impression of a towering volume. His first version of the project had gone unnoticed in the official competition, hung in a corner at the Rotes Rathaus, but a few months later for the Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung Mies worked the design up into a set of grandly scaled perspective drawings in dramatic chiaroscuro charcoal and in photomontage. The perspective was such that viewers could almost walk into images between 1.4 and 1.8 meters in height. Not since Piranesi had a graphic technique combined accessibility and fantastic projection to such stunning effect. His composition eschewed the overtly Gothic imagery, the organicism, and the mysticism of colored glass that had featured so prominently in the work of Wenzel Hablik, the Luckhardt brothers (who took a prize in the competition), and Bruno Taut. In its place Mies proposed a very pragmatic calculation—as Dietrich Neumann has shown—of maximizing space with deep floor plates combined with floor to ceiling glass on all façades, the height created more by the omission of a base and cornice and the complete stripping away of any articulation of the façades. The sheer glass wrapping of the jagged volume responded to a long-standing trope in the German discourse on the fact that American skyscrapers were more startling in the bold novelty of construction photographs than in the completed dressing of historical stone and terracotta façades evoking classical and medieval civilization. “Only skyscrapers under construction reveal bold constructive thoughts . . . the impression of high-reaching steel skeletons is overpowering. With the raising of the

graphite on brown paper, mounted on cardboard, 55.3 x 87.6 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Mies van der Rohe Archive

117

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Glass High-Rise (project), elevation, 1922, charcoal, chalk, and pencil on paper, mounted on cardboard, 137.8 x 83.2 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Mies van der Rohe Archive

Cradle | Peter Keler | 1:7.849

Literature Behne 1922–23. Behrendt 1923. Berg 1922. Berlin 1988b. Marx/Weber 2003. Mies van der Rohe 1922. Neumann 1992. Neumann 1995. New York 2001.

year of execution: 1922 Material: wood, colored, rope weave on a frame format: 91.7 x 91.7 x 98 cm loaned by: Klassik Stiftung Weimar, N 24/36 photo: Hartwig Klappert, 2008

Cradle Peter Keler

Prof. Dr. Barry Bergdoll, an art historian, is a professor at Columbia University and Chief Curator for Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. C 17 M 100 Y 83 K 0

118

Gropius’s design for the Chicago Tribune Tower was exhibited facing Mies’s tower. In his dynamic piling of units based on the forms and dimensions of the famous “Chicago window”—an A-B-A arrangement in which a large central fixed panel for light and a ­broad view was flanked by two operable sash windows for air—Gropius’s tower seemed the pragmatist next to Mies’s study of the skyscraper primarily as a problem of a unified form for a whole new scale of urban building. As Max Berg, that other great master of large-scale effects born of heroic form giving to modern technology—notably in his vast concrete-domed Jahrhunderthalle at Breslau—was one of the few commentators to have seized on this aspect of Mies’s work when he singled out Mies’s entry to the Friedrichstrasse competition in concluding his article in Bauwelt in May of 1922: “In this design, designer Mies van der Rohe of Berlin strives for the greatest simplicity under the watchword: ‘honeycomb.’ But the floor plan does not correspond to the diverse and changing needs of a commercial building. If the entire structure was to serve as a department store, then the depth of the rooms could be regarded as justified—all the more so since the exterior walls, wholly dissolved in glass, allow light to penetrate to greater depths. The design exercises a powerful appeal and can be regarded as an interesting and fruitful attempt to master the formal problems of the high-rise.” With his prominent place in the 1923 exhibition at Weimar, following on his prominence two years running in the Grosse Berliner Kunst­ausstellung, Mies had emerged from obscurity. In 1928, he would shun the suggestion of taking the reins of the Bauhaus, but in 1930 he arrived in Dessau to direct the third and last phase of the school where art and architecture had entered new dialogues.

pyramid, cube, and sphere.” Kandinsky assigned the primary colors of blue, yellow, and red to the basic forms, as shown on one of the few color cards in the catalogue. Keler demonstrated precisely the same principles in his furniture, which is composed of blue circles, yellow triangles, and red rectangles. Yet it is not this formal configuration that makes the cradle so unique, but rather the entirely practical application of these underlying formal principles. The blue wheels support the body of the cradle, whose yellow end panels point downward to the lower, movable point of gravity around which the cradle rocks. Wicker “windows” in the red side panels permit air and light to enter the interior of the cradle from both sides. With apparent ease, the application of formal principles in Keler’s cradle produces a wonderfully functional piece of furniture—as the author himself can testify. His son spent the first months of his life in a replica of this cradle, and his parents’ aesthetic preference did not detract in the least from the primary purpose of rocking the child gently to sleep—on the contrary. The leaflet issued for the Ausstellung von Arbeiten der Gesellen und Lehrlinge im Staatlichen Bauhaus Weimar (Exhibition of Works by Journeymen and Apprentices at the Staat­liches Bauhaus Weimar) in April 1922 describes the work of students in Itten’s pre­liminary course. With regard to the workshop curriculum, it states that the student was expected to “comprehend the material, or more precisely the matter, from which he plans to create a work, with all of his senses.” That presupposes an understanding of the relationship between a given material and other materials. The student should “assemble and compose the various materials in order to visualize their close relationships to each other.” Keler met this objective with his cradle, in which the bentwood wheels surround the plywood body, which in turn surrounds the woven “windows.” A comparison of Keler’s cradle to a child’s bed designed by Johannes Itten circa 1921 and built in the carpentry workshop is quite revealing. The first workshop master of form used motifs that appear both folkloric and appropriate for children, and which also exhibit affinities with the moderate Expressionist architecture of those postwar years—as in the case of the upward-striving triangles, for example. In contrast, Alma Buscher’s child’s bed (1924) represents a functional approach with no reference whatsoever to aesthetic theorems of the kind expressed in Keler’s cradle. Buscher’s children’s furniture items, including the bed equipped with lateral springs to protect against side impact, were among the first Bauhaus products to find a market. Walter Gropius assumed the offices of Bauhaus director and art director of the carpentry workshop in 1922, the year in which Wassily Kandinsky joined the Bauhaus faculty. Kandinsky was in charge of the wall-painting workshop but exerted his greatest influence in elementary studies, which were mandatory for all students. In this course, Kandinsky worked with color cards illustrating his theory of the correspondence between the primary colors and basic geometric forms. These were based on the principles of synesthesia Kandinsky had described in his programmatic essay entitled Concerning the Spiritual in Art in 1911. Kandinsky had systematized the theory of correspondence during his years at the Moscow “Institute of Artistic Culture” (INKhUK) and the VkHUTEMAS, the Russian counterpart of the Bauhaus, in 1922. He continued to pursue these ideas at the Bauhaus. During the latter half of 1922, Gropius emphasized the differences between the past and future philosophies of the Bauhaus. “The one reflects the romantic, sentimental working approach,” he noted at the meeting of the council of masters on October 3. “The results

120

Basic forms and primary colors—the cradle designed by Peter Keler in 1922 does not strike viewers today as surprising at all. Imaginative, certainly, but entirely in keeping with what we tend to associate with the term “Bauhaus.” The distinctive quality of the design becomes evident only within the context of its time. The early Bauhaus had reached the height of its potential by 1922. Most of the works shown at the famous Bauhaus Weimar 1919–1923 exhibition were completed by the summer of the following year for presentation to the public as a résumé and—as it turned ­out—the final chapter in the early craft-oriented phase of the Bauhaus. Born in northern Germany in 1898, Peter Keler enrolled as a student at the Kunstgewerbe­ schule (School of Arts and Crafts) in Kiel at the age of twenty. He soon forged close ties with the artists’ group in Worpswede. In 1921, he began studying wall painting at the Bauhaus. He worked under Wassily Kandinsky and in the carpentry shop under Johannes Itten, the first master of form, who also taught the preliminary course. Kandinsky’s influence on Keler is impossible to overlook. According to Kandinsky, the circle, the triangle, and the square were the basic elements of the flat surface, while the sphere, the pyramid, and the cube were the fundamental components of three-dimensional structures. “Thus in the first part, devoted to the matter of form,” wrote Kandinsky in the 1923 Bauhaus catalogue, “the flat surface is traced back to three basic elements—triangle, square, and circle—and three-dimensional space to the basic solid elements derived from them—­

Wonderful Furniture Peter Keler’s Cradle Bernhard Schulz C 20 M 100 Y 80 K 0

Peter Keler, bed designs for a man, a woman, and a child, 1923 (?),­gouache and collage on paper, Klassik Stiftung Weimar

121

African Fairytales, Cover | Anny Wottitz | 1:1.3

Literature Berlin 1984. Siebenbrodt 2000. Wahl 2001.

Book with text illustrations, sixteen plates, and a language card; experimental binding, as a semi-hardcover made of different natural materials, plant fibers with cut and dyed African-style motifs, sewn elements, shells attached with string, and seed pods as corner reinforcements original Title: Afrikanische Märchen year of execution: 1922–23 editor: Carl Meinhof book design: Elisabeth Weber Publisher: Jena, Eugen DiederichsVerlag, 1921 format: 21 x 13 x 3.3 cm loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 1758 photo: Hartwig Klappert, 2008

Cover of African Fairytales Anny Wottitz

Bernhard Schulz (born 1953) is a journalist with the daily newspaper Tagesspiegel in Berlin.

C 22 M 100 Y 78 K 0

122

are products which may be particularly valuable but were also time-consuming to produce and have nothing to do with the practical requirements of contemporary life. The other approach is an outgrowth of contemporary life, and the result is a universally valid form, a useful object . . .” The comment Gropius added to his fundamental distinction is especially interesting with regard to Keler’s cradle: “The two works by Breuer serve as an example: the romantic chair and the polished table in extremely reduced form.” Marcel Breuer, a student at the Bauhaus since 1920 who took charge of the carpentry workshop as master and Gropius’s successor just five years later, initially designed furniture items whose expressive, primitive formal language destined them for an existence as one-ofa-kind objects, as in the case of the African Chair produced in collaboration with Gunta Stölzl. Yet only a year later, Breuer created furniture pieces which appear as pure configurations of weight-bearing and supporting components. The chair made of polished cherry with an upholstered seat and a belted back returned in a smaller form as a children’s chair along with a thoroughly plain, round table, to which Gropius may have been referring in his remark in October 1922. Keler’s cradle was not produced industrially at the time, but—as the irony of history would have it—was industrially manufactured fifty years later within the context of the revival of Bauhaus design in products intended for a small, design-conscious, and quite affluent clientele. In its perfect harmony of form and function, of reduction to basic geometric forms and emphatic utility, the cradle has but one rival in the Bauhaus repertoire: the chess set designed a year later, in 1924, by Josef Hartwig—and which is still being produced today following its rediscovery some years ago. Peter Keler, who officially completed his studies in 1925, was not involved in this shift of focus at the Bauhaus. He remained in Weimar, where he established his own studio for interior architecture and commercial graphic design. In 1922, he had designed a colored poster for the short-lived KURI Group (the abbreviation stands for “constructive, utilitarian, rational, international”) which is documented in a surviving black-and-white photograph. The program of the KURI Group, expressed in the key sentence “Kuri unites the achievements of technology with art,” underscores the basic current of thinking at the Bauhaus and the greater Bauhaus community, which Gropius summarized soon thereafter in the famous formula, “Art and technology—a new unity.”

Merely Light-hearted, or Subversive? A Bookbinding by Anny Wottitz Mechthild Lobisch and Nina Wiedemeyer C 24 M 100 Y 76 K 0

124

rapid physical deterioration is predictable. The binding of African Fairytales is unusable, broken at the joints, its disintegration seems all but irreversible. Connoisseurship and the knowledge of craftsmanship in coping with complex working procedures were perfectly combined in the master craftsman Otto Dorfner. The craftsman asks how the object is made, and endures the protracted periods needed for the acquisition of the required skills and the execution of complex tasks. Wottitz’s works stand in crass opposition to this attitude. Dorfner’s collaborators Fritz Wiese and Wilhelm Nauhaus, later professors in Munich and Halle, cultivated the skills of construction and decoration (regarded by Wottitz with such carelessness) in order to derive design elements from the technical construction of bookbinding, striving to integrate interlacing both functionally and in design terms. Does Wottitz’s binding, her knotting, dying, and stitching, relegate her to the niche of the textile arts—recommended by Dorfner for women at the Bauhaus in order to provide the building with “cozy furnishings”? Or can her tearing of exotic plant fibers, her fitting on of seed capsules, her ornaments engraved into tree bark, her amateurish assemblage, and the crude texture of the covering materials possibly be understood instead as a subversive gesture? Certainly, this is not the cosy textile envisioned by Dorfner. While we know nothing about the production of African Fairytales, both the book’s choice of materials and the traces of the working processes involved furnish evidence of the tensions characterizing a sensitive juncture in the development of the Bauhaus, a point at which the applied and fine arts—despite all theories—drift apart and are cemented into a hierarchy. The mental potentials of artistic action are exclusively attributed to one side while “mere handicraft” is an incessant reproach against the other side. Under the pressure to justify itself in relation to industrial production, the arts and crafts sought refuge in the realm of art, discovering rougher means of aesthetic expression. While design developed in collaboration with industry, the Bauhaus lost sight of the intellectual potentials of craftsmanship: a knowledge of materials, forms, and procedures. Dorfner had recognized this problematic with clarity, and had criticized the hierarchy between art and craft at the Bauhaus in 1922, claiming mutual respect and equality. Under the influence of the Bauhaus, he had expanded his formal repertoire, and precisely his emphatic will to form had made him an expert craftsman, not willing to a be degraded to the status of a handyman for the fine arts. His insistence on craft qualities might be vilified as conservative—and this was indeed Gropius’s attitude. But did not Gropius himself arrive in office as an advocate of a utopia in which fine art was to be of service to craft, in which the arts and crafts were to be overcome by the educational workshop system, with architects, sculptors, and painters called back to the craft? And had his own mentor not been the very same Peter Behrens who had designed bookbindings? And had interior designer Pierre Legrain not revolutionized the art of French bookbinding? Van de Velde started as a painter, diligently translating his ideas as a book and bookbinding designer as well. To be sure, Gropius understood very well the creative potential inherent in the fine arts, but he was concerned primarily with subordinating everything to architecture, and allowing the personality of the artist to recede in favor of a standardized industrial culture. Among the artist instructors as well, none had taken up binding design as a concern. The bindings of Paul Klein, a Bauhaus student and a journeyman of Dorfner’s, could have held their own in relation to the works of Marianne Brandt, Wolfgang Tümpel, or Otto Lindig.

One either echoes master bookbinder Otto Dorfner in deeming this work naïve and dilettantish, an instance of improvised defiance of bookbinding techniques. Or else one unfolds the layers of an object in order to gain insights into the attitudes of an artist and her milieu at the Bauhaus. At Weimar’s Grossherzoglich-Sächsische Kunstgewerbeschule (Grand Ducal-Saxon School of Arts and Crafts), Otto Dorfner was head of the bookbindery. He became a master in 1919—the same year that the workshop he had taken over was affiliated with the Bauhaus. The foundations of training at the arts and crafts school under the exclusive aegis of Henry van de Velde—an approach that had shaped Dorfner’s attitudes—had been the acquisition of craftsmanship and a confrontation with traditional design models in association with the development of a new style. Dorfner was a master craftsman and in consummate control of his craft. Between September 1922 and May 1923, and following Otto Dorfner’s departure from the Bauhaus, direction of the bookbinding workshop fell to the young Bauhaus student and bookbinding journeywoman Anny Wottitz. Wottitz is mainly mentioned in connection with the circle of friends consisting of Bruno Adler, Friedl Dicker, and Franz Singer, who came to Weimar in 1921 with Johannes Itten and returned to Vienna via Berlin in 1923 after his departure. Anny Wottitz was responsible for at least some bindings of the editions brought out by Bruno Adler’s Utopia-Verlag in Weimar. Also dating from this period is the binding for the African Fairytales. Wottitz carved, sewed, stitched, and mounted exotic materials to form her binding, thereby evoking an “Africanism” that mirrored popular perception of the “Otherness” of African primitive art. In his Die drei Sünden wider der Schönheit (Three Sins Against Beauty), Van de Velde equated the “absolute, eternal forms” of primitive art with creative immediacy, since they did not distract the creative spirit via “any intermediary.” In Elisabeth Weber’s book design, exoticism encounters a repertoire of handicraft forms, while ornamentation and illustrations betray an ethnological and colonial perspective. Choice of material and execution for the binding are constrained by the functional canon of bookbinding: material for spine and joint overlapping onto the boards; joined materials for the cover as well as corner reinforcements. When the volume is opened, naïveté and coarseness recede. A black flyleaf is combined with a kind of red doublure strip overlaid by a violet joint strip, forming an abstract image. The made endpaper is smaller, allowing the brighter block of the book to emerge as a paper-toned frame. The carelessly adjusted materials convert the interior into a sketch, into a design characterized by a considerable degree of tension between inside and out. And although the incoherence between the respective materials and their selection has to be seen in the context of Itten’s teachings on material and texture, they nonetheless have their origins in the arts and crafts (Kunstgewerbe), and precisely in that which the Werkbund and the Bauhaus had attempted to leave behind: work utopias based on medieval techniques. Other bindings by Anny Wottitz imitate medieval techniques, including the braided-in headbands, thongs laced into wooden boards, large raised bands, and bad gluings. Formal details emerge from the selection of recalcitrant materials and a lack of craftsmanship. In the case of her bindings for the Utopia-Verlag, Wottitz’s work also showed her to be quite unconcerned about function. While her artistic treatment of colors and geometric subdivisions makes her bindings attractive, their

Paul Klein, cover for Karl Ferdinand Gutzkow, Uriel Acosta: Der Sadduzäer von Amsterdam, with black-and-white “urzink” drawings by Franz Kolbrand, nineteenth triangle print, Hans von Weber, Munich, 1922; yellow maro-

125

quin tassel cover with black leather appliqués, thermal transfer print with hand gilding, top-edge gilt, black color edging, gray paper mirror, black paper flyleaf, Sammlung Walter Krepl, Ulm

Draft Designs for the Bauhaus Signet | Oskar Schlemmer | 1:1.85

Up until the present day, a misapprehension of craftsmanship (Kunsthandwerk) and specifically of the art of bookbinding passes like a red thread through German conceptions of art. Only Burg Giebichenstein Hochschule für Kunst und Design (University of Art and Design) in Halle maintains aspects of the ambition to conceive of art and craft as a unity. There too, however, the art of bookbinding has taken a back place. Given what little we know of Wottitz’s later activities, she seems to have exemplified the arts-and-crafts-type. The work known to us is rudimentary, and her time at the Bauhaus was too brief to provide insight into whether it might have been possible to unify artistic impulses with sound craftsmanship. The destiny of the Bauhaus bindery describes a path on which artistic genius and craftsmanship seemed irreconcilable.

Literature Lobisch 1999. Müller-Krumbach 2005. Sennett 2008. Van de Velde 1918. Vienna et al. 1999. Wiese 1981.

126

year of execution: 1922 Material: double-page from a booklet, ink, pencil, and opaque white on paper format: 33 x 41 cm loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, GS 7

Two Draft Designs for the Bauhaus Signet Oskar Schlemmer

Nina Wiedemeyer is an art historian and exhibition organizer who lives in Berlin.

C 26 M 100 Y 74 K 0

Prof. Mechthild Lobisch (born 1940) is an artist and professor emeritus in the subjects of painting and book art at Burg Giebichenstein, the University of Art and Design in Halle. She directs the Otto Dorfner Institut, which she founded.

129

may have abandoned these symbols in response to protests by others at the Bauhaus, most notably Gropius.” This interpretation is unacceptable. It is much more likely that Schlemmer removed the two symbols even without Gropius’s protest, as they would have overloaded the image from a visual point of view. But what would they have meant? Schlemmer used these elements frequently during those years and later as well. It would seem that he associated them with Meyer-Amden but also regarded them as symbols of the gradually maturing philosophical foundation of his art. In the broadest sense, they stood for order and harmony and for the romantic­esoteric orientation in his art, in which the human being was conceived as part of a cosmic whole. The version of 1921 was also inspired by very recent ideas, however. Schlemmer responded to elements of the asymmetrical harmony and the radical horizontal-vertical contrasts that played an important role in the work of the Dutch De Stijl artist Theo van Doesburg, who had campaigned for his idea at the Bauhaus since April 1921. Schlemmer may have been acquainted with Van Doesburg’s stepped head of 1917, which Van Doesburg exchanged with the Hungarian artist Sándor Bortnyik, another frequent visitor to the

The Head as a Successful Design Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus Head Magdalena Droste

Otto Meyer-Amden, study of a lily of the valley, 1908, 18.4 x 12 cm

C 28 M 100 Y 72 K 0

128

Apart from the Bauhaus Stairway, the Bauhaus head is probably Oskar Schlemmer’s best-known work. But is it really a single “work”? What we see here are two draft designs featuring heads for a Bauhaus stamp—images that soon developed lives of their own. Almost immediately after they were finished in 1921, the two different heads, which were first studied by Wulf Herzogenrath in 1973 (the head on the left is more elongated, the one on the right is somewhat more compact and exhibits fine horizontal lines near the eye and mouth), were used in so many different variations that it would be impossible to list or reproduce them all here. The version on the right was used on official Bauhaus letters and documents. The head appeared as a logo or signet in printed materials, often without the concentric circles enclosing the lettering. Bauhaus students put variations of the head on postcards and posters for the Bauhaus exhibition of 1923. Alfred Arndt used a variant form on official correspondence in Dessau in 1925, as Ute Brüning has noted. The head appeared as a signet on numerous book covers after 1945. Hans Maria Wingler selected another variation as the logo for the Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin. And it is entirely possible that the image would still be in use today if it weren’t for copyright problems. Herzogenrath included many of these variations in his book entitled Bauhaus-Utopien in 1988. Considering the designs themselves and the different purposes for which they were used, we should actually speak of two heads, but their evident similarity is so strong that they are referred to in the singular here as well. The two draft designs by Schlemmer shown here originated within the context of a competition among Bauhaus masters. At a meeting on October 12, 1921, the council of masters of the Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar called for the design of a new stamp. It was to serve as a symbol for superior-quality Bauhaus works that would “prevent the circulation of less worthy things as Bauhaus works,” according to the edited minutes of the council meeting. “A Bauhaus stamp competition brought me the victory,” wrote Schlemmer in a letter to his friend and fellow artist Otto Meyer-Amden on December 7, 1921, with which he enclosed a printed publication. The enclosure was presumably the advertising brochure for the company that published the Bauhaus print project, New European Graphics. The slimmer head without the circles appeared in this publication for the first time. The origin of the head can be traced to Schlemmer’s first years at the art academy in Stuttgart. The flat profile head Schlemmer designed for a poster for a “Neuer Kunstsalon” (new art salon) at the Neckartor was identified as a precursor in 1967. The Swiss art historian Andreas Meier first introduced Otto Meyer-Amden’s 1908 Maiglöckchenkopf (Lily of the Valley Head) to the discussion in 1986. Schlemmer never forgot the image of Meyer-Amden’s “angular head” as long as he lived. Following his colleague’s death, Schlemmer recalled the “delicate and austere artistic geometry” of the head in 1934. The Maiglöckchenkopf illustrated here is a drawing based on a lost work realized by Schlemmer’s Swiss friend Otto Meyer-Amden in 1908, when he was fellow student of Oskar Schlemmer and Willi Baumeister and the Stuttgart Kunstakademie. Both Baumeister and Schlemmer were admirers of Meyer-Amden, who expressed the hope of introducing “the new religion” (scholars have yet to determine precisely what this meant) as early as 1910. The memory of the early poster and the profile of the Maiglöckchenkopf remains present in the two stepped heads designed for the stamp. Still barely visible in the head on the left are two elements Schlemmer later obliterated: a circle and a cross. Herzogenrath chose to interpret these as symbols of reason and emotion: “Schlemmer

Oskar Schlemmer, poster for a new art salon at the Neckartor, 1914, private collection

Theo van Doesburg, design for a glass-painting composition, woman’s head, 1917, 36.5 x 24.5 cm, Szépművészeti Múzeum, Budapest

Literature Droste 2007. Droste 2009a. Droste 2009b. Herzogenrath 1973. Otterlo/Utrecht 2000. Huch 1922. Keyserling 1922.

Production of Marcel Duchamp’s “Readymades” as anti-art

Opening of the Tempelhof Airport in Berlin

Berlin 1999b.

Meyer 1985. Rössler 2009. Schlemmer/Meyer-Amden n. d. Schlemmer 1958. Wahl 2001.

unemployed

POLITICS

Prof. Dr. Magdalena Droste is an art historian and the Chair of Art History at the Brandenburg University of Technology in Cottbus.

CULTURE 

MODERN LIFE

0.7 mil.

1923

Introduction of public radio broadcasting in Germany. Between 1923 and 1933, the number of radios in Germany rises from around 10,000 to 5 million.

Kemal Ataturk becomes President of Turkey and enforces the secularization and Europeanization of his country.

Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture

200,000 participate in the German Gymnastics Festival in Munich

Gerrit Rietveld, Red-Blue Chair (1917–23). The ideas of Gerrit Rietveld and the Dutch De Stijl group exercise an influence on the Bauhaus.

Werckmeister 1990.

The NSDAP (Nazi Party) is banned throughout the German Reich.

Regular air traffic between Berlin and London

Neumann 1967.

C 30 M 100 Y 70 K 0

130

Bauhaus, in Weimar in 1922. Schlemmer’s draft designs must have seemed quite avantgarde at the Bauhaus, which was still strongly influenced by Expressionism at that time. The fact that hardly anyone inquired as to the purpose and meaning of this work is as characteristic of the Bauhaus head as its varied use. What did the head stand for? Schlemmer’s profile view evoked associations with portraits of rulers on coins and medals, a tradition of sovereignty that can be traced back to antiquity. In this way, Schlemmer gave his heads a certain dignity. Both heads are composed as three-part images whose elements become longer, slimmer, and more delicate toward the top. Both exhibit a feature Schlemmer incorporated into many of the heads he designed at the Bauhaus in Weimar: the Greek “blending of forehead and nose,” as author Ricarda Huch referred to it. Schlemmer must have studied aspects of physiognomy within the context of his work on the heads. In her discussion of the Greek profile, Ricarda Huch went on to say that “Where the forehead and nose blended into one, as in the typical Greek image, the suggestion is that negative and positive spirit, masculinity and femininity are not so clearly separated from one another, that the human being is not yet fully self-aware.” Many of Schlemmer’s heads are impossible to identify with certainty as male or female, and this ambiguity appears to have been intended by the artist, for one of the goals he pursued in his art, and one whose viability he tested particularly during the early Bauhaus years, was to create human types. At that time, Schlemmer was still influenced by the writings of philosopher Hermann Graf Keyserling, who sought to prepare humanity systematically for a higher future. “Thus in the creation of a new type of human being, which is the most important objective in our time, we should be concerned neither with the number of those who embody it nor with their durability. Their impact will consist in their inner emotions,” wrote Keyserling. Although it is initially viewed as that of a male, Schlemmer’s head appears to have been influenced by such ideas. It is the heroic individual who undertakes the utopian task of building a new world with the Bauhaus after the lost world war. With this head, Schlemmer created an object of identification that was accepted immediately. As in nearly all of his important works, Schlemmer achieved an extraordinary degree of concentration here as well. In drawing inspiration from Otto Meyer-Amden’s Maiglöckchenkopf, he integrated elements of the most recent Constructivist art, designed an androgynous profile that elevated the individual to heroic status while depicting it as a type, thereby creating a visual symbol of the Bauhaus that remains valid even today.

C 33 M 100 Y 67 K 0

CITATION

Oskar Schlemmer takes over the theater workshop.

The first great Bauhaus exhibition under the motto “Art and technology— ­­a new unity”

“Art   and technology—a new unity.” Walter Gropius 1923

Kurt Schmidt creates the Mechanical Ballet.

35

EVENTS

TEACHING

Students

1923 Johannes Itten ­leaves the ­Bauhaus. László Moholy-Nagy takes charge of the preliminary course and the metal workshop. Josef Albers heads the “Werklehre” (instruction in craftsmanship) and the glass workshop.

“We   want to create a clear, organic building corpus, arising naked and gleaming from its inner law, without lies and playfulness, one which affirms our world with machines, wires, and rapid trains . . . The new spirit of building means the overcoming of inertia, the balancing of oppositions.” Walter Gropius 1923

106

Grotesque Figure I | Oskar Schlemmer | 1:3.028

Original Title: Groteske I year of execution: 1923 Material: walnut, ivory, metal shaft format: 55 x 24 x 11 cm loaned by: Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, NG 20/57 Photo: Hartwig Klappert, 2009

Grotesque Figure I Oskar Schlemmer

“The human eternally seeks his own kind, or his analogy, or the incomparable. He seeks his counterpart, the übermensch, or a fantasy figure.” Oskar Schlemmer, 1925

135

In many cases, these are architecturally related works such as the wall decoration in the Weimar workshop building for the Bauhaus exhibition of 1923, for which he combined painted murals with sculptural reliefs in plaster and mortar. But also produced in 1923— the year when the directorship of the theater workshop was transferred to him after the failure of Lothar Schreyer—were two “Rundplastiken,” or fully three-dimensional sculptures (Schlemmer). Alongside Abstrakten Figur (Abstract Figure), he produced Grotesque Figure, realized in two versions using identical materials. On January 8, 1924, Oskar Schlemmer wrote in his journal: “By its very nature, of course, sculpture must be realized in its purest form, as a three-dimensional object, in contrast to the essence of painting, which is concerned with planarity. The planar image exists in two dimensions (height and breadth). Moreover, it is graspable in a single instant and from a single viewpoint. Sculpture is three-dimensional (height, breadth, depth). It cannot be grasped in a single instant, but instead only in a sequence of positions and view axes. Since a sculpture is not exhausted in a single viewpoint, it compels movement in

Figures In Artificial Space Oskar Schlemmer’s Grotesque Figure I Torsten Blume

Oskar Schlemmer, Abstrakte Figur (Abstract Figure), 1921–23, cast 1963, nickel-plated bronze, 105.5 x 62.5 x 21.4 cm, BauhausArchiv Berlin C 35 M 100 Y 65 K 0

134

The modernist avant-gardes generated a multiplicity of quasi-human artificial figures and technoid human doppelgänger. Contemplated with a sense of fascination were display window mannequins and dress forms, marionettes and jointed dolls, robots and mechanical figures, wearers of prostheses and anatomical models, all of these perceived as leading enigmatic existences that oscillated between deceptive lifelikeness and emphatic artificiality. At the Bauhaus, it was Oskar Schlemmer in particular who made a significant and independent contribution to this cosmos of artificial humanity. The special feature of­ his recasting and reinterpretation of the human figure was that he always conceived and designed artificial “living environments” for his geometrically constructed abstract figures. In his essays, journal entries, and letters, he speaks repeatedly of the “fluidum”— the aura—of the human body in space. This “fluidum” is on the one hand that spatial effect produced by the human being and his physique, as well as by his internal and external movements in space. On the other hand, it is the imaginary medium in which the body is perceived within an architectonic environment, whether by its owner or by others. In his essay “Mensch und Kunstfigur” (“Human and Artificial Figure”), which appeared in 1925 in the fourth Bauhaus book Theater at the Bauhaus, he summarizes his central theme, the connection between the living, organic human and the cubic space of architecture: “The laws of cubic space are those of the invisible network of lines of planimetric and stereometric relationships. . . . The laws of the organic human body, in contrast, are found in the invisible functions of its interior: heartbeat, circulation, respiration, brain and nervous activity. If these are determinative, then the center is the human being whose movements and emanations create an imaginary space. Cubic, abstract space, then, is only the horizontal scaffolding of this fluidum.” Schlemmer sought pictorial equivalents for his basic conception of the human body in connection with a newly formulated basic conception of space, an attempt that involved him in efforts to link the physiques of his artificial figures with architectonic space. By means of an elementary, newly elaborated “armature of form,” Schlemmer reinvented the human form on the basis of the same constructive thinking that was applied by architects in real space and by painters in fictive space. But differently from his Bauhaus colleague Wassily Kandinsky, for example, who investigated the elementary laws of color, form, and surface organization in a way wholly detached from any real-world object, Schlemmer never renounced that which he regarded as the “noblest” subject “of the visible world”: the human figure. In particular after World War I (both before his appointment as a master of form at the Bauhaus and afterward), he turned his attention not just toward painting, but also to dance performance and sculpture. As a dancer and choreographer, he investigated in his Triadic Ballet the space-shaping mechanisms of bodily movements, developing costumes that were simultaneously sculptural models of movement traces as well ­as media for programming movement. Parallel to these activities, Schlemmer’s sculptural works proclaimed the difference between architectonic and bodily space. For the most part, his sculptural oeuvre dates from between 1919 and 1923. As a rule, he used reliefs to develop his stereometrically constructed figures, which emerge from the plane surface.

Oskar Schlemmer, Bauplastik R (Architectural Sculpture R), 1919, cast from a plaster original 1962, aluminum, 99.5 x 25.5 x 8.5 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Study in Equilibrium, Photo | Lucia Moholy | 1:0.81

Literature Von Maur 1972. Schlemmer 1925b. Schlemmer 1990.

year of execution: 1923–24, contact print from, 1950s Material: contact print from a glass negative format: 13.2 x 18.4 cm loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, F 972

Torsten Blume (born 1964) is an art historian and curator at the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau.

C 37 M 100 Y 63 K 0

136

the viewer, and only the sum of impressions leads to an understanding of the sculptural object. For this reason, three-dimensional plastic images which fail to yield up a sequence of surprises when circled, but instead only a repeated view (and this is true for all stereometric bodies), are not essential to sculpture.” A “genuine sculpture” should never present itself “in a surface projection” in such a way “that its perception as a body is thereby rendered superfluous.” It can “therefore be referred to as sculptural only to the degree that its individual views are inexhaustible.” Grotesque Figure fulfills this demand only to a limited extent. It is not really a “Rundplastik,” but instead a two-sided relief with a distinct emphasis on the silhouette as frontal view—although the narrow profile side also offers contrasting and independent views. This sculpture of polished and finely-grained nut wood makes the impression of an archaic, mythical creature. This remarkable artificial being from another world is not the result of a deformation of the human figure, but has instead been generated as an idiosyncratic image of the human via an elementary process of shaping form. The noble material has been handled with painstaking precision. There are no traces of an emotionally tinged manual treatment, no surface irregularities produced by the artisanal procedures, and no uncertainty concerning the shaping of the figure. This creature—whose S-curve volume swings out into the space like a wave, while at the same time it is supported by a vertical axis and marked by convexity—has been constructed through strict geometric logic and stereometric shapes. Were it not for the eyes, formed of ivory discs and metal buttons, and the heart-shaped, ivory mouth, allusions to the human form would be virtually undetectable. Because of them, we perceive a whimsically androgynous body, an organic construction that seems suspended upon a vertical metal shaft. This shaft has been inserted into an oversized (at least in comparison to the figure as a whole) foot shape. This shaft also makes it possible for the figure to rotate. One can, in a sense, play with it: a variety of associations result, depending upon the orientation of the tip of the foot. If the foot points in the direction of the figure’s imaginary gaze, then the effect is bizarre, comical, even grotesque. If it points in the other direction, it instead becomes a kind of elevation upon which the artificial figure is presented with pathetic and majestic earnestness. Might this sculpture in fact be a reversible figure, one that even thematizes the boundary line beyond which the sublime reverts to the comical? Particularly in his stage works (he also appeared as a Musical Clown), Schlemmer was no stranger to the comical and the ironical. Oskar Schlemmer’s figures in artificial space reflect the technification of the human environment during the industrial era. With seriousness, and yet not without ironic distance, they thematize the adaptation of human beings to the logic and rhythms of the “machine age.” Schlemmer was by no means an advocate of the subjugation of human beings to the constructive principles of machines and their laws. While accepting the “signs of the times,” “the machine,” and “abstraction,” he attempted through his art to create a new, generally valid, essential image of the human being, one that would testify to a new universal consciousness and a new dignity. And yet these artificial “personifications of the highest perceptions and concepts,” within which the internal conflict of modern man has been suspended, were also intended as astonishing “figures of wonder.”

Photograph of a Study in Equilibrium, by Johannes Zabel from László Moholy-Nagy’s Preliminary Course Lucia Moholy

Alexander­Calder would later call mobiles. Rodchenko’s spatial constructions, which he also termed “reflecting surfaces” and wished to realize in metal, likewise contained the germ for what Moholy-Nagy would call the “reflective play of light.” The spatial constructions of two-dimensional elements, whether materially oriented, like Tatlin’s counter-reliefs, or formally oriented, like the image compositions conveyed into three-dimensional space by Konstantin Medunetsky and in El Lissitzky’s Prouns— which El Lissitzky himself called “a transit station from painting to architecture”—always have the system of panel painting, pictorial composition, and the pictorial perception of three-dimensional artifacts as references in the background. The space-frame constructions of rods distanced themselves extremely from this dependency on the pictorial. They were exhibited together for the first time at the exhibition of the Society of Young Artists (OBMOKhU) in Moscow in May of 1921. The photos of this exhibition are among the most important documents of the first group of Constructivists, which the likeminded artists Alexei Gan, Varvara Stepanova, Alexander Rodchenko, Karl Ioganson, and Georgii Stenberg joined two months prior to the exhibition. The lasting significance of this group’s works for Moholy-Nagy, both in his own work and in the program for his preliminary course at the Bauhaus, may be seen in his repeated publication of photos from the OBMOKhU exhibition, first in the Buch neuer Künstler (Book of New Artists), which Moholy-Nagy and Lajos Kassák published in 1922, and again in his 1929 Bauhaus book From Material to Architecture, which placed numerous works from the preliminary course in the larger context of a systematic reflection on sculpture and spatial construction in the first third of the twentieth century. In assembling his book and his preliminary course, Moholy-Nagy was guided by the genesis of plastic articulations when working from a solid block, hollowing and perforating it, then creating relationships of tension in space. These relationships could be made through frameworks and gridworks, through cables and nets, and through patterns of motion made visible, in particular through light and its plastic modulation of a world in motion. This world is not the world of objective, solid bodies, but instead a world of relations: “relation instead of mass.” And it is atop these changing relationships that the spatial experience is built. Since dynamics and dematerialization often involve vertigo, and moreover since intellect and feeling grow apart from one other, what matters here is the attainment of a new equilibrium and a psychophysical integrity. This horizon of Moholy-Nagy’s program ensures his undiminished relevance today. In the two extant overview photographs of the OBMOKhU exhibition, one at first sees only scaffolds or frames in front of unrecognizable paintings on the walls in the background. On closer examination, the spatial constructions may be distinguished from one another. Each appears to address a different problem. With a skeleton construction, for example, Stenberg treats the problem of projecting arms (like cranes) and their lever actions. From a composition of like, or geometrically similar, elements following set rules, Rodchenko created self-contained, circular, and richly varied spatial systems demonstrating universal principles of construction. Karl Ioganson, a Latvian-born sculptor who entered industry in 1924, thematized and modelled the orthogonal crossing of axes that is the constructive equivalent of the Cartesian coordinate system, and thus embodies the essence of three-dimensionality. “All buildings,” Ioganson said, “the old and the new, even the most splendid, are sited on a cross. I do not mean the construction as such, but rather the representation of what it rests upon.” Ioganson wished to realize this crossing

“Relation   instead of Mass” Spatial Constructions in the Teaching of Moholy-Nagy Joachim Krausse

Karl Hermann Haupt, Konstruk­ tionszeichnung für eine Gleich­ gewichtstudie (Construction for an Equilibrium Study), 1924, pencil on tracing paper, 35 x 48.3 cm Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin C 39 M 100 Y 61 K 0

138

This object is not intended as a work of art in the emphatic sense. Nor, however, is it to be understood as a useful thing, like fixtures or chassis that serve practical purposes. The equilibrium study that the Bauhaus student Johannes Zabel created in László MoholyNagy’s preliminary course is a specimen from a group of artifacts that derived from the programmatic transcending of the boundary that had previously divided artistic composition from technical construction. To get an idea of this categorical and professional separation of form and structure, it is helpful to consider sculptures of monumental character. The Statue of Liberty, for instance, was created by the sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi in France. To ship it to New York, dismantled into its component parts, required the assistance of two engineers, Maurice Koechlin and Gustave Eiffel. They constructed the inner frame, the techtonic skeleton of this monumental sculpture. The construction was entirely concealed behind the sculpture’s figural form. Here, the artistic composition of form is accorded the status of its outward disguise. This relationship of form and structure also ruled over the monumental architecture of the Wilhelmine period, with its historical formal borrowings. The extent to which new possibilities for construction were disguised behind these sorts of costumings prompted Walter Benjamin to remark on “how dream-bound technological production was in its beginnings.” Yet we can see this relationship reasserting itself in the digital age as well: the dinosaur animations in the film Jurassic Park, for example, are the result of placing an outer shape on a geometric gridwork that, like the frame construction under the Statue of Liberty, is hidden from the viewer. After the completion of the Statue of Liberty in 1881, Eiffel went on to work on the first engineering construction without formal draping for a purely monumental purpose, the Eiffel Tower. The puzzlement of the senses that the work caused in contemporary observers is well-known. But the inspirations from gridwork and nodal connections, with their new plastic qualities and spatial values, were embraced by artists, construction engineers, and theoreticians in equal measure. This is attested to by Naum Gabo’s early figural sculptures, which create volume through intersecting surface elements and their alternating light-and-shadow effect, by the image-and-text passages in Sigfried Giedion’s book Bauen in Frankreich (Building in France), for which László Moholy-Nagy did the graphic design, and by Konrad Wachsmann’s later book Wendepunkt im Bauen (The Turning Point of Building). While constructing buildings is fundamentally oriented toward stability through static equilibrium, the experiments of Constructivist artists sought to expand this existing static framework to introduce lability and mobility into the plastic artifacts. Alexander Rodchenko’s “Spatial Constructions,” made in three series in Moscow between 1918 and 1921, are exemplary of this path from “stabiles” to “mobiles.” Like his teacher Vladimir Tatlin, Rodchenko assembled and disassembled two-dimensional material elements to work the plane picture into three-dimensional space. The abstract sculptures that Rodchenko made by fitting together slitted flat elements create spaces without defining them through mass. Rodchenko discovered, as had Gabo, that the rejection of mass can in fact intensify the spatial effect. In a second series, concentric rings of geometric shapes are cut from a single surface, polygons, circles, and ellipses that repeat themselves from the inside out, each distinguished from the next only by its size and location. Their wire connections move, such that the different parts of the free-hanging formation present a changing interplay of reflected light and shadow. Here is the beginning of what

Kenneth Snelson, Early X-Piece, 1948 (from: Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller, Design als Kunst einer Wissenschaft, eds. Joachim Krausse and Claude Lichtenstein, exh. cat. Museum für Gestaltung Zurich, Baden 2000)

139

Exhibition of the Russian Constructivists in Moscow, 1921 (from: Lajos Kassák and László Moholy-Nagy, Buch neuer Künstler, Vienna 1922)

Form-Color Organ | Kurt Schmidt | 1:11.187

Literature: Benjamin 1980. Giedion 1928. Kassák/Moholy-Nagy 1922. Krausse 1995. Moholy-Nagy 1929. Rodchenko 2002. Wachsmann 1959. Zurich 2000.

Original Title: Form- und Farborgel year of execution: 1923 Material: oil and tempera with spirit varnish on wood format: 103.6 x 103.6 cm loaned by: Klassik Stiftung Weimar, N 15/74 Photo: Hartwig Klappert, 2008

Prof. Dr. Joachim Krausse is a journalist and a professor emeritus at the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences in Dessau; he has been a fellow at the Bauhaus University in

Form-Color Organ Kurt Schmidt

Weimar since 2009. He is a regular contributor to the architecture magazine Arch+.

C 41 M 100 Y 59 K 0

140

of axes without an intersection, however, which is to say without a mechanical nodal connection. He was only able to do this by way of an external tensile loading holding the rods together and in position in the three directions. Here, the tensioned cable is placed on the imaginary edge of a Platonic solid, the octahedron. The systematic refusal to use a rigid, mechanical node led Ioganson to his true invention: his octahedral module opened the door to a previously entirely unknown class of spatial constructions. This complex of constructions would not come to light again until they were created for the second time, independently of Ioganson and from another direction, by Richard Buckminster Fuller and Kenneth Snelson at Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1948 and 1949. Fuller furnished the term “tensegrity,” a portmanteau word Fuller made from “tension integrity.” It is a construction concept realized in the wire-spoke wheel of a bicycle, in which the hub is connected to the rim only by tension members, namely the spikes. Tensegrities were thus structures that were not held together in the usual way, by rigid connections of components pressed together, but rather solely by tension components being pulled apart. This was an entirely new constructive response to the old question of what holds things, or indeed systems, together. The significance of Ioganson’s invention was never fully apparent to Moholy-Nagy or his contemporaries, though Moholy-Nagy’s thinking and his exercises for the preliminary course were moving in the same direction. At Black Mountain, Josef Albers—who had been Moholy-Nagy’s successor at the Bauhaus in Dessau—followed Fuller and Snelson’s tensegrity experiments with enthusiastic interest. Kenneth Snelson, a sculptor like Ioganson, made the breakthrough to multipolar tensegrities in his Early X-Piece from 1948–49. Snelson had experimented with mobiles in the manner of Calder and attended Fuller’s lectures at Black Mountain College. His Early X-Piece calls to mind a tightrope walker, keeping his balance by holding his arms at right angles to the movement of his legs. He seeks to make the tensile forces of gravitation pull on him as far outward as possible, so he holds a balancing pole. If one incorporates invisible gravitational forces as systemic components, the tightrope walker is, like the Early X-Piece, one of the prototypical tensegrities. To a certain extent, the tightrope walker is the model for tensegrity. Acrobatic models have something to do with the activation of experiences of the body. In contrast to training at technical schools, the preliminary course at the Bauhaus always took body experiences seriously. Albers immediately assimilated tensegrities into his teaching, taking them to Germany in 1956, to the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm. It was clear to him what sensory and cognitive potential could be mined from these “spatial constructions.”

prompted his turn to a Constructivist formal idiom in 1922. That same year, Schmidt was among the sixteen signatories to the KURI Manifesto (“constructive, utilitarian, rational,­international”), through which a group of Bauhaus students around Farkas Molnár self-consciously formulated their aims. Anticipating the new direction adopted by the Bauhaus in 1923 and proclaimed under the slogan “Art and technology—a new unity,” the tendency promoted by KURI was oriented to a (Constructivist) total work of art that would occupy the gap resulting from the failure of the Weimar Bauhaus to provide training in architecture. Parallel to the Bauhaus, Theo van Doesburg offered classes in the Weimar studio of former Bauhäusler Karl Peter Röhl, and these were attended by Kurt Schmidt as well in 1922. Van Doesburg not only conveyed the artistic fundamentals of the “Neoplasticism” of De Stijl, with its radical restriction of artistic resources to vertical and horizontal elements, the primary colors (red, yellow, and blue), and black, gray, and white. Of even greater significance were the many contacts cultivated by this peripatetic artist and publicist with the international Constructivist avant-garde, whose works he made known in Weimar. The International Congress of Dadaists and Constructivists, organized by the Weimar De Stijl group, brought Tristan Tzara and Jean Arp to Weimar, along with Hans Richter, a pioneer of abstract film. Both Schmidt’s stage works and his conception for a Form-Color Organ clearly betray the impact of designs by Richter and his artistic partner Viking Eggeling. In music, and in the contrapuntal fugue in particular, both artists found a model of “life as such” in its “dynamic and polar ordering of contradictory energies” and “creative unification of contrast and analogy.” Translated now into three dimensions, the syncopically changing rhythms and vertical and horizontal strips of the Form-Color Organ generate the underlying structure of the composition. In Schmidt’s relief, the “fourth dimension” of time ­(an important topos of art at the time, and one that made stage and film attractive media) is present through the movements of the beholder. This interactive approach constitutes a remarkably early anticipation of the kinetic art of the 1960s. As though on a musical instrument, viewers were meant to “play” on the Form-Color Organ, and by moving in relation to it, experiencing “changing chromatic variations and experiencing a contrastive transition from warm tones in the red-yellow-orange range to cold tones in the blue-greenviolet range,” as Kurt Schmidt commented in 1980. The incorporation of the beholder can be regarded as Schmidt’s personal contribution to this thematic spectrum, one that also reflects his artistic focus on the activities of the theater workshop. From a formal perspective as well, the same themes were prevalent in both the theatrical avant-garde as well as in the field of painting in the 1920s, as seen in László Moholy-Nagy’s and Walter Gropius’s designs for a “Total Theater,” which redefines the traditional space of the theater, or in the Reflektorischen Lichtspielen (Reflective Light Plays) of Bauhaus students Kurt Schwerdtfeger and Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, formed by a color-light space with flexible parameters. In his 1922 Der Wille zum Stil (The Will to Style), finally, the integration of the techniques of film into the painting of pure forms was called for by Theo van Doesburg as well. The “resolution of the dichotomy between static and dynamic, spatial and temporal elements” was said now to correspond to the requirements of contemporary artistic activity. Also evident in the chromatic design of the wooden relief was the influence of Van Doesburg’s teachings on color. On the basis of a “chromatic series” which traverses the color

Synesthesia and Kinetics Kurt Schmidt’s Form-Color Organ Constanze Hofstaetter

Theo van Doesburg, Rhythm of a Russian Dance, 1918, oil on canvas, 135.9 x 61.6 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York C 43 M 100 Y 57 K 0

142

In 1923, when Bauhaus student Kurt Schmidt produced his Form- und Farborgel mit bewegenden Farbklängen (Form-Color Organ with Movable Colored Sounds), a circa onemeter-square colored relief assembled from wooden strips configured at right angles to one another against a flat ground, he intervened simultaneously in two central discourses of contemporary art: that dealing with synesthesia between the visual arts and music, and that dealing with the integration of temporality into a normally static pictorial support. Already a decade earlier, in the context of the inauguration of painterly abstraction, references to synesthetic relationships between painting and music, between tone and color, had played a major role. Wassily Kandinsky in particular had consistently invoked musical analogies in his theoretical writings in order to illustrate the absolute, compositional principles of his work, detached now from objective or representational functions. Serving as a central metaphor for the “invisible and underlying reality” whose essence was conceptualized as being embodied in time and space, movement and rhythm, was the musiccompositional principle of the fugue. As a model of universal dualism, its contrapuntal system of reference allowed a synthesis of oppositions to be experienced visually. Musical polyphony opened up the possibility of developing a multiplicity of linear movements simultaneously. Color as a correlation to the “inner sound” of the forms of appearance finds its counterpart here in the element of time, in the connection between the pictorial object with the rhythms of a universal dialectic. For Kurt Schmidt, the milieu of the Weimar Bauhaus offered numerous contacts with well-known avant-garde artists whose works represented original contributions to this thematic complex. At the school, he was able to familiarize himself with a broad spectrum of synesthetic concepts. In the preliminary course and later in Johannes Itten’s instruction in form, he received decisive inspiration, particularly in ideas derived from theories of rhythm and others concerning contrast and structure, which sought to grasp the dialectic of a dualistic universe in visual analogies. This same dialectic was also central to Itten’s intensive artistic exchange with Viennese twelve-tone composer Josef Matthias Hauer. Kurt Schmidt also attended Paul Klee’s classes on elementary design on a regular basis. In his first lecture cycle at the Bauhaus, Paul Klee presented a graphic transcription of the opening measures of the Adagio from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Sonata No. 6 for violin and harpsichord, in which pitches and time lengths were translated into an orthogonal system of coordinates. In his “polyphonic painting,” Klee pursued numerous analogies with music, as did Kandinsky, whose courses Schmidt attended beginning in 1922. The central significance attributed to this theme at the Bauhaus is also confirmed by the classes of Gertrud Grunow, who supplemented artistic training proper with exercises in spiritual and bodily harmonization. In general, both music and dance played important roles at the Bauhaus. Itten, Klee, Kandinsky, and Lyonel Feininger played music or composed in their free time. Festivities at the Bauhaus were famous for their musical and comedic performances by the Bauhaus Band, as well as by various members of the student and teaching body. The reductive, two-dimensional, mobile geometric forms in a restricted number of highly contrasting colors used in Kurt Schmidt’s stage work The Mechanical Ballet are coordinated to the “industrial” rhythms of its musical score, specially composed by Hans H. Stuckenschmidt. In its artistic vocabulary, both the Mechanical Ballet as well as Schmidt’s Form-Color Organ testify to his encounters with international Constructivism and with De Stijl, which

143

Kurt Schmidt, draft design for the Mechanical Ballet, 1923, opaque paint on cardboard, 34.5 x 48.5 cm, Klassik Stiftung Weimar

Bauhaus Exhibition Poster | Joost Schmidt | 1:2.74

progression from cold to warm, the primary and secondary colors were ordered according to criteria of “dissonance.” Concepts such as “perfect dissonance” or “linear recurrent dissonance” also imply musical references. Van Doesburg’s considerations—according to which colors are distinguished by their varied energetic potentialities, making it possible to represent the transition from one state of energy to another through the chromatic series—were translated congenially in Schmidt’s wooden relief. The dissolving views and changing perspectives perceived while moving before this object allow the transitory character of color to be experienced directly. In a way consistent with Oskar Schlemmer’s conception of the stage as an “ideal chemical-physical laboratory” for investigating color effects, theater artist Kurt Schmidt unites object and public in a continuum of relativized spatiotemporal references. In doing so, he brings together the visual, kinetic, and synesthetic potentialities embodied in the Form-Color Organ in the form of a single object.

Literature Van Doesburg 1922. Geelhaar 1985. Gera 1990. Hemken/Stommer 1992. Henderson 1985. Hoffmann 1989. Hofstaetter 2007. Schawelka 2003. Schinköth 2006. Van Straaten 1996. Utrecht 2000.

144

year of execution: 1923 Material: lithograph in red and black, lithographed stickers with corrected exhibition dates format: 68.5 x 47.5 cm loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, permanent loan from the Bauhaus-Archiv GmbH

C 46 M 100 Y 54 K 0

Dr. Constanze Hofstaetter is an art historian who serves on the Executive Board of Cultura Vivendi in Schleswig.

Poster for the Bauhaus Exhibition in Weimar Joost Schmidt

147 Oskar Schlemmer. According to reports, the integration of this schematic profile into the poster design was stipulated by the competition’s organizers. As a result, this Bauhaus signet appears in all of the known poster designs, albeit in diverse ways. If Joost Schmidt emphasizes planarity, selecting a geometric-abstract formal idiom and dynamizing the pictorial surface by means of a diagonal composition, then he does not disavow his origins in painting. His design does not have its point of departure in the art of typography, that is to say in a standardized organization of text and image in the service of information transmission, but instead from an artistic striving to transport additional meaning and contents by means of a visual language. It was only logical, then, that Schmidt should have placed his own logo in the upper right corner as a counterpoint to the overall form, thereby asserting his artistic individuality (complete with the romanticism of the craftsman). In contrast to Schmidt, Fritz Schleifer detaches his poster design from all allusions to painting—unless, that is to say, one identifies the Dutch De Stijl group, with its philosophy of Neoplasticism, as a spiritual forefather. Schlemmer’s Bauhaus signet is positioned on the large-format poster in a way that determines the overall design, while the lower portion of the pictorial surface is reserved—almost like a sculptural base—for the lines of assertive text. The overall impression is additive, that is to say, all of the pictorial elements seem to have begun as independent units which were then assembled into a larger configuration. Schmidt, by contrast, proceeds subtractively, opening up a previously self-enclosed formation to the surrounding pictorial surface. If in Schleifer’s design the unprinted, empty portions of the picture surface emerge as active factors, then only

“We’re   Here! We’re Ready! And We Will Succeed!” Processes of Self-Discovery of a Public and Official Avant-Garde Kai-Uwe Hemken

Fritz Schleifer, poster for the Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar, 1923, offset print, collage, 100 x 72.5 cm, Sammlung Wulf Herzogenrath C 48 M 100 Y 52 K 0

146

“We’re Here! We’re Ready! And We Will Succeed!” It was with this avowal of affirmation that the Bauhäusler went to work in 1923 in order to prepare the first exhibition showcasing their still young institution. In light of the continuing skepticism expressed in the public realm in relation to the state-run Bauhaus academy in Weimar, motivation and self-assertion were urgently needed. With defiance, doggedness, and outward professionalism, the Bauhäusler struggled to demonstrate the kind of internal operational coherence that was not as yet genuinely in evidence. In fact, the artists assembled at the school were top-flight individualists who had brought vanguard artistic ideas to fully convincing maturity even before taking up teaching appointments in Weimar. Installed at the Bauhaus already at the moment of its conceptual foundation was a paradox, one that would persist—independently of changing programmatic orientations—until its ultimate closure. Over the course of a decade, Walter Gropius had disposed of a fundamental topos: the antagonism between the academy and the avant-garde. From the Nazarenes to the Impressionists, and all the way to the Vienna Secession, it had been considered good form among avant-gardists to defiantly confront established artists along with the putatively generally binding conventions of the academies and to call attention to themselves via high-visibility activities (exhibitions scandals and such) in the public realm. Gropius took a different path, uniting a multiplicity of avant-gardist mavericks from Germany and abroad in a state-run institution. In doing so, Gropius also did justice to a critique voiced publicly already in the late nineteenth century: it was often claimed that academic artists were eccentric lone wolves, and demands were raised for their normalization or integration into societal concerns. A key role was to have been played in this context by, among other things, handicraft skills, regarded now as the interface between these two separate spheres. And if the orientation of the Bauhaus had already been firmly defined in 1922 via the much-touted formula “Art and technology—a new unity,” then the “Bauhaus” label in reality lacked the aesthetic and conceptual homogeneity that would have allowed it to appear credibly before the public under such a branding concept. The well-documented competition among Bauhaus avant-gardists was already in full swing, and it was mirrored in the facility’s aesthetic profile and appearance. A historic turning point was reached in 1923, when preparations were underway for the premiere public display of the school’s achievements to date. Immense resources were dedicated to this undertaking, and the event testified to many aspects of the school’s current situation: its potential for innovation, the degree of self-motivation present there, and not least of all a persistent struggle over the institution’s orientation, one concerned with the future initiators of an authoritative body of regulations and norms for the Dessau arts academy. An index of this situation is the advertising campaign for the exhibition, in particular its poster designs. Incisive if not necessarily innovative is a graphic design submitted by Joost Schmidt in an internal competition for a poster for the first Bauhaus exhibition. Dominating the vertical format of the poster is an emphatically planar and diagonal figure. The aggregation of black, gray, and red surfaces, in conjunction with isolated linear elements, virtually propel the few words and lines of text into the foreground, so that even though these textual elements provide the relevant data intended to orient potential exhibition visitors, they are at the same time merely tolerated, so to speak, within the total structure of geometric forms. Striking is the stylized silhouettes of the human head, an invention of Bauhaus master

Josef Albers, three draft designs for a flag for the Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar, 1923, opaque white, watercolor, and pencil on packing paper, 23.1 x 15.1 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Haus am Horn, Design Plan | Georg Muche and Büro Walter Gropius | 1:1.93

Literature Brüning 1995b. Hemken 1995. Hemken 2008. Schlemmer 1969.

year of execution: 1923 Material: blueprint, ink, and pencil format: 34 x 66.6 cm loaned by: Klassik Stiftung Weimar, L 2108 A, loan from the Bauaktenarchiv Weimar

Prof. Dr. Kai-Uwe Hemken is an art historian at the School of Art and Design in Kassel.

C 50 M 100 Y 50 K 0

148

the figure-ground pattern is significant in Schmidt’s design, while the picture surface is reduced to the status of a passive entity. The question that poses itself, then, is: What might have prompted Schmidt to submit this relatively unconventional design? Revealing in this context is the fact that Schmidt was at this time a student of Schlemmer’s—who was responsible, incidentally, both curatorially and organizationally for exhibition preparations for the department of painting and sculpture, and whose own works in these media (based on press reports) were given the most imposing presentation at the exhibition itself. These aspects may explain Schlemmer’s formal influence on Schmidt, but we should by no means attribute to the latter an unreflected reception of his mentor. A more precise examination of Schmidt’s diagonal composition may serve to illuminate this issue. Conspicuous already at first glance are anthropomorphic allusions stimulated by the rounded form as a head or face, a device that encourages the beholder to interpret the projecting linear contours as stylized extremities or a formally simplified mannequin. Apparently mirrored within this configuration of elementary forms is the central theme of the works of Oskar Schlemmer, who did not view the human figure simply as the point of departure for arriving at aesthetic solutions. For him, human physiognomy was an emblem and a reflection of metaphysical contents. With his conception of the human individual as a “cosmic being,” Schlemmer heightened the ideas of his historical predecessors, who regarded the human form (as in Albrecht Dürer’s case) as a central point of orientation for the teaching of proportion, yet who (because indebted to the conception of art prevailing in the modern era) were by no means receptive to the ennobling of the human form via cosmic amplification. As a modernist, Schlemmer can be categorized as the type of artist who perceived painting as a discipline capable of conveying intellectual and to some extent philosophical contents. In this light, it is hardly surprising that Schlemmer chose the human form as his constant emblem, emphasizing its emblematic dimension as a kind of phenotype. In 1923, the strivings of the Bauhaus to fuse art and technology must have been regarded by a metaphysician as unsettling. As a painter and metaphysician, he would have interpreted the orientation of his art academy toward industry and the economy as an appeal to endow these objectives with a human countenance. In their writings, the generation of Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian lamented the one-dimensional development of society, now devoted exclusively to pure pragmatism and materialism. The arts of the avant-garde were to have confronted this reality with an artistic one, recalling once again the loss of spirituality and religion. Joost Schmidt’s design for the first Bauhaus exhibition exudes this atmosphere: despite the euphoria of new departures, and entirely in the spirit of his teacher, Schmidt’s design never loses sight of this dimension. The chosen figuration visualizes this ultimately failed attempt to establish the teaching of the human being as a “cosmic entity” as the philosophy—and ultimately as its corporate signboard as well—of the industry-friendly Bauhaus.

Application for a Building Permit for the Haus Am Horn, Design Plan Georg Muche and Büro Walter Gropius

he responded to the mysticism of the dominant Johannes Itten with his down-to-earth emphasis on sound craftsmanship, coupled nonetheless with artistic ambition. This approach gave the twenty-eight-year-old painter greater weight in the eyes of young Bauhaus students, especially after Muche had discussed his intentions regarding the dimensions, structure, and room configuration of a contemporary single-family house with such infectious enthusiasm. His description of how a modern home for “young people” should be furnished so that they could live in a “beautiful, . . . pleasant, and functional” setting was also in line with the principles of the Bauhaus school, which was then in the process of developing furniture and furnishings suitable for industrial production in its workshops. Ultimately, Gropius had bowed to the expressed will of the younger members “in the spirit of democracy” and, turning to Muche, remarked that “their élan—even if it is born of delusion—is the nerve that drives our exhibition. I am willing to go along.” The Bauhaus director acted with appropriate solidarity and assigned Adolf Meyer, his partner of many years, to serve as advisor on technical issues and matters of engineering design. Meyer and members of Gropius’s firm prepared the necessary technical drawings, including the blueprint for the petition for a building permit for the Haus Am Horn, which was made in 1923 and signed by Walter Gropius on October 3, 1923. This technical group drawing shows the incorporation of the house into the existing topography and also includes two ground plans, four elevations, and one building section. We see the building with its partial basement containing a furnace room, a washing room, and a pantry, and above it the ground floor, which is dominated by a square central living room around which the other rooms needed by a modern model family are grouped. One of the problems posed by this axially symmetrical, almost classically structured design was that of lighting in the living room located in the interior. The solution was to raise this room out of the building cube to a height of over four meters in order to provide indirect light from a band of windows facing south and west. Thus the view of the street and the garden is restricted for the most part to the adjacent hall areas and the living room, the bedrooms, and the guest room. In this way, the living room represents the ideal image of contemplative, self-centered family life. Muche developed a modern variation on the typology of the atrium house in the ground plan. That typology had been a standard feature of European villa architecture in the Palladian style according to the ancient Roman concept of the sublime since the Renaissance. Thus this modern single-family setting was still somewhat surrounded by the architectural flair of Italy, which architect Walter Gropius was presumably prepared to accept as a tribute to Weimar classicism, especially as the reference was concealed within the building itself and masked by the functional, asymmetrically configured window bands in each building façade. This aspect probably played a secondary role, however, since Gropius, who had failed to gain approval for his own proposals for a model house, was thus able to realize an experiment that conformed entirely to his intentions with the Haus Am Horn. This model house embodied ideas he had advocated as early as 1910 under the influence of Fordism in his “Programm zur Gründung einer allgemeinen Hausbaugesellschaft auf künstlerisch einheitlicher Grundlage m.b.H.” (Program devoted to establishing a general housing construction company on a uniform artistic foundation): an industrially prefabricated house that could be built quickly and economically. The 1910 program contained a detailed description of this industrial housing production

150 Bauhaus director Walter Gropius surprised his international guests at the opening of the Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar in 1923 with a unique work of architecture. What he presented was a small single-family house that had been erected overlooking the romantic setting of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s garden house in a slightly hilly suburban area. Yet contrary to expectations, the austere, plainly composed Haus Am Horn, as it was later named with reference to its location, did not conform to what most contemporaries would have regarded as the ideal image of an attractive home, and certainly not of a representative villa. It was not only in Weimar—where, in the early years of the young German republic, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche was still the dominant voice, and modern architecture was largely identified with the elaborate, ornamental Jugendstil buildings designed by Henry van de Velde and accepted accordingly—that the Haus Am Horn, which had no visible roof, was generally regarded with a sense of bafflement. This modern, minimalist architectural concept met with little approval elsewhere as well, even in the metropolis of Berlin. A correspondent writing for the Berliner Tageblatt went so far as to describe it as a “totally misguided attempt to create a model house.” Even less hostile reviewers found it “bizarre” at best, or, as the Berlin architect Bruno Taut suggested, “marred by certain deficiencies.” One of the reasons frequently cited is that the formally reductive design was not, as might have been expected, the work of architect Walter Gropius, who enjoyed an international reputation, nor that of one of his employees. The concept was based instead on ideas conceived by a painter and sculptor, the young Bauhaus instructor Georg Muche, who had moved to Weimar to assume the position of master of form for wood sculpture in 1920. Muche had already attracted attention within the context of the preliminary course, as

Typing and Standardization for a Modern Atrium House The Haus Am Horn in Weimar Karin Wilhelm C 52 M 100 Y 48 K 0

Georg Muche and Büro Walter Gropius, Haus Am Horn, 1923, photograph, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

151

Farkas Molnár, George und El Muche mit dem Haus Am Horn (George and El Muche at the Haus Am Horn), 1923, drypoint, 24.8 x 19.7 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Director’s Office, Isometric Plan | Walter Gropius and Herbert Bayer | 1:1.287

Literature Berliner Tageblatt 1980. Gropius 1923. Muche 1965. Probst/Schädlich 1987. Taut 1923.

year of execution: 1923 Material: four-color book print format: 24 x 24 cm loaned by: Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, I 14280 G

Prof. Dr. Karin Wilhelm (born 1947) is a professor of architectural and urban history and theory at Braunschweig Technical University. C 54 M 100 Y 46 K 0

152

process on the basis of division of labor and with the proviso that “art and technology [be brought] into an advantageous union.” This idea naturally assumed renewed importance during the economically troubled postwar years of the Weimar Republic. Gropius expressed similar ideas once again in 1923, the year of the Bauhaus exhibition, in his work entitled “Idee und Aufbau des Staatlichen Bauhauses Weimar” (“Theory and Organization of the State Bauhaus in Weimar”): “The goal . . . is to assert the demand for the greatest possible degree of standardization and maximum variability in residential buildings. The solution to the most important problem must be found by standardizing building components and assembling them into different housing organisms—that is, to create a large-scale modular building system using new technical and new spatial possibilities, from which different housing machines can be composed, depending on the numbers and needs of the occupants.” The Haus Am Horn was built in accordance with similar specifications on land formerly planned for a model development, which had been under discussion since 1921 but was never realized, and for which employees of Gropius’s firm had already drafted plans for single-family row houses exhibiting a certain sensitivity to problems of standardization. Although the individualistic symmetry of Georg Muche’s design could only remain brittle and inflexible compared to the ideas presented by Walter Gropius within the context of his modular principles devoted to variability and flexibility, the Haus Am Horn was erected in accordance with the concepts of prefabrication and furnished inside with standard integrated furniture items that became a part of the house and thus helped conserve space. The fact that the Haus Am Horn was ready for occupancy after a four-month construction period is attributable to the use of standardized building materials for walls and ceilings, which could now be erected for the first time with Jurko blocks—simple standardized lightweight cinderblocks—laid in a braced configuration with standard joint widths. Thus the singlefamily house in Weimar represents the earliest phase in the industrialization of building that Gropius developed in a more advanced form in the Törten housing estate in Dessau beginning in 1926. In this sense, the Haus Am Horn was indeed a model house, a pragmatic experiment in mass housing construction that was given additional brilliance and elegance by furnishings produced by the various Bauhaus workshops—an outstanding example of the principle of “Art and technology—a new unity.”

Isometric Rendering of the Director’s Office Walter Gropius (plan) and Herbert Bayer (drawing)

155

to a common spatial sonority, the director’s office is revealed as a Gesamtkunstwerk, and hence exemplifies Gropius’s conception of space, as outlined that same year in his essay “Idee und Aufbau des Staatlichen Bauhauses Weimar” (Theory and Organization of the State Bauhaus in Weimar). With his point of departure in number and movement, the “primary elements of space,” Gropius had defined a path upon which the creative, and even artistic individual could fix a spatial conception in a drawing, and—with consideration given to the characteristics of the materials applied—could pass over “with spirit and handicraft” from the intellectual into the material realm: “The mind conceives mathematical space on the strength of understanding and through calculation and measurement. . . . The hand grasps the palpable and material space of reality lying outside of us, constructs it according to the laws of materials and mechanics, and measures and weighs the material substance which conditions reality, its solidity as well as its mechanical and constructive properties. The hand masters reality through craft skills and with the help of tools and machines.” Gropius left no doubt that the task of the Bauhaus was to convey to its students the emotional, intellectual, and handicraft prerequisites for this act of creation, one which in the end could only culminate in an artistic space such as that of the director’s­

Mental Space in a Material World Ideal and Reality in the Weimar Director’s Office Peter Müller

Walter Gropius, director’s office, 1923–24, reproduction of a colored photograph, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

C 57 M 100 Y 43 K 0

154

In the summer of 1923—and subsequent to the work on the Haus Am Horn—the installation of a director’s office in the upper story of Henry van de Velde’s former Grossherzog­ lich-Sächsische Hochschule für bildende Kunst (Grand Ducal-Saxon Academy of Fine Art) was the second programmatic design task undertaken by the Weimar Bauhaus. The design concept and the designs of most of the furnishings are the work of Walter Gropius. The office was the most important representative space at the Bauhaus, one that offered visitors something resembling a formal statement of commitment. In the framework of the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition, it may also have served as a highpoint, one encountered by visitors after they had traversed a presentation of workshop display pieces and an overview of the state of contemporary building. Due to the insufficient capacities of the workshops, the 1923 outfitting of the office remained rudimentary, and it was consequently Herbert Bayer’s drawings that were responsible for elevating the room to an icon of modern interior design. With these renderings, Bayer (who was still an apprentice in the workshop for wall painting directed by Wassily Kandinsky ­and became head of the workshop for printing and advertisement at the Dessau Bauhaus beginning in 1925) produced a compelling visualization of Gropius’ ideas, and his drawings were presented already as part of the Bauhaus exhibition and published in the accompanying publication. Bayer’s isometric representations of the director’s office presented an idealized spatial cube, one which Gropius implanted into an elongated studio of the art school building by means of a partition wall and by breaking a door into one wall. The cubic room, its edges measuring five meters in length, stylized the incisive room-within-a-room principle by visualizing a second, smaller cube in the southwestern corner of the office, effected by means of contrasting colors, wall textures, a multicolored carpet, and the lighting scheme. The basic unit of measurement of this cube-within-a-cube—which measured 3.15 meters square—was derived from golden section proportions and from the specifications of the space as a whole. Soffit luminaries suspended from taut wires defined its corners and boundaries within the larger room, and the furniture seems to have simultaneously recapitulated and dissolved its strict, cubic form. All of the furnishings—some of them displaying strong primary colors, and hence clearly betraying the influence of De Stijl—were given fixed positions, each conditioned by various spatial boundaries. In Bayer’s drawing, they are held together optically by means of a meandering profile in dark wood, one whose restrained, late-Expressionist verve mediates between the various layers of the cube, and which even encompasses the shelves—first of all the shelves of mirrored glass that “hover” above the desk. As though they wanted to overcome the conventional load distribution and gravity, the shelves, with their sweeping convolutions, adopt the meander motif, thereby emphatically dynamizing the space. While this smaller, virtual room served for representative functions and intellectual exchange—and is decorated with a citrus yellow armchair, a yellow sofa, a stool-type side table, and a carpet in blue, violet, and yellow tones which entirely covers the area’s floor space—, the surrounding zone lying between door and window, with its desk and shelves, seems to have been reserved for the administrative tasks of the director and is thus oriented toward the real world. Only the writing table, part of which overlaps the carpet, links the two spheres. With all of its furnishings and objects composed in relation

Walter Gropius, director’s office, 1923, photograph (vintage print), Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Combination Teapot | Theodor Bogler | 1:1.814

Literature Berlin 1994. Gropius 1923. Jehle-Schulte Strathaus 1990. Rehm 2005. Weimar 1923. Wingler/Droste 1982. Winkler/Oschmann 1999. Zietsch 2002.

year of execution: 1923 Material: earthenware, reddish-brown body, cast and assembled, white glaze format: height 12.7 cm loaned by: Klassik Stiftung Weimar, N 151/55 photo: Hartwig Klappert, 2008

Combination Teapot L 1 with Off-Centered Lid Theodor Bogler

Dr. Peter Müller (born 1967) is an art historian who lives in Berlin.

C 59 M 100 Y 41 K 0

156

office, in which “all of the laws of the real, the intellectual, and spiritual worlds” would find “a simultaneous solution.” From this perspective, the drawings and decorations for the Weimar director’s office not only fulfilled Gropius’s artistic or representative claims, but also stood—like the Haus Am Horn—for the idea of the Bauhaus and for the performance capacities of its workshops. Even today, it is this intimate nexus joining the visionary aspirations of the Bauhaus and Gropius’s conceptual world which raises the design for the director’s office to the status of an ideal. Still, it could not be practically realized. To be sure, the room was furnished and given a color scheme for the Bauhaus exhibition, the inner cube circumscribed by means of colored surfaces, soffit luminaries, and a carpet by Benita Otte measuring 3.15 meters square. Among the planned furnishings, however, only the writing table, an armchair, a meander bookshelf, and the new door leading to the anteroom were completed. Also present was a wall hanging in silk mounted on the door, produced by Else Mögelin at the beginning of the year to mark the completion of her studies. Despite the stepwise completion of the furnishing scheme, the removal from the room in the summer of 1924 of Otte’s carpet (in all likelihood, it was sold) and its replacement by the work of Gertrud Arndt, composed of yellow, blue, and gray squares and measuring only 1.8 x 2.4 meters, detracted substantially from the room’s artistic and spatial integrity. Consequently, no contemporary photograph can compete with Bayer’s drawing. Only his image, with its isometric projection (a method of representation favored in classical modernism), was capable of presenting fully the space as a whole, in correct proportions and hence endowed with aesthetic equilibrium, and moreover in a way that allowed its interlocking and staggered spatial values to extend into infinity. And it was on the basis of Bayer’s image that the room was reconstructed in 1999. Walter Gropius never wrote about the Weimar director’s office—apparently, Herbert Bayer’s drawing sufficed to convey his internal image of it. When the Bauhaus relocated to Dessau, he took an armchair, Else Mögelin’s wall hanging, and the writing desk—the latter would also accompany him to America. The director’s office at Dessau was also provided with various functional levels; the working area was inscribed with mathematical precision and according to a ratio of 2:1, and was further accentuated by means of a recessed ceiling area, various chromatic accents, the flooring, and not least the items of furniture. Emerging with the installation of built-in wall cabinets and a glazed vitrine, which converted its edges into furniture, was a space featuring balanced proportions, one that no longer dominated the interior as a whole but instead supplemented it functionally. For the sake of the overall impact of the Bauhaus building, it was decided not to outfit Gropius’s office as an autarkic work of art, but instead to integrate it logically between the secretariat and the seminar room into the larger structure of the directorate. Only the pieces transferred from Weimar, with their value as mementos, served a self-referential program.

For a little more than four years, the small town of Dornburg, not far from Jena, became the site of the Bauhaus pottery workshops situated in the stables of a Rococo castle. The artist Gerhard Marcks was appointed as master of form, the potter Max Krehan as master craftsman. This dual principle, which was part of a new concept in the teaching of design, was vital for the further development of the “old” arts and crafts model. It later enabled a synthesis of a basic training in craftsmanship, the teaching of art, and the development of prototypes for industrial production. Looking back on his time teaching at the Bauhaus, Theodor Bogler described how the students underwent a “double schooling.” In preparation for the first great Bauhaus exhibition in the summer of 1923, Gropius encouraged all of the workshops to produce designs that would be more compatible with the requirements of industrial production. In partial collaboration with Gerhard Marcks, the two influential journeymen Theodor Bogler and Otto Lindig created “programmatic vessel objects,” experimental-analytical studies, which increasingly distanced themselves from the classical, Romantic manner of artisanal pottery, in search of an autonomous language. A central role was played by aspects of form—surface and color were subordinated to sculptural and structural qualities. Significant vessel objects are the double pot by Bogler and Marcks, as well as the tall lidded pot by Lindig. In relation to later studies and tableware designs, these works already show the full range of “compositional techniques” of the Bauhaus potters: the breaking down into basic stereometric elements (building blocks, modules), an open, additive construction principle, a strong rhythmization and arrangement of silhouettes, as well as the focus on functional elements (handle, spout/lip, base, opening, and the like). Walter Gropius, however, still complained about the dominance of a single-piece aesthetic. He found the designs to be too intricate and not sufficiently standardized for industrial production. As a result, Bogler and Lindig visited the Thuringian porcelain factories

From Bauhaus Pottery to Laboratory for Industrial Product Development Hubert Kittel

Theodor Bogler, combination teapot (plaster model molds), 1923, photograph in Bauhaus-Album 2, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Archiv der Moderne C 61 M 100 Y 39 K 0

158

Kahla, Volkstedt, and Lichte. A collaboration with the earthenware factories of Hermann Harkort in Velten-Vordamm near Berlin resulted in the first showcase project for the workshop: Bogler’s storage containers for the kitchen of Georg Muche’s experimental house in Weimar. This success raised the profile of the Dornburg Bauhaus workshop. In the fall of 1923, an earthenware slipcasting method was developed and the first plaster models could be produced. The Dornburg workshop was thus in a position to provide techniques for producing models and forms in plaster as well as pouring and turning techniques for fine ceramics. This enabled the workshop to create designs for the earthenware and porcelain industry, as well as to rationalize its own production methods. As a result, the Bauhaus workshop in Dornburg was able to offer a new kind of ceramics course, turning the site into a “research laboratory” for craft-based and industrial production. Gropius stated: “The creation of types for objects of daily use is a social necessity.” At the Bauhaus, the figure who came closest to this program was Bogler, “probably the most revolutionary among the Bauhaus potters” (Ekkart Klinge), who was also the most radical in adopting the path of “experimental research.” His most important Bauhaus ceramics are object lessons in a totally new attitude to twentieth-century pottery design. More informative than a consideration of Bogler’s combination teapot L 1 alone is a review of the process of its fabrication and the idea of a product range or form family based on the combination of various pre-existing parts. The condition for the production of such types was the transition from single elements turned on a potter’s wheel and their assemblage to a pouring technique using precisely developed plaster models and forms. This ensured these pieces’ suitability for industrial reproduction. The modular approach also allowed a broad range of possible combinations using the smallest possible number of parts, admirably fulfilling Gropius’s maxims of a “new work ethos”: “simplicity in multiplicity” through “standardization” and the “reduction to typical forms and colors that can be universally understood.” There was a display board with photographs of plaster models showing four variations of the combination teapot. One photograph shows the six individual elements: lid, funnel, handle, handle loops, spout, and body. The latter could also be used upside down. Besides the four variations in historical pictures, a further teapot has also been documented. This has a lateral pipe handle at a ninety-degree angle to the spout, possibly inspired by East Asian models. Theodor Bogler’s combination teapots thus offer very different design possibilities; the diversity reflects the different possibilities of handling and use. The individual solutions differ in their function and ergonomic structure. What is striking is Bogler’s attitude to and method of design. They demonstrate a constructive, almost architectural, conception of form and bear witness to a great joy in experimentation. At the Weimar Bauhaus, the breaking down of utilitarian objects into their component parts or functional elements and the reassemblage of these elements into variable structures led to great experimental, sculptural, and spatial results comparable to the experiments being carried out simultaneously in the metal workshop. Clearly the fascination for tea preparation, in the form of complex formal solutions and appliance-like structures (tea urns, samovars, and the like), was widely shared and a source of inspiration. Bogler’s so-called mocca machine was probably the most courageous and unusual work in this context. This project rigorously distanced itself from artisanal methods by developing a porcelain model suitable for industrial production. This can be seen in the Theodor Bogler, combination teapot, four teapot variations and six plaster model cores, 1923, photograph in Bauhaus-Album 2, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Archiv der Moderne

Theodor Bogler, “Mocca machine,” five parts, 1923, earthenware, Klassik Stiftung Weimar

159

Theodor Bogler, “Mocca machine,” six parts, 1923, porcelain, produced by the Aelteste Volkstedter Porzellanfabrik, Klassik Stiftung Weimar

Lady’s Dressing Table | Marcel Breuer | 1:6.857

Literature Bogler 1959. Winkler 2007.

year of execution: 1923 reconstruction: of stand and m ­ irror, 2004, by Gerhard Oschmann Material: walnut and lemon wood, ­ olished nickel fittings, with moveable p mirrors format: 168 x 126.5 x 48 cm loaned by: Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, I 18679 MSDB photo: Hartwig Klappert, 2008

Lady’s Dressing Table from the Haus Am Horn Marcel Breuer

Prof. Hubert Kittel (born 1953) is a designer and a professor for product design at Burg Giebichenstein, the University of Art and Design in Halle. C 63 M 100 Y 37 K 0

160

t­ hree-step design and development process from hand-turned and assembled ceramic object (earthenware) via a plaster model (for the production of the casting molds) to the cast and assembled porcelain version as industrial prototype. Bogler’s mocca machine and a few designs by Otto Lindig represented a further attempt to make contact with the porcelain industry. In the spring of 1924, the Aelteste Volk­ stedter Porzellanfabrik near Rudolstadt produced the first prototypes—a pioneering act! Nevertheless, this was not put into production, just as later attempts with the Staatliche Porzellan-Manufaktur in Berlin also clearly did not lead to success. From a present-day perspective, it seems that these designs were still too intricate for industrial production, and the conditions were still lacking in Dornburg for continuous collaboration. Nevertheless, the pottery workshop was the first at the Weimar Bauhaus to be able to provide companies with models suitable for industrial production. Almost all the significant prototypes of the workshops, especially the pottery workshop, were made between 1922 and the middle of 1924. As “incunabula of industrial design” (Annegrete Janda), they jut out of the twentieth-century design landscape as a curious and homogenous group of design achievements. Alongside the most significant achievements of the other Bauhaus workshops, Bogler’s pots and utensils represent some of the most original, innovative, and still inspiring works from the whole spectrum of what was produced during the Weimar years. They reflect a radical break with the past and a high degree of experimentation, curiosity, and a desire for renewal. And—there remains a paradox: although it had become one of the most experimental and influential workshops at the Bauhaus, the pottery department was left behind in Dornburg and branded an “anti-modern relict” that was no longer relevant to the Dessau model. After the closure of the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dornburg at the end of 1924, Marcks and his most active students continued designing for the ceramics industry: Otto Lindig among others at the Staatliche Majolika Manufaktur in Karlsruhe; Theodor Bogler as artistic director of the earthenware factory Velten-Vordamm; while Margarete Heymann worked nearby in her Haël-Werkstätten für Künstlerische Keramik. At the Burg Giebichenstein school in Halle, Gerhard Marcks and his former students Marguerite Friedlaender, Franz Rudolf Wildenhain, and Wolfgang Löber energetically continued what ­had already been started in Dornburg: the developmental work for industrial production.

have the same dimensions in cross section as the furniture legs of Gerrit Rietveld, and they support a frame that, together with a perpendicular strut, carries a box topped with a metal-framed and glazed cover panel. This panel slides to the right to provide access to the box’s contents; at the same time, it provides, together with another panel (which is fixed in place), a convenient, acid-resistant surface on which to keep things. The dressing table gains stability on the right side through the addition of a narrow, deep set of walnut drawers, reminiscent of a traditional small chest of drawers, again topped with a glazed cover panel. Additional independent points of emphasis include a larger oval and a smaller circular mirror. The former can be swiveled from side to side; the latter can be swiveled from side to side and can also be tilted up and down. Both mirrors are secured to a nickel-plated rod. The vitrine display case in the living room of the model house was designed with architectural models in mind, and is comprised of a collection of elements that can be disassembled. Likewise, the dressing table is built out of individual components that are as clear as possible in form and oriented toward an alliance with modern mobility. The dressing table’s agglomeration of parts anticipates the principle of series production. In it are already the beginnings of the development of modern assembled furniture. Breuer’s furniture is distinguished by contrasts in form, material, and color, by its playful creation of uncertainty, both through deviation from the accustomed and through the intentional disruption of familiar systems of ordering, and by its sculptural presence, still so captivating today. There is, furthermore, the conspicuous engagement with signs and significance: Breuer sought to make a dressing table for the self-assured modern woman, freed in large measure from the burdens of trivial housework, and to develop it on the basis of design principles oriented toward practical operation and an

“Liberated   Combing” at Modernism’s Vanity Table The Lady’s Dressing Table by Marcel Breuer Lutz Schöbe

Marcel Breuer, cabinet from the living room in the Haus Am Horn, 1923, produced in the carpentry workshop of the Bauhaus Weimar, maple, matte red, Hungarian ash, matte, pear wood, black C 65 M 100 Y 35 K 0

162

When the Haus Am Horn model house opened at the Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar in the summer of 1923, the interiors drew much attention. The public was fascinated, confused, and overwhelmed in equal measure by the many new approaches to the design of living space. One piece of furniture in particular appears to have stood out for its extraordinary appearance: the dressing table from the lady’s bedroom. Certain contemporary observers found the dressing table reminiscent of medical spaces, likening it to “an operating table,” “something at the dentist’s,” and even threateningly outstretched “instruments of torture.” Marcel Lajos Breuer, an apprentice carpenter at the Bauhaus, had designed this purported monstrosity. The Bauhaus carpentry workshop records show that he built it as a qualifying work to become a journeyman. It belonged to a group of pieces of exhibition furniture by Breuer, who had just turned twenty. Together with the other objects in the interiors of the model house, these pieces provided a visual presentation for the spectrum of work going on at the Bauhaus and for the Bauhaus’s objectives. Among the areas that Breuer furnished at the Haus Am Horn were the central living room, the adjoining work niche, and the aforementioned lady’s bedroom, which included, in addition to the dressing table, a swivel chair, a bed, and built-ins on two walls of the room, including a built-in secretary and shelves. For decades, Marcel Breuer’s exhibition works for the Haus Am Horn were thought to be lost. They were known solely through a handful of black-and-white photographs. Happily, some of these pieces have resurfaced and come to be held by museums. These same pieces are also ideally suited to reflect the substantial shift that occurred in 1921 and the years that followed in the work of their creator, world-famous today as an architect and furniture designer. It was in 1921, after a short period of pursuing “emotional and romantic work distant from modern life,” as Walter Gropius called it, that Breuer began to reorient his praxis as a designer. The quest for a new formal language led him to an intensified concentration on functional connections. The outcome was the elimination of all components in a piece of furniture except for those that were constructively or operationally necessary. These components were assembled according to an additive principle. Breuer found himself at the threshold of a design method oriented to industrial standards and linked to a new concept of space. This shift had a variety of antecedents, including the influences of De Stijl and Russian Constructivism. The artistic and artisanal teaching at the Bauhaus and the debates within that institution on problem-solving processes were especially important. With the dressing table for the Haus Am Horn, Marcel Breuer developed a new type. It was not until some years later that he designed, for the Gropius House in Dessau, modernism’s most forceful dressing table, an almost entirely transparent, chrome-plated glass “flacon- étagère” that seemed to float in space in front of a mirror that covered an entire wall. Yet even in the Weimar furniture he created something that had little left in common with the Baroque poudreuse, or with that usually four-legged, compact dressing table from the bedrooms of bourgeois households of the nineteenth century, with a box frame that could be opened and a round mirror with an adjustable height. Breuer’s piece of furniture has only two, quite narrow lemonwood legs, which are square in cross section. Of these two legs, one has been shifted to the center and continues upward past the table surface to double as the mount point for one of the two swivelling mirrors. Interestingly, the legs

and polished, polished nickel fittings, four parts (reconstruction, 2007, by Gerd Oschmann), 220 x 137 x 78 cm, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau

Marcel Breuer, isometric rendering of the lady’s bedroom in the Haus Am Horn, 1923, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin (illustration from Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar, 1923)

163

Lady’s dressing table in the lady’s bedroom in the Haus Am Horn, 1923, photograph, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Table Lamp | Wilhelm Wagenfeld | 1:1.69

Literature Emmrich 1989. Gropius 1923. Meyer 1924. Wahl 2001. Winkler/Oschmann 1999. Wolsdorff 1980. Wünsche 1989.

year of execution: design 1924 (based on preliminary design by Carl Jacob Jucker 1923), produced ca. 1927 Material: brass (nickel-plated), heat-resistant glass tube, mirror glass, opal glass format: height 38 cm loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 658 photo: Hartwig Klappert, 2008

Table Lamp (Glass Version MT 9/ME 1) Wilhelm Wagenfeld

Lutz Schöbe (born 1955), an art historian, is a curator at the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau.

C 67 M 100 Y 33 K 0

164

“unburdened” space. In this effort, he used Constructivist means to elevate the dressing table of the nineteenth century, but without repudiating signs and significance. The round shapes in this piece of furniture symbolize the female element, as do the round seat of the dressing table’s swivel chair and the arched baseboard of the bed in the lady’s bedroom. The combination of woods in a variety of colors, the brightly painted walls, and a multicolored carpet are as much a part of this complex system of references as is the functionally and semantically motivated coordination of table and chair, in which certain elements, such as the frame of the mirror and the swivel shaft of the chair, are borrowings from machines, and are made to be used. These elements may be traced back to corresponding connections between form and function of the sort that Breuer had encountered in variants by Hungarian Constructivist friends of his, in the teaching of Johannes Itten, Walter Gropius, and Adolf Meyer, and in Paul Klee’s theory of elemental design. Beyond this, Breuer seems to have adopted a spatial concept from Gropius. This concept is particularly evident in the layout of the lady’s bedroom—Breuer’s first planned-out, complex design of space—and the dressing table is unthinkable without it. It is clear merely from the isometric view for this room, in which one line, in Paul Klee’s sense of the line as an envisioning of the space-time continuum, runs through the contours of the free-standing furniture, the structure of the built-in furniture, and the baseboard, that Breuer wished to create a room that correlated to Gropius’s theory of “artistic space.” Such a space included transcendental, mathematical, and material space, and in it, “all the laws of the real, the psychic, and the spiritual world [were to find] a simultaneous solution” (Gropius). In Breuer’s layout, much like in the layout of Gropius’s director’s office, though with less consistency, there may be recognized a “mathematical and geometrical arrangement as a structure that can be experienced.” This arrangement, in its application of the Golden Ratio, the balancing of the horizontal and the vertical, the rectangular composition from rectangular bodies and surfaces in a manner analogous to the principles of De Stijl in the Netherlands and the Suprematist conception of form, evokes “a novel aesthetic order” (Winkler). Breuer himself ultimately thought of the space as a microcosm: the lady’s bedroom was, “in the order of precedence of interior rooms, the internal center” (Wünsche) of the contemporary home, a refuge of spiritual, intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional intimacy. In that room, perspective could be found.

In 1924, the office of the Bauhaus director was reached by the back stairs in the great academy of fine art of Henry van de Velde. Wall paintings in the stairwell led the way. Yet the interior of the director’s office—almost as though he were subletting the space— manifested the spirit of the new era. The first thing one would notice on entering the room was the ceiling lighting, boldly stretched across space. The gaze would then glide downward, to a lemon-yellow upholstered chair, its arms jutting out into space. The gaze progressed to the free-floating glass shelves just above the left armrest. Lastly, one would take in the glowing glass dome of the lamp on the director’s desk. After so many forms that expanded into space, here was a highly concentrated form, directed entirely to itself. It held the gaze for some time. The lamp was the first design object to have made its way from a Bauhaus workshop onto the director’s desk. Soon thereafter, it reappeared on other desks of the avant-garde. Bruno Taut had the lamp at his house in Dahlewitz; Ferdinand Kramer installed one in Ernst May’s studio apartment in the New Frankfurt; Adolf Schneck placed one on the concert grand piano in a music salon in Stuttgart. It seems that, for the avant-gardists, this lamp was more a sign of the new than a functional work lamp. The MT 8 (metal) and MT 9 and MT 10 (glass) lamps were soon known as the “Bauhaus lamp.” It was also around this time that German modernism began to be identified with the “Bauhaus style.” The photograph of the director’s office is evidence in a double sense. Firstly, it attests to the course that the Bauhaus had taken since 1923. The lamp on the director’s desk proclaims: This, and no other way, is how Walter Gropius wants the products of the Bauhaus to be. The language of form, if not yet the language of production, distinguishes the lamp from an artisanal work. It looks like an industrial product and stands for the course taken by the Bauhaus in the years after 1923: “Art and technology—a new unity.” The two Bauhaus lamps, one with the base and shaft made in metal, the other in glass, symbolize a serial industrial product with which the epoch of craftwork was brought to an end.

The Lamp on the Director’s Desk Walter Scheiffele

Wilhelm Wagenfeld, table lamp MT 8/ME 2, metal version, 1924, Klassik Stiftung Weimar

C 70 M 100 Y 30 K 0

166

The photograph had additional significance for Carl Jacob Jucker, who considered himself one of the lamp’s designers. When he wrote to the Bauhaus-Archiv in 1983, “I have another photograph in which the glass lamp is on Gropius’s desk,” it was proof for him that the lamp, which had become famous, could only have been by him. The Bauhaus lamp has now become a point of controversy almost without parallel in the history of design. But: Which lamp did Jucker see on Gropius’s desk? It is worth considering the circumstances under which this seemingly unassuming object became the subject of such dispute. A change in strategy was underway at the Bauhaus in 1923 and 1924. Already the previous year, Oskar Schlemmer (who is also thought to have played a part in the creation of the Bauhaus lamp) anticipated what he termed the “Itten/Gropius duel”: “We can and may do only what is most real; we wish to strive for the realization of ideas. Instead of cathedrals, the housing machine [Wohnmaschine].” After years of experimentation, Gropius, himself under pressure from the left-wing government of Thuringia, insisted on a major Bauhaus exhibition, at the center of which was to be a model house. The Bauhaus workshops were to provide specimens of modern furniture and housewares. This was the context in which the goldsmithing and silversmithing workshop was converted into a metal shop. The artist László Moholy-Nagy, who had become the workshop’s leader and master of form in the spring of 1923, supported Walter Gropius’s plan and ordered that electric lamps be developed for the model house. Gyula Pap and Carl Jacob Jucker, both Bauhaus students, worked on preliminary models of electric lamps. Pap designed a metal and glass floor lamp, while Jucker labored away on a desk lamp. By May, they had created an experimental series of six lamps, the most prominent features of which were glass bases and shafts. It was a successful beginning that was never to be finished. All of the documented variations revolve around the final form of the lamp. Jucker never made the step from placing a ring around the light bulb (he tried a number of variations on this) to using a sphere. One of Jucker’s experiments was nonetheless shown with Pap’s floor lamp at the large Bauhaus exhibition that ran from August to September of 1923. Jucker left the Bauhaus in September, leaving his lamps behind him as an incomplete project. The Bauhaus lamp to come was hardly the necessary result of these preliminary works. But in October, Wilhelm Wagenfeld came to Weimar and, during one of his rotations, worked in the metal shop, where pressure was growing for commercially viable designs. In March of 1924, Gropius pressed for the metal shop to develop “reproducible products.” Wagenfeld then designed a metal lamp with an opal glass bell as its crowning conclusion. He produced fifteen copies of this type. In June, Wagenfeld acted on a suggestion from Moholy-Nagy to take Jucker’s combination of materials as a model for a second glass lamp. He produced fifty metal and ten glass lamps at the workshop in time for the Leipzig Autumn Fair. Gropius wanted the lamps to be presented at the fair “in series.” In the summer of 1925, Gropius and Moholy-Nagy coedited the volume New Works from the Bauhaus Workshops, seventh in the Bauhaus book series. Both Bauhaus lamps appear in the volume. The glass lamp is ascribed to Jucker and Wagenfeld and dated 1923–24, while the metal lamp is ascribed to Wagenfeld and given the date 1924. The order of creation of the designs is thus reversed, a reversal that was to have significant consequences for their later reception. In the two Bauhaus lamps, elements that led to chaos in other projects came together into a single form. Between the fields of influence of De Stijl and Russian Constructivism, Carl Jacob Jucker, lamps, 1923, photograph, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

167

Gyula Pap, floor lamp, photograph, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Performance of the first large chorus line in Berlin and the beginnings of “girl culture”

Germany’s first traffic crossing lights are installed at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. Despite public warnings, the number of traffic accidents rises continuously.

Droste 1997. Manske 1992. Selle 2007. Weber 1988, p. 136.

unemployed

0.9 mil.

POLITICS

Prof. Dr. Walter Scheiffele ­ (born 1946), a graphic designer and design historian, is a professor at the Weissensee Art Academy, Berlin.

CULTURE 

MODERN LIFE

The millionth Ford automobile rolls off the assembly line in Detroit.

The Chilehaus in ­Hamburg is inaugurated. It serves primarily as an office building.

The Opel Factory in Rüsselsheim is the first German production site to be outfitted with assembly lines. Produced there is the “Laubfrosch” (Tree Frog).

The new mass media LP conquers the market.

André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism

Introduction of the Reichsmark (RM) and currency stabilization

Jean Patou brings the first sun cream onto the market.

Wolsdorff 1983.

1924

Literature

C 72 M 100 Y 28 K 0

168

with inspirations from Marcel Breuer, Oskar Schlemmer, and László Moholy-Nagy, in the parallelism of designs from Gyula Pap to Carl Jacob Jucker to Wilhelm Wagenfeld, the lamps evolved from their first rudimentary incarnations into a revelation of perfection of form that surprised even those who had played a part in their making. The lamps have become synonymous with the goals of the Bauhaus. The appreciation of the Bauhaus lamps came remarkably late. It is apparent that the reception of the Bauhaus was discontinuous not only in East Germany, but in West Germany as well. In the 1950s, Wagenfeld was forced to defend the Bauhaus even within the Deutscher Werkbund against the accusation of a Communist orientation. Gropius was accused of Bolshevist leanings in the debate over Rudolf Schwarz. The Hochschule für Gestaltung (College of Design) in Ulm, which regarded itself as the successor to the Bauhaus, was closed by the state government of Württemberg in 1968, the same year in which the exhibition 50 Jahre Bauhaus, opened by Walter Gropius, inaugurated a Bauhaus renaissance in West Germany. In the 1970s, the Bauhaus-Archiv in West Berlin began systematic research into the history of the Bauhaus. When, in 1983, Jucker directed the Bauhaus-Archiv’s attention to “the glass lamp on Gropius’s desk,” he believed it was his own lamp. In truth, what he saw was Wagenfeld’s metal lamp. This fact speaks against him. By 1983, Jucker had taken his earlier lamps and added a glass dome comparable to Wagenfeld’s. When Walter Schnepel sought to market a reissue of the “Jucker/Wagenfeld Lamp” through his firm Tecnolumen in 1980, he found that Imago, an Italian firm, had already long sold a Jucker lamp. Schnepel reacted to this discovery by announcing that he would bring to market Wilhelm Wagenfeld’s lamp in the 1924 version. With that lamp began the real success story of the Bauhaus lamp—and the controversy as to its authorship that has continued ever since. The Berlin Regional Court decided the matter in favor of Wilhelm Wagenfeld on August 16, 2005. The Wagenfeld Lamp has come out ahead in the market as well. In the era of its mechanical reproduction, the Bauhaus lamp has become an icon, both as an image and as an object. Its form bears witness to one of those rare moments in the history of design in which there comes about, amidst the confluence of utopia and industry, art and technology, a symbol of the new age.

C 74 M 100 Y 26 K 0

The Bauhaus budget is reduced from 146,000 to 50,000 marks.

“In   its form, the table lamp—a type designed for industrial production—attains the greatest simplicity, and the most marked reduction in the application of time and materials.” Wilhelm Wagenfeld 1924

Memorandum by Marcel Breuer, Georg Muche, and Farkas Molnár on the founding of an architecture de­partment

45

CITATION

EVENTS

TEACHING

Students

1924

Founding of the Friends of the Bauhaus. Members include Peter Behrens, Marc Chagall, Albert Einstein, Oskar Kokoschka, and Arnold Schoenberg.

As a precautionary measure, the employment contracts of the masters are terminated as of March 31, 1925.

82

year of execution: 1924 Material: collage and tempera on yellowish cardboard

loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 7440

format: 47.5 x 32.4 cm

1924. 18/V., Portfolio Presented by the Bauhaus Masters at the Birthday Celebration for Walter Gropius on May 18, 1924

Birthday Portfolio for Walter Gropius | Bauhaus masters | 1:2.296

“But   we are not oriented today to motif and construction, but instead to function, which is to say, to the results of these functions. Once we have designed an object so that it functions properly and its function is not intrusive, then [it is] finished.” Marcel Breuer 1924

On April 1, 1925, the masters announce the closure of the Weimar Bauhaus.

Founding of the Bauhaus Kapelle

Festivals at the Bauhaus provide additional opportunities to implement creative ideas and to don unusual costumes.

might not be extended, the masters, otherwise rather reluctant to involve themselves in political matters, rallied around their director and submitted a declaration to the government announcing that they would resign as well if Gropius were forced to leave. Thus, for the time being at least, the danger appeared to have been averted. It was in this situation that the celebration took place on May 18, 1924—and the masters presented their birthday gift. Obviously suggested by László Moholy-Nagy, the gift was a veritable powder keg. The artist-masters obtained a photograph from the Vossische Zei­ tung—an extremely dynamic, politically charged source image. It showed a large crowd of people who, according to the caption, were “listening to the announcement of the election results [of the Reichstag elections of May 4, 1924] from loudspeakers.” The loudspeaker in the foreground stands on a light-colored windowsill facing the outdoors and the dark mass of people gathered on Potsdamer Platz. The photo was taken by press photographer John Graudenz, who thus became one of the first photographers to present the subject of radio as a mass media in a visual image. The fact that Moholy-Nagy chose this particular photograph as a source for the paintings reflects his own personal interest in processes of visual communication. It was he, more than anyone else, who advocated the inclusion of technical innovations in the work of the Bauhaus. Not all of his fellow painters shared this attitude, and they were particularly incensed by Moholy-Nagy’s radical appeal that traditional painting be replaced by photography and film. They did not reject the notion of art as an educational resource, but as independent artists, they had no intention of blending their own work with technology. The choice of the loudspeaker motif may have been prompted by the fact that Ise and Walter Gropius had purchased a gramophone several months earlier, the first in the Bauhaus community. It is said to have been greatly admired and frequently used. Yet another connotation derives from the proposal to “set up a radio receiving station at the Bauhaus,

Celebrated as a Bauhaus festivity on May 18, 1924, Walter Gropius’s birthday party, as described here by the young wife of the Bauhaus director, was evidently a cheerful moment. Yet the situation was anything but simple. “We are experiencing a very tense internal crisis,” wrote Walter in a letter to Ise Gropius in March 1924, in which he mentioned a grave conflict between Wassily Kandinsky and his students. Although the programmatic reorientation toward the “unity of art and technology” appeared to be progressing irreversibly and the major Bauhaus exhibition of 1923 had made a lasting impression, not everyone involved supported the new program. The painters were particularly skeptical—and their reservations are subtly expressed in the collective portfolio presented to Gropius on his birthday. Even more dangerous, indeed life-threatening, so to speak, was the external crisis, for the school had lost virtually all of its political support following the February 1924 elections in Thuringia and the victory of the right-wing conservatives. The Bauhaus, and above all its director, were fighting for survival. The increasingly vicious attacks were countered in the public forum, and a circle of friends was formed of prominent personalities who spoke out on behalf of the Bauhaus. In response to rumors circulating in April that Gropius’s contract

A Cheerful Moment The Gropius Portfolio of May 18, 1924 Peter Hahn

John Graudenz, clipped newspaper photo from the weekly supplement “Zeitbilder” in the Vossische Zeitung, no. 19 of May 11, 1924, 1924, newspaper print, 19.5 x 22.5 cm

László Moholy-Nagy, untitled, 1924, pencil, ink, and watercolor on watercolor paper, motif 19.1 x 22 cm, sheet 25.4 x 31.7 cm C 76 M 100 Y 24 K 0

172

“Walter was showered with gifts from students and masters and celebrated with more spontaneity and enthusiasm than ever before. . . . I had never experienced such an atmosphere of cordiality and good cheer! Schlemmer directed a huge choir in the most fantastic manner, incredible caricatures of skyscrapers rose to the ceiling, every workshop brought its own gift, and the masters presented him with a portfolio of paintings, all variations on the same subject (a photo from the newspaper with loudspeaker and audience). The band was in a fantastic mood, and Walter was finally carried through the room to deafening cheers.” Ise Gropius, June 1924

Paul Klee, Lösung “ee” der Geburtstagsaufgabe (Solution “ee” of the birthday assignment), 1924, tempera on sized cardboard, mounted on lightweight white cardboard, motif 19.4 x 13.5 cm, cardboard backing 26.5 x 27.8 cm

Oskar Schlemmer, untitled, 1924, red and black ink and watercolor over partially erased pencil drawing on paper, 36 x 24.8 cm

173

Wassily Kandinsky, untitled, 1924, ink, watercolor, and opaque paint on yellowish paper, motif 19.6 x 22.5 cm, sheet 34.8 x 24.7 cm

organized as a simple association.” The idea was presented at a meeting of the Bauhaus Council on February 18, 1924, and supported by Gropius. This technical innovation was evidently followed with great interest. On the agenda for the same meeting was a discussion on “cooperation with the Europa-Film AG.” In any event, the Bauhaus was by no means resistant to the brand-new technical media that were emerging at the time. László Moholy-Nagy, who suggested the birthday gift and also designed its front cover, subjected the photograph to rigorous Constructivist analysis in his own contribution. As in the photograph, the side edges and the diagonal windowsill form the dynamic picture frame; the radio receiver is rendered as a red square, the speaker as an orange circle; the crowd visible in the photograph is represented as a grainy texture. Do the two crosses, positive and negative, relate to the motif of the leafless tree in the midst of the crowd? Or are they to be interpreted as symbols of the acoustic message that emanates from ­the loudspeaker? Paul Klee took a much freer approach to the subject. He abandoned the horizontal format and built a vertically oriented triad composed of the loudspeaker, an arrow, and an ornamental structure, to which the word “OHR” (ear) is added in the interest of clarity: information source—information channel—receiver. The massive yellow loudspeaker and an equally large red arrow point aggressively toward the filigree ear. A small, pale green plant ducks its head at the fringe of the boisterous crowd. A green exclamation point points to it—as a warning? Does Klee then offer an ambivalent commentary with his caption “Lösung ‘ee’ der Geburtstagsaufgabe” (“Solution ‘ee’ of the birthday assignment”), suggesting perhaps that, while technical progress may be powerful, it is violent as well. Oskar Schlemmer also interpreted the source photograph from the standpoint of the interaction between the information source and the receiver, but his approach was more detached and analytical. His work features the radio as the starting point, its function Georg Muche, untitled, 1924, pencil, ink, and watercolor on paper, motif 18.2 x 19.1 cm, sheet 25.8 x 16.1 cm

Lyonel Feininger, Vivat Gropi!, 1924, ink and watercolor on Japan paper, motif 19.6 x 22.5 cm, sheet 28.5 x 21.5 cm C 78 M 100 Y 22 K 0

174

suggested by tubes and knobs, and includes the dominant element, the loudspeaker, and finally the human ear, represented by an anatomical sketch of its inner structure. The pictorial elements are identified by corresponding words: the “radio” is clearly recognizable, as is the ear paired with the Latin word Auris. Schlemmer added the equation “1 x 1 = 1” in large characters. Linked by the huge loudspeaker, the sender and the receiver become one. The piece reads like a teaching illustration. Schlemmer actually did use similar illustrations in his teaching, which began with nude drawing in 1921 and gradually developed into a systematic course on “The Human Figure” by 1928. The course was not confined to formal aesthetic aspects such as proportion and form but also encompassed anatomical studies—like the inner ear shown in the birthday painting. A keen observer, Schlemmer was well aware that technology and progressive mechanization were playing an increasingly dominant role in human life: “A sign of our times is abstraction; . . . another sign of our times is mechanization, an unstoppable process that affects all areas of life and art,” he wrote in 1925. His statement might also serve as a commentary on the birthday gift for Gropius—about whom Schlemmer, by the way, was less than enthusiastic. “I stand farther from his throne than ever before,” he wrote in a letter to his friend and fellow painter Otto Meyer-Amden in February 1924. “Kandinsky, once so close like everyone else, is disgruntled and has already been displaced by Moholy, the newest man.” Kandinsky disgruntled? His contribution to Gropius’s birthday gift certainly does not convey that impression. It is a radiant composition rendered in the abstract formal language the artist had developed by that time. Although he used the basic framework of the source, he transformed the relationship between the radio and the listening crowd into an extraordinarily dynamic, indeed explosive, situation. The loudspeaker appears as a yellow triangle. We recall that, according to Kandinsky’s theory of art, the triangle is associated with the color yellow, which is regarded as aggressive and explosive. This effect is intensified by the lines of force that proceed from the jagged end of the triangle toward a row of colored circles into which the heads of people in the attentive crowd have metamorphosed. Other elements, including a windmill-like structure and an undulating diagonal line drawn through the composition, also suggest associations with energy, and thus their interaction represents a powerful paradigm for the dynamic relationship that is the focus of this work. In contrast, the piece by Georg Muche is much closer to the source photograph. Of all the contributing artists, he departed the least from its structure and proportions. The tranquil foreground that leads diagonally into the picture, the lateral boundaries of the image, which are identically structured, the radio with the loudspeaker rendered with a lustrous sheen as in the photograph, even the shadow cast by the loudspeaker, and lastly the attentive crowd, composed of numerous colored circles, are clearly identifiable. In formal terms, the picture exhibits little abstraction, although it differs from the photograph by virtue of its bright, almost cheerful color scheme. Lyonel Feininger’s painting responds to the composition of the photograph but interprets it, surprisingly without reference to its content, as an idyllic sea scene bathed in moonlight. The radio appears as a ship, a huge cloud of steam rises from the loudspeaker, the crowd has melted into the blue night. Feininger realized numerous marine motifs, but in this case, the sea scene clashes with the urban subject of the photograph. A subtle protest against the technical focus and against the technological euphoria at the Bauhaus despite

175

Multimedia Trade Fair Stand | Herbert Bayer | 1:2.694

the cheer expressed in the caption “Vivat Gropi!”? Feininger had expressed his displeasure with the posters relating to the unity of art and technology in the summer of 1923. “Ach,” he wrote to his wife Julia, “if there is nothing more to art? than that it can be yoked together with technology and should be functional from now on? A view I simply despise.” In the scene in Feininger’s birthday painting, it appears as if the ship is heading at full speed for a collision with the wall. Did Feininger see the Bauhaus on the verge of a crash? Viewed in retrospect, he would not have been wrong. The happy moment of the celebration, although it lasted for days according to Ise Gropius, was soon over. After endless disputes over libelous claims, contracts, and finances, the last year of the Bauhaus in Weimar ended in self-dissolution brought about by the masters. What remained, however, was a portfolio created by a group of avant-garde artists that is unique in art history, a thema con variationes of the kind encountered otherwise only in music. All of the masters of form at the Bauhaus—with the sole exception of Gerhard Marcks, for reasons unknown— were involved in the project. Gropius treasured the work. He took it along when he emigrated to the United States. It was shown at the Bauhaus 1919–1928 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1938 and then disappeared until 1985, when it appeared in the collection of the Bauhaus-Archiv—another cheerful moment.

Literature Berlin 1988a. Feininger n. d. Feininger 1905–1935. Gropius n. d. Isaacs 1983–84. Kerbs 2007. Moholy-Nagy 1925. Schlemmer 1925a. Schlemmer 1958. Wahl 2001.

176

year of execution: 1924 Material: Gouache, collage elements, charcoal, black ink, and graphite on paper format: 54.6 x 46.8 cm loaned by: Harvard University Art Museums, Busch-Reisinger Museum, Cambridge, MA, BR 48.101, gift of the artist

I wish to thank Klaus Weber for his valuable advice.

C 80 M 100 Y 20 K 0

Dr. Peter Hahn (born 1938), an art historian, is the former Director of the Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin.

Design for the Multimedia Trade Fair Stand of a Toothpaste Producer Herbert Bayer

179 advertising purposes, and we might well regard it as a form of advertising architecture. Human figures appear very small in these ink drawings and are dwarfed by the dominant building structures. The viewer sees the construction from above, as if he were sitting in an aircraft manufactured by Junkers and looking down from the air at a quasi-objective total overview of the structure. The proportions of these four designs are extreme, which was not unusual. Bayer’s references were the monumental trade fair stands that were common at the time. The most harmonious of the group is the toothpaste advertising pavilion. It is quite obvious in all of these designs that the will to advertise overpowers everything else—including sensible architectural proportions. Modernity is symbolized here by the right angle, by the absence of ornamentation and decoration, by the typography, and by the obvious tendency toward asymmetry. It almost seems as if symmetry and asymmetry are competing with each other for right angles. We might refer to what the student Bayer was experimenting with as “advertising by extremes.” The “Regina” design contains much of what later made Bayer famous—not only the montage technique, but also the early and still somewhat unusual use of photography,

The Will to Advertise An Early Design by Herbert Bayer Anja Baumhoff

Herbert Bayer, design for a cigarette pavilion, 1924, ink, tempera, pencil, and collage on cardboard 50.5 x 38 cm, ­B auhaus-Archiv Berlin C 83 M 100 Y 17 K 0

178

In 1924, the young Bauhaus student Herbert Bayer designed a trade fair stand for a toothpaste producer. The kiosk advertised the “Regina” brand. Bayer symbolized the multimedia aspect of advertising, a highly progressive concept at the time, in the form of a loudspeaker on the left-hand side of the building positioned near the entrance. The loudspeaker’s broad­ cast message is identified by the word “Regina.” Smoke rising from a chimney on the roof forms the word “Regina” and below it on the red wall on the right-hand side, the image of a young woman’s face displays her beautiful, perfectly clean teeth. Born in Haag, Austria, in 1900, Herbert Bayer began his training at the architecture firm of Georg Schmidthammer in Linz in 1919–20. His first typographic designs were realized during that period. In 1921, he worked for architect Emanuel Josef Margold at the Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt before moving on to the Bauhaus to join the wall-painting workshop under the leadership of Wassily Kandinsky in October of the same year. Two years later, following several months of travel in Italy, he set up his own wall-painting workshop in Berchtesgaden but then decided to return to the Bauhaus to complete his studies and take the journeyman’s examination. His change of heart proved worthwhile, for Walter Gropius appointed him to a position as junior master in the new print and advertising workshop, which was renamed as the advertising workshop in 1927. Bayer’s decision to interrupt his studies in July 1923 and travel through Italy with a friend was by no means unusual. Following his return in October 1924, he realized an entire series of designs in rapid succession, among them this proposal for the trade fair pavilion. The style of the design clearly suggests that, after roughly a year and a half in the South, he had re-embraced the stylistic tendencies of the years preceding his travels. The influence of the Dutch De Stijl movement is impossible to overlook. During this period, he realized several other designs in addition to the “Regina” toothpaste design, including a cigarette pavilion and a newspaper stand. An open waiting room with a kiosk rendered in the same style is indicative of Bayer’s interest in architecture. Bayer positioned the “Regina” pavilion at an angle, with its corners pointing in the four cardinal directions. In contrast to the many frontal views of buildings, this cube is rotated, as if pointing at the viewer like an arrow. One precursor of this approach is the isometric drawing of Walter Gropius’s office executed by Bayer in 1923. Here as well, the object is positioned in a similar way and thus evokes an impression that is unusually dynamic for a drawing. Evident in all of these designs is the influence of the Dutch De Stijl movement, whose concepts were propagated in Weimar for the most part by the artist, provocateur, and theorist Theo van Doesburg between 1921 and 1923. Bayer made use of the interplay of strong color contrasts and of symmetry and asymmetry that was typical of De Stijl in an almost playful manner. He did not try to minimize or individualize this influence. He had not yet focused on the goal of developing his own visual language. Yet ever since the Hungarian Constructivist László Moholy-Nagy had begun teaching at the State Bauhaus, the star of De Stijl had ceased to shine so brightly in Weimar. Thus Bayer embraced a visual concept that was already getting out of date. Not only do these designs from 1924 exhibit the same style, they are also oriented toward architecture. The subjects are small buildings, pavilions, and kiosks. Bayer continued to do variations on these designs throughout his life, although we may reasonably assume that this particular reproduction corresponds very closely to the original. Its proportions are quite remarkable. The oversized roof with its vertical surfaces was conceived for

Herbert Bayer, design for a newspaper kiosk, 1924, tempera­and collage on paper, 64.5 x 34.5 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Tea Infuser | Marianne Brandt | 1:1.077

Literature Berlin 1999b. Droste 1982. Wahl 2001.

year of execution: 1924 Material: brass, interior silver-plated, ebony, silver tea strainer format: height 7.5 cm loaned by: Klassik Stiftung Weimar, N 255 Photo: Hartwig Klappert, 2008

Tea Infuser MT 49 Marianne Brandt

Dr. Anja Baumhoff, a historian, is a lecturer in the history of art and design at Loughborough University in Leicestershire.

C 85 M 100 Y 15 K 0

180

although it is only vaguely suggested here. Bayer did not incorporate photography into his art until 1925. That was the year in which he began working on the standard Universal typeface, which we can still admire today on the outside wall of the Bauhaus building in Dessau, as it is particularly well suited for logos. Bayer also introduced the DIN standard at the Bauhaus and designed all of the school’s printed matter accordingly. This new commercial graphic art represented the Bauhaus effectively and advertised its goals and ideas. Bayer also deserves credit for establishing lowercase print as the standard that is still associated with the Bauhaus today. Bayer regarded himself primarily as an “advertising specialist” until about 1927–28, after which he adopted a freer, more artistic approach. His career gained appreciable momentum when he began working on his own in 1928. As art director at the Dorland Agency in Berlin, he developed a unique visual language that combined advertising and art in an unprecedented manner. He used montage techniques, new spray paint methods, and Surrealist motifs. By this time, Bayer had outgrown the Bauhaus, where rational design still took precedence. “What had been an appeal for the creative combination of all conceivable media and methods in Moholy’s article entitled ‘Photographie in der Reklame’ (Photography in Advertising) of September 1927 was transformed in Bayer’s hands into a method of subtle, fascinating seduction” (Ute Brüning). Bayer confidently steered the viewer through new, unfamiliar visual worlds, whose clear composition and surprising associative effects exerted a fascinating appeal. He juxtaposed completely unrelated motifs in space and with unaccustomed logic, inspired by Moholy-Nagy’s notion of a seemingly organic sur-reality. This method encourages the consumer to believe that he himself has thought of the idea suggested by the advertiser, which significantly heightens the impact of the advertising. These sophisticated tricks were not available to Bayer when he designed the “Regina” pavilion, however. The early developments described here only foreshadow his great potential. These early works bear witness to a long learning process that preceded his rise to success as one of the most distinctive and internationally renowned commercial artists of the twentieth century.

182

183

In 2008, Heidi Specker photographed the Landhaus Lemke (Lemke country house) in Berlin, designed in 1932 by the then Bauhaus director Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Her photography describes the special atmosphere of daily life in a modernist setting. A picture depicting the shadow of a teapot that forms a still life on the wall suggests a simple, natural interaction with the modern world of Bauhaus objects. In contrast, Hartwig Klappert’s­photograph depicts the paradigmatically modern tea infuser in all its cool presence. Between the three-dimensional thingness of the prototype and its abstract, ­two-dimensional projection, a dialogue of modern “classics” emerges.

Landhaus Lemke Heidi Specker C 87 M 100 Y 13 K 0

Heidi Specker, Landhaus Lemke: Raum 5, 2008, hand offset print, 60 x 45 cm, collection of the artist

Bauhaus Chess Set | Josef Hartwig | 1:0.833

184

year of execution: 1924 Material: maple, matte finish with black stain, walnut case format: queen 5.1 x 2.8 x 2.8 cm, pawns 2 x 2 x 2 cm loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 2073 photo: Hartwig Klappert, 2008

Bauhaus Chess Set (Model XVI) Josef Hartwig C 89 M 100 Y 11 K 0

Heidi Specker (born 1962) is a photographer, artist, and professor of photography and media at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig.

revolution is made clear from comparing Hartwig’s designs with the chess set created at nearly the same time by Vilmos Huszár, a member of De Stijl, and seen for the first time in the December 1922 issue of the journal De Stijl. Huszár’s chess pieces resulted from a rigorously geometrical simplification, and in this way constituted a purely formal new construction. By contrast, Hartwig’s chess pieces seek, both in their size relationships and in their design, to express their specific characteristics. Their volumes correspond to their value in the game, and their forms to the respective ways in which they can move across the board. Pawns and rooks move orthogonally to the edge of the board, a fact embodied in their cubic shape. The bishop moves diagonally, a fact expressed by a diagonal cross. The knight moves in a right-angled hook, and therefore is comprised of two opposing right angles, the one atop the other. The king and queen can move orthogonally and diagonally. Both have a rook cube as their base. The king’s limited mobility is expressed through the placement of a pawn cube diagonally atop the base, while the queen’s unlimited range is represented by a ball. In advertising materials, Hartwig elaborated on the relationships between the pieces’ possibilities for movement and their various shapes by means of diagramlike illustrations, suggesting an inevitability of design. Although he offered the various game versions that he created up through 1924 as equally valid alternatives, a comparison of these designs gives the impression of a nearly natural development, in which the essence of the individual pieces increasingly approaches pure representation. The final Model XVI seems the most consistent in this regard. The impression that the functions of each piece are immediately visible is strengthened by the fact that all of the pieces are made up out of simple geometric bodies, in particular cubes. This stylistic characteristic permits an attribution of Hartwig’s chess

187

Constructivism and “Essence Research” in Design The Bauhaus Chess Set Peter Bernhard

Vilmos Huszár, chess set, illustration in the journal De Stijl, no. 5, 1922, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

C 91 M 100 Y 9 K 0

186

In his 1925 “Principles of Bauhaus Production,” Walter Gropius declared: “A thing is defined by its essence [Wesen]. To design a thing so that it functions rightly—a container, a chair, a house—one must first investigate its essence; for the thing must serve its purpose perfectly, that is, it must fulfill its functions in practice, and be durable, inexpensive, and ‘beautiful.’ This essence research will have as its result that, through the resolute consideration of all modern production methods, constructions, and materials, forms will emerge that will often seem unusual and surprising, since they differ from the conventional.” The precedence of the functional over the aesthetic, thus proclaimed, was to emancipate from craftwork the new discipline later internationally known by the English word “design.” Gropius broke radically from the traditional formal canon. At the same time, he could draw on preexisting movements which, working from similar fundamental reasoning, had also called for an ethos of suitability to function. Before the turn of the twentieth century, the American architect Louis Sullivan had already postulated that the putative law of nature that “form follows function” was a generally binding maxim of design. Likewise, in 1907, the year of its founding, the Deutscher Werkbund called on “the designers: [to] give each thing an appearance that truly derives from its essence.” All of these statements articulate a demand to get to the bottom of things, to comprehend their “idea” or “essence,” and to materialize this “idea” or “essence” through the design process. In “essence research,” Gropius contributed a new concept that was to have an integrating effect on a great many Bauhaus members: on the one hand, those artists who inclined toward the esoteric found in “essence” a vocabulary word already familiar to them; on the other, those technicians who fought on the side of scientific rigor could identify with the term “research,” and analogous expressions existed in the natural sciences of the time as well. In his Bauhaus book From Material to Architecture, László Moholy-Nagy was thus able to quote the remark of the biologist Raoul Heinrich Francé that there “exists for each thing, whether an object or a concept, by natural law only one form that corresponds to the thing’s essence.” The idea of essence research appealed not only to the masters of form at the Bauhaus, but also to its master craftsmen, as can be seen from Josef Hartwig’s Bauhaus chess set. Josef Hartwig was an ideal embodiment of the type of tradesman called for by Gropius in the first Bauhaus program. Between 1893 and 1897, he trained in Munich as a stonemason and sculptor. Gifted as a craftsman and artistically receptive, he was the right man to execute the relief drafted by August Endell in 1897 for the façade of the Elvira photography studio. From 1904 until 1908, Hartwig studied at the Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts) in Munich; he worked independently thereafter in a number of cities. In April of 1921, he became the master craftsman at the Bauhaus wood-carving and stone sculpture workshops. In this capacity, he oversaw work on Walter Gropius’s 1922 Monument to the March Victims, and, together with Joost Schmidt and Oskar Schlemmer, executed the wall reliefs in the Bauhaus school buildings in 1923. When it moved to Dessau, the Bauhaus took with it neither the wood-carving nor the stone sculpture workshop. Hartwig left Weimar at this time, departing to become head of the sculpture workshop at the Kunstschule in Frankfurt (renamed the Städelschule in 1933). Quite soon after coming to the Bauhaus, Hartwig had adopted as his own the call for a design in accordance with essence. In 1922, he created his first models for a chess set wholly captive to this design paradigm. That this sort of Bauhaus functionalism represents more than an aesthetic

set to Constructivism, the avant-garde movement that originated in Russia and which sought, by replacing the traditional language of forms and images with a small number of elementary forms and colors, to usher in an artistic and cultural new beginning. The relatively inconspicuous proportions of the pieces could also be regarded as Constructivist. Hartwig’s non-pawn, non-king pieces each fit into a square of the same size, while the diagonals of their cubic bodies correspond to the edge length of a square on the board; the body diagonals of the pawns, for their part, are the same length as the rook’s edge length. The simple, clearly structured assemblage of the game aids in the understanding of the construction as a whole. According to Constructivist functionalism, every object should show not only what it was made to do, but also how it was made. Since they were made with a complete rejection of the traditional stylistic vocabulary, these objects were comprehensible to those without bourgeois art-historical education. In this regard, the Bauhaus conceived of itself as a continuation of the Enlightenment and as part of a comprehensive cultural renewal. Hartwig situated his game in this context when he wrote of it, in a 1924 issue of the journal Junge Menschen, “For a thousand years, chess was played as an imitation of the battle between two opposing armies, until, over the course of the past two centuries, it increasingly developed into a purely abstract game of understanding. . . . Where once naturalistic figural representation . . . was a given and the only right way, the contemporary meaning of playing chess compels us to an abstract design of the game pieces. Since the function of things is the most elementary part of their essence, . . . there can be only one way to the goal when designing a chess set, namely to make pieces that symbolize how they move and what their value is.” Despite assertions of this kind, Hannes Meyer was already opposing in the 1920s what he viewed as an obsession with objects in essence research, which he wished to replace with

188

189

Herbert Bayer, catalogue of models, insert describing the Bauhaus chess set, 1923, ­B auhaus-Archiv Berlin

C 93 M 100 Y 7 K 0

Josef Hartwig, chess set ­(Model I), 1922, figures: limewood, handcrafted, partially stained in red; base with felt underlay;

case: limewood with metal fittings, 7.5 (height of the tallest figure) x ­ 2 x 2 cm, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau

Exposition internationale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. This arts-andcrafts world fair gives the new “Art Déco” style its name.

Die Neue Sammlung, the first design museum worldwide, opens in Munich.

Diffusion of amateur photography through the “Leica,” manufactured by the Leitz firm

Wagenfeld 1948.

The exhibition Neue Sachlichkeit: ­ Deutsche Malerei seit dem Expressionismus (The New Objectivity: German Painting since Expressionism) at the Kunsthalle Mannheim

C 96 M 100 Y 4 K 0

Prof. Dr. Peter Bernhard ­(born 1968), a philosopher, is a temporary professor at the Department of Philosophy at University of Erlangen-Nürnberg.

CULTURE 

MODERN LIFE

Inauguration of television technology in Germany

Bruno Taut and Martin Wagner, Hufeisensiedlung (Horseshoe estate)

Werner Heisenberg and others develop quantum mechanics.

190

1925

Sullivan 1896.

unemployed

Hartwig 1955.

Friedrich Ebert dies. Paul von Hindenburg becomes President of the Reich.

Hartwig 1924.

Hitler publishes his book Mein Kampf.

Gropius 1925c.

Reestablishment of the NSDAP (Nazi Party) with 270,000 members

Francé 1920.

POLITICS

Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin 2006.

Acceptance by the Reichstag of the Locarno Treaties in order to secure peace in Europe

Inauguration of the first escalators in Germany at the Tietz department store in Cologne

Avenarius 1907.

Sergei M. Eisenstein, The Battleship Potemkin

Literature

Increasingly, textile manufacturers advertise “ready-made clothing,” which replaces the hitherto customary individually tailored items of clothing.

a socially determined design. In the same period, Gropius’s friend Alexander Dorner criticized essence research for its claim to an absoluteness permitting no alternatives of any kind, a critique that anticipated the core of the postmodern position. Moreover, “essence research” failed to establish itself as a technical term in product design. The term could not be internationalized not least because of the impossibility of a full translation of the philosophical term Wesen, “essence,” into English. Nor was the concept of Wesen as self-explanatory after World War II as it had been in the 1920s, the high period of Expressionism and Phenomenology. One of the last to continue using the concept was Wilhelm Wagenfeld, who became a journeyman at the Bauhaus metal workshop in 1923 and was its head from 1928 until 1930. He published his design theory position in 1948 under the title Wesen und Gestalt der Dinge um uns (The Essence and Form of Things around Us).

0.6 mil.

C 98 M 100 Y 2 K 0

unemployed

POLITICS

CULTURE 

MODERN LIFE

CITATION

Prototype of the Frankfurter Kitchen by Margarete SchütteLihotzky

Opening of the GeSoLei (Large Exhibition for Health Care, Social Welfare, and Physical Education) in Dusseldorf. With 7.5 million visitors, it is the largest trade fair of

2 mil.

1926

Founding of Die Form, the journal of the German Werkbund

Development of 16 mm film

introduction of writing without capital letters

Germany becomes a permanent member of the League of Nations.

Josephine Baker appears in Germany for the first time.

the Weimar Republic. Its political and social objective is education resulting in a new, highly productive individual.

Clearing-out party in Weimar

“Two   years ago, when I saw the finished version of my first steel club chair, I thought that, of all my works, this piece would bring me the most criticism. It is my most extreme work, both in its outer appearance and the use of materials; it is the least artistic, the most logical, the least ‘cozy,’ the most mechanical. However, the opposite of what I had expected came true.” Marcel Breuer 1927

Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky negotiate concerning the move of the Bauhaus to Dessau.

All masters of form except for Gerhard Marcks transfer with the Bauhaus to Dessau.

28

EVENTS

TEACHING

Students

1925 73 Development of frottage by Max Ernst

Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann and his French counterpart Aristide Briand receive the Nobel Peace Prize for their work toward reconciliation.

Charlie Chaplin, The Gold Rush

Founding of German Lufthansa in Berlin

“A   thing is defined by its essence. To design a thing so that it functions rightly—a container, a chair, a house—one must first investigate its essence;­for the thing must serve its purpose perfectly, that is, it must fulfill its function in practice, and be durable, inexpensive, and ‘beautiful.’” Walter Gropius 1925

The Dessau Town Council resolves to take over the Bauhaus.

The Bauhaus font is developed by Herbert Bayer.

C 100 M 100 Y 0 K 0

Roofing ceremony for the Bauhaus building, followed by a “White Festival” at the Volksheim (House of the People) and the youth center

The first issue of the journal Bauhaus appears.

“Building   means the design of life processes. The majority of individuals have similar living requirements. It is therefore logical and economically efficient to satisfy such similar mass needs in a unified and similar way.” Walter Gropius 1926

Completion of the masters’ houses

28

CITATION

EVENTS

TEACHING

Students

1926

A citizens’ group in Dessau resolves on a protest action against the “un-German” Bauhaus.

73

year of execution: 1926

Material: tempera and ink on paper, mounted on cardboard

loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, permanent loan from the Scheper estate

format: 44.5 x 59.1 cm

Layout of the Bauhaus Building in Dessau Hinnerk Scheper

Public presentation of the first buildings of the Dessau-Törten housing estate

Bauhaus Building Layout | Hinnerk Scheper | 1:2.795

“For   the first time, the Earth witnesses a cult of naked reason, whose bright and sober principle effects us so strikingly in the cupola of the Hagia Sophia, in mathematical formulae, in French literature of the ‘grand siècle,’ and in the planned organization of gigantic trusts.” Ilja Ehrenburg 1927

December 4: opening of the Bauhaus building, coinciding with Wassily Kandinksy’s sixtieth birthday

The provincial government of Anhalt recognizes the title “Hochschule für Gestaltung” (College of Design). The masters officially become professors.

The chromatic orientation plan indicates the structure of the Bauhaus building in Dessau, erected in 1926, which mirrors the fundamentals of work at the school as a “built manifesto” of Bauhaus ideas. Gropius’s phrase “Art and technology—a new unity” called for a fusion of artistic and technical disciplines in order to constitute a new art of building. The design of the Bauhaus building is an expression of these efforts toward a renewal of architecture via intensive collective work. Produced in the workshops were the building’s furnishings, including luminaries, furnishings, and signage; the chromatic design of the building’s walls were executed by the workshop for wall painting under the direction of Hinnerk Scheper. The orientation plan produced in 1926 provides insight into the various functions accommodated by the Bauhaus building, as well as shedding light on the intentions of the chromatic design. For his plan, Scheper chose a highly interesting, light, and playful approach. Depicted on the sheet one above the next in an oblique view are the stories of the Bauhaus building. Colors and lettering has been applied to some stories. The colors and abbreviations indicate the individual functions explained in the key found in the lower left corner. The levels are interlinked by means of meandering, colored arrows indicating routes to various departments, each marked by a different color, and the administrative area. An affixed, typewritten text contains explanations of the chromatic scheme. Since they depict the building’s organization, the colors of the orientation plan correspond only to a limited degree to the colorist treatment of the surfaces.

Function and Color in the Bauhaus Building in Dessau Monika Markgraf

Walter Gropius (design) and Lucia Moholy (photograph), Bauhaus building from the north­ west, 1926, gelatin silver print, 12.2 x 20.6 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin C 100 M 98 Y 2 K 0

196

The complex articulation of the Bauhaus corresponds to the functions accommodated in the building. Located in the north wing was the state vocational school, the “laboratory of ideas” was found in the workshop wing, while students and junior masters of the Bauhaus lived in the dormitory block. The connecting wing linked the dormitory block and the workshop wing, and accommodated the canteen, stage, and auditorium, which could be joined to form a single surface for large events. The bridge—which contained the administrative offices, including the director’s office—spanned a street, connecting the workshop wing to the north wing. Just as the building’s spatial order is only truly grasped when it is circumambulated, the interior configuration reveals itself only when it is traversed. A characteristic element is the use of large windows, which serve to open up the building, effecting an interpenetration of interior and exterior. An outstanding attribute is the glass curtain façade suspended in front of the building along the workshop wing, a feature that would prove seminal for later twentieth-century architecture. With its cubic volumes topped by flat roofs, the outfitting of the roof terrace as a “gymnastics area for students,” and the plastered, painted white wall surfaces, the Bauhaus building manifests a number of traits typical of the so-called New Building. A special quality of the design is its balanced proportions and harmonious relationship between part and whole. The design of the envelope reflects the building’s functions. Corresponding to the mission of the Bauhaus workshops as a “forge of ideas” is the novel construction with the glass curtain façade. The corridor in the bridge wing underscores the presence of routes through the building by means of elongated horizontal strip windows, executed without supports. The vertical rectangular windows of the events level, by contrast, allow light to fall deeply within the large space. The studios were intended to provide residents with opportunities for retreat from intensive work on collective tasks. This function corresponds to the design, with individual windows and small balconies. A dark base running around the building ties together the various parts, endowing it with stability. Not just the volumes and the façade design correspond to the functions of the different parts of the building; the design of the Bauhaus interior, too, is based on differentiated spatial structures, surfaces, and colors. The following notations are found on the chromatic orientation plan: “Colored orientation plan with indications of the ordering of the building complex by coloristic means as conditioned by function. From the vestibule, directional arrows and lines indicate routes to the workshops and departments, each bearing a characteristic color. The design differentiates between load-bearing and non-bearing surfaces, thereby endowing the architectonic tension with lucid expression. The spatial effect of the colors is heightened by the application of a variety of materials: slick high-gloss, polished, granular, and rough plastered surfaces, dull matte and high-gloss coats of paint, glass, metal, and so on.” Accordingly, the color scheme is assigned the task of endowing the architecture with a more powerful expressiveness, and is functional in the sense that it is conceptualized and deployed as an element of the complex as a whole. For this reason, it must be regarded as an indispensable and integral component of the total contribution of the workshops to the new architecture. For Scheper, the material quality of the paint itself, the nature of the ground to which it is applied, the technique of application, and the final surface treatment are important resources that influence the architectonic expression of individual parts, thereby helping to shape space. In Scheper’s hands, finally, color also serves to orient Dining hall in the Bauhaus building by Walter Gropius, 1926–27, enlargement from a color slide (Agfa Wolfen, photographer unknown), Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Stairway in the north wing of the Bauhaus building by Walter Gropius, 1926–27, enlargement from a color slide (Agfa Wolfen, photographer unknown), ­B auhaus-Archiv Berlin

197

Teachers’ room in the north wing of the Bauhaus building by Walter Gropius, 1926–27, enlargement from a color slide (Agfa Wolfen, photographer unknown), ­B auhaus-Archiv Berlin

Masters’ Houses, Exterior Design | Alfred Arndt | 1:4.187

Literature Baumann 2007. Berlin 2005a. Dessau 1996. Gropius 1930. Markgraf 2006. Nerdinger 1985. Prigge 2006. Rehm 2005. Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau 1999.

year of execution: 1926 Material: ink and tempera on drawing paper, mounted on grayish-green cardboard format: drawing 66.2 x 46.7 cm, backing cardboard 75.7 x 55.8 cm loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 976

Dipl.-Ing. Monika Markgraf (born 1955), an architect, is an academic consultant for building research and architectural conservation at the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau. C 100 M 96 Y 4 K 0

198

users within the building, and is hence deployed from a psychological perspective. This aspect of surface design in modern architecture was long neglected, and has become a greater focus of attention only in recent years when it was recognized that the coloration, materiality, and structuration of surfaces are decisive factors in the impact of modern architecture, which may be substantially impaired even through minor interventions. The chromatic orientation plan offers little information about the coloristic treatment of surfaces. Detailed entries on the painting of the Bauhaus building are found in the color plan, also produced in 1926, whose entries for the most part fail to correspond to the color scheme as actually executed. As comprehensive investigations carried out in recent years have demonstrated, the “attempt at a colored façade treatment,” on the other hand, was not ultimately realized. The unplastered, rough surface of the workshop wing was painted in a thin, white lime slurry. The chromatic organization of the workshops shown in the orientation plan remains unrealized. The appearance of the instruction rooms of the state school located in the north wing was determined by the color-painted beams and supports. The ceiling surfaces of the rooms in the first upper story of the bridge, which are subdivided by white beams, on the other hand, were painted in color. In the dormitory block as well, the ceilings and beams of the corridors in the various levels were given different colors. In the main building, the naturally occurring play of light and shadow was enhanced by the use of gray surfaces. Color was also employed to aid orientation, with the different levels treated variously and routes through the building emphasized with the color red. The directional arrows and lines referred to in the orientation plan, however, were not executed. The design of the events level in the Bauhaus building documents the cooperation amongst the workshops. The chromatic design underscores the construction of loadbearing and panel surfaces, and the special treatment of the surfaces, which contribute to the overall effect of the architecture, emphasizes the special character of the spatial sequencing. The decor, too, has been integrated into the overall effect. The glossy white undersides of the beams in the canteen, for example, correspond to the lacquered white tables and doors as well as the white oval glass bowls of the luminaries. The furnishings, designed by Marcel Breuer, including tables and stools as well as tubular steel chairs in the auditorium were produced in the Bauhaus furniture workshop. The ceiling lights were based on a design by Max Krajewski produced in the metal workshop. Spaces, surfaces, and furnishings come together to form a unified design. The Bauhaus building—which has been comprehensively renovated in recent years—is today the headquarters of the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau. In 1996, the outstanding significance of the Bauhaus, with its buildings in Weimar and Dessau, was entered into the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites.

Color Plan for the Exterior Design of the Duplex Masters’ Houses in Dessau Alfred Arndt

masters’ houses reflect the constructive principal referred to by Gropius as “Baukasten im Grossen” (“large-scale modular building blocks”). It may well be that the additive succession of architectural volumes as well as the familiar mirroring and rotation of the ground plans of the masters’ houses can be traced back to the “building block” principle. In the mid-1920s, Gropius had engaged in intensive discussions on rational building methods with Ernst May, Bruno Taut, and Martin Wagner. But to trace the external design of the masters’ houses to functional aspects exclusively would fail to go far enough. The broad, massive proportions of the architectural volumes, for example, are less functional in origin and are instead a purposely deployed architectural and artistic resource chosen by Gropius. According to his own statements, Gropius learned about the importance of proportions for architecture during his activities in the architectural studio of Peter Behrens, where he worked from 1908 to 1910. He also assimilated ideas about contemporary teachings of proportions through pertinent texts including Hendrik Petrus Berlage’s Grundlagen und Entwicklung der Architektur (Foundations and Development of Architecture) of 1908. In formal terms, the masters’ houses were also enriched by the projecting surfaces of the canopies and balconies. This stylistic resource of European avant-garde architecture was fundamentally indebted to Wright’s extraordinarily popular Prairie Houses in Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and other locations. An essential design element of the masters’ houses was the color scheme. In the end, of course, Gropius declined to adopt Arndt’s proposal for differentiating the larger surfaces as well as the individual architectural volumes of the façades of the masters’ houses. Still, he did adopt the color scheme for the undersides of the balconies, the projecting structural members, as well as for door and window jambs. In 1925, Gropius formulated the question: “How do we want to live?” Not long afterward, he gave an adequate reply to this question with his single-family house in the masters’ housing estate. The precondition for his concept of residence is the ground plan. Very much in the spirit of Le Corbusier’s slogan of the “machine for living,” propagated in the early 1920s, Gropius subdivided his house into individual sections intended to bring about a reduction in the daily routine of running a household. The center of Gropius’s house was

The Paradigm of the New Building The Dessau Masters’ Houses Robin Rehm

Living room of Gropius House, 1926–27, enlargement from a color slide (Agfa Wolfen, photographer unknown), Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

C 100 M 93 Y 7 K 0

200

Alfred Arndt’s color plan for the Dessau masters’ houses by Walter Gropius is a source of astonishment. The freely arranged buildings are rendered in an unusual view from below. Essentially, this mode of presentation serves to depict the chromatic external design of the masters’ houses in a maximally coherent way. For the chromatic treatment of the undersides of projecting architectural elements such as balconies and roof overhangs is an essential aspect of this coloristic conception. Accordingly, the plan reveals at a glance that the façades were not meant to be pure white, light gray, and pale yellow, but red and blue as well. In the end, this concept remained unexecuted, since Gropius preferred an external appearance that was largely white. All the same, Arndt’s color plan can be regarded as an eloquent instance of Gropius’s architecture of the Neues Bauen (New Building) as well as for the residential culture propagated by the Bauhaus. With good reason, it has been emphasized repeatedly that the masters’ houses and the Bauhaus building together form a self-enclosed architectural ensemble, one that manifests the Bauhaus “idea” in artistic, pedagogic, and societal terms. Both complexes were designed in Gropius’s architectural studio in 1925–26, and were outfitted for the most part by the Bauhaus workshops. Preliminary design drawings by studio associate Carl Fieger show that the locations of the individual residential houses were determined at an early planning stage. The Gropius single-family home opens the elongated building lot, then overgrown with pine trees, while behind it, the three double houses for the masters were to have been positioned at regular intervals parallel to Burgkühnauer Allee. Articulated at the same time in Fieger’s drawing are essential principles of Bauhaus architecture. In keeping with his conception of architecture, Gropius devoted special attention to function. Concerns with functionality found expression in the masters’ houses, for example, in the window openings, cut sharply into the walls, in the tubular steel railings of the balconies, in the elongated sashes of the steel windows, as well as in the smooth surfaces of the doors. All handcraft work was replaced by mechanical manufacture, as called for already by Frank Lloyd Wright in an essay contained in the portfolio Ausgeführte Bau­ ten und Entwürfe (Executed Buildings and Designs), published in 1911–12 by Wasmuth Verlag). Through the combination of standardized architectural volumes, moreover, the

Studio of Moholy-Nagy House, 1926–27, enlargement from a color slide (Agfa Wolfen, photographer unknown), Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Lucia Moholy, veranda of Gropius House with a view of Muche-Schlemmer House, 1926–27, photograph, 15 x 21.3 cm, ­B auhaus-Archiv Berlin

201

Lucia Moholy, Kandinsky-Klee House from the northwest, 1927, photograph, 30 x 40 cm, ­B auhaus-Archiv Berlin

Club Chair | Marcel Breuer | 1:7.779

Literature Berlage 1908. Berlin 1994. Berlin 1999a. Bois 1981. Dessau 2000. Engelmann/Schädlich 1991. Frampton 1991. Gropius 1930. Meyer 1924. Nerdinger 1985. Rehm 2005. Thöner 2002. Wright 1910.

year of execution: 1926 Material: steel tubing, welded connection fittings and bolted push connections, anthracite-colored eisengarn fabric upholstery format: 70.5 x 81 x 69.5 cm, seat height: 30 cm, tube diameter: 2.2 cm loaned by: Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, I 996 M Photo: Hartwig Klappert, 2008

Club Chair B 3, Second Version Marcel Breuer

Dr. Robin Rehm is an art historian at the ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) in Zurich.

C 100 M 91 Y 9 K 0

202

the living room, which is furnished with built-in shelves, an expandable sofa, and a secretary. Mobility, variability, and efficiency were the criteria of the installation. Deserving of particular attention is the tubular steel club chair, which—together with six other furniture designs made specially for the Bauhaus building and the masters’ housing estate—was produced by Marcel Breuer with the assistance of a metalworker from the Junkers Werke and several Dessau metalworking firms. Before long, Breuer’s tubular steel club chair, later called the Wassily, became one of the best-known of all Bauhaus objects. Not all of the furnishings in the Gropius House had their origins in the Bauhaus workshops. The Midgard lamp above the expandable sofa, dating from between 1919 and 1926, for example, had been developed by the Thuringian engineer Curt Fischer in several stages. Beyond functional demands, the furnishings of the Gropius House were governed by a number of formal criteria. The built-in shelves, for example, did not serve exclusively practical needs, but also ensured the design of a unified cubic interior. Against this backdrop, Breuer’s filigree tubular steel furniture sought its place in the orthogonal room structure. Evidence for the degree to which geometric subdivisions of space received attention at the Bauhaus is found in Herbert Bayer’s 1923 axonometric depiction of the director’s office at Weimar as well as in Oskar Schlemmer’s various scenes of the Dessau Bauhaus theater stage. The ambivalence of function and form extends all the way to the design of interior surfaces and decor: the nickel plating of the tubular steel furniture, the high polish of the wood furniture, the glass surfaces of tables and cabinet doors, all generate reflections, refractions, sparkles of light, and shadow figures. Corresponding effects were deployed at the Bauhaus as artistic resources, as for example in Georg Muche’s 1922 mirror photographs and László Moholy-Nagy’s photograms beginning in 1922. Finally, the coloration of the interiors can be regarded as a special feature of the masters’ housing estate. While the chromatic palette of the houses occupied by Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy was essentially restricted to white, orange, and black, those occupied by Lyonel Feininger, Georg Muche, Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee were characterized by a more various color scheme, one even involving gold and silver walls. Notable in particular is the color scheme of the studios, which was arrived at by the Bauhaus masters in consultation with the wall-painting workshop. In closing, we return to Arndt’s unconventional rendering of the masters’ houses. In general, the method most frequently deployed at the Bauhaus for representing objects in space was that of parallel perspective. As a rule, objects were shown in bird’s-eye perspective. Apparently, Arndt’s presentation of houses from below was an exceptional case at the school. Arndt may have been inspired by the axonometric projections of the maison particulière published in 1924 in the journal De Stijl by Theo van Doesburg and Cornelis van Eesteren. Arndt’s recourse to parallel perspective, then, can be regarded as evidence of the not-to-be-underestimated importance of geometry and its multifarious implications for the architecture of the New Building.

Thus, in aesthetic terms, a design should correspond to the avant-garde spirit of the Weimar Republic, a new type of chair that would bring about a unification of art and technology according to the stringent demands of simplicity and objectivity. In this sense, compared to the so-called African Chair from 1921, the slatted chair could be seen as an advance. It was not meant to highlight its owner’s individuality through a hand-painted and hand-carved thronelike construction, but—as mentioned above—represent a type of chair that was in keeping with the times. Breuer showed this development in the first issue of the magazine bauhaus in a sequence of film stills. Even if the Wassily can be traced back to the function analysis, or “essence research,” of the Bauhaus, other sources of inspiration can also be added: first and foremost, De Stijl from the Netherlands, which influenced many students at the Bauhaus. Although Breuer did not attend the De Stijl courses, he was probably inspired by Gerrit Rietveld’s slatted chairs from around 1917, including the famous Red and Blue Chair, whose “elementary” formal vocabulary corresponded to his own program. As a Hungarian, Breuer may also have been influenced by the bentwood furniture that was common in the old Danube Monarchy. This was made from wooden rods and already included chairs made from continuous lengths; even the Wassily’s runners have a precursor in rocking chairs and particularly in Josef Hoffmann’s Sitting Machine from around 1905. As spectacular as the Wassily was, Breuer’s attitude to design remained pragmatic. In the text “Form Funktion” from 1924, he observed that it was necessary to “work without having to philosophize before every move.” The Wassily probably came out of Breuer’s desire to experiment with metal. Although there had already been a few experiments in bent metalwork at the Weimar Bauhaus, Breuer’s interest in making concrete designs and producing prototypes initially resulted from a close cooperation with Junkers Werke, which, for some years, had been developing so-called carcass furniture from sheet metal and duralumin (a durable aluminum alloy) for the construction and interior fittings of airplanes. Hence, Breuer first designed “carcass furniture from sheet steel,” then furniture from duralumin, and finally “tubular steel frame furniture”—including the Wassily chair. According to Breuer, the idea of using tubular steel came from the curved tubular steel handlebars of an Adler bicycle, whereupon he first contacted the bicycle manufacturer and then the company Mannesmann to get hold of the necessary materials for the production of furniture. While in the first pieces he bent and then welded the material, the welded seams were later replaced with round-head, then hex-head screws. From 1926, the back and the seat were stretched with eisengarn fabric (a particularly strong, cotton-based fabric first developed in Germany), leaving certain portions of the chair open, in contrast to traditional upholstered chairs. The back had a slight incline that fitted to the shape of the sitter’s back, allowing a healthier sitting posture. Among the most important innovations are the runners, since the statics, compared with the function of traditional chair legs, are shifted, and the chair also becomes more mobile. In order to be granted a patent, the Bauhaus was asked by the patent attorneys to list the most important innovations. After consultation with Breuer, it mentioned, in addition, the ease of production “on site,” durability, lightness and stability, the use of semi-finished materials, the fact that it could be dismantled due to the screw connections, and thus

Design for a New Lifestyle Marcel Breuer’s Club Chair B 3 Gerda Breuer

Marcel Breuer, stool B 9 (cafeteria stool), 1926, steel tubing, nickel plated, push connections, doublebolted, wooden seat, stained black, 45.5 x 45.5 x 37 cm, tube diameter: 2.2 cm, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau C 100 M 89 Y 11 K 0

204

In 1927, Marcel Breuer wrote about his astonishment at the popularity of his tubular steel chair, which later became known as the Wassily: “Two years ago, when I saw the finished version of my first steel club chair, I thought that, of all my works, this piece would bring me the most criticism. It is my most extreme work, both in its outer appearance and the use of materials; it is the least artistic, the most logical, the least ‘cozy,’ the most mechanical. However, the opposite of what I had expected came true.” Sure enough, the chair has had an extraordinary career, one that is still in evidence today—although other designs by Breuer were much more successful at the time. Designed in 1925, initially with braced tubular steel legs rather than the distinctive runners, the chair was shown for the first time in January 1926 during a Breuer exhibition at the Dessau Kunsthalle. Following a number of changes to the design, it was included among the furnishings of the new Bauhaus building that opened in December 1926. In this period, Breuer still talked about his “steel club chair,” while the Bauhaus described it as a “chair from extruded nickel-plated tubular steel with straps,” and noted in brackets: “the abstract chair!” In September 1926, Breuer successfully applied for a patent for seven new furniture designs, including the Wassily. In 1926–27, without consulting the Bauhaus, he founded the company Standard-Möbel in Berlin with the Hungarian architect Stefan Lengyel to produce the tubular steel furniture. At the same time, the chair, which was now being circulated under the name “B 3,” was still being produced under Breuer’s supervision in smaller workshops in Dessau. Breuer’s personal initiative and his attempt to find interim marketing solutions caused a certain resentment at the Bauhaus; Oskar Schlemmer even talked about the “Breuer crisis.” Later, production was taken over by Thonet. In the 1960s, after Dino Gavina had received the license from Marcel Breuer in New York, the Italian company Gavina started to manufacture the chair under the now familiar name Wassily, taken from the Bauhaus teacher Wassily Kandinsky, who had shown an early enthusiasm for the chair. From 1961 to the present day, the chair has also been internationally distributed by Knoll. The current chairs are based on a version of the design produced by Standard in 1927. The development of the Wassily can be traced back to a change of direction that the Weimar Bauhaus underwent in 1922 at the behest of its then director Walter Gropius: from the focus on art and craft to a production department experimenting with the latest materials and techniques. Breuer, who was one of the six joinery apprentices to begin their training at the Weimar Bauhaus after graduating from the preliminary course in the summer semester of 1921, had already designed a slatted chair in a similar spirit, which was industrially produced and distributed by the Bauhaus from 1922 to 1925. This slatted chair complied with the laboratories’ function analysis, according to which every detail was reviewed with the aim of developing prototypes for industrial production. In 1925, the year the Wassily was designed, Breuer justified the slatted chair according to purely functional—constructive, ergonomic, economic, and health—requirements. The chair should be factory produced, inexpensive, comfortable, and healthy, and thus correspond to the “basic principles of Bauhaus production” that Gropius had set out in 1926 when he called for the exploration of an object’s essential principles, “for [it] must serve its purpose perfectly, that is, it must fulfill its function in practice, and be durable, inexpensive, and ‘beautiful.’”

205

Marcel Breuer, chair B 5, 1927, produced by Standard Möbel GmbH Berlin, steel tubing, nickelplated, iron hex screws, original red eisengarn fabric upholstery, 86 x 44.5 x 53 cm, tube diameter: 2 cm, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau

Petersschule | Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer | 1:2.795

easily transported—the montage principle was one of Gropius’s requirements for “factorybased” production. All these are useful qualities, which contrast markedly with the chair’s current image as a status symbol. Nevertheless, even at the time, the success of the tubular steel furniture was probably a result of the fact that it corresponded aesthetically with the lifestyle of the avant-garde. Walter Gropius automatically integrated it into his master’s house in Dessau, which was intended as a kind of showcase of modern design.

Literature Breuer 1925. Breuer 1928. Breuer 2001. Droste 2001. Emmrich 1989. Erfurth 1983. Gropius 1925c. Leipziger Illustrierte Zeitung n. d. New York 1981. Schlemmer 1990. Standard-Möbel n. d. Wiegand/Karsten 1926.

206

year of execution: 1926 Material: ink over drawing on paper, inscriptions collaged, mounted on cardboard format: 59.1 x 42 cm loaned by: Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, I 6796 G

C 100 M 87 Y 13 K 0

Prof. Dr. Gerda Breuer (born 1948) is a design historian at the Bergi­ schen Universität Wuppertal and an academic advisor at the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau.

Entry for the Architecture Competition for the Petersschule, Basel Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer

By November 30, 1926, more than a hundred projects had been submitted to the competition for the design of a girls’ school across from the Peterskirche in downtown Basel. Among these entries were the projects of some of Switzerland’s most radical architects, all of them members of the ABC group, an organization founded in 1924 that promoted the principles of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity). Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer’s project Kompromiss, as well as those identified with the names Gäll aber suber nach Oste (Paul Artaria) and Ostfront (Hans Schmidt), were all disqualified during the first stage of the competition for presenting “incomplete or imperfect solutions, or for not responding to the program.” The first prize was awarded to the Basel architect Hans Mähly, a former collaborator in the “Neoclassical rooted” workshop of Hans Bernoulli, “for presenting the clearest solution in every sense.” Although Meyer’s project did not succeed in the competition, it became the most influential and renowned of the entries. His proposal, based on strict mathematical calculations of insulation and structural design, highlighted scientific knowledge as the only means to create the adequate conditions for the attainment of an effective education, following, as Michael Hays states, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi’s active learning methodology: “The desired conditions are, first, Pestalozzian sociocorporal ones: ‘No commanded study but rather experienced knowledge. No deformation of the spine but rather hygiene. No school cripples but rather vital youth!’” The design reflected the wide range of interests Meyer had been investigating for some years before his association with Wittwer and their participation in the contest. In 1926

Radical Architecture for a Vital Youth Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer’s Entry for the Petersschule Competition Raquel Franklin

Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer, model of the Petersschule, Basel, 1926 (design), model 1 : 2000 (1989), wood, Plexiglas, metal, 40 x 100 x 100 cm, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau C 100 M 85 Y 15 K 0

208

he wrote to Willi Baumeister: “My favorite readings are nowadays mathematical writings and biological theories, as well as musical criticism and philosophical analysis, all the rest, which had eminently interested me for the last two years, has vanished in the Orcus.” While Meyer did not explain which were the topics he left behind, a clear evolution of ideas can be traced back to 1924, the two-year period he was referring to. At this time, Meyer was placed in charge of the Swiss pavilion at the International Cooperatives Exhibition in Ghent, Belgium. Together with Jean Bard, he worked on a play for the Coop Theater and designed the showcases for the exhibition of the Swiss production. The showcase, more than literally presenting the products, made a representation of the mechanized process of manufacture through the organization of packages. He wrote, “In the display window of today, psychological capital is made of the tensions between modern materials with the aid of lighting. It is display window organization rather than window dressing.” Contrary to the straightforward message of social well-being expressed in the theater, the showcase and the linocuts he produced from it tended toward abstraction. Meyer emphasized concepts such as transparency, fragmentation, diagonalization, layering, and geometry, all of them related to the mathematical curiosity he revealed in his letter to Baumeister. Prior to the competition, Meyer published the first important article on his Weltanschauung, “Die Neue Welt” (“The New World”) in the Swiss magazine Das Werk, in which he visualized the conception of new forms as products of the formula: “function x economics.” The Peters­ schule represented the materialization of the ideas he expressed there. In the opening paragraph Meyer recognized the capacity of the human intellect to transform nature; science and mechanization were the tools to reshape the world according to new principles: “The flight of the ‘Norge’ to the North Pole, the Zeiss planetarium at Jena, and Flettner’s rotor ship represent the latest stages to be reported in the mechanization of our planet. Being the outcome of extreme precision in thought, they all provide striking evidence of the way in which science continues to permeate our environment. Thus in the diagram of the present age, we find everywhere, amidst the sinuous lines of its social and economic fields of force, straight lines which are mechanical and scientific in origin. They are cogent evidence of the victory of man the thinker over amorphous nature. This new knowledge undermines and transforms existing values. It gives our new world its shape.” The “new world” would be the product of pure construction, just as the Petersschule: “Individual form, building mass, natural color of material, and surface texture come into being automatically, and this functional conception of building in all its aspects leads to pure construction. Pure construction is the characteristic feature of the new world of forms.” Accordingly, the school proposal derived from a functional organization of “constructive units (cells),” such as classrooms, open and enclosed playgrounds and toilets, as well as communal spaces at the main points of the composition, for instance, the exhibition area, the school kitchen, and the school bath. Aspects such as lighting would decide the best orientation of the cells and, through precise formulas, determine the dimensions of the windows. Light from above would be preferred, especially for the drawing room, as well as an eastern orientation for the classrooms. Construction would also solve the problems generated by the inadequacy of the site to provide enough playground space. Under the current conditions, the space for the playground of about five hundred square meters hardly equaled the number of students. In order to meet the requirements of a modern school, additional space should be “artistically”­

209

Self-Portrait | LÁszlÓ Moholy-Nagy | 1:1.288

Literature Berlin 1989. Hays 1992. Konkurrenz 1926. Meyer/Baumeister 1926. Meyer/Baumeister 1927. Meyer-Bergner 1980. Rucki/Huber 1998. Schaidt 1965. Winkler 1989.

Original Title: Selbstportrait im Profil year of execution: 1926 Material: photogram, reproduction by the artist based on the collaged original format: gelatin silver print, 30.2 x 23.6 cm (original: 23.2 x 16.8 cm, Sammlung Arnold Crane) loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 891

Self-Portrait in Profile László Moholy-Nagy

Dr. Raquel Franklin is an architectural historian at the Architectural Research Center of the Universidad Anahuac, Mexico Norte.

C 100 M 83 Y 17 K 0

210

created­by hanging a two-deck iron structure from the building, thus multiplying by three the surfaces devoted to sporting activities and recreation. The platforms would be covered, as in a ship deck, with hardwood floors. As for the rest of the building, its structure would be of “unadorned standardized concrete pieces.” The suspended structure derived from Soviet influences, mainly known through El Lissitzky’s association with the ABC, whose magazine ABC—Beiträge zum Bauen had published some examples of Constructivist architecture. Meyer and Wittwer’s project, consisting of a rectangular volume with, on the one hand, an external staircase on the western façade forming a diagonal line, and, on the other, the suspended canopies of the eastern side in a dynamic balance, was presented as the product of “pure construction,” therefore, as Meyer understood it, had no consideration of the stylistic features of its surroundings. The identity of place was in no jeopardy when introducing a new building, since, as the architect argued, “Constructive form is not peculiar to any country; it is cosmopolitan and the expression of an international philosophy of building. Internationality is a prerogative of our time.” The Petersschule competition coincided with a trip Meyer planned to Germany in order to study the production of modern architecture firsthand. His journey of December 3, 1926, included attendance at the inauguration of the Bauhaus building in Dessau. A couple of weeks later, back in Basel on December 17, the same day the jury made its decision, he wrote Baumeister about his appointment as professor at the Bauhaus, teaching the newly established course on architecture. Meyer’s position, “fanatical about mathematics and physics,” summarized the fundamental principles on which he based his architecture, as the Petersschule showed, and those that would determine his teaching at the school, as he explained to Walter Gropius: “Basically my teaching will be on absolutely functionalcollectivist-constructive lines in keeping with ‘ABC’ and ‘The New World.’” The Petersschule was the first major enterprise where Wittwer, and especially Meyer, committed themselves to the production of a radical language for architecture, a resolution that would open for them the opportunity to participate as protagonists in the most influential school of the modern times, the Bauhaus.

In February 1928, the popular monthly magazine UHU, published by Ullstein in Berlin, contained a double-page spread under the headline “Photograms—a new and playful pastime with photosensitive paper.” “Prof. Moholy-Nagy”—as he was introduced in this article (although he had just left the Bauhaus in Dessau together with his mentor, Walter Gropius)—was using this magazine as a vehicle through which to place the photogram on a par with those traditional techniques that artists had, from time immemorial, been using to portray themselves, for the example he showed was a “photogrammed selfportrait” made simply by placing his head sideways on a sheet of light-sensitive paper and exposing it. What seemed to be such an innocuous publication in UHU, a leisure magazine intended primarily for the entertainment of young people, did in fact have certain art-political motives. Firstly, here was a professor of art demonstrating to a relatively art-illiterate readership a technique with which anybody could, it seemed, create amazingly new kinds of images with the utmost ease using only “a ray of sunlight,” lightsensitive paper, and “any old objects,” in other words, without any need for years of nature study, without any need for painstakingly acquired skills, without brush or stylus, oil or watercolor. The provocative assertions behind all this were that “the picture paints itself” and “everybody is talented.” Secondly, readers were told that the professor was even the “inventor of the photogram,” a statement that must have raised the eyebrows of many a colleague. After all, it had originally been invented by William Henry Fox Talbot (1835) and then reinvented by Christian Schad (1919) and Man Ray (1922). Nevertheless, MoholyNagy was at all events the inventor of the photogram as a medium of self-portraiture. Naturally, Moholy-Nagy had justified reasons for presenting himself as the “inventor of the photogram,” for this was precisely the technique he had been seeking—without first having been familiar with it—when it suddenly appeared before him and more or less decided the direction in which his art was henceforth to go. Indeed, shortly before he discovered the photograms made by the “Loheland woman,” Bertha Günther, he had published, in the magazine De Stijl in July 1922, an article entitled “Produktion Reproduktion” outlining his vision of a more direct kind of photography, in which light acts on the

László Moholy-Nagy as the Lodestar of a New Art Form A “Photogrammed” Self-Portrait Floris M. Neusüss and Renate Heyne

Journal UHU, no. 5, Berlin, February 1928, 17 x 23.9 cm, private collection

C 100 M 80 Y 20 K 0

212

light-sensitive material without first being reflected from objects, as is the case with conventional photography. Unlike conventional photography, which Moholy-Nagy described as “reproductive,” this new, “productive” photography would visualize what had never been seen before, indeed it was to create completely new visual experiences. To this end, the light-sensitive material would “receive and record various light phenomena (parts of light displays) which we ourselves will have formed by means of mirror or lens devices.” Later that summer, while on a visit to “Loheland” in the Rhön region of Germany, MoholyNagy came across, quite by chance, the technique of the photogram. It must have seemed like a revelation, for it corresponded exactly to his vision as formulated in “Produktion Reproduktion.” He saw it as a discovery and, consequently, was later to describe its “revaluation” into a medium of artistic expression as his “invention.” Back in Berlin, in late summer or autumn 1922, the photographic novice Moholy-Nagy sought to realize his notions of “light design” using the technique of the photogram and the simplest means at his disposal, namely “forming” light (initially sunlight) into compositions on postcard-sized sheets of light-sensitive paper by guiding, deflecting, and refracting it through various materials and substances, perhaps also reflecting it with the aid of mirrors. These small photograms were similar in form to Moholy-Nagy’s “transparent” paintings and his “field paintings” of the same period. Moholy-Nagy’s appointment at the Bauhaus in March 1923 was accompanied by the publication of some of his first photograms in the American magazine Broom, which at that time had its editorial headquarters in Berlin. The magazine contained four photograms by Man Ray and four by László Moholy-Nagy as well as a text written by the latter—largely about the photogram—and entitled “Light: a Medium of Plastic Expression.” At the Bauhaus in Weimar, Moholy-Nagy altered and extended his photogram techniques, now familiarizing himself with the use of darkroom papers, which made him independent of sunlight and enabled him to use small light sources that could be projected onto the paper from any desired angle. While his first photograms, produced in Berlin, were still dominated by flat, two-dimensional forms, the photograms in Weimar increasingly featured voluminous, three-dimensional forms. Although Moholy-Nagy generally obeyed the concept he had formulated in “Produktion Reproduktion,” namely that creative activities “are useful only if they produce new, so far unknown relations” and will enrich man’s “functional apparatuses” through his craving “for ever new impressions,” he nevertheless produced, both in Weimar and in each of his later creative periods (Dessau, Berlin, Chicago), a small number of floral photograms—as a direct reference, perhaps, to the “Loheland woman.” Both these floral photograms and his photograms of hands and heads and a few photograms of recognizable objects are an exception in his oeuvre, some of them being explicitly designated by Moholy-Nagy as “primitive forms of the photogram.” By reason of their recognizability, these “primitive” photograms stand at the very beginning of the process of evolution toward the perfect photogram, which no longer triggers any “complexes of material memories” but acts through “pure light design” and the “inherent laws” of the light-sensitive material. Finished in Weimar in the summer of 1924, the manuscript of the eighth Bauhaus book, entitled Painting, Photography, Film, gave Moholy-Nagy an opportunity to demonstrate such photograms. Their disadvantage of being colorless by comparison with painting was turned by Moholy-Nagy into the advantage of the “sublime values” of their very fine László Moholy-Nagy, Photogrammiertes Selbstbildnis (Photogrammed Self-Portrait), n. d., 90 x 60 cm, Sammlung Hattula Moholy-Nagy

213

Floris M. Neusüss and Renate Heyne, trial photogram with László Moholy-Nagy’s LightSpace Modulator (1922–30, replica produced in 1970) in the BauhausArchiv Berlin, 2006

Moholy-Nagy 1925. Moholy-Nagy 1996. Neusüss/Heyne 1990. Offset: Buch und Werbekunst 1926.

The average working week is 50.5 hours.

unemployed

1.3 mil.

1927

Introduction in Germany of unemployment insurance laws

POLITICS

Prof. Floris M. Neusüss (born 1937) is a photogram artist and historian in Kassel. In collaboration with Renate Heyne, he assembled an archive on the history of the photogram in art.

CULTURE 

First selection of a Miss Germany at the Berlin Sportpalast

The Werkbund exhibition Die Wohnung (The Apartment) is organized under the direction of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe together with the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart.

Opening of the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum in Bremen, the first museum dedicated to a single artist

Gerhard Muche and Richard Paulick, Steel House

Unification throughout the German Reich of traffic signs in white and red

Eileen Gray, side table E 1027

UHU 4, 5, 1928.

The reforms contained in §218 legalize abortion for medical reasons.

Fritz Lang, Metropolis

Charles A. Lindbergh makes the first solo flight across the Atlantic from New York to Paris.

Heyne 2009.

MODERN LIFE

Renate Heyne (born 1947) is an artist and artistic associate at the School of Art and Design in Kassel.

Literature

C 100 M 78 Y 22 K 0

214

gradations of grey, which no painting could ever achieve. It was in Painting, Photogra­ phy, Film, too, that Moholy-Nagy introduced the term “photogram” (the designation now widely used for such photographic images), although he still deemed it necessary in the years that followed to write a more explanatory caption on the backs of any photograms submitted for reproduction, such as “cameraless photography,” “photography without camera,” “cameraless photo,” or “cameraless photogram,” as was the case, for example, with his photogram for publication in the magazine UHU. This self-portrait has a special status in Moholy-Nagy’s oeuvre. It was produced in Dessau in 1926—as noted on the reverse side of the exemplar submitted for publication in UHU— and belongs to a small group of five self-portraits, all measuring circa twenty-four by eight­een centimeters. Two of them each have a very close variant, and they are all facing right. Thus we may readily assume that Moholy-Nagy was here seeking a certain formal solution and had found it in the self-portrait published in UHU, for it was precisely with this variant that Moholy-Nagy intended to present himself as the “Bringer of Light” elsewhere, too. He had the photogram reproduced and enlarged to ninety by sixty centimeters, the normal format for a painting, enabling him to show it in exhibitions together with his paintings. Unfortunately, only one single photographic document of such an exhibition has survived. It shows this enlargement hanging next to an equally large painting in his one-man exhibition in Brno in 1935. Since it was obviously intended to be recognizable, not least on account of the caption in UHU, one might now justifiably ask oneself whether this photogram ought to be grouped with the aforementioned “primitive photograms,” or whether it is in fact an example of pure, non-referential “light design,” for it takes a photogram-accustomed eye to recognize a human head at all, let alone that of the artist. Even during its making, Moholy-Nagy already made multiple exposures with round objects (plates?) so as to transform the shape of the head into a kind of half-moon. However, this half-moon was subsequently obliterated in this particular photogram through the addition of another photogram piece collaged over the chin. Here we cannot but be reminded of one of Moholy-Nagy’s other texts, “Fotoplastische Reklame” (published in issue no. 7 of the magazine Offset: Buch und Werbekunst, Leipzig 1926), in which he wrote: “Sometimes, without it being my intention, I arrived at visual effects of virtually cosmic-astronomical magnitude. I always endeavored to avoid them, as it was precisely in these effects that I could recognize disadvantages on account of whole complexes of material memories.” For this self-portrait, everything seems valid. It is at once personified and abstract; it transports the author as a luminescent object into cosmic regions, but not until he has first donned his spectacles. Indeed, one might assume that it is Moholy-Nagy’s—not entirely modest—intention here to present himself as the lodestar of a new art form realizable only through light and its supreme master.

C 100 M 76 Y 24 K 0

CITATION

Polemic against the Bauhaus masters appears in Dessau’s right-wing press

Georg Muche leaves the Bauhaus.

“Naturally,   [the] strivings of the Bauhaus . . . also relate to the field of stagecraft. This also resembles the structure of an orchestral complex . . . which serves not least the metaphysical needs of human beings by setting up an illusory world and creating on the basis of the rational and the transcendental.” Oskar Schlemmer 1927

Hannes Meyer establishes the department of architecture.

41

EVENTS

TEACHING

Students

1927

Concert by Béla Bartók in the auditorium of the Bauhaus

The Fieger Residency, immediately adjacent to the Dessau-Törten estate, is conceived as a model for a small house.

Radiance/Drifting Center, Study | Lena Bergner | 1:1.389

“What   it means to begin from specific spatial dimensions and to relate everything back to them can be grasped only by someone who understands spatial mathematics and dynamics: namely, the simultaneous interrelationship of everything occurring within a specific and singular space. Important, ultimately, is the way in which the dimensions of the auditorium, its height, depth, and breadth, relate to one another and to the human figure.” Oskar Schlemmer 1926

Establishment of the free painting class under Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Lyonel Feininger

125

year of execution: 1927

Original Title: Strahlung/Abgewandertes Zentrum

Material: watercolor and ink on drawing cardboard

loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 4669

format: 23.3 x 32.7 cm

Radiance/Drifting Center, Study for Paul Klee’s Class Lena Bergner

Already during his first year at the Bauhaus, Klee was not free of doubt over whether his art-making and his teaching activities were reconcilable. “Here in the studio, I’m working on a half-dozen paintings, drawings, and thinking about my course, all at the same time. For all of these things must happen together, otherwise it’s impossible,” he wrote in late 1921 to his wife, Lily. At the same time, he found the constraints of teaching useful, since they compelled him to become more conscious of his own artistic stance. Through the years, nonetheless, Klee experienced his teaching responsibilities increasingly as a burden. For this reason, he established the so-called free painting class in collaboration with Wassily Kandinsky, a form of instruction that was not tied to the pedagogical program of the Bauhaus, and where as of the winter semester 1926–27, students were free to participate beginning in their fourth year of studies. Max Bill describes the class as a setting where students were able to satisfy their “maladie de la peinture,” to work out their concealed desires to work in the autonomous media of painting. In the summer of 1927, the summer during which Lena Bergner painted her watercolor, Klee’s need for undisturbed artistic work came into open conflict with the Bauhaus directorate. Klee not only extended his vacation by several weeks without authorization, but now also restructured the “Gestaltungslehre” (“Design Course”). He separated theory from practice, and following a theoretical introduction, “surrendered the direction of practical work entirely to the students themselves.” It is this mode of instruction that Lena Bergner’s study documents—and its quality and precision is not only an expression of profound knowledge, but also the result of Klee’s prescribed student autonomy. Lena Bergner arrived at the Bauhaus for the winter semester of 1926–27, choosing weaving as her main subject. Like all students, she began with basic instruction, participating in Klee’s “Instruction in Visual Form” during the summer semester of 1927. In October of 1930, she concluded her studies, earning a Bauhaus diploma. In 1931, she married Hannes Meyer and traveled with him to Moscow. She died in 1981, after living for many years in Mexico and Switzerland. Surviving in her estate are numerous records and practice pieces from Klee’s courses. Among these are a transcript of her class notes, as well as numerous practice pieces in a variety of formats.

219

Poetry and Thoroughness Paul Klee’s Teachings at the Bauhaus Christine Hopfengart

Lena Bergner, Belichtung/Beschattung (Illumination/Shading), study for Paul Klee’s class, 1927, watercolor and ink on drawing cardboard, 23.3 x 32.7 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin C 100 M 74 Y 26 K 0

218

On August 22, 1927, a Monday, Bauhaus student Lena Bergner executed the large-format watercolor she entitled Radiance/Drifting Center. On the reverse, she inscribed the notation: “Bauhaus/Klee’s class.” At the time, her teacher was in Corsica, where he was not only enjoying Mediterranean culture, but, in keeping with his style of travel, also studying the land and its people in order to exploit his impressions of them artistically. Lena Bergner’s study, then, was not executed during classes, but instead during the semester break. This circumstance might have been deemed irrelevant if not for the fact that it touches upon a problem that was symptomatic for Paul Klee’s role as an instructor at the Bauhaus, one that came to a head in the summer of 1927, and that was resolved only with his departure in 1931 for the art academy in Dusseldorf. Paul Klee had begun teaching at the Bauhaus in April of 1921. Up until that point, he had had little experience with art instruction—whether as a teacher or as a student. He had taken on only one female private drawing student prior to the Bauhaus and had broken off his studies at the art academy in Munich prematurely. Rather than submitting to an accredited program, he withdrew to his parents’ home where he continued his learning process himself. Upon taking up his teaching duties at the Bauhaus, then, Klee was unable to fall back on a tried and true system of instruction and instead came up with his own “composition study class.” Only beginning in the winter semester of 1921–22 did he delineate a system with his “Bildnerische Formlehre,” or “Instruction in Visual Form,” which became a fixed component of basic studies at the Bauhaus and was mandatory for all students in second semester. It is believed that more than ninety percent of all Bauhaus students took this course. Characteristic of Klee’s instruction was the anthropological orientation of his theories and their anchoring in a system of cosmic wholeness. Klee spoke of the “humanization of the object,” and converging in his demonstrations were conceptual, scientific, and philosophical considerations. Also characteristic of Klee’s teachings was his lack of dogmatism, his attempts to equip students to make independent judgments. He even attempted to undermine their readiness to accept his own ideas by concluding his course with the words: “This is only one possibility—I myself, incidentally, make no use of it.” Klee’s students were unanimous in regarding his teachings as being objective and thorough, but also described them as being “an artwork in and of themselves.” “There was something laconic about his lectures . . . he was wholly averse to classroom theatricality,” recalled Xanti Schawinsky, while Helene Schmidt-Nonne reports that “his assignments often resembled the formulae of mathematicians or physicists, but were, carefully considered, the purest poetry.” Surviving are numerous notes, practice compositions, and color studies which mirror the emphases of his course. Alongside his “Instruction in Visual Form,” Klee also took part in traditional forms of art instruction such as sketching from the nude. But most importantly, he had to fulfill his obligations as a master of form in the various workshops. He was assigned responsibility for the bookbindery, and after the closure of this workshop, the one for painting on glass. Of greater consequence were his activities in the weaving workshop. Beginning in the summer semester of 1927, Klee offered theoretical instruction in design there, concentrating on the composition and subdivision of the plane surface and its potential application to textile design. His arrangements of squares and his system of horizontal stripes encountered a pronounced resonance.

Reingard Voigt, Ökonomie der Mittel: komplementär kombiniert geschoben/gespiegelt und gedreht (The Economy of Means: Complementary Combination Shifted/Mirrored and Rotated),

1929–30, watercolor on cardboard, affixed to cardboard, BauhausArchiv Berlin, gift of Waltraut Voigt

Slit Tapestry Red-Green | Gunta Stölzl | 1:7.042

The watercolor Radiance/Drifting Center was executed in connection with Klee’s teachings of form. Like other student works connected with this course, it deals with the establishment of compositional centers and its implications for pictorial structure. Concerning Klee himself, we know that in the final weeks of summer vacation, he was preoccupied with precisely this topic: “And now, I’m really getting down to work,” he wrote his wife, Lily, “the constructive schema for the establishment of foci is being improved.” Surviving among his pedagogical papers, in fact, is a group of sheets upon which the establishment of foci is constructed in various ways. Three important student works dealing with the topic of the “establishment of foci” have also survived. Konrad Püschel chose a perspectival construction which seems to generate a hollow body in depth, while Hubert Hoffmann sketched a garland of cubic funnels. In both, the visual language remains close to geometric structural forms of the kind applied by Paul Klee in his model drawings. Lena Bergner, on the other hand, devised a constructive figure based on polarity and tension, and with its luminous colors, dynamism, and cosmic visuality, she responds to the ultimately sober intent of the assignment with an expressive symbolism. The colored circles that delineate the path to the “drifting” center are reminiscent of the phases of the moon and the system of rays of cosmic connections, while the two complementary centers, blue and yellow respectively, are reminiscent of day and night, sun and moon. A preliminary drawing from the Bergner estate clearly indicates how many auxiliary lines were necessary for this construction, but also demonstrates that the final version was concerned less with geometry than with the image’s chromatic and compositional impact. Concerning Klee’s reaction, we know nothing. The sheer heterogeneity of these student works, however, demonstrates that Klee’s teachings were oriented to individualized solutions, and confirms Ida Kerkovius’s recollection that Klee called upon his students to “fulfill the assignment by inventing the needed design in the most personal manner possible.”

Literature Anger 1998. Bill 1963. Kerkovius 1959. Klee 1925. Klee 1927. Klee 1979, vol. 2. Klee 1999. Komor Müller 2007. Schmidt-Nonne 1997. Sharon n. d.

220

Original Title: Schlitzgobelin Rot-Grün year of execution: 1927–28 Material: cotton, wool, silk, and linen format: 150 x 110 cm loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 1998/5

Slit Tapestry Red-Green Gunta Stölzl C 100 M 72 Y 28 K 0

Dr. Christine Hopfengart (born 1955) is an art historian and is Head of the Department of Collection Supervision, Exhibitions, and Research at the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern.

given: the tapestry, writes Stölzl, “must first win for itself its independent right to exist.” Stölzl’s Slit Tapestry Red-Green (1927–28) speculates about what a tapestry might be if it were no longer a translation of painting into cloth but an exploration of weaving’s own possibilities. As such, it looks utterly different from contemporary paintings that understood themselves as “explorations of formation-problems”—and yet has a great deal to do with them. The slit tapestry is made up of repeating patterns, stripes and checks, in brilliant colors. These patterns relate so closely to the matrix of warp and woof that they recur again and again through the history of weaving. In her 1931 essay, Stölzl speaks of how, for weaving to develop as a medium, weavers must find ways to take account of how weavings are made, of “the weaving process—truth to materials,” and cites the emphatically patterned weavings of “Copts, Peruvians, early Goths” as examples of how this might be done. Stölzl builds her slit tapestry out of these patterns—sometimes lining up the patterns with the warp and woof of the weave, sometimes letting them swing out in undulating curves that flaunt their independence from the perpendicular lines of the threads. Setting a vertical stripe parallel to the warp results in a slit in the tapestry; the exuberant play between these two ways of using repetitive patterns, with and against the weave of the cloth, results in this slit tapestry. Around the turn of the century, painters had drawn on the resources of repetitive patterning as well—as in the splendor of the patterned fabrics that proliferate in the paintings of Klimt and the Nabis—to show that painting could deliver voluptuous visual pleasures that had little to do with the representation of things in three-dimensional space. As abstract painting developed in the 1910s, however, the pleasure of such patterning was marked off as a threat. It was felt that abstract painting must defeat what Kandinsky called the “danger of ornamentation”—the danger that abstract painting would be seen as mere decoration, pleasing to the eye but not possessed of the intellectual and emotional depth proper to painting, and thus consigned to the “feminine” realm of the handicrafts. Stölzl’s tapestry takes up these lush patterns—these patterns that painting had, so to speak, taken over from cloth and then expelled—and declares them to be what weaving is made of, what a weaver must explore in the tapestry (as a painter must explore what painting is made of in the easel painting). By exacerbating the patterning of these patterns, decorating the decorations until the effect is overwhelming—as we see in these stripes within stripes and checks within checks, striped checks and checkered stripes—the tapestry can “win for itself its independent right to exist.” It doubles back the gendered contradictions haunting abstract painting—art and craft, abstraction and decoration, autonomy and use, picture and thing—to reinvent weaving as a modernist medium. Stölzl’s magnificent tapestry is not only speculative—it is dialectical.

A Speculative Tapestry Gunta Stölzl’s Slit Tapestry Red-Green Annie Bourneuf

Anni Albers, wall hanging We 791 (orange), 1926 (replica woven in 1964), triple-weave, black, white, and orange cotton and synthetic silk, 175 x 118 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin C 100 M 70 Y 30 K 0

222

In the writings of Gunta Stölzl—the official head of the Bauhaus weaving workshop for many years and its unofficial leader from the very beginning—it sometimes sounds as if the technique of tapestry should have had no place at the Dessau Bauhaus. In a 1931 article, Stölzl looks back on the workshop’s transformation over the years, speaking of how the weavers came to criticize what they had been making in the first years at Weimar, to see “how pretentious these independent, unique objects were: blanket, curtain, wall hanging.” Since such things seemed “too autocratic,” they turned to “yard goods, which clearly could serve space, the housing problem,” developing fabrics to serve as “models for industry.” The handcrafted tapestry would seem the most “autocratic” kind of unique object of all. The very word for tapestry in German, Gobelin, recalls the art form’s long association with courtly pomp (the word refers to the Manufacture des Gobelins in Paris, which produced furnishings for the royal household under Louis XIV and later monarchs); a tapestry cannot be industrially produced and seems ill-suited, in any case, to the needs of mass society. Nor is that the end of its problems. In another article, looking back on the same shift toward treating cloth as “an object that serves a purpose,” Stölzl criticizes the work of the weaving workshop during its earliest Weimar years as based upon “pictorial principles,” as mistaking a weaving for “a picture made of wool.” In Europe, the very technique of tapestry weaving—weaving with discontinuous weft threads of different colors, so that areas of different colors may be built up independently—developed around the task of making woolen pictures, of translating cartoons, often by famous painters, into cloth wall hangings. Even Stölzl’s first tapestry, Kühe in einer Landschaft (Cows in Landscape; 1920), follows the basic conventions of landscape painting. Yet the weaving workshop in Dessau did have a place for the functionless, picturelike, one-off tapestry—and an important one. In the 1931 article cited earlier, Stölzl links the tapestry to speculation. She speaks of “speculative work on the tapestry” and sharply divides teaching at the weaving workshop into two distinct areas: “the development of fabrics for use for interior construction (models for industry)” and “speculative exploration of material, form, color in tapestries and carpets.” For Stölzl, the tapestry has a place parallel to that which the easel painting occupies for László Moholy-Nagy: its autonomy allows the greatest freedom in the pursuit of problems of material, form, and color. But the greatest obstacle to this kind of speculation in the tapestry is precisely that it lends itself so easily to comparisons with the easel painting; in recent centuries, writes Stölzl, tapestries have become “nothing but refined imitations of moldy oil paintings.” Whereas Moholy-Nagy speaks of the easel painting as the place for explorations of “optical formation [Gestaltung]” in general, Stölzl wants the tapestry to investigate interactions of form, color, texture, and material specific to weaving—how, for instance, “one and the same red, in wool and in silk, can never have the same effect.” The tapestry is the “pure exploration of formation-problems [Gestal­ tungsprobleme] by the individual”—the place where weavers can speculatively explore the particular properties of weaving, where weaving can, so to speak, lay claim to itself as a modernist medium. Stölzl is very conscious that, because of weaving’s associations with the handicrafts and “women’s work” (she herself wrote of weaving as “woman’s field of work”), many would deny weaving’s claim to be a medium in this emphatic sense. The autonomy of the tapestry, unlike that of the easel painting, could not be taken as a

Gertrud Arndt, wall hanging, 1927, double-weave, cotton and synthetic silk, 153 x 122 cm, ­B auhaus-Archiv Berlin

223

Grete Reichardt, samples of eisengarn fabric, cotton, partially lustered, rep binding, 7.5 x 9 cm each, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau

Sports at the Bauhaus | T. Lux Feininger | 1:0.948

Literature Berlin 1987a. Dessau 1997. Radewaldt 1986. Smith 2002. Smith 2007. Stölzl 1926. Stölzl 1931. Weltge-Wortmann 1993.

224

Original Title: Sport am Bauhaus year of execution: ca. 1927 Material: gelatin silver print format: 23.7 x 17.9 cm loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 7983

Sports at the Bauhaus T. Lux Feininger C 100 M 67 Y 33 K 0

Annie Bourneuf is a doctoral candidate with the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, Princeton, NJ.

To achieve this dramatic worm’s-eye view of his fellow students Xanti Schawinsky (left) and Erich Consemüller leaping above the playing field on the south side of the Dessau Bauhaus building, Lux Feininger had to lie on the ground and tilt his camera upward. Bringing together the school’s architecture and energetic student body through the techniques of the “new photography,” the teenaged photographer created an image that has become emblematic of the school’s life and the remarkable body of photographic ­work produced by its students. Although there was no formal workshop devoted to photography at the Bauhaus before 1929, many students were using it to document their daily lives in a variety of inventive ways. Few of them had any formal training, but they readily absorbed ideas from sources ranging from Russian Constructivism to avant-garde film and the popular press. Their adventurous attitude toward photography was also shaped by the school’s emphasis on experimentation and artistic innovation, which was introduced in the preliminary course. Although László Moholy-Nagy never taught a photography course during his tenure at the school (1923–28), he exerted tremendous influence through his own experiments and theoretical writings on the medium. He saw photography as an artistic medium of the future and promoted techniques such as unexpected viewpoints, extreme close-ups, radical cropping, negative printing, and the photogram, which he demonstrated in his seminal Painting, Photography, Film, published as the eighth Bauhaus book in 1925. Although the students’ approach was decidedly more playful than theoretical, they deployed many of the techniques of Moholy’s “new vision” as they attempted to capture the spirit and character of their Bauhaus experience through photography. One of the most exceptional of these amateur talents was Lux Feininger. Son of the painter and Bauhaus master Lyonel Feininger, Lux took up the camera in 1925 and

The Dynamics of Bauhaus Life T. Lux Feininger’s Sports at the Bauhaus Laura Muir

Anonymous (Fritz Schreiber?), high-jump outside the Prellerhaus,­ 1931, photograph, 12 x 17.9 cm, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau C 100 M 65 Y 35 K 0

226

enrolled at the Bauhaus a year later as one of its youngest students at the age of sixteen. Never without his camera, Feininger was always ready to record his fellow students and their activities in an exuberant style characterized by unconventional viewpoints and offkilter framing. While others produced small, often technically imperfect prints in darkrooms converted from bathrooms, Feininger had access to the darkroom his older brother Andreas had installed in the basement of their house in 1927. Although he usually made contact prints from his nine by twelve centimeter glass plate negatives, he occasionally used Andreas’s homemade enlarger to produce exhibition-size prints, such as this one. He had a special talent for drawing out his “models,” encouraging them by actively participating in their antics. After learning to play the banjo and clarinet, in 1928 he joined the Bauhaus jazz band and soon was combining his interest in music and photography in a series of lively images of band members dancing and playing on the Bauhaus roof. Sport was another aspect of Bauhaus life that became an important subject for Feininger. The popularity of exercise at the school reflected a new culture of health in postwar Germany that inspired the transformation of physiques, lifestyles, and living environments. Modern architecture incorporated sun balconies, roof terraces, and large windows for natural light. Walter Gropius’s designs for the Dessau Bauhaus had all of these features as well as a gymnastics room in the basement and a playing field where Feininger made this photograph. Believing that physical activity provided a necessary balance to the intellectual demands of school life, Hannes Meyer hired two physical education instructors when he became director in 1928. Otto Büttner taught track and field and Karla Grosch taught gymnastics. Feininger made several photographs of Grosch’s classes as well as more informal athletic activities, such as the soccer match depicted here. Uniting fitness and the building’s innovative design, Feininger’s image emphasizes the role of sport at the school while embodying the notion of healthy modern living. The energetic style of 1920s photography was ideally suited to the subjects of sport and fitness. Images of athletes frequently appeared in newspapers, magazines, and advertising, revealing a new image of the body through the use of dramatic angles and unusual perspectives. Evoking the most innovative press photography of the period, Sport at the Bauhaus brilliantly captures the dynamic immediacy of the play. Despite its reportagelike feel, however, the photograph was actually staged. Working with glass plate negatives, every exposure counted and because of the slowness of his shutter speed, Feininger had to direct Schawinsky and Consemüller’s leap in order to coordinate his exposure with the moment of their collision. The success of this carefully choreographed image may in part be attributed to ideas Feininger had absorbed in Oskar Schlemmer’s theater workshop and through his experience of making stage photographs. After completing the preliminary course, in 1927 Feininger joined the theater workshop and soon was photographing performances that Schlemmer posed for the camera. Made from the same frontal viewpoint, they often record the performance of a single dancer at the center of a darkened stage and became part of Schlemmer’s study of the delineation of space by the human figure. In Sport at the Bauhaus, Feininger retains the frontal viewpoint and central positioning of the figures, but exchanges the controlled environment of the theater for the freedom of the playing field in order to conduct his own spirited investigation into the concept of the dynamic human figure in space.

227

Stella Steyn, architecture class taught by Alcar Rudelt, 1932, photograph, 19 x 15.6 cm, ­ Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau

the mouth | Herbert Bayer | 1:4.838

In Feininger’s image, the Bauhaus building serves as a backdrop to the players’ performance. Students often photographed themselves on the balconies, terraces, and roof of the building, using it as a kind of prop or stage for their activities. Feininger may have recognized how closely this practice related to Schlemmer’s interest in the relationship between figure and architecture and in expanding his concepts for the stage to the real spaces of modern architecture. In Sports at the Bauhaus Feininger brings the building into active dialogue with the figures, rhyming the forms of their outstretched arms and legs with the vertical and horizontal lines of the architecture while precisely framing their movements within the rectangular space of the photograph just as the dancer’s performances had been framed by the stage. After Schlemmer’s departure from the school in 1929, Feininger turned his attention more and more to a career in painting. That same year the professional photographer Walter Peterhans established the first photography course at the Bauhaus within the typography and advertising workshop. Rejecting the experimentation that Moholy had advocated, Peterhans emphasized precise description, craftsmanship, and the practical application of photography to advertising. While this marked an end to the era of freewheeling student photography at the Bauhaus, Feininger’s work was gaining recognition outside the school through its publication in a variety of illustrated newspapers and magazines. He was also one of the students whose work was selected to represent the school in the landmark Film und Foto exhibition in 1929. Sports at the Bauhaus was among the images Gropius chose to represent school life in his Bauhaus Buildings Dessau, published as the twelfth Bauhaus book in 1930. It fulfilled a similar function in the catalogue for the Museum of Modern Art’s Bauhaus exhibition in 1938, and has since become one of the most widely reproduced photographs of the Weimar era. Its continued freshness and appeal are indebted to the authenticity of Feininger’s experience as a student and his openness to the possibilities of photography, which enabled him to bring together so many elements of this extraordinary time and place in this single seemingly artless image.

Literature Barche 1990. Feininger/Muir 2000 and 2008. Fiedler 1990b. London et al. 2006. New York 1980. Pastor 1985. Scharenberg 2003.

228 Original Title: prospekt: der mund. 44 zärtlichkeiten in din Material: collage on horizontally and vertically folded cardboard; colored and gold paper, colored wafers, newspaper clippings, envelope, cut-out paper sheets with signatures and lip prints of Bauhaus teachers and students in blue, pink, and black Occasion: gift from Bauhaus teachers and students to Walter Gropius on his forty-fourth birthday on May 18, 1927 format: 59 x 125 cm (folded: 29.7 x 21 cm) loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 6812

prospectus: the mouth: 44 tokens of affection in din Herbert Bayer C 100 M 63 Y 37 K 0

Laura Muir is an assistant curator at the Busch Reisinger Museum in Cambridge, MA.

The eighteenth of May was one of the highpoints in the calendar of celebrations at the Bauhaus. On the occasion of Walter Gropius’s birthday festivities, instructors and students demonstrated their affection and esteem by giving free rein to their creativity and delight in design invention. On his forty-fourth birthday in 1927, he received a collage by Herbert Bayer which featured an arrangement of innumerable lip prints of instructors and students in blue, pink, and black; small numbers identify each well-wisher with a name card. The large-format collage can be folded together like a prospectus in a handy DIN A4 format, an obvious allusion to the striving for standardization pursued at the Bauhaus: teachers and older students—the “normen Grössen” (standard sizes), as ironically entitled via an affixed word cut out from a printed text—have already submitted to the new systematics, with their name cards and lip prints arrayed in rows one below the next with great precision. Things are very different with the “novices,” who are identified by name in non-standardized script: their expressions of affection and their name tags form a wild tangle, streaming with exuberant lack of discipline from an open envelope. Despite their often highly fragile condition, as in the case of this collage, an astonishing number of gifts received by Gropius during his time at the Bauhaus have survived; it is a sign of their importance to him that he took them with him into emigration and preserved them for many decades. This is not the first time such documents of friendship have featured as museum displays. This collage was on view publicly already during Gropius’s lifetime, and was reproduced in a catalogue accompanying the Museum of Modern Art’s

“Tell   me how you celebrate, and I’ll tell you who you are.” (Oskar Schlemmer) Bauhaus Festivities in Dessau Mercedes Valdivieso

Walter Funkat (?), Bauhaus teachers and students at the “Metallic Festival,” 1929, gelatin silver print, 8.2 x 11.2 cm, BauhausArchiv Berlin C 100 M 61 Y 39 K 0

230

Bauhaus exhibition in New York in 1938 under the category of “Extra-curricular Activities.” As early as the Bauhaus program of 1919, these “activities” were declared explicitly to be among the aims of the school. Associated with such festivities was a double intention: they served on the one hand to promote contact between the school and the public, whose suspicions they sought to pacify. On the other, they had a distinctly pedagogical aim: they fostered collective work and solidified a sense of community, at the same time serving as a kind of venting mechanism or mode of catharsis, and as Ise Gropius reported in her diary, they were deployed deliberately by Gropius as a means of defusing and smoothing over the numerous personal and social conflicts that resulted from the intimate involvement of art and residency at the Bauhaus. An additional pedagogical aim of the festivities was the development of the “play instinct,” and in 1927, Oskar Schlemmer in the Bauhaus magazine invokes the authority of Friedrich Schiller and his letters in Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man), where play is identified as the power that makes artistic creativity possible precisely by virtue of its non-purposeful character. Particularly during the Dessau period, Oskar Schlemmer was the “designer of festivities,” and was responsible for conceptualizing large-scale public celebrations, which also served as testing grounds for the dances and sketches of the theater workshop. Alongside official events, any conceivable occasion could overflow into a pretext for festivities: the completion of a particularly successful carpet, the acquisition by the Kandinskys of citizenship rights, the birth of a child . . . Lively depictions of such goings-on are portrayed repeatedly in the letters, diaries, and memoirs of the Bauhäusler. While the spirit of the Wandervogel youth movement still adhered to the festivals of the Weimar period (for example the Lantern Parade and the Kite Festival), the school’s cultural celebrations lost their folksy character when the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, becoming reoriented as cultural events. Dancing was no longer accompanied by the harmonica, but instead by jazz music performed by the Bauhaus Band, which quickly acquired a reputation that went beyond the school. Organizational and design work for events lasted for weeks, with all the workshops participating in preparations. Invitations and programs were printed up, and lithographed postcards and posters served publicity purposes. The first large public festival at Dessau took place on March 20, 1926, on the occasion of the roof-topping ceremony for the new Bauhaus building: “The White Festival” took place under the aegis of a unified motto concerning costume and space design: “2/3 white, 1/3 color, the latter ‘checked,’ ‘dotted,’ and ‘striped.’” Taking place during the same year for the inauguration of the Bauhaus building on December 4–5 was an additional official celebration, with more than two thousand domestic and foreign guests in attendance. The next costume ball was organized for the first anniversary of the opening of the Bauhaus building and the birthday of Wassily Kandinsky on December 4, 1927. Schlemmer, who choreographed the event, reports in detail in letters addressed to his wife (dated December 1 and 5) concerning the preparations and the course of the events. The “Slogan Festival” featured sketches lampooning the quirks of the Bauhaus instructors, and participants appeared adorned in appropriate mottos—one female student, for example, as the “Naked Facts.” Unfortunately, Schlemmer fails to inform us about the particulars of her costume. With the future of the Bauhaus called into question, threatened both by the severe economic crisis and by internal stresses, the carnival ball of 1928 almost failed to come off. T. Lux Feininger, members of the Bauhaus Band, ca. 1928, gelatin silver print, 24 x 17.9 cm, BauhausArchiv Berlin

Robert Binnemann, slide for the “Metallic Festival,” 1929, gelatin silver print, 13.9 x 8.9 cm, BauhausArchiv Berlin

231

Marianne Brandt, festive banquet with cold platters, 1927–28, gelatin silver print, 10.5 x 8 cm, BauhausArchiv Berlin

Bauhaus Books: No. 1 | Walter Gropius | 1:1.088

Literature Bauhaus 1, 3, 1927. Gropius 1998, p. 97. Hesse 1963, p. 242. Schlemmer 1958.

Original Title: Internationale Architektur year of execution: 1925 Publisher: Albert Langen, Munich format: 23 x 18 cm loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Bauhaus Books No. 1: International Architecture Walter Gropius

Dr. Mercedes Valdivieso is an art historian and a professor at the University of Lleida in Barcelona.

C 100 M 59 Y 41 K 0

232

Walter Gropius had announced his resignation, and leaving the school as well were László Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Breuer, and Herbert Bayer. Yet to be celebrated on February 21, finally, was the “Beard, Nose, and Heart Festival,” which was even exported to Berlin. The farewell party for Walter Gropius, which took place the following month, on March 24, was appropriately intimate in character. Still, no effort was spared when it came to preparations. Schlemmer delivered a rhymed lecture, entitled “The Bauhaus at 9: A Chronicle,” accompanied by a multimedia presentation consisting of music, slides, and film. As a parting gift, Walter Gropius received a casket designed by Herbert Bayer and bearing the same title, containing collages by Bauhaus masters, students, and the individual workshops. Despite a few glitches and the sadness of the occasion, the farewell party ended with dancing and “wild revelry”: “things went on until morning, and many people never got to sleep at all,” reports Schlemmer in a letter to his wife dated March 26. The highpoint of festivities at the Bauhaus was the “Metallic Festival,” which was subtitled “A Ringing-Chiming-Bell Festival.” It took place on February 9, 1929, under new Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer. Striking descriptions are found in both the newspapers and in Schlemmer’s diary of February 1929. Conveyed by a tinplated toboggan, guests slid into the rooms, where the ceilings were hung with silver spheres, and the walls, also clad in tinplate, reflected distorted images of the dancers’ bodies. Reflective metal was seen everywhere, and the Bauhäusler outdid themselves with inspired ideas, as though sensing that the event might be their swan song. A staircase, each of whose steps made a different sound, led to a raffle, among whose prizes were steel chairs and aluminum lamps, but also works by Kandinsky and Klee. In his memoirs, Dessau Mayor Fritz Hesse wrote that on that evening, “the harmony between the Bauhaus and the citizenry was complete.” The carnival festival taking place on March 1, 1929, exposed the truth about this seeming harmony, and there was an incident when a number of Bauhäusler, who felt themselves provoked by some of the guests, raised their voices to sing “The International.” The Bauhaus festivities had finally lost their “innocence.” Domestic political catastrophes and social unrest had become too grave either to be ignored or repressed via parody. Meyer’s successor, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, attempted to maintain the Bauhaus’ noninvolvement in political events, and the carnival ball of spring 1931 was closed to the public, taking place in discreet silence. But even such a “low profile” approach could no longer rescue the Bauhaus. Taking place in Berlin on February 18, 1933, was the last large Bauhaus celebration.

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

235

10

The Bauhaus Books as Aesthetic Program The Avant-Garde in a Format of 23 x 18 Florian Illies C 100 M 57 Y 43 K 0

234

The Bauhaus books, long neglected by researchers and the public, are a first-rate source for the Bauhaus’s programmatic self-understanding, both internal and external. A total of fourteen volumes were published in the years between 1925 and 1930, edited jointly by Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy. Gropius’s role was largely a formal one, such that the books and their pioneering layout may be ascribed to the oeuvre of László Moholy-Nagy. The series of fourteen dust jackets is notable for its elegance and its masterful formal vocabulary, as well as for its swift artistic development in the latter half of the 1920s. It may be ranked as one of the foremost works of avant-garde typography from the Bauhaus. The dust jackets are “a sort of visual and verbal instruction manual that places extreme emphasis on word and image, structures them, and governs the tempo of perception” (Ute Brüning). That Moholy-Nagy could succeed, in dust jackets for books by Kazimir Malevich, Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, and Theo van Doesburg—to name only the most dominant figures—in condensing the authors’ entire artistic oeuvres and their respective complex programs into symbols of great simplicity—this is among the greatest achievements of interpretation and distillation in the art history of the twentieth century. In Malevich’s manuscript, for example, Moholy-Nagy found illustration 73, Contrasting Suprematist Elements, and, through minor optical adjustments, transformed this work of art, comprised of a square, cross, and circle, into the graphic emblem of timeless power that appears on the book’s cover. The Bauhaus books also underscore the long-overlooked work of the great artist-revolutionary Moholy-Nagy as a publisher (with the operational support of his wife Lucia Moholy, who had experience in publishing). It is impressive how, with each new volume, MoholyNagy succeeded in developing out of the content of each work a design congenial to it, while never losing sight of the character of each book as part of a series. Also not to be underestimated is the importance of the radically international approach of the series, which garnered as authors the most important Dutch and Russian theoreticians of the avant-garde—even, in the case of Malevich, one who “differs from our point of view in fundamental questions,” as the editors noted to the reader at the beginning of Malevich’s Bauhaus book no. 11, The Non-Objective World. The design and the title of this book in particular have made a lasting contribution to Moholy-Nagy’s fame, as when, in 1970, Annely Juda took the name for her legendary London exhibition of abstract art from its title. The publication history of the Bauhaus books reflects the checkered history of the Bauhaus itself: the appearance of the first volume was delayed for a number of years by the move from Weimar to Dessau, and the preparation of the books, printed by Albert Langen Verlag in Munich (with a new publisher’s imprint designed by Moholy-Nagy himself), ran into repeated organizational and financial difficulties. Most of the books were published in a twenty-three by eighteen centimeter format in a first edition of between 1,150 and 3,450 copies (“stiffly bound 7 marks, bound in linen 9 marks”). Some of the books went through multiple editions, such as Moholy-Nagy’s legendary Bauhaus book no. 8 Painting, Photography, Film. (In the second edition, the word “Photographie” in the German title was changed to “Fotografie.” A thorough analysis of Moholy-Nagy’s autograph corrections to galley proofs in the Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin remains a desideratum for art­historical research, as does an intellectual history and history of the reception of the Bauhaus books on the whole.) Above all, the lists of announced future titles planned for the series provide a look into the evolving programmatic orientation of the Bauhaus between

Paul Klee, Pädagogisches Skizzen­ buch (Pedagogical Sketchbook), no. 2, Munich 1925 • Adolf Meyer, Ein Versuchshaus des Bauhauses in Weimar (An Experimental House by the Weimar Bauhaus), no. 3, Munich 1925 • Oskar Schlemmer, Die

11

12

Bühne im Bauhaus (Theater at the Bauhaus), no. 4, Munich 1925 • Piet Mondrian, Neue Gestaltung—Neoplastizismus (New Design—Neoplasticism), no. 5, ­Munich 1925 • Theo van Doesburg, Grundbegriffe der

13

neuen gestalten­den Kunst (Principles of Neoplastic Art), ­no. 6, Munich 1925 • Walter Gropius, Neue Arbeiten der Bauhauswerkstätten (New Works from the Bauhaus Workshops), no. 7, Munich 1925 • László Moholy-Nagy, Malerei,

14

Photographie, Film (Painting, Photography, Film), no. 8, Munich 1925 • Wassily Kandinsky, Punkt und Linie zu Fläche: Beitrag zur Analyse der malerischen Elemente (Point and Line to Plane: An Analysis of the Elements of Painting),­no. 9,

Brüning 1995c. Fiedler/Buschfeld 1995. Findeli 1995b.

Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, Die Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny Opera)

Marbach 1997.

First Five Year Plan in the Soviet Union

Bremer 1979.

Steamboat Willie is the first publicly screened animated film and the first sound film featuring Mickey Mouse.

The LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin becomes famous through numerous spectacular trips, and is regarded as the most successful dirigible of its time.

Literature

unemployed

1928

Founding of CIAM (Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne), in La Sarraz, Switzerland

1.3 mil.

POLITICS

Florian Illies (born 1971) is a journalist and is arts and culture editor of the weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT in Hamburg.

CULTURE 

­ auhausbauten Dessau (Bauhaus B Buildings Dessau), no. 12, Munich 1930 • Albert Gleizes, Kubis­mus (Cubism), no. 13, Munich 1928 • László Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur (From Material to Architecture), no. 14, Munich 1929

C 100 M 54 Y 46 K 0

Munich, 1926 • Jacobus Johannes Peter Oud, Holländische Archi­ tektur (Dutch Architecture), no. 10, Munich 1926 Kazimir Malevich, Die gegenstandslose Welt (The Non-Objective World), no. 11, Munich 1927 • Walter Gropius,

MODERN LIFE

Discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming

236

The Briand-Kellogg Pact (designed to abolish war): 54 nations become signatories by late 1929.

Founding of the conservative architectural association “Block.” The membership includes Paul Schultze-Naumburg and Paul Schmitthenner.

Reichstag elections. Results: 153 SPD (Social­ ists), 62 Zentrum, 73 DNVP (National­Conservatives), 54 KPD (Communists), 45 DVP (Liberals), 25 DDP (Democrats), 12 NSDAP (Nazis) . . .

The first wireless longdistance telephone traffic is opened between Germany and the U.S.

1923 and 1930. The books were to be the manifesto for the synthetic understanding of life and art at the Bauhaus. In 1923, László Moholy-Nagy sent Alexander Rodchenko a list of thirty planned books. At the top were the words, “Starting from the recognition that all areas of design in life are closely connected,” followed by such titles as Neue Erziehungs­ fragen (New Questions in Upbringing), Spezialformen der Politik (Special Forms in Politics), and Konstruktive Biologie (Constructive Biology). Even Albert Einstein was slated to publish a book in the series. Rarely has the Bauhaus’s unified approach been so clearly documented as here: the books would, as the editors’ announcement put it, “treat artistic, scientific, and technical questions through the lens of their interrelations.” After lengthy initial difficulties, the first eight volumes appeared in 1925, and twenty-two additional titles were announced, differing significantly from those in the first list. Seventeen more titles were added in the announcement of 1926, though certain prior titles were deleted. Over the years, a total of forty-five Bauhaus books were announced; together, they were to illuminate the new worldview in all its many facets. Only fourteen books were actually published, and almost all of them in the core areas of art, design, and architecture. This publication history is thus a history of programmatic concentration as well. In addition, the announced volumes cast light on the various goals in content that Gropius and Moholy-Nagy pursued as editors of the series. The history of the announcements is a parallel to the history of the gradual changes that occurred in the programmatic orientation of the Bauhaus over time, and of how the impulsive, integrative approach of the Weimar period, in which the idea for the publications series first arose, gave way to an increasingly pragmatic aesthetic pedagogy crafted during the Dessau years. “Read the entirety once more”—these words of László Moholy-Nagy’s appear, for example, in the corrected galley proofs for his own book, directing the reader once more to the significance of the content in his introduction. “Read the entirety once more”—this should also be an admonition to us, as readers today, to understand the Bauhaus books as a central work in one of the most important avant-garde movements of the twentieth century—and to read them.

C 100 M 52 Y 48 K 0

CITATION “What   should the Bauhaus be? . . . It should be a connection between workshop activities, autonomous art, and science.” Hannes Meyer 1928

Walter Gropius steps down as director, Hannes Meyer is appointed in his place. Several Bauhäusler attend the VkHUTEMAS Academy in Moscow.

46

EVENTS

TEACHING

Students

1928

“Building   is merely organization: social, technical, economic, psychic organization.” Hannes Meyer 1928

Lecture series by Naum Gabo on basic design issues

Erection of the co-op building, completion of the Dessau-Törten estate

László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, and Marcel Breuer leave the Bauhaus.

“I  taught my students the connection between building and society, the path from formal intuition to scientific research into construction, and the challenge: the needs of the people instead of luxury.” Hannes Meyer 1930

Marianne Brandt becomes head of the metal workshop.

130

Dessau-Törten Housing Estate | Walter Gropius | 1:3.23

year of execution: ca. 1928 Material: gelatin silver print on cardboard format: 54.4 x 86.3 cm loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 3751/4 photo: Emil Theis

Dessau-Törten Housing Estate with the Cooperative Building Viewed from the Southeast Walter Gropius

Heightened expectations were associated with the Dessau-Törten housing estate, realized by Walter Gropius between 1926 and 1928—and not just on the part of Mayor Fritz Hesse, who foresaw new impulses emerging from the relocation of the Bauhaus from Weimar to Dessau, particularly in the area of residential development. Within a few years, the former royal seat had developed into a dynamic economic center that was home to large concerns of supra-regional importance, among them IG Farben, the Agfa film factory, and the Junkers aeronautics and motor works. Given Dessau’s rapidly growing population, hopes were high that the “Reichsheimstättensiedlung” (State Homestead Settlement) at Dessau-Törten would provide inexpensive housing. But Gropius regarded the project as an opportunity to set up the kind of experimental building projects he had consistently called for, by means of which various new materials and construction methods could be compared and tested. For Gropius, such “testing stations” were also crucial components of instruction at the Bauhaus, and represented an indispensable prerequisite for the economic, technological, and artistic modernization of residential development. The key term for such reforms was “rationalization.” Building processes as a whole—from design planning to site organization all the way to the erection of the building—were to have been fundamentally reconceived under the primacy of cost-saving measures. After World War I, the need for a comprehensive rationalization of residential development was recognized by numerous architects and engineers, as well as by representatives of the building trades and by policy makers. This recognition led not only to the development of novel building materials and construction systems and to the erection of up-to-date housing estates (for example in Berlin, Magdeburg, Frankfurt am Main, and Celle), but also to the establishment in 1927 of the “Reichsforschunggesellschaft” (State Research Society) for efficiency and construction in housing, which provided financial support for the Dessau project among numerous other experimental housing developments. Although Gropius frequently invoked the American model of industrial assembly line production in his lectures, the significance for him of introducing rational building methods went beyond economic advantages. In his description of the estate in Bauhaus Buildings Dessau (Bauhaus book no. 12), published in 1930, he associates the term “rationalization” with the Latin root of the word, “ratio = reason,” suggesting a more broadly

“A   New and Better World” The Dessau-Törten Housing Estate and the Rationalization of Residential Development Andreas Schwarting

Erich Consemüller, model furnishings in the first completed section of the Dessau-Törten estate, furniture by Marcel Breuer, 1926–27, photograph, ­B auhaus-Archiv Berlin C 100 M 50 Y 50 K 0

240

conceived conception of rationalization: “Rationalization is not a mechanical ordering! We absolutely must not forget about the ratio of the creative!” A characterization of the Dessau-Törten estate as “a new and better world,” which appeared in the Oldenburgische Landeszeitung newspaper in 1928, speaks eloquently of the far-reaching design claims underlying the project. As early as 1910, Gropius had prepared a program for the establishment of a “society for housing development on artistically unified foundations,” demonstrating the advantages of the industrialization of building processes, in particular with regard to the aesthetic qualities of the new architecture. The characteristics of this architecture—to be formed of prefabricated, standardized components—were to have been solidity, elegant simplicity, and good proportions. In connecting the artistic design work of the architect with the efficient activity of building developers, Gropius perceived the possibility of bringing “art and technology into an advantageous union.” The industrial production of buildings was by no means perceived as being opposed to individual desires and freedoms. Instead, the industrial production of easily combinable constructive elements would accommodate desires for individualized design choices. But despite the demand, expressed repeatedly by Gropius subsequently, that “it is not the house as a whole that is to be standardized and industrially prefabricated, but instead the individual building elements, thereby allowing them to be assembled into a variety of different house types,” only three different basic types of row houses were actually realized in Dessau. In fact, the construction of the houses did not correspond to industrially manufactured systems of assembly. The walls were erected in a relatively conventional manner on site with cinderblocks, and the stories, of sheathed concrete girders (“Rapidbalken”) set in place with cranes in a dry state. Far-reaching reforms affected in particular the organization of the construction site: the building process had been carefully planned and precisely diagrammed beforehand, and the temporal interlocking of work phases avoided periods of idle time. In place of the vision of the “Baukasten im Grossen” (largescale modular building blocks), developed in Weimar in 1923, which enabled each user to assemble a house tailored precisely to his individual needs, we find in Dessau the “off-therack” house, an economical mass commodity having two or three bedrooms and living surfaces ranging from circa seventy-four to eighty-five square meters. Ultimately remaining a matter for conjecture is whether this change can be attributed to the limited financial and technological opportunities available to the Dessau project, or whether instead Gropius simply did not aspire to a more pronounced individualization of the houses. In the case of the Dessau masters’ houses as well, where individualized design would have been far easier to arrange by virtue of the greater financial leeway and limited number of occupants involved, the wishes of subsequent residents went for the most part unheeded. Since both projects were conceptualized as exemplary presentations of a variety of building types, it was only logical for them to neglect the demands of individuals during the planning process. Nonetheless, similar requirements and the “life processes” derived from them were thematized in constructive and design terms. As a result, the external appearance became an interface between beholder and building, and was intended to express the house’s various functions. More important than the barely perceptible boundaries separating the single-family homes of the Sietö II-1927 type, each set at the center of the receding or projecting architectural volumes, were differentiations between use areas: entries and vertical accesses were indicated Kitchen in a house in the first completed section of the DessauTörten estate (photo: Wedekind), 1926–27, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Co-op building in the DessauTörten estate, 1928, photograph, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

241

Dessau-Törten estate, SIETÖ II houses on the Kleinring, 1927, photograph, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Material Study | Takehiko Mizutani | 1:3.653

Literature Deutsches Handwerksinstitut 1932. Engelmann/Schädlich 1991. Gropius 1925d. Gropius 1930. Nerdinger 1985. Oldenburgische Landeszeitung 1928. Probst/Schädlich 1987. Reichsforschungsgesellschaft 1929. Schwarting 2001. Schwarting 2009.

year of execution: 1928 Material: sheet brass format: height 72.5 cm loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 1614 Photo: Hartwig Klappert, 2008

Dr. Andreas Schwarting ­(born 1966) is an architectural historian with the Department of Architecture of Dresden Technical University. C 100 M 48 Y 52 K 0

242

by multistory­vertical strip windows and set off distinctly from residential and sleeping areas, with their horizontal windows, by transverse walls finished in wash plaster. “True form” was to have resulted from living processes alone (and not from individual representative needs). Although the recessions and projections of identical and repeating architectural volumes reflect the industrial production of the houses from sequential procedures, traditional design principles also play a substantial role. The orientation of the complex as a whole toward the functional center containing the cooperative building, the differentiation of the street area by means of plaza-style expanses and the grouping of houses, as well as the bundling of pairs of entries via the mirror reversal of the ground plans: all of these correspond fundamentally to the tried-and-true instrumentarium of garden city architecture. Such references to tradition, nonetheless, were aesthetically alienated and reinterpreted. The geometric center of the estate is marked by the mast of a high voltage line which traverses the settlement, unifying it spatially in optical terms. As a powerful symbol of progress, the mast stands within the view axes of a number of estate streets, and celebrates—looming up far above the rows of houses—“the world of machines, wires, and fast vehicles” greeted with such euphoria by Gropius. Emil Theis’s painstakingly composed photograph visualizes the fragile construction of this “new and better world,” whose aesthetic perfection, nonetheless, could only be achieved by retouching a distracting factory smokestack found in the center of the image. In reality, the first cracks began to appear in the façade—literally—only shortly thereafter. Even before the last streets had been laid out, a number of houses already displayed serious structural defects. The insulation was inadequate even by contemporary standards, and numerous thermal bridges had led to moisture damage, while the simple catches of the steel windows led to serious problems with drafts. The constructive measures introduced by individual owners shortly after the estate’s completion were responses not only to constructive defects, but also to the low standard of amenities present in the houses, with their dry toilets in outbuildings and their sitting bathtubs in kitchens. Gropius, who referred critically in 1964 to his architecture of the 1920s as “somewhat strict and harsh,” recognized resignedly that it had been a mistake “to have prefabricated entire houses, all of them indistinguishable from their neighbors, instead of prefabricating interchangeable constructive elements. The result was uniformity instead of unity.” Although the statement concedes indirectly that the vision of “largescale modular building blocks” could not have been realized under the conditions prevailing in Dessau, the concept retained its urgency for housing development—not only for him, but also in a different and far less artistic sense: it was the residents themselves who altered their homes subsequently, inevitably using industrially manufactured and standardized constructive components, thereby implementing the great “building blocks” idea despite everything—even if, in the process, they gave the estate an appearance remote from the aesthetic unity originally envisioned by Gropius.

Material Study for the Preliminary Course taught by Josef Albers Takehiko Mizutani

“Ours is an economically oriented age . . . economic form arises out of function and mate­ rial. Study of material naturally precedes understanding of function. Thus our attempt to come to terms with form begins with study of the material.” These opening lines of Josef Albers’s seminal 1928 article on the teaching of design, “Werklicher Formunterricht,” which appeared in the magazine bauhaus, nos. 2/3, encapsulate the educational philosophy and teaching methods developed by Albers during his time at the Bauhaus. Before arriving as a student at the Weimar Bauhaus in 1921, Albers was a trained elementary school teacher, a professional background that served him well when, in 1923 after just two years of study, Albers was appointed by Walter Gropius to head the Bauhaus’s preliminary course, known as the Vorkurs. Structured as an introductory overview, the course was a requirement for all new Bauhaus students before they progressed to study in a specific Bauhaus workshop. The preliminary course had been taught since the Bauhaus’s inception by one of the school’s first professors, Johannes Itten. When Itten suddenly departed the Bauhaus in 1923, Albers was appointed to fill the position, making him the first former student to join the Bauhaus faculty. Albers approached this new role with characteristic intensity, removing the expressionistic tendencies that had characterized Itten’s teaching. Instead, Albers placed strong focus on the study of core properties of the materials with which his students were working. In this newly appointed role, Albers developed his treatise of “seeing by doing” in which focused analysis and experimentation with materials were of paramount importance. In a 1968 interview conducted by George Baird, Albers reflected on the independent thinking and visual instincts he sought to foster in each of his s­ tudents,

Albers’s Preliminary Course Function and Material Oliver Barker

Konrad Püschel, ridge folds, material exercise for the preliminary course taught by Josef Albers, 1926–27, folded paper, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau

Wils Ebert, Endlose Spirale (Endless Spiral), exercise for the preliminary course taught by Josef Albers, 1929, steel wire, welded, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau C 100 M 46 Y 54 K 0

244

saying: “On my own I changed the whole attitude of my teaching and decided that the Material as search is the beginning. Not only as in Itten’s course, the surface Materie, that means what we call in English the texture. Materie is a better word because texture is only a part of it. But I started without any introduction of the possibilities of the material as presented by wire, let’s try what we can do new with wire. Give it a new shape, what can we do with matches, what can we do with matchboxes was a project. And then later I introduced the study of paper, what was at that time considered a wrapping material.” Under the umbrella of the preliminary course, Albers provided his students with two approaches to studying the physical materials with which they were working. Within the framework of what he called Materie studies, students explored the possibilities of a material’s external appearance. Albers encouraged his students to deeply examine the distinct characteristics of a material’s surface, exploring its textures in collage (as seen in Monica Bella Broner-Ullmann’s Contrast Study, 1929–30), drawing, and other media. As he explained in “Werklicher Formunterricht,” Albers believed such studies enabled the students to focus on “the systemic ordering of materials into suites with rising or falling values . . . tactile scales from hard to soft, smooth to rough, warm to cold or hard-edged to amorphous, smoothly polished to sticky-absorbent.” Simultaneous to the intensive study of external surface texture and flat-planar movement, Albers challenged his preliminary course students to investigate the internal properties of materials, exploiting structural possibilities and limitations. Working with a wide range of materials—paper, wire mesh, corrugated cardboard, glass, plastic, sheet metal, tin foil, matchboxes—Albers’s students were encouraged to explore the dormant possibilities of these substances. Albers spoke about this approach in “Werklicher Formunterricht”: “We seek to maximize exploitation of the material by experimenting with maximal carrying capacity (highest elevation, broadest distribution of load, heaviest loading), maximal strength (while retaining flexibility), the closest connections, the smallest or weakest state . . . when students’ learning is directed more toward technological and economical concerns than toward traditional forms, they learn to see both statically and dynami­ cally . . . this kind of learning schools a spatial imagination that is rare.” Takehiko Mizutani’s Material Study is a precise example of the spatial learning Albers advocated with his preliminary course students. As one of only three Japanese students ever to attend the Bauhaus, Mizutani joined together three circular pieces of brass sheeting, creating a volumetric and sculptural form that is both dynamic and graceful. Beginning with the largest of the three pieces of brass sheeting, Mizutani sculpted the main body of the work by wrapping the material to create a conical form at the piece’s base that was echoed again at the work’s top. Mizutani then employed two smaller brass circles, carefully inserting them into the piece’s center to form the nexus of the entire work. Through this use of material, Mizutani counteracts the brass sheeting’s inert, static physical properties, transposing them into a three-dimensional form that gives equal consideration to positive and negative space. The educational concept of the preliminary course evolved with the changing expectations of the Bauhaus, occupying a fundamental place in its curriculum. By pushing the core principles of the preliminary course into areas of unchartered visual exploration, Albers provided his students with training in textural interplay, volume, form, and proportion.­His overarching vision was to create a course in which he was able “to teach Monica Bella Broner-Ullmann, Kontraststudie (Contrast Study), material study for the preliminary course taught by Josef Albers, 1929–30, pencil drawing highlighted with opaque paint and mounted fabric elements on soft,

gray paper, mounted on backing cardboard, motif 29.1 x 21 cm, backing 30 x 24.7 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

245

Monica Bella Broner-Ullmann, motion study for the preliminary course taught by Josef Albers, 1929, collage with patterned wall­ paper, mounted on cardboard, 31 x 22.9 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Trade Union School | Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer | 1:0.675

what tasks and materials are most congenial to the student . . . to provide substantial, lived insight.” Until the Bauhaus’s forced closure in 1933, Albers led the preliminary course with characteristic strength of vision, equipping his students for work that attempted, as he wrote, “to come to terms with form, [beginning] with the study of the material.”

Literature Albers/Baird 2007. Bauhaus 2, 2/3, 1928.

246

year of execution: 1930 Material: photograph (Junkers aerial photograph), 1930 format: 11.9 x 17.2 cm loaned by: Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, I 1691/1 F

C 100 M 43 Y 57 K 0

Oliver Barker is a curator and ­projects director at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany, CT.

Trade Union School of the ADGB (General German Trade Union Federation) in Bernau Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer

In my estimation, we owe one of modernism’s finest architectural drawings to Hannes Meyer. Since my university days, I have been fascinated by the plan he submitted for the competition for the Petersschule in Basel—a true icon of graphic art for me. The design is exceptionally elegant and bold, with the sweeping, spectacular descending terrace. Quite apart from this, the drawing is utterly straightforward, crystal clear and comprehensible. Here every line has its meaning. Everything in the drawing is constructively unambiguous and precisely formulated. This clarity of construction and drawing is truly a pleasure, as is the audacious design. Unfortunately, Meyer’s avant-garde design for the Petersschule was never realized. His design for another school building was, however, and it carries equal weight today as model and paradigm: the Trade Union School for the Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (ADGB) in Bernau. Both designs came about during the same time. The Union School is one of those structures to have exerted great influence on modern architecture, even though only a very few are familiar with it. Meyer’s design is so orderly and clear that the plans and the historic photos state and disclose all that is important and decisive to the architect. Consistent with its purpose, the structure has a highly functional and industrial character, not necessarily the character of the total work of art otherwise propagated at the Bauhaus. The structure’s architecture is simple and clear, at times raw and rough as well. What is so striking is the consistency of the effort to build, spatially and materially, only

249

The Courage to be Simple Hannes Meyer’s Trade Union School in Bernau Christoph Ingenhoven

Walter Peterhans, inner courtyard with pergola at the ADGB Trade Union School in Bernau, 1930, photograph, 17.5 x 23.8 cm, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau C 100 M 41 Y 59 K 0

248

what is necessary and dictated by the program and logic of the space. Meyer’s absolute trust in necessity is visible in the building. There is nothing superfluous, nothing redundant about the design. Everything is efficient and thought out. Every formal choice seems to have been made as a functional and rational decision, never an aesthetic one, even though an industrial appearance corresponds neatly with the self-understanding of an organization of trade unions. Every component of the building has its function. Everything is where it belongs. If one were to take away any part of the whole, it would leave a hole, that is, a constructive gap. One would want to correct details for formal and aesthetic reasons. A constructive problem would arise. Every detail and every structural installation “works” and functions. The glass roof outside of the training classrooms, for example, slopes in a way that does not match the right angles elsewhere in the building’s geometry; where the glass roof meets the building, an unattractive spandrel results. Yet if it were straightened, and the design thus purified and clarified, the drainage of rainwater would no longer be guaranteed, nor the constructive logic behind it. One can inquire in this way into the meaning of every detail, every room, and every part of the structure, and in so doing trace the creation of the entire building. Everything is logically arranged and simply designed to the maximum extent possible, even at the cost of certain formal and aesthetic sacrifices. The reduction to the most necessary, along with certain insufficiencies in the details, nonetheless make the building a bit harsh. A harsh effect must never be an end in itself, but as the result of an honest design process it is certainly legitimate. In this case, the harshness is a virtue. We must admire Meyer for the courage it took to make his way through the project with so objective and hard a design. I continue to see exemplary courage in this simplicity and directness, the courage to be rough and straight. This courage is one of the great lessons that can be drawn from this building. The building, with all its details, wishes to look like nothing other than what it is. Nothing is feigned or concealed, kept secret or hidden away. Everything is authentic and honest. To avoid any misunderstandings: this design posture does not make the school into the measure of all things. The constructive efficiency and the functional reduction are

Walter Peterhans, reading room in the library of the ADGB Trade Union School in Bernau, 1930, photograph, 17.5 x 23.8 cm, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau

Walter Peterhans, glassed hall­ way in the ADGB Trade Union School in Bernau, 1930, photograph, 17.5 x 23.8 cm, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau

Bauhaus Dress | Lis Volger | 1:8.947

exemplary, but they can also come across as careworn, disciplined, and somewhat stale. Hannes Meyer was born in Switzerland, and it is possible that this building reflects an all too austere and Calvinist attitude in him. To my mind, the building could be more elegant, and have more design value added. In this building, Meyer brought modernism forward technically, but not, perhaps, artistically. I believe Hannes Meyer went further in this line than did Walter Gropius. For me, the Union School in Bernau represents an early inspiration for the architecture of Max Bill at the Hochschule für Gestaltung (College of Design) in Ulm, and for the Brutalism of Alison and Peter Smithson. Meyer’s constructive honesty and rational functionalism thus did not blossom until the 1960s. The Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm is functionally well-differentiated, and with its staggering of buildings, large window surfaces, and low building heights—like the school in Bernau—the structure has gradually established a relationship with the landscape space that surrounds it. Yet the late 1960s and early 1970s made clear the magnitude of the monotony to which this formal abstinence can lead. When this design gesture has become a matter of course and an end in itself, the question arises again for me as to the surplus of form. Merely stringing together technically correct characteristics and constructively solved problems does not result in architecture in and of itself. Hannes Meyer nevertheless showed that these are prerequisites to, and conditions of, good architecture. This constructively honest design posture is what makes Meyer’s Union School one of the incunabula of modernism.

250 year of execution: 1928, made in the weaving workshop at the Bauhaus Dessau Material: cotton and synthetic silk format: length 101 cm, width 60 cm, waist 42 cm loaned by: Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, I/8/4/2423 T Photo: Hartwig Klappert, 2008

Bauhaus Dress Lis Volger C 100 M 39 Y 61 K 0

Christoph Ingenhoven (born 1960), an architect, is the founder of the office of Ingenhoven Architects in Dusseldorf.

252

253 An idea’s significance becomes apparent in the context of the moment in which it arises. It is the daring, the heedlessness, the resolution with which an unfamiliar step, a revolutionary step, is taken. This dress, radically minimalistic and functional in design, was once able to release its wearer from her role as a decorated prestige piece in an overbearing patriarchal society. By wearing only what was most necessary, the woman who wore this dress became the actionist of her time.

Reduced Necessity Lis Volger’s Bauhaus Dress Wolfgang Joop C 100 M 37 Y 63 K 0

Erich Consemüller, Bauhaus scene (Lis Beyer or Ise Gropius sitting in a tubular steel chair designed by Marcel Breuer), 1926, gelatin silver print, 12.9 x 15.1 cm, Sammlung Wulf Herzogenrath

Barcelona Pavilion | Ludwig Mies van der Rohe | 1:5.563

254 year of execution: 1928–29 Material: graphite on drawing cardboard format: 99.1 x 130.2 cm loaned by: courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, MR 14.1 A&D, Mies van der Rohe Archive, gift of the architect

C 100 M 35 Y 65 K 0

Wolfgang Joop (born 1944) is a fashion designer who lives in Potsdam.

German Pavilion at the International Exposition in Barcelona, 1929 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

256

257

C 100 M 33 Y 67 K 0

Morning Cleaning, Mies van der Rohe Foundation, Barcelona Jeff Wall

Jeff Wall, Morning Cleaning, Mies van der Rohe Foundation, Barcelona, 1999, slide in light box, 180.7 x 351 cm, collection of the artist, permanent loan to the Museum für Moderne Kunst, ­ Frankfurt am Main

C 100 M 30 Y 70 K 0

Jeff Wall (born 1946) is an artist who lives in Vancouver.

unemployed

POLITICS

CULTURE 

MODERN LIFE

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona Pavilion

1929

Ending with the death of Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann is a period of political equilibrium in the Weimar Republic.

Walter Gropius, Arbeitsamt Dessau (Employment Bureau Building)

The Miele firm offers the first electric dishwasher.

Edwin P. Hubble develops his theory of an expanding universe.

258 1.9 mil.

“Bloody   May” in Berlin: 33 people die when police break up a May 1st demonstration using weapons.

Werkbund exhibition Film und Foto Opening of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York

There are 223 sound film theaters in the German Reich. Of 191 films produced in Germany, only eight are “talkies.”

The crash of the market at the New York Stock Exchange on October 25 triggers a worldwide economic crisis.

Henry Russell Hitchcock, Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration

There are more than 1 million motor vehicles in Germany.

C 100 M 28 Y 72 K 0

CITATION

Guest appearances by the Bauhaus Theater in Europe

Metallic Festival

“We   condemn every form that prostitutes itself to the level of a formula. The ultimate aim of all work at the Bauhaus is the summation of all life-forming powers into the harmonious shaping of our society.” Hannes Meyer 1929

Traveling exhibition Young Bauhaus Painters

Walter Peterhans becomes head of the new photography workshop.

58

EVENTS

TEACHING

Students

1929

Farewell celebration for Oskar Schlemmer

The Bauhaus is represented at the Leipzig Spring Fair.

The Bauhaus “Volks­ wohnung” (People’s Apartment) is displayed at the Grassi Museum

Erected by Hannes Meyer and the Bauhaus between 1928 and 1930 is the Federal School of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (General German Federation of Trade Unions) in Bernau.

Ludwig Hilberseimer becomes an instructor in town planning.

Colors and Forms | Eugen Batz | 1:1.854

“The   purpose of the Bauhaus and its journal is to be young, to dare afresh, in spite of all naysayers. To prepare a joyful work for the untroubled times to come. Standing there in a row are building and image, functional and artistic forms, praxis and theory, production and critique, ours and other’s or our opponents’: all of these allow lively powers their full leeway.” Ernst Kállai and Hannes Meyer 1928

The Bauhaus GmbH disburses 32,000 Reichs­ marks to students.

143

original Title: Die räumliche Wirkung von Farben und Formen

year of execution: 1929–30

Material: tempera over pencil on black paper

loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 755a

format: 39.2 x 32.9 cm

Three-Dimensional Effects of Colors and Forms Eugen Batz

262

263

Bitte nicht nachmachen (Please Do Not Impersonate) Oliver Kossack C 100 M 26 Y 74 K 0

Oliver Kossack, Bitte nicht nachmachen (Please Do Not Impersonate), 2008, enamel paint, oil and tape strips on ­canvas, 150 x 200 cm, collection of the artist

Metal Dance | Oskar Schlemmer | 1:0.35

264 original Title: Metalltanz year of execution: 1929 Material: gelatin silver print format: 7.4 x 5.8 cm loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 10370/1

C 100 M 24 Y 76 K 0

Oliver Kossack (born 1967) is an artist who lives in Leipzig.

Metal Dance Oskar Schlemmer (Choreography) Karla Grosch (Dance) and Robert Binnemann (Photograph)

266

267

The Dance Günther Uecker C 100 M 22 Y 78 K 0

Günther Uecker, New York Dancer, 1965, pencil on drawing cardboard, 30.5 x 21.5 cm, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau

Portrait of the Beloved | Walter Peterhans | 1:1.816

The Dance

Sign and gesture, visible in dynamic sequences, in the rhythm of breathing, in the expression of our internal and external perceptions; they create a form. The stage, a house of dancing columns, the world is manifested through the dance.

268 original Title: Bildnis der Geliebten year of execution: 1929 Material: gelatin silver print format: 32.8 x 35.8 cm loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 7217

Portrait of the Beloved Walter Peterhans C 100 M 20 Y 80 K 0

Günther Uecker (born 1930) is an artist who lives in Dusseldorf.

An extraordinarily precise still life composed of ephemeral objects and artificially illuminated: that is our first impression of this photographic image, a rather large one for the period, which was executed by Walter Peterhans around the time of his arrival at the Bauhaus. Visible is a painstakingly calculated composition consisting of feathers, strips of tulle, angel hair, tinsel, and sewing accessories, all of them spread out on a piece of fine leather, its structure visible near the edges of the image. In a way that resembles a film still, the light strikes the objects from two sides, from the lower right and the upper left, and is hence identifiable as artificial in origin, and moreover as studio lighting. But now an initial source of irritation intrudes: a second version of this image exists, one that rotates the first version ninety degrees in a clockwise direction. This version bears the very different and possibly later title: Stillleben mit Netz (Still Life with Mesh). Portrait of the Beloved delineates a form that echoes a woman’s breasts, and the dedication found along the lower edge leaves little doubt concerning its significance: “This is you, Gretl.” The other ingredients are arranged in a way that allows us to reconstruct a highly emotional romantic relationship, one clearly now at an end. When he arrived at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Walter Peterhans had just left his Berlin studio in the hands of the two women he had trained there: Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach, alias ringl + pit. Using the magic of hyper-precise detail views reminiscent of the second generation of Surrealists around 1930 and borrowing, in terms of media, from the techniques of object photography, Peterhans not only produced a portrait of his beloved via an image of objects, but beyond this, also a mannerist composition that assembles allegorically charged elements whose examination discloses a love story as beautiful as it must have been painful. During that same year, in 1929, Walter Peterhans founded the workshop for photography

An Allegorical Magic of Things and Consummate Technique The Photographer Walter Peterhans Rolf Sachsse

Walter Peterhans, Toter Hase (Stillleben mit Folie) (Dead Rabbit [Still Life with Foil]), ca. 1929, gelatin silver print, 28.8 x 31.6 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin C 100 M 17 Y 83 K 0

270

at the Bauhaus as a genuine design workshop operating parallel to the class in advertising. Having grown up the son of a camera manufacturer, and having followed up studies in art history and mathematics by equipping himself with a training in printing techniques, Peterhans approached his duties as instructor at the Bauhaus in a highly systematic fashion. He had his students begin by preparing sensitometric wedges, exposure bracketing, and halation sequences; only after six months did he assign small tasks in studio or outdoor photography. But there as well, the results suggest the testing out of chiaroscuro and lighting effects, grayscale distributions, and exposure times, and all of this in relative independence from the respective motif, which presents itself superficially as a merely external pretext for the image. Through this instruction, in any event, Peterhans laid the ideal foundations for work in the other classes, for instance those of Joost Schmidt and Josef Albers, but also of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. For the Bauhaus as a whole, Peterhans’s teaching concept marked a turn toward a media-based praxis with a scientific foundation, as already demanded by Hannes Meyer. It was solely to Peterhans’s credit that both advertising and photojournalism at the Bauhaus around 1930 were indisputably on a par with the best work of the period, exhibiting all the elements of avant-garde photo production. The success of his pedagogical activities was enormous: virtually no Bauhaus student of the generation around 1930 failed to produce at least a small photographic oeuvre, and in 1933, when Peterhans shut down the Bauhaus together with his remaining colleagues, he was immediately wooed by Albert Reimann’s private design school. After his emigration to the United States, Walter Peterhans was active as an instructor, and developed a preliminary course in visual communication that he would introduce to the Hochschule für Gestaltung (College of Design) in Ulm in the 1950s. Ever indefatigable, he directed workshops in photography at numerous locations; even on the day of his death, he was attending an event for an association of German photographers. Walter Peterhans’s impact as a teacher was bought at the price of his almost total renunciation of his own identity as photographer and artist—which he certainly was. As a consequence, his own oeuvre seems to bear no relationship to the works of his Bauhaus students. There, where Umbo and Marianne Brandt had delighted in experimentation, and where a series of procedures involving the sculptural qualities and facture of light had sprung up around Lucia Moholy and László Moholy-Nagy, Peterhans dedicated himself as head of the photography workshop to perfecting technique, producing brilliant still lifes, portraits rich in grayscale values, photojournalistic sequences, and advertising photography. In a number of different respects, the Portrait of the Beloved marks a decisive point in the development of the Bauhaus photography workshop: to begin with, this highly private, almost old-masterly arrangement, this captivatingly perfect individual image, contradicts all contemporary tendencies regarding the construction and use of imagery. Yet at the same time, it testifies to a photographic tradition universally present at art schools during the 1920s, namely the documentation of all goings on by means of simple snapshot images: no intimate relationship could avoid being registered by an ephemeral double portrait, no party, no day at the beach without the presence of the ubiquitous camera, no excursion without its photographic memento. In this regard, the Bauhaus was no different from any other art or design school in Europe. But with this image and its caption, and in good Surrealist fashion, Peterhans pushed the tradition to the point of absurdity: with Walter Peterhans, Ohne Titel (Mädchenbildnis) (Untitled [Portrait of a Girl]), n. d., gelatin silver print, 20.7 x 26.2 cm, BauhausArchiv Berlin

271

Grete Stern, Seide (Silk), photostudy for the class taught by Walter Peterhans, 1927, gelatin silver print 1989, 18 x 23.9 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Van Deren 1982. Meurer/Vinçon 1983. Peterhans 1967. Sachsse/Weinfeld 1987.

Third CIAM Congress on “rational building development” in Brussels

Josef von Sternberg, The Blue Angel

The ADAC (German Auto Club) installs the first emergency telephone.

Thöner 2002b.

First NSDAP Provincial Minister in Thuringia. Exercises influence on educational and cultural policies.

Darmstadt 1967.

Lewis Milestone, All Quiet on the Western Front (film)

Uruguay—the host country—wins 4:2 in the finals against Argentina at the first Soccer World Cup.

Auerbach 1982.

The National Socialists speak out against the film All Quiet on the Western Front

Literature

C 100 M 15 Y 85 K 0

unemployed

Collapse of the government of the German Reich, dissolution of the Reichstag. Reichstag election. Results: 143 SPD (Socialists), 107 NSDAP (Nazis), 68 Zentrum, 77 KPD (Communists), 41 DNVP (National­Conservatives), 30 DVP (Liberals) . . .

1930

Carl Fieger, “Kornhaus” Restaurant

POLITICS

Prof. Dr. Rolf Sachsse (born 1949) is a professor of design history and theory at the Saar Academy of Visual Arts in Saarbrücken.

CULTURE 

MODERN LIFE

Opening of the German Museum for Hygiene in Dresden

272

3 mil.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Haus Tugendhat

In response to growing demand, the airplane type JU 52 is manufactured in large-scale serial production by Junkers in Dessau.

the materials of Freudian dream interpretation, he uses his image to lead viewers on a journey of individual psychology. Yet in the end, he confronts them with something quite different, namely an image that continually escapes any hasty reading, and that alludes to something much larger: to photography itself, and to the teaching of this medium at a school like the Bauhaus. In this sense, the image stands for the fateful year of 1929—one decisive not only for the world economy, but for the Bauhaus as well. The experimental impetus has been lost; founder Walter Gropius, teachers like László Moholy-Nagy, masters like Herbert Bayer have already abandoned the foundering ship of the school. Hannes Meyer’s attempts at reorganization have failed. The institution led by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is little more than one among many German design schools with claims to modernity and difficulties with political legitimation. In this light, the discovery or rediscovery of older virtues in photographic practice could look like a return to a niche, but may in fact signify precisely the reverse: on the one hand, Peterhans’s extreme degree of precision hones and perfects everything that was missing from experimental dilettantishness. On the other, he also deconstructs the pathos of an apocalyptic mood, thereby supplying the preconditions for successful work after the crisis. Self-evidently, someone like Walter Peterhans could no longer concern himself with the utopia of an expressionist-socialist school of building (or “Bau Haus”) according to the model of the Gothic-era building workshop. On the other hand, the subtly calibrated arrangement of his still life and the mannerism of his design resources, ranging from lighting to materiality to the disintegration of form, rescues a freedom of formal invention—something that had always been more important at the Bauhaus than ideology anyway.

C 100 M 13 Y 87 K 0

CITATION “The   new building is a social work . . . As an ultimate aim of the people’s social welfare, the new housing estate is entirely a consciously organized work of joint forces.” Hannes Meyer 1929

Destruction of Schlemmer’s frescoes in Weimar

The Bauhaus wallpapers become the school’s most successful products.

44

EVENTS

TEACHING

Students

1930

Hannes Meyer builds the “Laubenganghäuser” (buildings with access balconies) in Dessau in bricks and mortar in collaboration with the architecture department.

“The   Bauhaus apartment is inexpensive as a result of maximal space utilization, minimal dimensions, time-saving practical installation . . . To avoid the decorative, to promote the practical.” Bauhaus magazine 1929

Dismissal of Hannes Meyer. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe becomes the third director of the Bauhaus.

Light-Space Modulator | LÁszlÓ Moholy-Nagy | 1:5.311

“The   Bauhaus [is] an attempt to Bolshevize German taste, propaganda from Russia.” A representative of the DVP in the Anhalter Anzeiger 1929

Karel Teige gives a guest course on contemporary literature and typography.

122

year of execution: 1922–30, replica (1970)

original Title: Licht-Raum-Modulator

Material: based on the original in the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Cambridge, MA, chromed steel, aluminum, glass, Plexiglas, wood, electric motor

format: height 91 cm

loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 3085

Photo: Hartwig Klappert, 2008

Light-Space Modulator László Moholy-Nagy

277

For Moholy Zero, Light Sculptures, and Light Spaces Otto Piene

Otto Piene, Für Moholy (For Moholy), light room, assembled by the artist and Günter Thorn for the Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model project in December 2008, ­consisting of: C 100 M 11 Y 89 K 0

276

The work For Moholy is made up of two components: the light room that I put together in December 2008 for the project Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model (with my longtime assistant and friend Günter Thorn) as well as Günter Thorn’s photos of the light room. The light room For Moholy consists of five elements, which collectively make up a distinct group, but which can be arranged differently. Four of these are the light sculptures Light Pyramid, Hanging Light Sphere, Light Cube, and Small Light Ballet. The fifth element is the Perforated Light Walls, behind which kinetic light sculptures (“light mills”) have been installed. These light mills are only evident as a result of their light projections emerging through the perforations and filling the whole light room. The materials are perforated sheet metal, chrome-plated perforated brass spheres, light bulbs of different wattage with filaments and reflectors that are responsible for the “spidery” shapes that move and spin through the room. The perforations function like pinhole lenses (as in a “pinhole camera”) that form and shape the projections. My work with light began after World War II with painting—the raster paintings which eventually led to my Light Ballet (1959). My first (negative) review in a newspaper referred to the precedence of László Moholy-Nagy as a source for my work with light. This short remark prompted me to seek out the Bauhaus-related literature on Moholy-Nagy’s work, which at the time wasn’t easy to find. I discovered him and his Bauhaus light colleagues— as well as, in another context, Thomas Wilfred and György Kepes. Kepes, the longtime friend and assistant of Moholy-Nagy in Berlin and London, was the founding professor of the light department of the New Bauhaus in Chicago under Moholy-Nagy, the director proposed by Walter Gropius. After the breakup of the friendship of Kepes and Moholy-Nagy and the latter’s death in 1946, Kepes went on to teach and research light at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the School of Architecture. His plan to found an institute of art, science, and technology became a reality in 1967 at MIT. In 1968 I became the first fellow with an international background and active connections (Group Zero) at this Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS), and later Kepes’s successor as CAVS Director and MIT professor (1974). Shortly after my arrival in Cambridge, I saw Moholy-Nagy’s original artwork, the LightSpace Modulator, in the Busch-Reisinger Museum. In 1970, Woody Flowers of MIT built two replicas under the supervision of Nan Rosenthal, my wife at the time. These are currently in Eindhoven and in the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. In 1999, in the exhibition XX. Jahrhundert: Ein Jahrhundert Kunst in Deutschland (20th Century: A Century of Art in Germany) at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, MoholyNagy’s room with the Light-Space Modulator and my Light Room commissioned by the museum formed the kinetic focus of this wide-ranging exhibition. Lichtpyramide (Light Pyramid), 1999, perforated sheet aluminum, edge length 147.5 cm, collection of the artist • Kleines Lichtballett (Small Light Ballet), 1972, chromeplated brass, diameter 50 cm,

collection of the artist • Hängende Lichtkugel (Hanging Light Sphere), 1972, chrome-plated brass, diameter 70 cm, ten spheres, each with a diameter of 18 cm, collection of the artist • Lichtkubus (Light Cube), 1999, perforated sheet aluminum,

edge length 60 cm, collection of the artist • Perforierte Lichtwände (Perforated Light Walls), 1999, perforated gray cardboard, thickness approx. 5 mm, collection of the artist

Three Photographs | Heinz Loew and Edmund Collein | 1:2

Series of experiments: “Von Grader und Kreis (Stab und Ring) zu Hyperboloid und Kugel” (From line and circle (rod and ring) to hyperboloid and sphere), for Joost Schmidt’s class at the sculpture workshop

278

year of execution: ca. 1930 Material: gelatin silver print, new print from the original negative format: 18.3 x 17, 17.6 x 17.4, 18.2 x 17.3 cm loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 7743/1-3

Three Photographs Heinz Loew and Edmund Collein C 100 M 9 Y 91 K 0

Otto Piene (born 1928), a “sky artist,” was a cofounder of the “Gruppe ZERO” (1957) and is Director Emeritus of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA.

The “light sculptural studies” owe their existence to a suggestion of Joost Schmidt’s. Schmidt had observed how virtual bodies appeared and transformed on the regulator of a steam engine while it rotated at different speeds. Realized by Edmund Collein in 1928 in ­the sculpture workshop of the Dessau Bauhaus, their machine allowed a range of experiments, resulting in numerous interpenetrating shell-like forms. Alongside the studies for the so-called “paraboloid sculpture,” they represented the last stage in a series of exercises and experiments to investigate, using basic planimetric and stereometric forms, the relation­ship between bodies and space positively and negatively in relation to light and shadow, which was then visualized through rotation and torsion in real and virtual movement. Initial studies focused on the cube as body and as spatial structure dominated by directional forces with man at its center, which then advanced to the study of pyramid, cylinder, sphere, cone, regular polyhedrons, and hyperboloids. These were first developed using theory and isometric studies in the medium of drawing, and later constructed using string, paper, wood, metal, clay, and plaster—even glass. Besides the “composition and light studies,” particularly the “interpenetration studies” were intended to increase visual awareness of complex intersecting planes and negative volumes. With the use of several light sources, direct and reflected light played not only a passive role in heightening sculptural effects, ­but also an actively constructive role in the production of form. As an apprentice in Oskar Schlemmer’s wood-carving and stone sculpture workshop in Weimar, Schmidt was already occupied in his own work with questions of elementary

The Workshop as Laboratory Joost Schmidt’s Influence on Teaching and Design Peter Stasny

Joost Schmidt, penetration study, 1930, pencil drawing on cardboard, 14.5 x 19.5 cm, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau

C 100 M 7 Y 93 K 0

280

design, which at the Bauhaus, during the reorientation beginning in 1923, were geared toward an aesthetically as well as conceptually more exact understanding of visual elements, introducing an increasing scientification of the design process. The dynamic balancing act between a mathematical-scientific and an intuitive-emotional approach, which—not least as a result of Joost Schmidt’s classes—had an influence on the teaching in Dessau up to the era of the directorship of Mies van der Rohe, is already evident in Schmidt’s remarks about the abstract reliefs that he made for the vestibule of the Bauhaus building on the occasion of the 1923 exhibition: “In the preparatory studies [for the reliefs], the expressive possibilities became clearer to me than before. The geometric figures were no longer an expressionless neutral structure; I became aware of their beauty.” They also had an influence on the design of Schmidt’s exhibition poster, which by drawing on Constructivism pointed the way to a new kind of typography and poster design that would be established with Lázló Moholy-Nagy’s arrival at the Bauhaus. Mathematics and geometry also created the basis for the “strict logic of his later typographical works” (Helene Schmidt-Nonne), which he pursued in an autodidactic way after 1923. In 1925, When Joost Schmidt took over the sculpture workshop at the Dessau Bauhaus as a junior master, it was still integrated into the stage workshop run by Oskar Schlemmer. In Weimar, the stage workshop had already explored the interaction between basic twodimensional and three-dimensional forms in movement, as a form of autonomous experimentation in the sense of Wassily Kandinsky’s notion of an “abstract stage synthesis.” Since Schmidt’s ideas for a mechanical stage could not be reconciled with Schlemmer’s notion of a theater of figures, the former left his post as technical master in the stage workshop in 1927 and concentrated on building up the sculpture workshop, which had grown out of the Weimar wood-carving and stone sculpture workshop. Within a year, he had turned this into a laboratory for research into form and space and radically uncoupled the term “sculpture” from its basis in art. At roughly the same time as the sculpture workshop, Schmidt was also given a typography class that was a requirement throughout the whole yearlong period of the foundation studies; in the following years Schmidt developed the typography class into an independent course in design that was constantly revised. In line with the educational utopia of the Bauhaus, the “outline of a teaching concept for the foundation studies at the Dessau Bauhaus” from 1928 on was aimed at the inclusion of the whole man and was geared toward “training (awakening) the creative powers based on the emotional artistic side” and “the rational technical side.” At the center of this was the development of a sense of form, space, color, and material on the basis of “exercises in composition,” the “exploration of logical relationships,” and color studies after Wilhelm Ostwald. Alongside principles of method such as “beginning from below with the simplest things,” “learning through doing,” “finding,” or “re-finding,” “comparing,” “explaining,” and “training,” Schmidt’s teaching concept not only established the “sum of everything . . . that defines Bauhaus teaching” (Rainer Wick), but to all appearances also the basic principles for work in the sculpture workshop, whose aims have been described by the student Heinz Loew as “awakening, developing, heightening of the qualities of spatial imagination, the conscious experience of the sensory perception of space.” When, after the departure of Herbert Bayer in 1928, Schmidt also took over the printing and advertising workshop, his teaching in design formed the core of these classes too.

281

Franz Ehrlich, penetration and illumination study (for Joost Schmidt’s class), 1929–30, photograph, gelatin silver paper, new print from the original negative, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Wardrobe for Bachelors | Josef Pohl | 1:8.675

While the classes initially focused on two-dimensional design and the concerns of advertising design, the “study and work plan for the advertising workshop, printing workshop, and photography department” conceived the following year, combined the disciplines of “typography,” “advertising design,” “photography,” and “sculpture,” and linked these to the complex training that was originally intended by Bayer to prepare the student to become an advertising specialist. In this connection, Ute Brüning has pointed out the importance of the sculpture workshop as the site from which Schmidt coordinated all the workshops involved in advertising projects. Among the latter, particular emphasis should be given to the exhibition designs such as the Junkers booth in the Berlin exhibition Gas und Wasser (Gas and Water), the booth of the Vienna Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum (Museum for Social and Economic Affairs) at the Linz exhibition Wohnung und Siedlung (Home and Housing Settlement) and for the stand “Wirtschaftliche Vereinigung der Konservenindustrie” (Economic Union of the Canning Industry) that made up part of the Dresden Hygiene-Ausstellung. All of these took place between 1929 and 1930. After 1929, Schmidt stretched his teaching load still further by not only teaching his typography course, but also “objective drawing” and “technical drawing.” Finally, after Schlemmer’s departure, he also took over the figure and life drawing classes. As has recently been shown by Lutz Schöbe, these classes didn’t only interpret man mechanically as a techno-biological system, but also—drawing on the teachings of Johannes Itten, Paul Klee, and Oskar Schlemmer—esoterically, in his earthly-cosmic rootedness. Finally, when Mies van der Rohe took over the directorship of the Bauhaus, the productive operations and exhibition designs were abandoned and thus also Schmidt’s system of a “combination tool kit” (Joost Schmidt) that he used in his design teaching. From 1930–31 onward, the content and purpose of his classes was determined by “advertising design.” Despite the investigation of two-dimensional design through a series of variations on themes, it is still possible to make out the influences of the spatial studies that took place in the sculpture workshop—for instance, in Eugen Batz’s famous Cellon poster from 1931 or in the brochure Schmidt designed for the City of Dessau the same year. Finally, however, for Mies van der Rohe, this type of course in advertising no longer seemed up to date, which is why Joost Schmidt was no longer part of the Bauhaus in Berlin.

Literature Berlin et al 1995. Brüning 1995a. Brüning 1999. Droste 1993. Marzona 1984. Neumann 1985. Schlemmer 1990. Schmidt 1928a. Schmidt 1928b. Schöbe 2005. Stasny 1996. Wick 2000. Wingler 1975.

year of execution: 1930

282

Material: plywood, gaboun matte, on a beechwood frame, nickel-plated fittings format: 151.5 x 61.3 x 73.3 cm loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 1998/43

Wardrobe on Rollers for Bachelors Josef Pohl C 100 M 4 Y 96 K 0

Dr. Peter Stasny, an art and design historian, is Vice Dean and Studio Head for Knowledge Transfer and Research Networking at the New Design University in St. Pölten.

284

285

Hommage à Joseph Pohl Update Wardrobe on Rollers for Bachelors, 2009 Achim Heine C 100 M 2 Y 98 K 0

Achim Heine, Update Wardrobe on Rollers for Bachelors, plywood, 151 x 122.6 x 73.3 cm, collection of the artist

Lucia Self-Portrait | Lucia Moholy | 1:0.956

original Title: Lucia Selbstportrait

286

year of execution: 1930 Material: gelatin silver print format: 23.9 x 17.9 cm loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 1243/440.2

Lucia Self-Portrait Lucia Moholy C 100 M 0 Y 100 K 0

Prof. Achim Heine (born 1955), a designer, is a professor of experimental design at the University of the Arts in Berlin.

Lucia Moholy’s concept of photography is easily understood: to present objects and persons in an objective fashion, free from flagrant decorations or subjective characterizations—to, in a word, objectify them. Lucia Moholy was born in Karolinenthal, near Prague, in 1894. She married the Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy, little known at the time, in Berlin in 1921. She went with him to the Bauhaus two years later, when Walter Gropius asked Moholy-Nagy to teach the preliminary course. Lucia Moholy’s primary job at the Bauhaus was to assist her husband with technical photographic matters. She was the very first person at the Bauhaus to work professionally with photography and also studied with photographers in Weimar and Leipzig to elaborate her technical knowledge; at the Hochschule für Graphik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, she was introduced to various image reproduction techniques. This education furnished the basis for Lucia Moholy’s additional creative work at the Bauhaus, namely photographing for advertising purposes various Bauhaus products and the master workshops that made them. From these beginnings, she developed a photographic style that was entirely her own, one that can be grouped neither with the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) nor with the

Encounter with Oneself Lucia Moholy’s Self-Portrait Anja Schädlich

Hajo Rose, Montage Selbstportrait (Self-Portrait Montage), 1930, gelatin silver print, 24 x 17.9 cm, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau

C 98 M 0 Y 100 K 0

288

Neue Sehen (New Vision), two rival stylistic movements in the photography of the early 1920s. One might assume that Lucia Moholy’s photographic style was situated between these two movements, yet this would be oversimplified and imprecise. The New Vision provoked its audience by compelling the viewer to look at things in a “new” way: extreme close-ups and views from above and below alienate the viewer from conventional perspectives. Lucia Moholy’s husband, László Moholy-Nagy, was a central figure in the New Vision, pursuing experiments in alternative points of view. The New Objectivity, by contrast, sought to depict everyday things in unusual ways, arranging and staggering and reproducing a product that, through this staging, was raised to prominence as an art object. Lucia Moholy realized her photographs in an entirely different fashion than that used by the photographers of the New Vision and the New Objectivity. She positioned individual objects on a glass plate, so as to minimize shadows, and used homogeneous backgrounds. Each of these two measures served to bring the objects into the foreground and eliminate distractions. In her portrait photography, she worked from her experience with Bauhaus objects. She photographed people from one or more perspectives against uniform backgrounds. In a manuscript, Lucia Moholy justified her choice of various views thus: “a side view can be more clear, for a person’s character, than the front view, the one clearer than the other; for some, a detail is characteristic, for others head and hand, for yet others the full figure is indispensable etc.” Lucia Moholy’s photography of portraits and objects is not the “snapshot photography” typical of the Bauhaus, and it makes clear that her style was not shaped by the Bauhaus. Lucia Moholy was surprisingly unaffected by her husband’s enthusiasm for photographic experimentation as well. Likewise, Lucia Moholy’s self-portrait does not involve the sort of self-staging so popular at the time in photographs by Marta Astfalck-Vietz and Claude Cahun, among others. Even at the Bauhaus in the late 1920s and early 1930s, there were no self-observations comparable to the self-portrait of Lucia Moholy. There were “self-photos,” whether taken for fun, because of boredom, or out of enthusiasm for experimentation, including photographs of László Moholy-Nagy, Marianne Brandt, Gertrud Arndt, and Kurt Kranz. Lucia Moholy’s self-portrait, however, is something else altogether. Lucia Moholy’s portrait of herself, which, according to her notation on one of the prints, she made in 1930, is not in keeping with her reputation as an objective documentarian. Lucia Moholy is at the center of the self-portrait, against a blurred background. She poses as the thinker, her head supported by hands balled into fists. Her inquisitive gaze points directly at the observer. These are indicia that speak against ascribing the photograph to the realm of the objective. The self-portrait as such, by its very nature, makes a pure objectivity in self-representation largely impossible. The person portrayed is also the person portraying, someone who perceives herself subjectively and objectively at the same time, but who cannot observe herself in a purely objectifying fashion. The public expects from a self-portrait that it be a complementary detail of the artist, by the artist herself, in which she stylizes herself into an art object. Whether this photograph depicting Lucia Moholy is really a self-portrait is not fully known. On two of the prints, the photographer has written “self-portrait” (Photography Marianne Brandt, Selbstporträt in der Kugel gespiegelt (Self-Portrait Reflected in a Sphere), 1928–29, gelatin silver print, new print from the original negative, 18 x 24 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

289

Herbert Bayer, self-portrait, 1932, gelatin silver print, 39.8 x 29.8 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

With All Ten Fingers | Marianne Brandt | 1:3.083

Archive, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau) and “Lucia self-portrait, 1930” (Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin). There are no other references to this photo as a self-photo, however, in the index of works that the artist otherwise maintained with great meticulousness. Nor does the photo itself offer any definite clues to suggest an autonomous method, such as a mirror in which Lucia Moholy could photograph herself or a cord to trigger the shutter. No other attested self-portrait of the photographer exists. It may be gathered that Lucia Moholy’s self-portrait of 1930 was not made as a pure documentation of herself. Rather, it puts on display the apparent self-observation of a woman who was undergoing radical change, privately, professionally, and socially—a psychic transformation to be found in the present photograph as well. In 1929, a year before the self-portait’s creation, she separated from László Moholy-Nagy, with whom she had come from the Bauhaus in Dessau to Berlin in 1928. In the spring of 1930, Lucia Moholy began teaching at Johannes Itten’s private art school in Berlin, where she oversaw the class in photography. It was at this turning point in her life that she emerged, privately and professionally, out of the shadow of the great “total artist” László Moholy-Nagy and came forth from the sheltering walls of the Bauhaus. She may have also reflected during this time on her role as a woman in society. The 1920s witnessed an emancipation of women, at the least professionally, and it was not for nothing that those who had the necessary financial support from families or husbands chose for themselves the profession of the female photographer. In a spirit of self-determination, these women traveled around with their cameras, discovered a freedom that was previously unknown, and opened their own photography studios (including those of Yva, Madame d’Ora, Imogen Cunningham, Berenice Abbott, and others). Lucia Moholy did not intend her self-portrait photograph as an objectification of the person depicted. The photograph reproduced here is the only instance in the artist’s photographic work in which she allowed a psychologizing characterization of the person portrayed. She presents herself as contemplative and vulnerable. The self-portrait signifies the start of a new, independent period in the photographer’s life, both chronologically and thematically. This photo is a critical examination of that period. Lucia Moholy appears to have found the frontal view she selected to be particularly characteristic—an immediate presentation that sets the viewer in direct contact with the person portrayed, but which at the same time is, in Lucia Moholy’s words, an “encounter with oneself,” a self-observation not documentary in nature. Lucia Moholy’s self-portrait must therefore be regarded as a unique testament. It is beyond the confines of the context of the Bauhaus, the photography of the New Vision and of the New Objectivity, and the conventional self-portrait photography of the period. It is beyond the bounds of her own oeuvre as well.

Literature Esau 1995. Moholy n. d. Moholy: Kunst n. d. Moholy 1926–29. Moholy 1958. Moholy-Nagy 1925. Osterwold 1985. Sachsse 1985. Wick 1991.

original Title: Mit allen zehn Fingern year of execution: 1930 or later

290

Material: photomontage of newspaper clippings, pencil on cardboard format: 65.2 x 50 cm loaned by: Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, I 677 G

With All Ten Fingers Marianne Brandt C 96 M 0 Y 100 K 0

Anja Schädlich (born 1981), an art historian and curator, is a doctoral candidate in art history at the Free University in Berlin.

role, and agency of women at the Bauhaus. Since the constitution of the Weimar Republic guaranteed women full freedom of study, the school’s admission policy could not discriminate based on an applicant’s gender, and Gropius stated publicly that there should be no difference between the “beautiful” and “strong” sexes. Further, the leading role that many women took in the creative, intellectual, and social life of the school; the number of them who received their degrees; and even the fact that the Bauhaus’s program was so integrated as to have men and women living and working together all made this an extremely progressive institution. Yet many aspects of the Bauhaus demonstrated a less-than-progressive approach to gender relations. For example, in 1920, the administration quietly changed its policy to restrict the number of women admitted to one-third of the incoming class. Further, the vast majority of female students were streamed into workshops that were deemed appropriate to their gender: weaving or, during the initial years, ceramics and bookbinding. While With All Ten Fingers would seem to respond to this mixture of modern freedoms and traditional constraints experienced by women in the Bauhaus, the date of 1927 cannot be correct, since at least one montage element—the picture of the young woman—was not published until 1930. In addition, the style conforms to Brandt’s sparser compositional approach from 1929 and later. Yet this misinterpretation of With All Ten Fingers allowed it to function as a meditation upon the complex gender relations at the Bauhaus, a significant aspect of the school’s history. The fact that With All Ten Fingers could only have been made in 1930 or later helps us to understand it more accurately as relating to the experiences of Bauhaus members after leaving the school and to the bleak financial times of the early 1930s. The image of the young woman comes from a Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung cover where she appears in a claustrophobic office that can hardly contain her dramatic gestures. In BIZ, the photograph is entitled “the decisive moment”; its caption reveals that this is an aspiring actress whose future depends upon the casting agent scrutinizing her. The accompanying article describes the hardships of theater life in which so many compete for so few jobs and often travel from afar for only a few moments to prove themselves. In typical BIZ style, this catchy image offered readers a fun look behind the scenes of the Weimar Republic’s popular entertainment industry. Yet this picture’s reception must also be understood in terms of a much broader crisis of the Angestellten, the large population of white-collar workers, many of them female, who were central to interwar Germany’s cultural landscape. The global financial crisis, sparked in part by the 1929 Wall Street crash, meant that many were out of work by 1930. The image of a modern young woman pulling out all the stops to get a job would have struck a chord with the numerous readers of BIZ, who would have been painfully aware that desperate attempts to get work were not limited to the realm of the theater. Brandt’s composition extricates this young woman from the crowded office and replaces the observing agent with a distant male figure to whom she is bound. This representation of a modern woman who is unable to free herself from constricting ties did in fact echo elements of Brandt’s own experience. It was, contrary to what many have assumed, not her relationship to Moholy-Nagy or Gropius in 1927 with which this image was engaging, but her life in the early 1930s when she had left the Bauhaus and become head of design at the Ruppelwerk metal factory in Gotha that is the reference point for the work. According to her letters, she found her work difficult because of the factory’s hierarchical administration­and outdated

On the “Beautiful” and “Strong” Sexes at the Bauhaus Marianne Brandt, Gender, and Photomontage Elizabeth Otto

Marianne Brandt, Montage I, 1924, photomontage with photograms, 42.1 x 30 cm, Klassik Stiftung Weimar

C 94 M 0 Y 100 K 0

292

Marianne Brandt is best known as a modernist designer of sleek metal objects. She was indeed one of the most successful members of the metal workshop, garnering the largest number of industrial contracts of any of its members and eventually serving as the workshop’s director. However, like many at the Bauhaus, Brandt’s skills translated into a number of media. She had come to the school in 1924 a fully trained painter and, during her five years there, also became accomplished in photography and in one of the Bauhaus’s least understood visual forms, photomontage. While today the term “photomontage” is often used to designate those fragmentary images that have been rephotographed—most famously those made by John Heartfield—at the time of the Bauhaus the word referred to any kind of pieced-together photographic image, including those such as Brandt’s, which today would be known as “photocollages.” Starting in the early 1920s, a number of Bauhaus members created such photomontages for various reasons: to give as gifts, to advertise parties or events, and to create representational images without relying on old-fashioned art forms. This last motivation—to escape from traditional, pictorial “salon art”—became more important with the 1923 arrival at the Bauhaus of the man who would become Brandt’s primary mentor, Hungarian Constructivist László Moholy-Nagy. As early as 1926, while on leave from the Bauhaus in Paris, Brandt began to work in montage, and she would eventually complete at least forty works in this versatile medium. Helfen Sie mit! (Help Out!) of 1926 is typical of these early montages in its carefully constructed flow of disjointed pictures and in the striking New Woman who dominates the composition. Brandt’s works often evince a dynamism that reflects both the depth of her compositional skill and the dramatic imagery of her sources in the interwar illustrated press. Her photomontages are ruminations on such topics as media culture, politics, gender relations, and the representation of New Womanhood. Several of these themes come to the fore in one of Brandt’s starkest compositions, With All Ten Fingers of circa 1930. Here a fashionable young woman appears to have fallen to her knees with her head thrown back and her arms spread wide. Her movement is arrested by the tautly pulled strings—sharp pencil lines—attached to each of her fingers. These make her into a marionette even as they connect her to a well-dressed businessman who floats above her, seemingly oblivious to her plight. Using only these two photographic elements, Brandt sets up a chain of opposites. The woman appears to be closer to the viewer; in addition, she is young, clad in modern and somewhat revealing clothing, and she strikes an open pose. By contrast, the man seems older, his body is fully covered in a traditional suit and coat, and his pose is much less expansive. The drawn “strings” and the blank paper that stretches between them emphasize the strained nature of their interaction between contrasts in gender, age, power, and location in space. Despite the sterile nature of its composition, this work allows viewers to look with attentive sympathy at the young woman who dominates the image but is at the mercy of the distant man to whom she is bound. Through the identification it fosters between viewers and the young woman, With All Ten Fingers thematizes the emotional ties and power relationships that many independentminded modern women of the day might have experienced. Decades after making the work, Brandt wrote “1927” on its verso. This note in the artist’s hand led some scholars to interpret this montage as a form of self-portraiture and to suggest that the image reflected Brandt’s feelings of dependence on or fruitless attachment to Moholy-Nagy or perhaps Walter Gropius; further, it allowed the work to fit into ongoing debates about the status,

293

László Moholy-Nagy, Die Lichter der Stadt (City Lights), 1926, photocollage with newspaper clippings, tempera on cardboard, 61.5 x 49.5 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Forming a coalition in Heinrich Brüning’s cabinet are the NSDAP (Nazis), DNVP (NationalConservatives), and the Stahlhelm (nationalist paramilitary organization).

Literature Baumhoff 2006. Bergius 1994. Berlin 2005b. Fiedler 1990a. Kruppa 1992. Maasberg/Prinz 2004. Müller 2009.

Large Frank Lloyd Wright exhibition in Europe

First television broadcast with sound

Baumhoff 2001.

5 mil.

Wynhoff 2003.

Hans Scharoun, Walter Gropius, and others, Berlin Siemensstadt housing estate

C 92 M 0 Y 100 K 0

unemployed

Dr. Elizabeth Otto is an art historian at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.

CULTURE 

MODERN LIFE

294

POLITICS

Shreve, Lamb & Harmon Associates, Empire State Building

The first electric ­razor comes onto the market.

1931

Weise 1996.

Emergency decree abolishing the right to demonstrate

Weinert 2003.

Banking crisis in Germany. Highpoint of the eco­nomic crisis in Germany. 70,000 bankruptcies are registered.

Ray 2001.

Deutsche Bauausstellung (German Architecture Exhibition) in Berlin

The world hears a radio broadcast of the Pope’s voice for the first time.

Otto 2009.

Discovery of the electron microscope

design aesthetic. In 1930 Brandt wrote to Moholy-Nagy with a sense of both despair and nostalgia for her time at the Bauhaus. She characterized her attempts to modernize Ruppel’s products as confined to “choosing the lesser of two evils” and described feeling trapped between a domineering boss and her wish to help keep the factory running and thus provide jobs for the workers. On top of everything else, her salary was helping to support a number of family, friends, and former Bauhaus colleagues who were out of work. Far from showing unreciprocated devotion to Moholy-Nagy, With All Ten Fingers picks up elements of his own photomontage technique to critique the stodgy and bureaucratic hierarchies to which she and many other Bauhaus graduates were now subjected. Having left behind one of the most creative institutions of the interwar period where design was seen as a way to bring modernity to the masses, Brandt here constructs a photomontage in which an overtly modern female figure labors at the behest of a man who pulls her strings. She thus creates an icon of the freedoms and restraints experienced by so many women of the Bauhaus and of the Weimar Republic.

C 90 M 0 Y 100 K 0

Gret Palucca dances in the auditorium.

“The   new time is a reality; it exists wholly independently of whether we say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to it . . . It is not a question of ‘what,’ but solely and entirely of ‘how’ . . . In order to establish standards, we must apply new values, identify ultimate ends.” Ludwig Mies van der Rohe 1930

Paul Klee accepts an invitation from the Dusseldorf Art Academy.

53

CITATION

EVENTS

TEACHING

Students

1931 Gunta Stölzl leaves the Bauhaus. Anni Albers becomes provisional head of the weaving workshop.

Design for a Socialist City | Reinhold Rossig | 1:4.476

“That   modern architecture is founded on function is conceded forthrightly by Mies and the post-functionalists. But the exaggeration of functionalism to a theory of building from which aesthetic considerations are entirely excluded is an attitude which they oppose.” Philip Johnson 1931

Municipal election: the NSDAP becomes the strongest party in Dessau, demands the elimination of the Bauhaus budget and the demolition of the Bauhaus building.

Consolidation of the workshops and the architecture department in “building and decoration”

141

year of execution: 1931

format: 74.9 x 99.8 cm

Material: ink and pencil on cardboard, inscription montages

loaned by: Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, I 360 G

scale: 1 : 10000

Design for a Socialist City, Sheet 1, Layout for Undergraduate Thesis (Bauhaus Diploma no. 51) Reinhold Rossig

A large folio sheet with a design for a socialist city—this was something out of the ordinary, even at the Bauhaus in 1931. The geographical dimensions of the design are immense. The folio sheet shows a detail from a linear arrangement of cities connected by railways, their full extent apparent from the small map in the lower left corner: the central railway line extends across hundreds of kilometers from Breslau to Berlin. No one at the Bauhaus a decade earlier would have thought of an industrialized world on such a scale. The early Bauhaus turned away from the city, and it was not until 1923 that the Bauhaus exhibition presented various designs for urban architecture, some of which had not been made at the Bauhaus: Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe raised up office towers out of downtown areas in Berlin and Chicago, while Le Corbusier showed his radical plan for a modern city of three million inhabitants. The Bauhaus buildings constructed in Dessau in 1925 and later gave a first clear idea of the sort of urban model toward which the Bauhaus was striving. Urban planning first appeared in the Bauhaus course offerings in 1927, with the introduction of construction theory, taught by Hannes Meyer. For the fourth semester, a variety ­of “special courses,” including “city building,” appeared under the heading “design studio with building praxis.” Following the departure of Hans Wittwer and Mart Stam in mid1929, Hannes Meyer hired the architect and urban planner Ludwig Hilberseimer, who had already published such influential books as Grosstadtarchitektur (1927), and who had become particularly known for his 1924 “Model for a Skyscraper City.” Alongside Hilbers­ eimer, listed in Bauhaus-Zeitschrift no. 3 (1929) as “director of construction theory,” the architects Anton Brenner, Edvard Heiberg, and Paul Artaria each taught for a time. In 1931, the Bauhaus curriculum listed “housing construction and housing settlements, urban ­planning” under the heading “construction.” Hilberseimer’s teaching typically involved analyses of the relationship between housing forms and density of construction, followed by the creation of plans for housing settlements. A common theme running through the plans, which employed rigid rows of houses, was the mixing of different kinds of buildings, including single-family homes,

“Design   for a Socialist City” On the Teaching of Urban Planning at the Bauhaus Wolfgang Thöner C 88 M 0 Y 100 K 0

298

usually L-shaped. Hilberseimer chose real places for some of the fictitious projects, and was also responsive to suggestions from students. Alongside plans for Dessau, such as the expansion of the Dessau-Törten development and the fictitious Junkers-Werke development, Hilberseimer oversaw competition entries as well. Reinhold Rossig, a trained building engineer, came to the Bauhaus in 1929 at the age of twenty-six. After the preliminary course and other accompanying courses, he studied construction and development while also attending the open painting courses offered by Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Rossig’s Bauhaus diploma records that he took “seminar, drafting, and review under architects Hannes Meyer and L. Hilberseimer” in the summer semester of 1930. In the fall of 1930, when Rossig began his last semester at the Bauhaus—now under the direction of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe—what stands out is his “continued studies of construction theory,” now under the “architects Mies van der Rohe and L. Hilberseimer.” The five architecture projects appearing at the end of the diploma list, after the designs for residential buildings, Rossig’s actual thesis work, the “Design for a Socialist City.” How did Rossig choose the theme for his thesis work? Hannes Meyer belonged to the circle of architects affiliated with the journal ABC. In the years after Meyer was made a professor, a left-wing, or indeed socialist, orientation was hardly a rarity at the Bauhaus. Alongside the official offerings in construction theory, the students Philip Tolziner and Tibor Weiner designed a communal house in 1930, inspired by Soviet models. They exhibited the project at the Bauhaus, and Hilberseimer expressed appreciative interest. Unlike Rossig, who was a member of the German Communist Party, Hilberseimer did not belong to any political party, but he made no secret of his social commitments. In a 1929 issue of the Bauhaus-Zeitschrift, for example, he called for “a thoroughly planned economy in which production reflects the needs of all people, not the profit motive of the individual.” This orientation united Hilberseimer with Mart Stam and Hannes Meyer, among other architects. Yet Hilberseimer also long maintained friendly ties with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The latter did not hold these sorts of views, though he evidently tolerated them. Hilberseimer was thus an integrating figure for the Bauhaus. Reinhold Rossig’s diploma thesis takes as its model the linear city, with its roots in Spanish and British models of the late nineteenth century. In the late 1920s, models for linear cities were proposed in the Soviet Union by architectural associations, such as OSA (Union of Contemporary Architects), and by Nikolai A. Milyutin. Linear cities were also discussed in the CIAM (Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne) debates on the “functional city.” Milyutin’s book Sozgorod (an abbreviation for the new socialist city), published in 1930, favored models for linear cities. The book must have been known at the Bauhaus; on the occasion of the German Construction Exhibition in Berlin in June of 1931 (at which the Bauhaus was represented by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich), there was a CIAM meeting in preparation for the upcoming congress on the “functional city,” at which the Soviet delegates introduced Milyutin’s concept as their standard. In addition, the Bauhaus had interacted closely with Soviet architects since the mid-1920s. Milyutin’s book presents in a positive light several architectural projects from the Bauhaus. Milyutin could conceive of the linear city only as an extension of the traditional city and as a dissolution of rural ways of life. In 1931, Hilberseimer developed a special model for a linear city, now known in the literature as the “pearl necklace model” (Fehl/­ Reinhold Rossig, design for a socialist city, sheet 2, housing block with communal areas and kitchen, 1 : 500, undergraduate thesis (Bauhaus diploma no. 51), 1931, ink and pencil on cardboard, 74.9 x 99.8 cm, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau

Model of the mixed architecture based on Ludwig Hilberseimer’s plans in the Bauhaus building in Dessau, ca. 1931, photograph, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Wils Ebert, sketches for a new design for Dessau (natural setting and wind diagram, distribution of industrial, residential, and working facilities, reconfiguration of streets,

299 housing and working facilities), ca. 1931, ink and colored pencil on tracing paper, 70 x 36.8 cm, BauhausArchiv Berlin

Bauhaus Wallpaper, Brochure | Joost Schmidt | 1:0.825

Rodríguez-Lores). Taking Dessau as his example, Hilberseimer suggested a transformation of the city into units of settlement arrayed along a train line. This approach is made clear, for example, in an urban planning study of Dessau prepared around 1931 by the student Wils Ebert. One of the folio sheets creates a linear arrangement of cities through the insertion of new residential districts running directly from north to south along train tracks connecting the industrial cities of Rosslau, Dessau, Wolfen, and Bitterfeld. Rossig, for his part, makes no apparent reference to any particular location, proposing a right-angled array of uniform “residential” and “industrial” zones. He notes on his folio sheet, however, that these are “connected to the cities nearby.” Likewise, sites of collectivized agriculture are joined “to the new breed of city.” The “residential complexes,” the industrial zones, and all other buildings are connected “by means of subways,” while long-distance connections are provided by an elevated railway. The folio sheets do not situate the institutions “dormitory, theater, cinema, athletics,” which are described as being in central locations but “outside the residential complex.” The underlying cultural model is that of a collectivist lifestyle characterized by industrial labor, and in which leisure time is spent in the “residential complex” and in the centrally situated areas of the “main kitchen” and the “collective spaces.” Rossig’s work shows the extent of experimentation in urban planning that occurred at the Bauhaus in the years after 1926. Hilberseimer allowed this approach, although it did not correspond to his own ideal of the free-standing house in a mixed structure of settlement. Hilberseimer’s conception of the linear city, we may safely infer, developed in part from productive conflict with such experiments. Hannes Meyer, after being dismissed from the Bauhaus in the autumn of 1930, took a group of Bauhaus graduates with him to the Soviet Union, where they collaborated on large-scale urban planning projects. Hilberseimer distanced himself in the 1960s from many of his urban planning visions of the 1920s. Reinhold Rossig was active until 1968 at the GDR’s Building Academy, which promulgated the concepts from which emerged, in 1963 and after, the socialist “Chemical Workers City” of Halle-Neustadt. In Milan in 1973, the Italian Neorealists in Aldo Rossi’s circle praised the result, while Joseph Rykwert criticized it as a “repulsive Hilberseimerian agglomeration.”

Literature Fehl/Rodríguez-Lores 1997. Gregotti 1986. Hilberseimer 1925. Hilberseimer 1927. Hilberseimer 1929a. Hilberseimer 1929b. Hilberseimer 1931. Kilian 2002. Milyutin 1930. Pommer 1988. Rykwert 1982. Winkler 2003. Wolsdorff 2001.

original Title: Der Bauhaustapete gehört die Zukunft year of execution: 1931

300

Material: letterpress print on art printing paper format: 14.8 x 21 cm loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 2991

C 86 M 0 Y 100 K 0

Dipl. paed. Wolfgang Thöner (born 1957), an art historian, is Head of Collections at the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau.

Advertising Brochure Entitled “The   Future Belongs to Bauhaus Wallpaper” Joost Schmidt

The present title page, designed by Joost Schmidt for the 1931 catalogue, is a carefully composed and lavishly executed work. The slogan that “the future belongs to bauhaus wallpaper” makes a verbal argument and expresses an ethos that clearly intends the first of the two meanings of the Latin word persuadere, namely “to convince someone,” rather than “to change someone’s mind.” Yet the slogan’s bold placement and the depiction of a crystal ball introduce a delicately ironic whiff of magical thinking—if not indeed intentional unseriousness—into the rational world of the Bauhaus. What is more, in startling contrast to the qualities and light hues of the wallpapers themselves, a brown-black color dominates on the title page of Joost Schmidt’s catalogue. Why is this? Schmidt has chosen it intentionally. This is because, in contrast to most advertising materials, which paint the public a picture of a set of circumstances they are to desire, this depiction visualizes the process of an imagined transformation. It has the courage to create a fantasy for the viewer, as though the viewer’s own house walls were to radiate fresh light hues and leave their heavy old color behind. A roll of wallpaper spills down from the top right of the page, coming to a stop at the left side. A crystal ball weighs the roll down, taming its unruliness. In the arcing surface of the crystal ball can be seen the image of the ideal modern living space, a room from one of Walter Gropius’s model houses. The house plant is cleverly employed to hide the camera, which is not reflected in the crystal ball. The roll of wallpaper is the bright and new, there to banish the dark-hued and old. Catharsis is a recurring theme throughout modernism. It is to be found in Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, Bruno Taut, and Adolf Behne, among the Dutch and the Russians, and in

Modern Wallpaper for Every Room Joost Schmidt’s Title Page for the Bauhaus Wallpaper Catalogue Claude Lichtenstein

Joost Schmidt, back cover of the brochure entitled The Future Belongs to Bauhaus Wallpaper, 1931, offset on art printing paper, 14.8 x 21 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin C 84 M 0 Y 100 K 0

302

The licensing fees from the Bauhaus wallpapers played a very significant role in the financial support of the Bauhaus in Dessau at least from 1929 on. What is generally and unthinkingly termed the Golden Twenties in truth existed in Germany only in the few years between the currency reform of 1923 and the start of the world economic crisis in late 1929. The Bauhaus’s reputation with the public largely arose in these years, when public recognition of the institution was at its peak and it had made the step to industrial production. It was in these years that the earlier, fascinatingly unconventional studies in form were transformed into a growing number of products for a broad audience. Bauhaus furniture, to be sure, primarily drew the attention of an audience of consciously modern tastes. Other products, however, were codified in a less avant-garde fashion and were suitable for use as stand-alone elements in offices or more traditionally furnished apartments. The variety of lamps for dining room tables, desks, and nightstands were such products, and the Bauhaus wallpapers were even more so. Viewed historically, wallpaper is an aspect of bourgeois, even feudal furnishing. Farmhouses had stone walls or wood paneling, not wallpaper. This may be a reason why Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer responded negatively at first to the Bauhaus wallpaper project. The project was pursued nonetheless, with the wallpaper being produced by the firm of Rasch, and it grew relatively successful. The collection was a suitable alternative to the usual wallpapers of the time, and, in its unobtrusive character, reflected Hannes Meyer’s idea of a serviceable and “organic” design. The wallpapers displayed a fine structure and were free from decorative motifs. Their fundamental formal neutrality corresponded to a cheerful color palette of delicate pastel tones in the realm of ochre, blue, and green.

Grete Reichardt, wallpaper design, pastel over structure, rubbed onto paper, 5.5 x 7.6 cm, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau

Bauhaus wallpaper catalogue, Gebr. Rasch & Co., 1932, 15.5 x 23.2 cm, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau

303 A role of Bauhaus wallpaper “bauhaus b9m,” 1931, width 51 cm, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau

Menagerie | Hans Thiemann | 1:3.652

Alexander­Schwab, Sigfried Giedion, and Hannes Meyer. Catharsis is not the result, but rather the process, of purification. The present work is itself about this process, to which Joost Schmidt gives expression. He was forced to express his argumentation by means of a contrast in brightness; at the time, most advertising was one-color or two-color. Naturalistic illustrative four-color printing in advertising would not become widespread until after World War II. The brochure, unable to reproduce the wallpaper colors directly, took as its message a progression from dark to light. It is, ultimately, a “before and after” picture. In two preliminary drafts, the crystal ball was larger, and the bolt of wallpaper was pre­ sented, in less perspectival fashion, unfurling in from the left. In the final version, the wallpaper is more accentuated, the crystal ball correspondingly less dominant. Yet the effect is to strengthen the visual announcement that work is necessary to achieve renewal. Before the new, bright expanses of pastels can banish the old, worn-out brown, the room will have to be cleaned out and its old wallpaper removed. The curled strip of paper and its spherical reflection inside the crystal ball are not a measuring tape, but rather a cutting from the side of the roll of wallpaper. This cutting and the roll draw attention to the labor of experts. At the time, hardly anyone would have put up wallpaper by himself. This was decades before the do-it-yourself movement. When this movement arrived a generation later, it went beyond wallpaper to include the introduction of latex paint and lambskin paint rollers. Bauhaus research revealed that the Bauhaus wallpapers were most often used ­in the construction of housing developments. The economic circumstances that set in after 1930, however, brought construction nearly to a standstill. In the realm of modern furnishings, too, the crisis gave rise to positions that modern furniture should be made compatible with existing pieces from the good old days. The commandment of the age was no longer the principle of radical renewal, but rather the principle of creating  mediating connections and synthesizing old and new. In other words: this brochure also targeted owners and managers of older buildings, promising the potential of Bauhaus wallpaper to freshen up rooms that were not conceived of as programmatically pure avowals of the New Building. This makes clear just how ingenious Schmidt’s approach is. It was not enough to simply advertise a finished product; he had to promote an intervention instead (“Get ready for a major brightening up of your four walls!”). The dark brown of the background is not only a graphically effective color; it is also a reference to an aesthetic meaning (one to be overcome). The statement that “the future belongs to bauhaus wallpaper” would be unthinkably timid for an advertisement today, nor was it truly electrifying even in 1931. This statement was playfully and elegantly redefined, however, by Schmidt’s idea of the crystal ball, a fine stroke on his part. Schmidt’s ingenuity was to take a basic form, the ball, with an objectivity and universality typical of the Bauhaus, use it in an opposing context, that of the occult, yet then deploy this context as the gentle provider of the New Living’s merry modernity.

Literature Brüning 1995b. Möller 1995.

year of execution: 1931 Material: oil on canvas

304

format: 59.5 x 68.5 cm loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 4352

Menagerie Hans Thiemann C 82 M 0 Y 100 K 0

Dipl.-Ing. Claude Lichtenstein (born 1949), an architect and journalist, is a lecturer in design history and theory at the School of Art and Design Zurich and at the University of Applied Sciences of Northwestern Switzerland.

Available at the Dessau Bauhaus were French art journals such as Cahiers d’art and La revolution surréaliste, both of which reported about current developments in Paris. According to a report by Kurt Kranz, who began his studies in Dessau in 1930, it was thanks to a trip to Paris undertaken by Hans Thiemann that, in addition to André Breton’s Second Surrealist Manifesto, Max Ernst’s collage novel La femme 100 têtes circulated in Dessau. Younger painters at the Bauhaus in particular were excited by attempts by the Surrealists to conquer realities “beyond every form of logic and morality” (Breton). In fact, the Surrealist program of a combinatorics of antitheses and contradictions in conjunction with a variety of collage techniques exercised an enormous attraction on Bauhaus students. The photomontages of Kurt Kranz and Hans Thiemann, executed in the early 1930s, display an idiosyncratic mélange of Surrealist and absurdist pictorial motifs and Constructivist elements, the latter betraying a distinct proximity to the photomontages of Moholy-Nagy. In the spirit of French Surrealism, the oft-cited “accidental meeting of the sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table” (Lautréamont) was expected to provoke poetic “eruptions,” allowing disparate pictorial elements to emerge as enigmatic ciphers. In the realm of painting as well, such “image collisions” were meant to lead to a coupling of controversial motifs with new meanings. In 1925, Herbert Bayer was among the first at the Bauhaus to paint Surrealist motifs, which also found their way into his commercial designs and photomontages beginning in 1928—at the moment when he left the Bauhaus to assume directorship of the renowned Dorland ad agency in Berlin. Hans Thiemann’s painting Menagerie is among the earliest works executed by him at

Surrealism at the Bauhaus Hans Thiemann’s Painting Menagerie Gerda Wendermann

Xanti Schawinsky, Fließende Architektur (Architecture in Flux), 1927, oil and tempera on canvas, 45.8 x 71.3 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin C 80 M 0 Y 100 K 0

306

Addressing his student Hans Thiemann in 1936 from exile in Paris, Wassily Kandinsky expressed himself with uncharacteristic forthrightness concerning his rejection of Surrealism: “When it comes to thematic content, ‘psychoanalytical motifs’ always strike me as repellent.” Between 1930 and 1933, Thiemann had attended the free painting classes directed by Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, which had been introduced at the Dessau Bauhaus by Hannes Meyer in 1927. Although Thiemann admired his teacher Kandinsky above all others, and had come to the Bauhaus expressly to study with him, he nonetheless (and not unlike some other students) found artistic models among the Surrealist circle. He had hoped to acquire a fundamental knowledge of Kandinsky’s teachings in composition and color, while his interest in Surrealism had been awakened two years earlier, just when the French movement had begun to encounter a pronounced international resonance (following an incubation period during the early 1920s). An initial highpoint in this European-wide reception was doubtless the wide-ranging 1929 exhibition Abstrakte und surrealistische Malerei und Plastik (Abstract and Surrealist Painting and Sculpture), organized by the married couple Sigfried Giedion and Carola Giedion-Welcker at the Kunsthaus Zürich. Confronting one another for the first time at this sensational show were works of geometric abstraction by El Lissitzky, Piet Mondrian, Antoine Pevsner, and Jean Arp; works by Bauhaus masters Josef Albers, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and László Moholy-Nagy; and works by Surrealist artists such as Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Jean Arp, Man Ray, René Magritte, André Masson, Francis Picabia, and Yves Tanguy. As Kandinsky emphasized later to Thiemann on the occasion of the great 1938 Surrealist exhibition in Paris, Jean Arp and Kandinsky himself—despite his own rejection of Surrealism—occupied a special position between the two competing camps. The latter respected André Breton, regarding him with “cordial affection, although we have at times attacked one another.” When it came to his students, on the other hand, he was able to accept the adaptation of Surrealist motifs, as long as the “clarity of expression” and a “command of form and material” were uncompromised. It had been possible already at the Weimar Bauhaus to follow the evolution of Dada into Surrealism through the multifaceted activities of Theo van Doesburg, who saw himself not just as a Constructivist, but as a Dadaist as well. In early 1922, he had established contacts with Tristan Tzara, whom he invited to Weimar. In September 1922, Tzara participated there together with Arp in the “International Congress of Constructivists and Dadaists,” delivering a lecture about “Dada à Paris.” Through Tzara’s mediation, moreover, Van Doesburg was in direct contact with the Surrealist scene in Paris, grouped around Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Francis Picabia, and Man Ray, who supplied textual and image contributions for the Dada journal Mécano, published in Weimar in 1922–23. Identifiable in the works of Paul Klee were points of tangency with the Surrealists, who recognized his approach as being analogous to écriture automatique. The collection of international art journals available in the Bauhaus library, among them the Italian Valori plastici, made it possible to acquire a familiarity with the Pittura Metafisica of Giorgio de Chirico, a tendency having an enormous influence on the development of Surrealist painting. The reception in Weimar of de Chirico was manifest as a kind of Magic Realism in the work of several Bauhaus students, including Johannes Driesch and Xanti Schawinsky. As early as 1921, moreover, de Chirico had been represented by the lithograph Oreste e Pilade in the fourth Bauhaus portfolio in the series New European Graphics.

Werner Drewes, Aggression, 1932, oil on fiberboard, 39 x 86 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

307

Inauguration of the circa 20-kilometer Autobahn between Cologne and Bonn

Beutler 1976. Essen 1977, No. 2. Hahn/Krause 2000.

The exhibition The International Style at MoMA, New York

Hofmann 1990.

6 mil.

Demands for reparations from Germany are concluded with a final payment of 3 billion Reichsmarks.

First film festival in Venice, “Mostra d’arte cinematografica”

Literature

C 78 M 0 Y 100 K 0

1932 unemployed

The SA and the SS ­are banned briefly.

POLITICS

Dr. Gerda Wendermann, an art historian, is a curator at the Klassik Stiftung Weimar.

CULTURE 

MODERN LIFE

308

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, refreshment stand

Increasingly, unemployment and widespread misery lead to rampant diseases of malnutrition.

The Werkbund housing estate is constructed in Vienna.

Reichstag election in July. Results: 230 NSDAP (Nazis), 133 SPD (Socialists), 75 Zentrum, 89 KPD (Communists), 37 DNVP (National-Conservatives) . . . Reichstag election in November. Results: 196 NSDAP, 121 SPD, 100 KPD, 70 Zentrum, 52 DNVP . . .

The first Degenerate Art exhibition in Germany

The first nuclear transformation is carried out with artificially accelerated particles in a “cascade generator.”

the Dessau Bauhaus, and it bears the number “9.” It dates from 1931, when Thiemann had been studying in Dessau for around a year. It features a series of traits characteristic of other surviving images by this artist. Appearing on the monochromatic surface of the picture are two different framed pictorial fields, each constructed with a different perspective, which seem like projections. On the right-hand side, on an area painted to appear as though it has been sliced away from the rest of the canvas, is a side view of a crouching lion, its head turned frontally toward the viewer. It casts a hard shadow toward the left, while the three figures ranged closely one behind the next and depicted on the lower left area of the picture cast their shadows toward the right. The procession is led by a female figure in turn-of-the-century costume, followed by a masculine armored figure and another male figure in contemporary dress. Floating above each head is a sphere. At the center of the background area of the picture is an indefinite, enigmatic plantlike form which contains an apple that is sliced open to expose its seeds and core. Quite evident here in the use of a perplexing perspective scheme having a variety of contradictory vanishing points is the influence of Pittura Metafisica. Following de Chirico’s model, Thiemann constructs an empty room within which clearly contoured pictorial elements appear like an ensemble of abandoned props on a stage, while the distinct cast shadows allude to a mysterious outer world. The emphatic isolation of the collage-style, cut-out elements, each assigned a different pictorial level, generates an effect of strangeness. If this image is compared with other works by Thiemann, in particular a series of parodies of celebrated works, including Oskar Schlemmer’s Tänzerin (Female Dancer), executed before the Bauhaus period, then they seem to confirm that he pursued an art of conscious allusion through his versatile oeuvre, an art directed against every form of pathos, and one in which the postulates of modernist painting are ironically ruptured. For him, stylistic pluralism was also a method of dismembering the unified pictorial field into apparently unrelated sections that stand alongside one another. Following the model of Max Ernst, he also consciously deploys aesthetically obsolete material drawn from a nineteenth-century image world, one whose rebuslike impenetrability refers to enciphered sexual contents. In fact, the individual pictorial elements stand for past epochs, thereby constituting a counterpoint to the functionally oriented modernism toward which the Bauhaus was striving.

C 77 M 0 Y 100 K 0

Resolution by the municipal council to close the Dessau Bauhaus on October 1.

25

CITATION

EVENTS

TEACHING

Students

Lilly Reich becomes head of the interior design department.

1932

“We   want now to extend the question of the formal design of handcrafted and industrial products toward a critique of commodity production; emerging now is not the how, but instead the what.” Ludwig Mies van der Rohe 1932

90

year of execution: 1932

original Title: Bauhaustreppe

Material: charcoal, graphite, and brown colored pencil on tracing paper

loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 3916

format: 162.3 x 112.5 cm

Bauhaus Stairway Oskar Schlemmer

Bauhaus Stairway | Oskar Schlemmer | 1:7.225

The Bauhaus moves to Berlin as an independent institute for teaching and research. Moves into the Bauhaus Berlin in October 1932.

of grouping the weavers on the stair came from Schlemmer.” He continues: “As I recollect it, Schlemmer came by us as we were discussing how to group this number of persons; I thought at the time that his presence was accidental but I now think (and have thought for a while) that he planned to be present.” Gunta Stölzl and the Schlemmers were close friends, maintaining a regular correspondence until the end of Schlemmer’s life. Several sketches made after the photograph as early as 1928, as well as smaller paintings closely related to figural elements of Bauhaus Stairway exist, although their precise dates are difficult to determine. Bauhaus Stairway was the next to last painting created in the Breslau studio, during the interim period between the closing of the Breslau Academy and the start of Schlemmer’s term at the Vereinigte Staatsschulen für freie und angewandte Kunst (United State Schools for Free and Applied Arts) in Berlin. A large drawing, identical in size to the painting—most probably executed immediately before it and used for transference of the composition to the canvas—is dated September 4, 1932. On that day, Schlemmer wrote in his diary: “Crisis: either I draw the curtain once again and plunge myself into total darkness (for purposes of meditation), or I commit myself to all-out use of color, not for decorative purposes but as an essential element of the painting.” This was a toxic period of significant political and personal uncertainty and introspection for Schlemmer, during which time he cast doubts as to the validity of his own artistic progressiveness. After its December 1932 showing in Berlin, Bauhaus Stairway was the mainstay in a controversial exhibition of Schlemmer’s oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings at the Württembergischer Kunstverein in his native Stuttgart. This opened on March 1, 1933, four days before the National Socialist Party came to power. On March 11, the reactionary critic for the Stuttgarter NS-Kurier published an ominously reproaching review: “This exhibition is doubtless the last chance the public will have to see painted Kunstbolschewismus [Bolshevik art] at large. Who wants to take these pictures seriously? Who respects them? Who wants to defend them as works of art? They are unfinished in every respect. One may say

Memorial and Manifesto Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus Stairway Lilian Tone

T. Lux Feininger, Die Weberinnen auf der Bauhaustreppe (Weavers on the Bauhaus Stairway), ca. 1927, gelatin silver print, 10.8 x 8.3 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin C 75 M 0 Y 100 K 0

312

Among the Bauhaus masters, Oskar Schlemmer was the only painter never to abandon the human figure, continuously celebrating the image of man as the ultimate humanist symbol. An artist at once seduced by theater and fulfilled by painting, Schlemmer’s practice came together under the aegis of “man as the measure of all things.” A particular brand of secular humanism informed his fundamental ground rules: “In the absence of a religious framework, restrict myself to the simplest, to that which lies close at hand. That means: the human figure standing, sitting, lying, walking. A theme capable of unlimited variations.” Schlemmer’s Bauhaus Stairway is an eloquent integration of architectural place and human form. Within a light-diffused space, highly stylized figures proceed up the triangular structure of a staircase. They walk away from the viewer, lending the painting a certain retrospective character, with the exception of an otherworldly dancer standing en pointe. Those figures positioned close to the painting’s edge are summarily cropped, suggesting the look of a snapshot. Shades of blue, red, yellow, and brown thinly overlay the canvas, the stairway losing substance as it ascends, dissolving into the transparency of the luminous background grid. There is a somber spirituality to this dematerializing rise, as if Schlemmer, however unwittingly, were experimenting with a secular, quotidian, and yet still glorious kind of ascension. The interpenetration of diffuse light and faceless figures invokes the evanescent quality of a portrayal of memory itself, fading away as we attempt to grasp it. Although the prototypical quality of the image tends to transcend specificity of place, Bauhaus Stairway directly depicts the iconic stairway of Gropius’s Bauhaus building in Dessau, the figures corresponding to students at the Bauhaus. Throughout Schlemmer’s oeuvre, idealized forms are drastically simplified, generating qualities of timelessness and anonymity, and a placeless sense of space. Paradoxically, Bauhaus Stairway both exemplifies and contradicts these tendencies. Perhaps the single most compelling expression of Schlemmer’s aesthetic concerns, this painting also runs counter to the kind of universalizing tone that generally pervades his work. At once denotative and connotative, it is infused with more or less subtle amounts of personal and historical markers that directly commemorate the artist’s emotional and professional involvement with the Bauhaus: its building, its philosophy, and its members. That Schlemmer titled it so exceptionally and unambiguously also corroborates the claim that this painting is to be understood as a personal tribute, beyond purely aesthetic concerns. Titles that name subjects and places are virtually absent within Schlemmer’s oeuvre, except for early in his youth. The extraordinary circumstances that marked the creation and early reception of Bauhaus Stairway help to account for the painting’s exceptional place within Schlemmer’s oeuvre, and its significance as both manifesto and memorial. Schlemmer painted Bauhaus Stairway as a vehement retort to the National Socialist Party’s decree on August 22, 1932, to shut down the Bauhaus. Between the first sketches and its ultimate completion, however, there exists a long dormant period. Schlemmer made the painting in Breslau on the basis of numerous preparatory drawings that were directly informed by a photograph by T. Lux Feininger. Dated 1927, Feininger’s photograph was taken at the request of a student committee in charge of “a farewell gift for Gropius in which the Bauhaus workshops were to be represented” (T. Lux Feininger). Belying its impromptu, snapshot quality, Feininger and Schlemmer jointly staged the photograph, carefully positioning Gunta Stölzl and the students of the weaving workshop on the main staircase of Gropius’s Bauhaus building in Dessau. Feininger recalls that “the idea

Oskar Schlemmer, Bauhaustreppe (Bauhaus Stairway), 1932, oil on canvas, 162.3 x 114.3 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of Philip Johnson

313 Oskar Schlemmer, Gruppe mit Sitzender (Group with Seated Figure), 1928, oil on canvas, 90.2x 36.2 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Kandem Lamp | Heinrich Bormann | 1:1.938

that in their decadent spiritual attitude they might as well be left on the junk heap where they could rot away unhindered.” Schlemmer’s link to the Bauhaus provided ammunition for the attack: “It is certainly no accident that Oskar Schlemmer belonged to the graveyard of the Dessau Bauhaus and the Breslau Academy.” In reaction, the Württembergischer Kunstverein withdrew the Schlemmer works from public view and hung them “in two back rooms, accessible only to insiders of unquestionable character.” The show’s scheduled itinerary in Dusseldorf was subsequently cancelled. But a protest review published on March 18 came to Schlemmer’s defense: “An art could be called Bolshevik in a narrow or broad sense if it carried something radically dissolving or destructive . . . a negative art emphasizing revolutionary and chaotic elements. Oskar Schlemmer’s painting on the contrary emphasizes clear, definite, bright, synthetic values. His painting, in the measurement of its proportions and in the closely knit space composition is anything but destructive or chaotic.” Alfred H. Barr, Jr., then director of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, witnessed these events in situ during his four-month sojourn in Stuttgart during the late winter and early spring of 1933. An undated note, written in his hand, reads: “Stutt­ gart. Closing of Schlemmer show—I missed the opening but got in afterwards by special permission as a foreigner. I was so enraged that I cabled Philip Johnson to buy the most important painting in the show just to spite the sons of bitches—Philip replied by buying the two biggest—with Bauhaus subjects.” Schlemmer’s first work to be sold overseas, and the last one to be acquired by a public institution during his lifetime, the painting went on public view at MoMA on October 3, 1933, immediately following its arrival in New York. In Bauhaus Stairway, Schlemmer offers a powerful synthesis of man and space, universality and memory, formal geometries and contemporary history, emblematic of perhaps his greatest pictorial achievement. Testifying to the utopian vision that served as its impetus and hastened its creation, the painting is also a document of the dystopian times that shaped history. The final entry in Schlemmer’s diary quotes a letter by Rainer Maria Rilke: “to consider art not a piece plucked out of the world, but the complete and utter transformation of the world into pure glory.” In Bauhaus Stairway, Schlemmer paradoxically achieves both conditions.

Literature Barr 1945. Barr Papers n. d. Feininger/Tone 2008. MoMA Archives 1933. MoMA Archives/NS-Kurier 1933. MoMA Archives/Schlemmer 1933. Schlemmer 1958.

year of execution: 1932 Material: arm made of nickel-plated brass tubing, foot made of black-enameled brass tubing, nickel-plated knurled screw; upper section of the reflector made of nickel-plated aluminum, moveable calotte made of blackenameled ­aluminum, produced by Körting & Mathiesen AG, Leipzig format: height 46 cm loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 2006/147

314

photo: Hartwig Klappert, 2008

Kandem Cane Table Lamp, No. 934 Heinrich-Siegfried Bormann C 73 M 0 Y 100 K 0

Lilian Tone is a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

1

2

3

10

7

11

8

5

6

9

Table Lamp by Kandem Ulrike Brandi

1. Light does not work without darkness. 2. A designer tends to see the lamp as an object. 3. A light designer sees the lamp as the source of light, and deals with the light that emerges. C 71 M 0 Y 100 K 0

316

4

317

12

4. At daybreak, the lamp is simply there. 5. The window lets in more and more light. 6. Lamp and designer face one another.

7. It starts to get dark outside; the table lamp casts a concentrated light. 8. The designer also concentrates. 9. It’s getting late. The idea is good.

10. Who’s there? 11. The little brother. 12. Goodnight! (Note: the second lamp is the ­Tobino table lamp by Achille Castiglioni, 1951, manufactured ­by Flos.)

Borchardt Department Store | Eduard Ludwig | 1:4.541

year of execution: 1931 Material: collage (photograph and pencil drawing) mounted on plywood format: 80 x 108 cm loaned by: Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, SBD I 21303 F

318

C 69 M 0 Y 100 K 0

Ulrike Brandi (born 1957) is a lighting designer who lives in Hamburg.

Remodeling Project for the Borchardt Department Store in Dessau Eduard Ludwig

Mutations Dessau’s Mies van der Rohe Gap Dieter Bankert

Present-day view of Lily-HerkingPlatz at Kavalierstrasse in Dessau, the site for the department store project by Eduard Ludwig (photo: Anne-Barbara Sommer, April 2009) C 67 M 0 Y 100 K 0

320

Leopold III, Duke of Anhalt-Dessau, prince of the Enlightenment, designed Dessau’s Kavalierstrasse as an extended south axis running parallel to the existing city, and the nobility and bourgeoisie built buildings along it befitting the capital of a small sovereign state. This backbone has remained the central bypass around the expanded network of older streets in the inner city. As such, Kavalierstrasse has naturally attracted the forces of urban development. In later years, the bourgeoisie laid claim to their masters’ buildings for their own uses; ducal structures that had fallen into disuse were torn down. Between the bombardment of World War II and the “Socialist Reconstruction” that followed, the historical edifices were almost entirely annihilated. When in 1931 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe asked his student Eduard Ludwig to design a clothing store to adjoin Carlo Ignazio Pozzi’s façade for the former court theater, it was no surprise that the resulting plan was for a thoroughly modern, highly functional glass building. The filigree grid façade, elongated horizontally only by the narrow edges of each floor’s ceilings, would surely have led to protests from every stratum of society. Even under a contemporary understanding of historic preservation, this building would be denied a permit were it proposed for the location next to the theater. In 1976, the war ruins of the classicistic court theater gave way to the “Haus des Reisens,” in which were a travel agency and, in the four upper levels, apartments. The Mies-Ludwig building, had it been built, would have stood to the right of the “Haus des Reisens,” at the same height! In 1930, the AOK health insurance conglomerate commissioned the Dessau architect Kurt Elster to squeeze a modern office and apartment building into just this space, a project that was built despite the malicious notice of the press. The building had a flat roof with a roof terrace. A counter area with the obligatory white plaster façade was added in the rear courtyard. Later additions were the “Theaterbau” arcades, with fashionable shops and offices, and the Café Altes Theater (with color design by Hinnerk Scheper and a wall hanging by Gunta Stölzl) behind the foyer of the court theater, which had burned in 1922. The AOK building survived the war years, the postwar years, and the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and shines today in Kavalierstrasse’s now-interrupted row of buildings. The theater café, a glowing red cube, has been made a theater itself, and is now called the Altes Theater. This city square, renamed in honor of the actress Lily Herking, who died in the theater fire of 1922, is not at the moment a site for architecture students’ academic exercises. If the center of Dessau had gotten its building by Ludwig, alias Mies, and Borchardt the businessman had gotten his office block, if the fire at the theater could have been extinguished in time, and never a dark shadow had fallen over the city, then the question might be posed here as to the maximum contrast permissible between old and new in a neighborhood of quality. In this particular case, it is to be regretted now and in the future that this striking modernist insertion was not made in the center of Dessau. In the city of the Bauhaus, it is an unforgivable loss.

321

Attack on the Bauhaus | Iwao Yamawaki | 1:1.04

original Title: Der Schlag gegen das Bauhaus year of execution: 1932 Material: photocollage (printed in the journal Kokusai-Kenchiku (Tokyo), vol. 8, no. 12, December 1932,­p. 272), letterpress print format: 26 x 19 cm loaned by: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Attack on the Bauhaus Iwao Yamawaki

Dipl.-Ing. Dieter Bankert ­(born 1938) is an architect who lives in Dessau-Rosslau.

C 65 M 0 Y 100 K 0

322

Japanese Bauhaus student Iwao Yamawaki (1898–1987) explicitly depicted the decisive end of the Dessau Bauhaus in 1932 through a photocollage expressing both the school’s aesthetic pedagogy and its tumultuous political struggles throughout its short history. The August 22, 1932, bill put forward by the Nazi Party (officially the National Socialist German Workers’ Party/NSDAP) to close the Bauhaus on October 1 passed with a majority vote. The members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), whose political support had been critical to the Bauhaus’s survival, abstained from voting and sealed its fate. Then-director Mies van der Rohe, who had taken an apolitical position from the outset of his tenure from 1930, responded by continuing the school as a private institution in a disused telephone factory in the Steglitz area of Berlin using the school’s royalties from wallpaper designs. However, the police did a raid and closed down the building of the Bauhaus in Berlin for a day on April 11, 1933, and by August the faculty finally resolved to dissolve the school. The overt political imagery of Nazi officials tromping over Walter Gropius’s Dessau Bauhaus building in Yamawaki’s collage proved to be too strong for its display in Germany in 1932, but nonetheless was published in black and white in the December 1932 issue of the Japanese journal Kokusai kenchiku (International Architecture). Yamawaki’s accompanying article “On the Closing of the Bauhaus,” which included translated excerpts of German reports elaborating on the school’s demise, identified the Berlin newspaper headline “Der Schlag gegen das Bauhaus” from August 23, 1932, as the source of his collage. Yamawaki’s article “On the Closing of the Bauhaus” noted his personal experience of the realities of attending the school between 1930–32 as a series of closings and dismissals. Iwao Yamawaki and his wife, Michiko, who became the second and third Japanese students to attend the Bauhaus after Takehiko Mizutani attended from 1926–29, arrived in Germany in the summer of 1930 just as the second director, the left-leaning Hannes Meyer, was forced to resign by the city of Dessau. Although Bauhaus founding director Walter Gropius had departed in February 1928, following the Nazis’ curtailment of the school’s funding and attacks on the Bauhaus as promoting “degenerate art” and “cultural

Complexities of the Collage Iwao Yamawaki’s Attack on the Bauhaus Ken Tadashi Oshima

Albert Hennig, Notizen zum gewaltsamen Ende einer Idee (Notes on the Violent End of an Idea), early summer 1933, charcoal

C 63 M 0 Y 100 K 0

324

bolshevism,” he stepped in to recommend that the third director be Mies, who underlined an apolitical direction for the school. Nonetheless, Yamawaki encountered political friction within the school, where he noted that “arguments never stopped” and one was required to “quickly judge political propositions.” Within the tense political context of Germany as well as Japan in 1932, Yamawaki’s article on the end of the Bauhaus did not explicitly articulate his own political opinions, but rather indirectly expressed his opinions through his selection of quotes including the Berliner Tageblatt July 13, 1930, assertion that “The National Socialist Party had continued to interfere with the artistic work and the educational direction of the Bauhaus.” While Yamawaki’s coverage of the Bauhaus included a photograph of the Dessau Bauhaus closed by Nazis, he also included images of the school’s exhibition space, posters, and studios, which he noted were marked by a distinctly international character with students from France, Britain, Holland, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Turkey, as well as Japan and Germany. The 1932 closing of the Dessau Bauhaus, however, expelled foreign nationals as well as Kandinsky and Hilberseimer and ended this international phase. Yamawaki’s collage combines aspects of his Bauhaus education under Mies, who emphasized both the practical and artistic sides of design. Following preliminary coursework with Josef Albers and Wassily Kandinsky, Yamawaki shifted the focus of his studies away from architecture and interior design to photography, a subject that had already interested him in Japan and that he wished to develop further with Walter Peterhans. He also looked to photomontage through the influence of his fellow student and future Bauhaus teacher Kurt Kranz and spent time photographing extensively during travels to Berlin, Amsterdam, and Moscow. Yamawaki’s collage of the modern activities of the time thus brought together his own photographs of the Dessau Bauhaus with images from the left-wing AIZ Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung, a workers’ magazine popular with Bauhaus students. Ultimately, Yamawaki’s publication of both the words and images of the Bauhaus expressed his desire for the worldwide dissemination of the school, which he hoped would “in some form or other, rear its head once again in the world of plastic arts.” In America, on paper, four sheets, 14 x 18.5 cm, 13.5 x 18.2 cm, 14.2 x 17.5 cm, 13.3 x 16.5 cm, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau

325

Results: 288 NSDAP (Nazis), 120 SPD (Socialists), 74 Zentrum, 81 KPD (Communists), 52 DNVP (NationalConservatives) . . .

4.8 mil.

Adolf Hitler is appointed Chancellor of the German Reich. The SA, the SS, and the Stahlhelm are appointed as auxiliary police forces.

1933

Von Hindenburg dissolves the Reichstag. The “Reichstagsbrandverordnung” (Reichstag Fire Decree) suspends most basic rights. The final Reichstag election in March.

Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, King Kong

The fourth CIAM Congress on “The Functional City” is held on a ship traveling toward Athens; the Athens Charter is issued.

Opening in Camden, New Jersey, in June of 1933 is the first drive-in cinema in the world.

unemployed

POLITICS

CULTURE 

Resignation of the government of Kurt von Schleicher

Coming onto the market in Germany is the “Volksempfänger,” a short wave radio for the Everyman. Joseph Goebbels refers to the radio as “the most important instrument of mass influence.”

MODERN LIFE

Prof. Ken Tadashi Oshima is an associate professor with the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington, WA.

C 61 M 0 Y 100 K 0

326

Book burnings

Disbanding of all labor unions

The “Pfeffermühle” cabaret is founded in Munich by Klaus and Erika Mann.

So-called “racial hygiene” becomes a branch of the medical profession.

the philosophy of the Bauhaus was reborn in 1933 under Josef Albers at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, in 1937 both under Moholy-Nagy and his colleagues at the New Bauhaus in Chicago and under Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer at Harvard, and in 1938 under Mies van der Rohe at the Armour Institute in Chicago. In Japan, Renshichirô Kawakita founded the Bauhaus-inspired School of New Architecture and Industrial Arts (1931–36) in the Ginza District of Tokyo. Yamawaki, upon returning to Japan in December 1932, started his own architect’s office and pursued photography inspired by his Bauhaus teachings for the rest of his life. In Tokyo, Yamawaki assisted his wife in the 1933 Bau­ haus Textile Exhibition, went on to plan and design the 1950 Gropius and the Bauhaus exhibition, and, inspired by the theater he had seen in Germany, established the Haiyu-za theater in the Roppongi district of Tokyo. As the Japanese authority on the Bauhaus, he went on to write numerous articles and books including Moholy-Nagy (1948), Mies van der Rohe (1948), and The World of Josef Albers (1963) and proved that the school’s ideals did not completely end in 1932.

CITATION

EVENTS

TEACHING

5 C 59 M 0 Y 100 K 0

Students

14 Bauhaus festival in Berlin with circa 700 participants 32 students are arrested

“At   its final session, the faculty composed a resolution announcing the closure of the Bauhaus. Primarily responsible for this decision was the institution’s difficult financial situation. The Office of the Secret State Police, the Prussian Ministry for Science, Art, and National Education and the school authorities have been made aware of this resolution.” Ludwig Mies van der Rohe 1933

1933

In July, Mies van der Rohe and the masters dissolve the Bauhaus.

C

iktn t n o u P zep c n n e erre e f f e rre

Regina Bittner The Bauhaus on the Market On the Difficult Relationship between the Bauhaus and Consumer Culture In an interview appearing in a thematic issue of the magazine DU dealing with that which is currently “good and cheap,” sociologist Sieghard Neckel makes reference to the Bauhaus. The aim of the school is said to have been the development of quality, aesthetically superior products featuring high degrees of functionality and durability which would be available to a mass consumer base at affordable prices. From functional household items all the way to mass housing development, the avant-garde felt obligated to contribute to the cultural design and decor of the Social Democratic era. When we attempt to determine what has become of these demands, it becomes clear that there is little left of the aspiration of providing commodities that are both “good and cheap.” A glance at prices already reveals, says Neckel, that Bauhaus furniture today can no longer be identified with such intentions. In the context of the aestheticization of everyday life which occurred during the 1980s, Bauhaus products had already been endowed with a new and emblematic character. In 1987, the Sinus Institute in Heidelberg published a study dealing with the transformations of social milieus in Germany with reference to styles of home decor. Surfacing within this multifaceted range of milieus was a pronounced taste for “cultural modernity”: the living rooms of the ambitious middle class were furnished with Marcel Breuer chairs. Bauhaus furniture corresponded to the desires for distinctiveness of an enlightened middle class, which associated recognizable Bauhaus products with a specific type of cultural capital: invoking the democratic ideas of the Bauhaus was a way to demonstrate openness, modernity, and reflexivity. Within the flood of designer products on offer, and their bids for modes of identification, these “classics” at the same time guaranteed something resembling “timeless contemporaneity.” In 2003, renewed investigations along the same lines detected displacements within this range of milieus. The new Sinus Institute study localized Bauhaus furniture now within upper-class milieus, particularly in so-called established or post-material circles. A lifestyle incorporating the Bauhaus look could now be situated between the poles of an ethics of success, a controlling mindset, and a pronounced claim to exclusivity on the one hand, and enlightened thinking, intellectual pretensions, and basically liberal attitudes on the other. Apparently, an environment composed of such

331

objects corresponded to the tastes of the winners in postindustrial society. It accommodated desires for distinction on the part of a service-provision and knowledge-based elite, one that was mobile, cosmopolitan, and enthusiastic about technology, and would liked to have seen its way of life prolonged indefinitely. Beginning in the mid-1980s, meanwhile, inexpensive copies of Bauhaus classics began to conquer the market. Produced in great numbers, they promoted the dismantling of the exclusivity of high-status milieus. Also observable beginning in the mid-1990s was the gradual disappearance of Bauhaus furniture from the magazine Schöner Wohnen. Purism, apparently, was out, replaced now by emotionality and atmosphere. Regaining social acceptance as well were aggressive displays of wealth and prestige. The Villa Gerl in Berlin, designed by Hans Kollhoff in the Neoclassic style, advertised the insignia of economic success and social recognition. For such strategies of distinction, the Bauhaus style had become unserviceable. When we trace the career of Bauhaus furniture design in the literature from its orientation toward daily objects intended for mass consumption to an orientation toward the exquisite design object, one gains the impression that we are dealing with a history of loss. Also said to have been lost in the course of the twentieth century were not only the social claims associated with Bauhaus design, but also the ambition to create objects of daily use that would be unencumbered by the constraints of consumer society. Going farther, we can say that—in a kind of reversal—these objects now played a role their inventors originally deplored: in place of the necessity for permanence and “timelessness,” we find instead “stable value” in the sense of an added value that corresponds to capital investment, and is hence more than merely symbolic. But this career can also be read differently: the inherent contradiction that emerged from attempts on the part of the Bauhaus during the 1920s to navigate between commodity aesthetics and consumer culture continues to manifest itself right up to the present day.

332

des deutschen Volkes (The Social Stratification of the German People), sociologist Theodor Geiger confirmed the presence in the Weimar Republic of a “sociohistorical distortion.” This distortion consisted in the fact that although statistical analyses showed that the proletariat was large in percentage terms compared with the middle class, most people nonetheless regarded themselves as belonging to the social center. Apparently, the social classes and strata of the Weimar Republic drew upon mentalities, ideologies, and explanations of social reality which for the most

C 55 M 0 Y 100 K 0

The Aesthetics of Mass-Packaging the New Middle Class • In his 1932 publication Zur sozialen Schichtung

part failed to correspond to their actual economic situations. The background against which modern society was reordering itself consisted of world war and revolution, the disintegration of the bourgeoisie as a sociocultural formation at the end of the German Empire, and the rise of the new white-collar middle classes. In general, the social and political climate of the Weimar Republic was determined by hopes for an equalization of social interests. The transformation of the proletariat into white-collar workers and, conversely, the proletarianization of white-collar workers formerly enjoying middle-class status was analyzed by Siegfried Kracauer with reference to its implications for the sociocultural order of Weimar society. A new mass culture of leisure activities characterizing everyday life in the metropoles had begun to erode formerly sharply drawn class boundaries and their externally recognizable traits of distinction. Pressures for equalization and reconciliation find expression in the programs and manifestoes of the Bauhaus, as well as in its energetic alliance with the market. Functionally designed things, houses, and appliances, with their positive implication of the equalizing power of technology, were regarded as contributing to the dismantling of the class and social differences whose reality was so feared in Weimar society. These so-to-speak “classless” objects—now freed of social codes and semiotic signals— accommodated the requirements of a new urban social group, the white-collar workers, and satisfied their search for self-­expression. The Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart had already had this specific target group in mind, namely the modern metropolitan individual. At the same time, this alliance with the market did not remain unremarked. In 1929, Ernst Kállai, editor of bau­ haus magazine, engaged in a critical retrospective of “Ten Years of the Bauhaus”: “Everyone today is aware of it: apartments with a lot of glass and gleaming metal: the Bauhaus style. The same is the case for the new hygienic residential and living atmosphere: the Bauhaus style. . . . lamps with nickel-plated bases and metal and glass panels as shades: the Bauhaus style. . . . Gropius and his colleagues are themselves guilty of the fact that the Bauhaus has spawned a series of imitators, and is now plagued by more-or-less objectionable artsy-craftsy manifestations, all presented as Bauhaus style.” Kállai’s critique not only refers to the circumstance that as early as the 1920s, virtually everything that looked new, objective, and innovative, and that corresponded to the consumerist requirements of the young urban white-collar workers, had already been labeled “Bauhaus style.” His remarks are also relevant to the circumstance that at the Bauhaus, two distinct camps remained opposed, groups referred to by Peter Galison as “aesthetes” and “functionalists.” These camps were

Sinus milieu study for Germany, 2003, localization of the social milieu which identifies with the “Bauhaus style”

Article in the British journal Observer on the currency of Bauhaus furniture, published on the occasion of the London presentation of the exhibition entitled 50 Jahre Bauhaus, 1968, BauhausArchiv Berlin

333

334

characterized by contrasting ideological premises, which influenced their respective relationships to industrial production and to the market. While Walter Gropius was reproached for the purportedly handicraft character of production of the Bauhaus (and stigmatized as handicraft in particular was everything characterized by an individualistic and sentimental orientation), advocates of functionalism grouped around Hannes Meyer and argued for a consistent rationalization, internationalization, and scientific reorientation. The focus of their efforts was that which Michael Hays has referred to as the “posthumanist subject,” a concept that invokes an altered conceptualization of subjectivity. Regarded now as obsolete was the ideology of the bourgeois subject, based on a humanistic model of subjectivity, one dependent on invocations of originality, universality, and authority. It is in functional architecture and functional objects that Hays detects the real provocation of an ideology of the bourgeois subject, for such objects are said to anticipate collective processes leading to the construction of a new subject status. Yet despite this

apparent avowal of a “mass aesthetic,” the Bauhaus under Hannes Meyer too was confronted with the ambivalencies of the market. For the sake of the collaboration between workshops and industry promoted so forcefully by Meyer, he was obliged to endure scolding from among his own ranks, who in turn reproached him for “collaborating” with the capitalists.

Walter and Ise Gropius in the living room of the director’s house, 1927 (photo: Lucia Moholy), Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Reformer or Victim: The Bauhaus on the Market

C 53 M 0 Y 100 K 0

Living room of the Bauhaus Volks­ wohnung (people’s apartment) at an exhibition in Leipzig (photo: Walter Peterhans), 1929, BauhausArchiv Berlin

While the interiors of many Berlin bars and clubs during the 1920s, decorated in the new and “objective” idiom, satisfied the leisure and consumerist desires of ambitious younger white-collar workers, critics of the so-called luxury uses of the Bauhaus style too were unable to escape the grip of the market. As early as the 1920s, the difficult relationship between the Bauhaus and consumerist culture gave rise to numerous views from various camps: Alexander­Schwab, for example, drew a line between conceptual and design “Sachlichkeit,” or objectivity, and capitalistic economic reification: “The new architecture has a

335

Literature Bittner 2003, p. 29. Breuer 2001. Galison 2001. Geiger 1932, p. 85. Hays 1992, p. 20. Kállai 1986, p. 136. Leiprecht/Seiler 2004. Müller/Dröge 1995, p. 48. Schwab 1930, p. 67. Schwartz 2006, p. 138. Veblen 2007.

336

Regina Bittner (born 1962), a cultural researcher, heads the Bauhaus ­Kolleg of the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau. C 51 M 0 Y 100 K 0

Marcel Breuer’s club chair, produced by Knoll International, in one of the lobbies of the art museum in Utsunomiya, Japan, January 2009 (photo: Wolfgang Thöner)

Patrick Rössler Escape into the Public Sphere The Exhibition as an Instrument of Self-Presentation at the Bauhaus

double face: haute bourgeois and proletarian, capitalist and socialist. It could even be said that it is both autocratic and democratic.” Ernst Kállai was even more emphatic: “Historic costume is now replaced by a technical one. But the latter is by no means better. The bourgeois remains a bourgeois. Despite all Sachlichkeit, his home remains a luxury object. The objectivity of the new way of living in the Bauhaus style has two sides: one for the many, the other for the few who are able to afford it.” Had the vital relationship with the market into which the Bauhaus entered with the intention of reforming all of this now reversed into its opposite—a superficial fashion designed to stimulate consumer society with new and innovative products? When the Bauhaus was confronted with the dynamic rules and mechanisms of the market, artistically designed products were converted into commodities. And it is thanks to these same mechanisms that, today, only a few Bauhaus designs have successfully entered the cosmos of higher status design products. With the differentiation of consumer society during the twentieth century (a process at whose origins the Bauhaus was present as an advocate of a mass consumerism oriented toward living standards, one whose generalization in Europe commenced only after World War II, and which has been marked since the 1980s by a shift toward middleclass lifestyle consumption), Bauhaus furnishings have gained in symbolic capital. In the meantime, they have come in particular to certify cultivated taste and a superior lifestyle. The fact that such needs for individual distinctiveness are satisfied primarily by Marcel Breuer’s tubular steel furniture and Marianne Brandt’s lamps is related to the consumerist practices and requirements for stylistic­ distinction pursued by the new urban middle classes whose origins lie in the 1920s. With the arrival of these objects on the market, a Bauhaus image was formed that has determined their changeable and dynamic careers as products up to the present day—careers whose highpoints are found in disputes over copyrights, and controversies involving the question of whether they are to be regarded as objects of use or as art objects. From the very beginning, the wooden furniture of Josef Albers, for instance, has been unsuitable as objects of “demonstrative consumption” (Veblen). Their austere look and reduced materiality contradicts the Bauhaus image that asserted itself on the market. They are not addressed, finally, to the bourgeois subject and his yearnings for individuality, but appear instead as that which they originally were: industrially produced objects intended for daily use. And if they have been taken up in one way or the other in everyday life, then that is perhaps genuine testimony to their success.

The guiding principle of the Bauhaus was launched by Walter Gropius with a drum roll: “Art and technology— ­a new unity” was the title of a programmatic lecture that formed a highpoint of the Weimar Bauhaus exhibition of 1923. In 1929, Hannes Meyer—Gropius’s successor as Bauhaus director—presented a contrasting model under the title “bauhaus and society,” a model whose essentials were to be propagated through a traveling exhibition. There is nothing surprising about the fact that this controversial art school—which found itself in a permanent state of emergency and was obliged to fend off an almost ceaseless stream of attacks from outsiders—arranged exhibitions as public relations events designed to legitimate its existence. The promotional activities undertaken by the Bauhaus—their existence confirmed by and occasionally criticized as overdone in contemporary accounts—were probably structurally necessary if the facility’s survival was to be insured. It would be wrong to restrict considerations of the strategies of self-presentation undertaken by the Bauhaus to its exhibition activities alone. Still, as a point of crystallization, the exhibitions are invaluable in the effort to clarify the manner in which public relations instruments were applied, when they were introduced, and with which aims. As early as late June 1919, less than three months after the school’s foundation, the Bauhaus organized its first exhibition of student works, an event deployed by Gropius to stage a confrontation between his own program and academic tradition. Subsequently, when certain renowned artists found among the school’s newly appointed instructors, among them Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee, participated in exhibitions, this made it possible to call attention to the institution by associating it with “big names.” The first, improvised, unprofessional presentation of the facility to the local public, on the other hand, proved a fiasco: despite their identification as material exercises from a preliminary course, the student and apprentice works presented in April and May of 1922 provoked controversy among the art public. The participation of Bauhaus masters in the Ersten Thüringischen Kunstausstellung (First Thuringian Art Exhibition) at the Landesmuseum in Weimar pro­ vided local politicians and the press with fresh ammunition for their attacks—and this despite national recognition of the coalition’s right-wing and conservative character.

337

338

C 49 M 0 Y 100 K 0

The Internationale Architektur exhibition as part of the Bauhaus exhibition of 1923 in Weimar, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Archiv der Moderne

Before the Bauhaus mustered a counterstrike, however, the school committed itself to a project that seems an oddity from today’s perspective. For its first exhibition outside of Germany, the masters shipped hundreds of watercolors, drawings, and woodblock and other prints, among them works from Johannes Itten’s preliminary course, to—of all places—India (!), specifically to the Indian Society of Oriental Art. The eventful circumstances surrounding the shipment—including the seizing of its contents by the customs authorities—have never been fully elucidated. Although subsequent research once concluded that some exhibits were permanently lost, a handwritten annotation in the Bauhaus files refers to a return of the sheets in the spring of 1923. The origins of the plans for the large-scale Bauhaus exhibition of late summer 1923 can no longer be fully clarified. Gropius always implied that the Thuringian government had demanded the exhibition as a kind of the public statement of account, one also intended to quell political resistance to the Bauhaus. Éva Forgács’s painstaking reconstruction of events, however, casts doubt on the notion that it was a question of forced concessions to political reality. It was clear to Gropius—who proposed concrete plans for the exhibition as late as September 1922 and presented these to the council of masters—that an event of this kind would fulfill a series of different functions. Not only would it serve—as commonly assumed—as a “means for securing the school’s existence” by legitimating its work in the eyes of taxpayers and the political opposition, but would at the same time strengthen inner cohesion. And in light of persistent internal factionalism, the myth of hostile pressure from without may even have served to reinforce a sense of loyalty among the Bauhäusler (as members of the Bauhaus are sometimes called). Moreover, the exhibition was supposed to launch an aggressive marketing strategy of Bauhaus products through industry, designed to make possible a degree of financial independence from government subsidies. For Gropius, last but not least, plans by the Deutscher Werkbund to hold its annual convention in Weimar in 1923 may have represented a personal challenge to confront his most important target group with successful results from the institution he had founded. Beginning in mid-August, the most diverse facets of activ­ ities of the Bauhaus were presented at a variety of locations throughout the city. The exhibition, conceptualized as a trade fair, was primarily directed at exhibition visitors, but was at the same time staged as a media event from the start—as “the event that would ‘introduce’ the Bauhaus to the world” (Forgács). The exhibition’s astonishing media resonance was amplified by the intensive press work undertaken by the Bauhaus directorate. Just as at an international architecture exhibition, the presentation of works by

the Bauhäusler—whose focal point was the experimental “Haus Am Horn,” a late realization of Gropius’s idea of the building as a total work of art—was flanked by a series of complementary events, chiefly the Bauhaus Week of August 15–19, 1923, with a heavy schedule of lectures, music, and theater performances. The enormous public resonance (official estimates by the municipal authorities cited hundreds of visitors on an average day, and thousands of guests during the Bauhaus Week) not only testifies to the broad success of the exhibition, but also to the effectiveness of the accompanying public relations campaign mounted by Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy. Representative of the importance attributed to public profiling from the very beginning is the financial plan for the exhibition, dated December 18, 1922, which already envisions 20 percent of the total costs being devoted to “propaganda, the printing of promotional texts, and trips designed to establish links with industry.” Within the Bauhaus itself, however, this aggressive focus on publicity was not uncontroversial. As early as October 1922, Bauhaus master Gerhard Marcks gave voice in a polemic to his “non-authoritative” insights into the planned media event: “The Bauhaus exhibition has begun! A poster on every Mitropa car! . . . Hotels jammed with foreigners. . . . The “Bauhaus Internationale” being played on public squares everywhere. People smoke only the Bauhaus Brand. . . . And the reason for all of this? Standing in the museum are a couple of cabinets filled with fabric samples and teapots, and Europe can’t stop raving about it. Poor Europe!” Shortly after taking up his directorship, Hannes Meyer developed an ideological counterposition to the Bauhaus of his predecessor Gropius. This position was manifested in a traveling exhibition of 1929–30, which presented mainly Bauhaus products at venues in Breslau, Zurich, Mannheim, Essen, Basel, and Dessau. If Gropius had wanted nothing less than to change the world, then Meyer subordinated himself to the society his design work was intended to serve. While Gropius’s turn toward industry had always left a place for the creative act of the individual, Meyer’s Bauhaus collective model tolerated even untalented students—as long as they conformed obediently to their societal function. The decision in favor of a traveling exhibition already mirrored the altered fundamental orientation: in 1923, Gropius let the world come to Weimar, while now, Meyer brought the Bauhaus to the people. It is characteristic that the venue for the Basel show (which ran from April 21 to May 20, 1929) was the Gewerbemuseum (Museum of Applied Arts), and that it ran concurrently with an exhibition of works by Bauhaus masters Josef Albers, Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Oskar Schlemmer in

Room devoted to Bauhaus buildings in Dessau in the Modern Architecture: International Exhibition presented by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1932, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

The Bauhaus touring exhibition in Zurich in 1930, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

339

340

C 47 M 0 Y 100 K 0

Title page of the catalogue for the Bauhaus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1938, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

the Basel Kunsthalle. The applied versus the fine arts—this contrast was addressed openly in an accompanying text by Ernst Kállai, then editor of the magazine bauhaus: “The temporal coincidence of these two exhibitions represents an opportunity for observant visitors to confirm that the Bauhaus in Dessau has two faces: a practical and functionally oriented one, and an artistic and freely fantastic one.” The traveling exhibition reflected this growing opposition with great clarity, and was dominated by workshop pieces, architectural designs, and examples from instruction in architecture and form. Georg Schmidt, head of the Basel Kunsthalle, contributed a lengthy introductory text to the traveling Bauhaus exhibition that was installed in the Zurich Kunstgewerbemuseum during the following year (from July 20 to August 17, 1930). Schmidt traces the new Bauhaus spirit back to the maxim of Sachlichkeit (objectivity). As its chosen aim, he specifies the “overcoming of style,” and still more drastically, stylelessness: “Just as a plow or an airplane has no style . . . and are nonetheless beautiful alongside their plain utility, the same is true for our cities, our houses, our furniture, and our appliances!” As the text itself concedes, this radical challenge was not yet fully implemented in the items on display in the exhibition, which themselves represented only stages along a path. For Meyer, however, it represented a final stage: ironically, his dismissal from his post as director, announced on August 1, 1930, arrived in the middle of the Zurich show. From an international perspective, this competition between­conceptualizations of the Bauhaus can be elucidated on the basis of two exhibition projects, each of which once again consolidated its respective strategy of self-presentation.­The Deutscher Werkbund was invited to organize a German department at the annual exhibition of the Société des artistes décorateurs in Paris’s Grand Palais. In early summer 1930, at a time when he was no longer director of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius was commissioned to work up the concept for the presentation. By virtue of the fact that he recruited his former Bauhaus colleagues Herbert Bayer, László Moholy-Nagy, and Marcel Breuer, whose approach to the presentation reverted to a large extent back to the products and concepts developed in Dessau, the “Section allemande” could be characterized fully as a presentation of the Bauhaus idea on an international platform. In conjunction with Herbert Bayer’s congenial exhibition guide, the show is essentially dedicated to documenting the innovative production of the early Dessau Bauhaus. A greater contrast with Hannes Meyer’s improvised Moscow Bauhaus exhibitions of 1930–31 is almost inconceivable. As Klee correctly predicted, Meyer’s path would lead him from the Bauhaus “to the East,” accompanied by

a few former Bauhäusler. His first, improvised presentation at the architecture academy under the title Das zerstörte Bauhaus (The Bauhaus Destroyed) was followed in 1931 by a show at Moscow’s State Museum of New Western Art, which took the form of a wide-ranging retrospective including more than one hundred and forty drawings, prints, and photographs, as well as around forty objects (most of them textile samples). The exhibition’s title betrays its focus: bauhaus dessau während der leitung unter hannes meyer 1928–1930 (The Dessau Bauhaus during the Directorship of Hannes Meyer 1928–1930). In contrast to the opulent Werkbund show, the few surviving photographs indicate a plain, conventional design of panels and showcases. This exhibition, also shown subsequently in Char­ kov in the Ukraine, was received with diffidence by public and officialdom alike. This contrast is visible in particular in the Moscow exhibition catalogue, which consists—unlike Bayer’s elegant design for the “Section allemande”—of a simple collection of texts printed on cheap paper, onto which the illustrations of products and architectural projects have been hastily arranged. Characteristically, the title page shows the cover of Die Kämpferin, a German workers’ sheet, which displays a German Communist Party poster from 1930 designed by former Bauhäusler Max Gebhard—that is to say, a motif with at most a tenuous connection to the Bauhaus. In his introductory catalogue text, Hannes Meyer relates the history of the Bauhaus from his own perspective, ending with the (undeniably correct) conclusion that “our experiences at the Dessau Bauhaus have demonstrated the impossibility of a ‘red Bauhaus’ as an institute for teaching socialist architecture under capitalist conditions.” Such interpretations are nowhere to be found in the important Bauhaus retrospectives of 1938 and 1968, which would substantially shape international perceptions of the institute. The title of the exhibition held in New York’s Museum of Modern Art (The Bauhaus 1919–1928) already reveals its exclusive concern with the “classical” Bauhaus under Gropius’s direction; it is not exactly astonishing, then, that the exhibition concept was the joint work of Gropius and Bayer. Both the choice of display items and the commentary contained in the catalogue (also printed in Germany after World War II) collectively emphasize the image attributed by preference to the Bauhaus retrospectively: professional and modern, international and cosmopolitan. The context of this exhibition too is decisive: from the perspective of its organizers, its essential function was to provide other Bauhäusler with new lives, enabling them to launch new careers in the American homeland where they had become exiled. Not long before Gropius’s death in 1969, the ambitious traveling exhibition of 1968—characterized once again by Herbert Bayer’s design style—conveyed the

The 50 Jahre Bauhaus exhibition in Stuttgart, 1968, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

341

Literature Bayer 1955. Bernays 1928. Berlin et al. 1995. Droste 1990. Fiedler/Feierabend 1999. Fleischmann 1984. Forgács 1995, p. 108. Haus 1994. Hemken 1994. Hüter 1982.

Rainer K. Wick Selective Appropriation Remarks on the Reception of Bauhaus Pedagogy in Germany

same image of the Bauhaus, contributing substantially to the formation of the school’s legend and its sympathetic rediscovery. Both the show’s venues, scattered all around the world, and the catalogue editions published in German, English, French, and Spanish, were ideally suited to endowing this self-presentation with legitimacy—one that has, moreover, left its traces on Bauhaus reception right ­up to the present day. Prof. Dr. Patrick Rössler (born 1964), a journalist and communications expert, is a professor at the University of Erfurt.

Isaacs 1983–84. James-Chakraborty 2006. Kállai 1929. Kröll 1974. Moscow 1931. Neumann 1985. Rössler 2009b. Scheidig 1966. Schimpf 2008. Schmidt 1930. Siebenbrodt 2000. Sohn 1997. Stuttgart 1968. Weimar 1923. Whitford 1993. Wingler 1975.

C 45 M 0 Y 100 K 0

342

The worldwide influence of that which might be referred to sweepingly as “Bauhaus pedagogy” has been conspicuous, especially regarding the impact of the principle of workshop training, the concept of the preliminary course, and the diffusion of elementary design instruction. This influence did not begin with the closing of the Bauhaus in 1933 and the emigration of numerous Bauhäusler (as those affiliated with the Bauhaus are often called) in particular to the United States, but is observable already during the Weimar Republic at institutes of art and design, as well as in general education. Still, not everything having the appearance of being bauhäuslerisch from a historical perspective can be traced back to the direct influence of the Bauhaus. Some such tendencies grew out of similarly oriented efforts at renewal in the context of the so-called art school reform movement between 1900 and 1933. This is true, for example, of the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts) in Halle, generally known as “Burg Giebichenstein,” where between 1915 and 1928, architect Paul Thiersch pursued the systematic organization of the workshops, initially as places of instruction, later as productive and production workshops. In contrast to the Bauhaus, with its programmatic technological and industrial orientation beginning in 1923 (“Art and technology— a new unity”), handicraft values were able to assert their centrality and primacy at Burg Giebichenstein as late as the end of the 1920s. In Halle, the heightened influence of the Bauhaus was detectable after the closing of the state Bauhaus school in Weimar, when teaching personnel at the “Burg” were to some extent recruited from among the ranks of former Bauhaus teachers and students (Gerhard Marcks, Benita Otte, Marguerite Friedlaender, Erich Dieckmann, Hans Wittwer, Erich Consemüller, Walter Herzger). Regarding its basic tendency, this is also true of the Staatliche Hochschule für Baukunst und Handwerk, the Weimar architectural academy that was the direct successor institution to the Bauhaus in Weimar. This institution was directed by Otto Bartning from 1926 to 1930, and a number of former Bauhäusler were engaged as instructors: Ernst Neufert, Heinz Nösselt, Erich Dieckmann, Otto Lindig, Reinhold Weidensee, Richard Winkelmayer, Wilhelm Wagenfeld, Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, and Otto Dorfner. In ways resembling Halle, the pedagogical core of the school was its workshops, with their orientation to productive

343

344

C 43 M 0 Y 100 K 0

Material study for Peter Keler’s preliminary course at the Hochschule für Architektur und Bildende Kunst in Weimar, 1949, Archiv Rainer K. Wick

activity. Even before the establishment of an architecture division at the Bauhaus (where it was accorded a primary status in programmatic terms), architecture was at the center of Bartning’s educational concept. The Frankfurter Kunstschule, created in 1922 through the fusion of the Städelschule and Frankfurt’s local school of applied arts, was “perhaps the most singular Bauhaus derivative” (Wingler) in the Weimar Republic. In 1924, under the direction of art historian Fritz Wichert, it was reorganized according to the model of the Weimar Bauhaus, and divided into three main departments: preliminary classes, design classes, and workshops. Bauhaus-derived impulses are also evident in the preliminary class for the second semester, directed by Bauhäusler Karl Peter Röhl, but also in the architecture department under Adolf Meyer, in the metal workshop under Christian Dell, and in the sculpture department under Josef Hartwig. And Ferdinand Kramer too—who studied at the Bauhaus briefly in 1919—was present at the Frankfurter Kunstschule as a visiting instructor from 1926 to 1928. Concerning the prototypical function of the preliminary course, about which Reyner Banham remarked that it had become customary to “regard it as the basic core, even the total substance of the ‘Bauhaus method’ as a whole,” it suffices to recall the presence as instructors of Bauhäusler Max Peiffer Watenphul at the Folkwang-Schule in Essen (1927–31) and Fritz Schleifer and Alfred Ehrhardt at the Landeskunstschule Hamburg (1930–33). Functioning as transmitters of Bauhaus ideas at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Stettin were Kurt Schwerdtfeger, Vincent Weber, and Else Mögelin. In the 1920s, elements of Bauhaus pedagogy also flowed into the private Itten school in Berlin through Itten himself, as well as through the teachings of former Bauhäusler such as Gyula Pap, Max Bronstein, Fred Forbat, Ernst Neufert, Umbo (Otto Umbehr), and Lucia Moholy. An interesting phenomenon from the point of view of reception history, alongside the adoption of elements of Bauhaus pedagogy at public and private art schools during the interwar period, is how pedagogical concepts drawn from the Bauhaus penetrated school instruction in the arts in the Weimar Republic. Among well-known pedagogues of art in the Weimar Republic who attempted to make the design concepts developed at the Bauhaus serviceable for training in both art and craft at schools of general instruction, we mention here only Christoph Natter, Hans Friedrich Geist, and Alfred Ehrhardt. Attempts to revive the Bauhaus after 1945 in the Soviet zone of occupation failed both in Dessau (Hubert Hoffmann) and in Weimar (Peter Keler, Hanns HoffmannLederer). In the German Democratic Republic (GDR), which was established in 1949, the Bauhaus and in

particular­Bauhaus Constructivism were regarded negatively and reproached for being formalistic and bourgeois, and even stigmatized as a “specific manifestation of imperialist ideology” (Letsch). Only in the 1960s is a change of attitude observable in the GDR, and on the occasion of the fifty-year jubilee of the opening ceremony of the Bauhaus building in Dessau in 1976, the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED) resolved to formally recognize the “creative achievements and progressive ideas of the Bauhaus,” designating Dessau as a site of historic importance of the Bauhaus heritage. Representing an attempt to reconstruct the Bauhaus in the still young Federal Republic of Germany was the foundation by Max Bill of the Hochschule für Gestaltung (College of Design) in Ulm in 1953. While Bill associated the college emphatically to the Dessau Bauhaus and attempted to profile it as the latter’s legitimate successor institution, a number of younger instructors distanced themselves explicitly from the Bauhaus heritage beginning in 1955 (in particular from the primacy accorded to art), which led to Bill’s resignation as rector and his exit from the faculty of the Ulm college in 1957.

Max Bill teaching color theory at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, 1956, Archiv der Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm

345

Kinetic light study for Kurt Kranz’s preliminary course at the Landeskunstschule in Hamburg, 1950s, Archiv Rainer K. Wick

Literature Banham 1964. Berlin 1977. Berlin 1996. Ehrhardt 1932. Grohn 1991. Halle/Karlsruhe 1993. Letsch 1959–60. Natter 1931. Otto 1969. Pfennig 1964. Schneider 1992. Schwerdtfeger 1954. Spitz 2002. Wick 1982.

Gabriele Diana Grawe Teaching at Black Mountain College and the New Bauhaus The Separation of Art and Design

In contradistinction to Bill’s holistic plan for a “New Bauhaus,” the reception of the pedagogical ideas of the Bauhaus remained highly selective in West Germany as a whole. At the majority of art and design schools during the 1950s and 1960s, this reception was restricted to a singular structural element of the Bauhaus curriculum, namely the preliminary course. Numerous Bauhäusler or individuals close to the Bauhaus were hired to teach preliminary courses, hence functioning as multipliers of the formal and aesthetic positions adopted by the Bauhaus. Among these individuals were Kurt Kranz in Hamburg, Gerhard Kadow in Krefeld, Hanns Hoffmann-Lederer in Darmstadt, Hannes Neuner and Maximilian Debus in Stuttgart, Max Burchartz in Essen, and Boris Kleint in Saarbrücken. The reproach of many critics that such courses were often little more than aestheticized and foreshortened versions of the Bauhaus preliminary course are as difficult to refute as the objection that the “overall ‘plan’ of the Bauhaus” (Otto) and the highly complex total system of Bauhaus pedagogy could not be adequately mirrored in “‘courses’ derived from art instruction at the Bauhaus” in such a truncated and arbitrary fashion. This was also true, correspondingly, of art instruction in schools during the 1950s and 1960s, where the design concepts of the Bauhaus made an impact primarily through two influential specialists, namely Bauhäusler Kurt Schwerdtfeger and his book Bildende Kunst und Schule (The Visual Arts and Schooling), with its strong orientation to the design teaching of Johannes Itten, and Reinhard Pfennig, with his text Gegenwart der Bil­ denden Kunst: Erziehung zum bildnerischen Denken (The Visual Arts Today: Education through Visual Thinking), whose subtitle invokes a central concept of Paul Klee’s. In the late 1960s, under the influence of the student movement, the Bauhaus was increasingly regarded as being ideologically questionable. Although the school was unjustly charged with having remained mired in the kind of drilled formal exercises that were inimical to emancipation, it is nonetheless true that the concepts of this representative art school of modernity have for many decades shown themselves to be sustainable as well as fully capable of transformation, so that even today, elements of Bauhaus pedagogy live on—if not explicitly, then in various “covert instruction plans.” Prof. Dr. Rainer K. Wick (born 1944), an art historian and art educator, is Chair of Art and Cultural Education at the University of Wuppertal.

Wick 1992. Wick 2000. Wick 2004. C 41 M 0 Y 100 K 0

346

Wick 2003.

The circle of influence of the institutions in the United States which succeeded the Bauhaus, offering artistic training in the narrower sense, are associated mainly with the names Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy. Albers’s teachings (conveyed initially via an experimental orientation at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and later at Yale University, where he achieved academic recognition) were closely tied to the decisive developments in the history of postwar (1945) American painting, which involved its conceptualization as a vehicle for carrying specific values associated with a notion of painting that was modern, abstract, and indigenously American. Albers’s pedagogy also played an important role in the establishment of an autonomous, self-referential art, one under no obligation to serve a workshop. The small group of teachers and educators at Black Mountain College seized the Great Depression in the United States as an opportunity to modify rigid educational conventions and the typical “grade and credit” system prevalent at North American institutions of higher education. The New Bauhaus in Chicago, by contrast, was a place of instruction for industrial design and photography, and was sustained increasingly by an orientation to design theory. On the one hand, the separation of fine art from the applied arts in artistic training could be traced back to a fundamental distinction that had been consistently central to the pedagogical theory and practice of a number of Bauhaus members, namely that between sensibility and rational thought, between subjective imagination and objective knowledge. On the other hand, a number of North American training institutions took up the preliminary course of the historic Bauhaus as a model for a kind of basic studies in artistic subjects, given the need to offer degrees that would qualify graduates to practice specific occupations. One consequence of this orientation was an increased level of specialization within more advanced studies. Both by virtue of the ideological underpinnings of art criticism and as a consequence of the practical necessities that conditioned artistic training, the pedagogical aims of Albers and Moholy-Nagy respectively—both of whom exercised an enormous influence as instructors when it came to the propagation of abstract art in the United States—were perceived as being mutually opposed, even virtually irreconcilable. The compartmentalization of separate subjects as well as the increasing intellectualization and scientific orientation of the training

347

348

Josef Albers in the color seminar at Black Mountain College in North Carolina (photo: Josef Brei­ ten­bach), 1944 (illustration from: Starting at Zero: Black Mountain College 1933–57, exh. cat. Arnolfini, Bristol; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; Cambridge 2005)

program at the Chicago institute under Moholy-Nagy’s direction reflected the fact that the education of designers rested on objectifiable knowledge and theory. Albers’s method of instruction, meanwhile, was based on a pedagogy of learning rather than one of instruction, one that negated the inculcation of secondary knowledge. Albers’s pedagogical activities were intrinsically linked to his artistic production. Underlying both his teachings and his creative oeuvre were concerns involving epistemology and theories of perception. As Albers explained in his Interaction of Color, each element and each material making up a given artwork is subject to a certain relativity, since no individual component can be endowed with totality. The artistic means deployed are pure, exclusively optical phenomena, and constitute the sole telos of artistic design. Collectively elaborated individual, social, psychological, scientific, and industrial processes formed the basis for all courses at Black Mountain and later at Yale.

C 39 M 0 Y 100 K 0

László Moholy-Nagy with a wood sculpture (photo: Vories Fischer), 1946, Sammlung Hattula MoholyNagy

As a result, Black Mountain College became a “symbol of academic freedom and of the experimental spirit” (Harris), a characterization suggestive of the romantic charm of the anti-academic atmosphere that contributed to the college’s myth. The history of Moholy-Nagy’s Chicago institute (in 1939, the New Bauhaus became the School of Design, which in turn became the Institute of Design in 1944 before ultimately being incorporated into the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1949) is characterized by a protracted series of varied transformations, all conditioned by the adaptation of the training program to American conditions. More than anything else, this meant accommodating market demands for occupational qualifications and setting up a program of systematic professional training. One consequence of this accommodation was the weakening of the integration of artistic disciplines prioritized by the Bauhaus curriculum. Little by little, the school

Walter Gropius in his office at Harvard University (photo: Ise Gropius), 1944, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

349

Literature Bauhaus-Archiv 1987. Findeli 1995. Grawe 2002, pp. 135–71. Harris 1987. Harris 2005.

Klaus von Beyme The Bauhaus: Internationalization and Globalization

abandoned the visionary promise of cultural renewal and concentrated instead on preparing students for professional life. As earlier, the studies commenced with the Vorkurs or “preliminary course” (later re-named the “foundation course” and “intellectual integration”). The main course of study, however, was divided into four specialized areas: industrial design, advertising arts, textile design, and photography. The restructuring of the teaching plan, which shifted more straightforward and modest educational objectives into the foreground, was a concession to criticisms formulated at the school. The results of these reforms, namely the institute’s newly professionalized image, should not distract from the fact that Moholy-Nagy remained faithful to the ideal of a comprehensive and multidisciplinary education while continuing to reject the idea of rapid occupational training. Dr. Gabriele Diana Grawe is an art historian and Chair in Art History at the Brandenburg University of Technology in Cottbus.

C 37 M 0 Y 100 K 0

350

The reception of the art of the Bauhaus has always been subject to fashion and myth. Some modernists were concerned primarily with the scientific foundations of art and architecture—as emphasized in particular by the resolutions of the Bauhaus Arbeitsrat (work council). Others were interested in the mystical aspects. The Bauhaus was not a unity, and even its various factions and individuals evolved over time. The contradictions involved have been referred to tellingly as “mystical rationality.” Ever since Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the evolution of the “isms” of classical modernism has been presented repeatedly in the form of graphic schemas. The Bauhaus does not fit easily into any of them. Because it accommodated such diverse protagonists and represented such a wide range of tendencies, from the rationalist and Constructivist wing (László Moholy-Nagy) all the way to an emphatically emotional and mystical approach to art (Johannes Itten), Barr positioned the school off to one side in relation to his other subdivisions. The process by which factions were formed at the Bauhaus was not constant through time. With the growing consolidation of the Weimar Republic in general and the Bauhaus in particular, the rational-scientific wing gained in strength. The application of the concept of myth in modern art must tolerate certain contradictions: here, the concept of myth formation will not satisfy the strict criteria of theologians or linguists. As a nominalist, I accept this concept nonetheless as one that has become established as a “buried cultural asset” in analyses of art. Myths have been associated with the Bauhaus in two forms. First, as the multifaceted point of crystallization of the modernist avant-gardes in Germany, the school has been an object around which myths have formed. As an agency of myth formation, on the other hand, the school made a number of theoretical contributions to mythology vis-à-vis art, religion, and life. The extent of the formation of theories and myths was also influenced by the organizational forms of each respective artist’s associations. The Bauhaus was an ideal playground and market for theories about art. On the one hand, director Walter Gropius was vigilant in safeguarding a plurality of perspectives, and took steps against sectarianism (Itten) and excessive politicization (mainly among the students). On the other hand, he was subject to both internal and external pressures (politicization, competing theories, such as those advocated by Theo van Doesburg during his

351

352

Theo van Doesburg and Cornelis van Eesteren, Contra-Construction Project, axonometric image, 1923, gouache over lithograph, 57.2 x 57.2 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of Edgar Kaufmann, Jr.

C 35 M 0 Y 100 K 0

László Moholy-Nagy, Konstruktion (Construction) (sheet from Kestnermappe 6), 1923, 61 x 45 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Weimar period), which stimulated debate. A few Bauhaus artists, Herbert Bayer among them, were preoccupied with a half-dozen different sciences, from biology to economics. Small wonder that reflective artists such as Oskar Schlemmer found that tendencies toward a scientificity at the Bauhaus “could get out of control.” But in making such judgments, the Bauhaus artists were highly selective. Oddly enough, Schlemmer did not regard psychology as a science at all, but instead only those disciplines directed toward “elementary forms, law, number,” and he lamented the fact that “everything psychic has become questionable.” It would be more accurate to say that subjective theories were not in demand at the Bauhaus—all the more reason Surrealism played virtually no role there. A social-scientific perspective on the “isms” cannot proceed as though the Bauhaus developed at a distance from international artistic networks. There were instances of wider reception and contacts (for example with Albert Gleizes in France), and the school attracted artists from abroad, from Itten to Moholy-Nagy (Kandinsky was no longer regarded as one of the “foreigners”), and there were failed attempts to establish foreign exponents of important groupings at the Bauhaus, including De Stijl artist Theo van Doesburg and Suprematist Kazimir Malevich. Comparativists are aware that invocations of faith in science do not mean the same thing for all of the “isms” of the avant-gardes. In one case, biology and psychology are invoked, in another, physics and technology. But all of the “isms” were influenced by the Bauhaus—even those having independent roots: in 1921, the Purism of Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier positioned the “perception of order” at the center of its theoretical efforts, attempting in particular to uncover the “mathematical quality” of order. Other artists, including Antoine Pevsner, who was close to Constructivism for a time, perceived only isomorphism between the sciences and artistic innovation. Later, his brother Naum Gabo recognized the danger of the dedifferentiation of societal subsystems more clearly than those artists who had heralded new discoveries amidst the atmosphere of the World War I period. In Gabo’s fundamental article “The Constructive Idea in Art,” written in 1937 for the British International Survey of Constructive Art, he emphasized that the function of science should not be imposed on art. “Art and science are two different streams which arise from the same creative source, and flow together into the same sea of general culture . . . Science teaches, art testifies, science persuades, art acts, science comprehends, informs, and certifies.” But art has more possibilities at its disposal, because it is able to influence the human psyche directly. “It does not follow the signposts of philosophical systems; instead, it dictates philosophical systems, as does life itself.” Science results

from a “lack of knowledge,” while art arises from a “superfluity of perceptions and from desires that are present in latent form.” More than any other movement, Constructivism, and specifically the loose international grouping “Abstraction Création,” reflected analytically on the relationship between science and art. As early as the “Realist Manifesto” of 1920, Pevsner and Gabo had concluded that Cubism’s intrinsically praiseworthy deconstructive tendencies had left behind only a “logical anarchy.” By 1937, however, Gabo had abandoned his revolutionary phraseology of 1920 in favor of the formation of constructive ideas. Although Constructivism is often reproached for a zealous scientism, Gabo made it clear in 1937 that the genius that is animated by the “creative idea of Constructivism” always thinks in positive terms. Alien to it is the doubt so characteristic of the scientific spirit. Finally, art is more influential because it affects viewers directly, while they shrink back from science. Occasionally, he says, a great scientist is even “redeemed” by insights drawn from the arts. Most avant-garde groups could have subscribed to Van Doesburg’s credo in De Stijl according to which modern art generates forms instead of representing preexisting ones. Still intersubjectively “transmissible” were constant exchanges between or suspensions of position and scale, of line and surface, in an active experience of art. But Van Doesburg’s efforts toward a “style” had already antagonized Piet Mondrian. The valorization of mathematics was less a cause for division, at least when proffered in an adequately mystified variant. Van Doesburg made a plea for the importance to art of a knowledge of mathematics. For him, the evolution of mathematics and a “multiplication of the axes of life” were “a necessity for modern man.” At the same time, he polemicized against the “parliamentarian philosophy” of German idealism, arguing in favor of the vitalist philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henri Bergson, a form of thinking which unites subject and object, though it is not compatible with his glorification of mathematics. In Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova’s “Productivist Manifesto” of 1920, a commitment to science was heightened—in contradistinction to earlier avant-gardist theories: “It [the Constructivist group] approaches the solution to this problem on the basis of scientific hypotheses.” This scientific conception, however, was subject to doubts because it swore by a synthesis of ideology and practical activity. As long as propagandistic activity was emphasized to such a degree, such a “pitiless battle against art in general” still guaranteed no scientificity. Other Constructivists, including Theo van Doesburg, El Lissitzky, and Hans Richter, in their “Declaration of the International Faction of Constructivists” at the First

Georges Vantongerloo, Konstruktion von Volumenbeziehungen (Construction of Volumetric Relationships), 1921, mahogany, 41 x 14.4 x 14.5 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York

353

Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus To Our House, title page of the edition published by Picador, London 1993 (first edition 1981)

Literature Asholt/Fähnders 1995, p. 210. Baljeu 1974. Berlin/Dusseldorf 1986. Von Beyme 2005. Van Doesburg 1925. Harrison/Wood 1998. Moholy-Nagy 1950. Schlemmer 1958. Wolfe 1984.

Justus H. Ulbricht “Timeless Gothic” Instead of “Dentist-Style with Housing Cubes” The National Socialist Opposition to the Bauhaus

International Congress of Progressive Artists in 1922 at least did not equate art and science, but instead valued art alongside science and technology as an “organizational method of life in general.” During a period when Van Doesburg glorified mathematics as the basis for Concrete Art, and despite assertions of the unity of “Elementarism,” this scientific approach contradicted the intuitive method favored by Mondrian. But this compromise formula did not remain the final word, for Theo van Doesburg later returned to his and Mondrian’s common roots in M. H. J. Schoenmaekers’ Hegelianizing irrationalism. Other De Stijl artists, including Georges Vantongerloo, proclaimed a “mathematical mysticism” whose name already reflected a singular synthesis of science, mysticism, and art. This Belgian De Stijl dissident called for the construction of the work of art in the framework of a given geometry. This went far beyond the ideas of the Bauhaus. The term “internationalization” was appropriate to the Bauhaus. At no other institution were both student body and faculty so international in composition. At the time, the term “globalization” was not yet in use. But the reception of the Bauhaus encompassed institutions such as VkHUTEMAS in Soviet Russia as affiliated facilities, and as late as the New Bauhaus in Chicago, extended all the way to the United States through emigrants such as Mies van der Rohe, Gropius, and Josef Albers—to name only the most influential. This corresponds in any event to a globalized Northern Hemisphere. The Bauhaus was not always received with open arms. In the United States, there were bitter attacks, including Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House. The Bauhaus was held responsible for every one-sided aspect of functionalism and Constructivism throughout the world. The school’s other “mythic” side, one which rendered homage to a moderate version of irrationalism, was overlooked by many critics. The Bauhaus was denounced as Marxist, and was credited with the invention of the social housing development, although architectural theory at the school had been notoriously inadequate. Mies van der Rohe’s American motto “less is more” was answered sarcastically by “less is a bore” (Robert Venturi), and the Bauhaus was designated the whipping boy of Postmodernism. Yet such instances of reception are not the last word. Already, books with titles like Post- to Neo- have approached the Bauhaus was a greater sense of fairness.

354

C 34 M 0 Y 100 K 0

Prof. Dr. Klaus von Beyme (born 1934) is a political scientist with the Department for Political Science at Heidelberg University.

As recently as twenty years ago, anyone mentioning the Bauhaus and National Socialism in the same breath or conceptualizing their relationship in any but wholly antithetical terms would probably have encountered astonishment—if not outright hostility—from the public and from many historians. For more than three decades after the tumultuous demise of the Third Reich, National Socialism was regarded as a dictatorship whose attitude toward the arts and cultural policies were strictly antimodernist, regressive, traditionalist, and hence hostile to the avantgardes in all fields. For many, in turn, the Bauhaus functioned not only as the legendary name of a once celebrated art school, but also as an all-encompassing code word for the evolution of artistic modernity, a critical-rational relationship with the world, and a creatively and aesthetically revolutionary attitude toward art, culture, and society—virtually as a symbol of utopian thought as well as a workshop for pragmatic and functionally oriented activities. Finally, the name of this art academy, founded in Weimar in 1919, had long since become a myth, one capable, moreover (and even in the absence of concrete historical references), of invoking a different myth—namely,­ modernity as an accomplished project. Available, meanwhile, is a far more differentiated image ­of the relationship between the avant-gardes, dictatorships, and modernity—and not just in the case of Germany. A flood of secondary literature—one by now too large to be mastered by any one researcher—has deconstructed the myth of the Bauhaus, tracing the image cultivated (not least by Walter Gropius as director) of the then most modern art school in Germany back to its real core, exploring contradictions between the school’s program and the achievements of participating artists, and shedding light on the personal and aesthetic diversity among the protagonists. The same is true for the phenomenon of National Socialism, whose sociopolitical praxis, worldview, and mentality have been investigated to the point of saturation. In the meantime, the specifically modern aspects of the National Socialist system have been identified, clarifying the character of the “split consciousness” prevailing during the years between 1933 and 1945. Having long since acquired the status of self-evident truths are the disunified and contradictory character of the movement’s ideology, the polycratic structure of its apparatus of authority,­ along with other long-overlooked

355

356

C 32 M 0 Y 100 K 0

Illustrations of the Dessau-Törten estate and the Bauhaus building, with defamatory captions, page from the book entitled Anhalt im Dienste des Führers, Dessau, 1937

and ­in­adequately interpreted aspects of National Socialist reality. Despite differing emphases, the research is unanimous in asserting that when it came to the cultural and arts policies of the National Socialist dictatorship, no uniformly oriented, specific ideological model was enforced successfully or with unambiguous consequences. As a result, there was really no such thing as an “art of National Socialism,” any more than there was a “National Socialist literature”—nor a “National Socialist architecture” through which the German Reich’s “will to build” and its individual political protagonists could find satisfying expression. Remaining virtually intact for many up to the present day despite such attempts at differentiation, apparently, is a cultural unease concerning the relationship between aesthetic modernity and National Socialist culture. In many cases, the popular images of both historical phenomena are still conditioned by the desire (although we now know better) to conceptualize them exclusively as antitheses, thereby simultaneously salvaging the political innocence of many works of art and of many artists. We still have our difficulties with the totalitarian dimensions of industrial modernity, whose existence has long since been confirmed with clinical objectivity by the formulation of a “dialectic of enlightenment” and by our recognition of the contradictions inherent to the aesthetic premises of the avantgardes. It seems as though an emphatic recourse to the history of the avant-gardes in the Weimar Republic (a history to which the term “Bauhaus” refers in shorthand)—so constitutive for the cultural self-understanding of the young Federal Republic—continues to function latently. An affirmative relationship to the contemporary reality of modernity in our own times, moreover, tends to block any self-critical retrospect of past epochs during which the avant-gardes and modernity found their feet. Only later in the history of Bauhaus research did any awareness emerge of the religious, esoteric, occasionally irrational and romanticist, which is to say partially a-modern or even anti-modern (i.e., neither enlightened nor rational) character of the early Weimar Bauhaus in particular—and not only of one of its “masters,” namely Johannes Itten—which allowed it to be positioned without difficulty in the religious history of modern intellectuals and artists. Recognized considerably earlier had been the identities of those Bauhäusler who had made their livelihoods in Germany after 1933, and who had consequently participated in the Third Reich or gone along with it. And insights into the technocratic rationality of National Socialist structures of authority had already rendered perceptible its partial—or as some would say, “foreshortened”— modernity. For this reason, the Third Reich has long

since come to be regarded as an integral component of modernity­in the “age of extremes” and not as somehow exceptional within German and European history. This somewhat essayistic contribution does not reengage with such ambiguities and distinctions, but attempts instead to clarify the radical critique of European and in particular German avant-gardist tendencies of the interwar period that was raised by racially oriented and National Socialist doctrines of art. When reading statements and manifestoes designed to found a genuinely “German art,” the contours of whose vaguely defined image emerged only in the battle against the aesthetic and philosophical options of the avant-garde (which is to say, at most ex negativo), one wonders how it was ever possible for many protagonists of modernist art and culture to have believed that modernism could have reached an accommodation with the Third Reich. By 1926, the painter, style reformer, publicist, and autodidact architect Paul Schultze-Naumburg already belonged to the solid core of the recently founded “National Socialist Kampfbund [combat league] for German Culture.” Although around 1900, Schultze-Naumburg had been an esteemed and recognized activist and forerunner of the reform movements of the educated middle classes, his critical and political stance became radicalized during World War I to such an extent that after 1918, he joined the farright milieu of the educated middle class, by the mid-1920s becoming a Vorkämpfer, or “pioneer” (as they were later called) of National Socialism. Appearing in 1927, the period of Schultze-Naumburg’s exit from the German Werkbund (which he had co-founded in 1907), was a slender polemic entitled Flaches oder geneigtes Dach (Flat Roof or Slanted), through which the author joined the struggle against architectural modernism—launched previously from Switzerland by Alexander von Senger. Von Senger had diagnosed the “Krisis der Architektur” already in 1927, and had perceived in Dessau and in the Neues Bauen (New Building) in general only “Moscow firebrands” and the “flat roofs of the Orient.” As early as the attacks against the “Model House Am Horn” of 1923, it was claimed that such an “extremely low manner of building . . . was an option only for the Orient.” Attaining a regrettable celebrity just a few years later was a photomontage showing a camel caravan winding its way through the buildings of the new Weissenhofsiedlung housing estate exhibition in Stuttgart. After 1934, Weimar Nazi cultural activist Hans Severus Ziegler invoked the name of his like-minded associate Paul Schultze-Naumburg when fulminating about the “Orientalistic and Bolshevistically oriented Bauhaus style [of] Gropius and his comrades,” denouncing such “weeds of a decadent era,” such “uprooting of the art of building from the soil of tradition and landscape.” He agitated against

Walter Gropius and Rudolf Hillebrecht, entry in the competition for the design of the “Haus der Arbeit,” 1934, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

357

358

“Orientalist cubes which belong at the edge of the desert,” against “stylistic Bolshevism,” against “Bolshevik-Jewish bungling and racial inferiority” and the “cold conventionalism of the interior design of the Bauhaus in Dessau and of the former Weimar Academy.” In his book Kunst und Rasse (Art and Race), SchultzeNaumburg had already denounced this “almost perverse flirtation with foreign races and their attitudes,” a publication that had catapulted him in 1928 into the phalanxes of the champions of a genuinely “German” art. In 1937, the tendentious montages appearing in this work, which contrasted “healthy” with “sick” art, would become prototypes for the propaganda exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art), which was mounted in Munich before traveling to a number of German cities. SchultzeNaumburg’s­1928 polemic was the first in a series of publications in the field of art theory (assuming we choose to dignify them with this designation) which gained him celebrity far beyond the restricted milieu of National Socialism. Appearing in the Goethe year of 1932, during which Schultze-Naumburg was reappointed director of the Staatliche Hochschule für Baukunst, bildende Künste und Handwerk (State Academy for Architecture, the Fine Arts, and Handicrafts), was the pamphlet Im Kampf um die Kunst (The Struggle for Art), whose final third attempted a settling of accounts with the New Building, said to emerge from a “world of gruesomeness,” and to express a “mass psychosis,” whose housing estates were said to resemble a “sequence of public­bathrooms” the sight of which made

C 30 M 0 Y 100 K 0

Herbert Bayer, double-page spread from the brochure entitled Deutschland, 1936, BauhausArchiv Berlin

one “feel distinctly as though one had been transported to Asia Minor.” Still more radical were the anti-Semitic, racist, and pro-euthanasia sentiments expressed in the brochure Rassengebundene Kunst (The Racial Character of Art), which appeared in a series “Volk und Wissen” (Race and Science), whose basic ideas were taken up again argumentatively three years later in the volume Nordische Schönheit (Nordic Beauty). In between came the publication of the little volume Kunst aus Blut und Boden (Art from Blood and Soil) and the opulently illustrated volume Die Kunst der Deutschen (The Art of the Germans), whose entire argumentation grew from the following sentence: “In no other document is the entire life, the relationship with the land which the nation has won as its homeland, its activities, its beliefs, and its moral laws more clearly visible than in its buildings.” Published in 1938 to supplement and to coincide with the exhibitions Entartete Musik and Entartete Kunst was Adolf Dresler’s propaganda text Deutsche Kunst und entartete “Kunst” (German Art and Degenerate “Art”), which called attention to itself by virtue of its sharp attacks on Edwin Redslob, former “Reichskunstwart” (arts minister) of the Weimar Republic. An art historian and cultural politician, Redslob had numbered during the 1920s among the most committed defenders of the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau. Dresler’s ostentatious horror of the “degeneration of taste in art,” of “an extremely dangerous Bolshevist assassination attempt on the life of the German people,” of the “corrosion of the state through the November Revolution and the Weimar Constitution,” was intended as an attack on the arts policies of the Republic, characterizing them as “sharpened weapons directed against the soul of the German people.” The attack was aimed at Redslob, vilified explicitly as a “cultural Bolshevist,” as a part of an ultimately “Jewish Bolshevist literary clique,” one which, “disguised as German,” had found its way “from the ghetto to the apex of the state.” For Dresler, the avant-garde and its adherents were nothing but an expression of the “spiritual bacterial warfare waged by the Jews against German culture,” and would consequently have to be segregated and eradicated. Even earlier, other National Socialist prophets of art such as Karl Eberlein had identified the archenemy of an “authentically” German culture as the “Ullstein Germans” (named for the widely respected publishing house), the “cultivated felaheens,” who had—in their roles as museum directors, art dealers, and art critics—promoted that which in reality was no more than “felaheen fashion and ersatz art.” Eberlein attacked the entire “civilization of the ‘machine for living’ and of the homeless cosmopolitan felaheens,” this “artsy-craftsy Negro geometry,” and “Esperanto art of a few esoterics,” vilifying the adherents of the avant-garde as the “world

359

360

as the essential guidelines of Nazi cultural and art policies—demonstrates with great clarity that the Bauhaus and the ideas of the European avant-garde movements never really had a chance in Nazi Germany, that they never could have. This assessment does not negate the circumstance that individual avant-gardists attempted in various ways to survive the ensuing “dark times.” With regard to the history of impact of the State Bauhaus schools in Weimar and Dessau, however, the Third Reich represented a painful break with avant-garde tradition. The Weimar Republic had been too brief and the majority of the German educated middle classes too unreceptive for this tradition to have established itself in Germany in a lasting way. Regrettably, the “purification of the temple of art” in Germany was successful, as suggested by the underlying pomposity of this worldview. We close now with an image: triumphant over all manner of “machines for living” after 1933 was the ideal of the “German house”—a triumph envisioned already in 1932 by Paul Schmitthenner. Qualifying in the eyes of conservative architects as a prototype of the “German house” was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Garden House in the Park an der Ilm in Weimar. As a consequence, a strand of argumentation directed against the objectivity of the New Building arrived at its culmination in the very location where the State Bauhaus School had originated. Dr. Justus H. Ulbricht (born 1954), a historian and German studies specialist, is a scholar, journalist, exhibition curator, and lecturer for adult and youth education in Jena.

Literature Borrmann 1989. Dresler 1938. Eberlein 1934.

Wilhelm Wagenfeld, KubusGeschirr (Cube Service; photo: Dore Barleben), 1938–39, glass, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Nerdinger 1993, pp. 9–23. Schäfer 1984. Schmitthenner 1932. Schultze-Naumburg 1927. Schultze-Naumburg 1928. Schultze-Naumburg 1934. Schultze-Naumburg 1937. Von Senger 1928. Von Senger 1931. Ulbricht 2000. Ulbricht 2009. Willrich 1932. Ziegler 1934.

C 28 M 0 Y 100 K 0

Lilly Reich and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Reichausstellung der Deutschen Textil- und Bekleidungs­ wirtschaft, Berlin, 1937, BauhausArchiv Berlin

gypsies of civilization.” He perceived the “German style” solely in “Romanesque-Staufian art, in the late Gothic, the late Renaissance, the late Baroque and the Rococo, the style of the Romantics and the ‘Neudeutschen’ [the Wagner School, roughly speaking], in Jugendstil, in Heimatkunst [regional art],” perceiving in all of these stylistic tendencies the forms of a “timeless Gothic” as manifestations of the “Faustian-German.” Another polemical book, which appeared in 1938 under the title Im Terror des Kunstbolschewismus (In Terror of Cultural Bolshevism), demonstrates that such a tone was no invention of the Third Reich, but had instead enjoyed an extended preparatory phase. The author of this book was Dresden artist and art critic Bettina Feistel-Rohme­ der, whose Deutsche Kunstgesellschaft (German Society of Art) had been formed in Dresden already in 1920, an organization found among the small but highly-active völkisch (i.e., chauvinistic) associations of the Weimar period which had dedicated themselves to the struggle for a “German art.” In March of 1930, the representatives of ten such völkisch associations joined forces to form the Führerrat (head council) of the Vereinigten Deutschen Kunst- und Kulturverbände (United German Art and Cultural Associations). Two honorary member of the Führerrat—Alfred Rosenberg and Paul Schultze-Naumburg—immediately became the founders of the National Socialist Combat League. Feistel-Rohmeder led attacks against the New Building and against modern art in general and the Bauhaus in particular. The argumentative models and aims of such attacks drew upon the anti-avant-garde discourses that had formed already under the Empire, and that had from the very beginning utilized patterns of interpretation based on racism and hostility to foreigners. This has been noted not only by numerous recent investigations, but was also recognized by perceptive contemporaries—Paul Westheim, for instance, who articulated his views in 1934 from exile in Paris in a well-informed book entitled Von der Rinnsteinkunst zum Kulturbolschewismus (From Gutter Art to Cultural Bolshevism), which was highly critical of certain discursive traditions. If it is the case, however, that the German bourgeoisie arrived at the Third Reich via the “semantic bridge” of the term “cultural Bolshevism,” then it is more or less self-evident that this route could not have been traveled by those who had themselves been defamed as “cultural Bolsheviks” and hence marginalized within the German cultural sphere even before 1933, and with heightened intensity thereafter. The text of National Socialist provenance cited in the previous passage—so representative of the anti-avant-garde attacks and resentment which (in spite of all polycratism) advanced after 1935 to serve

361

Ulrike Bestgen and Werner Möller Vice Versa—Art or the People? “Here I am Man, here dare it to be!” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

From People’s Needs to People’s Boutique—The New Role ­of Art • Today, the original Bauhaus is

362

history. Many of its products and particularly its name have become part of a sophisticated marketing and recycling strategy; its architecture and museums in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin have become the popular destinations of a profitable tourist and travel industry. The rich schedule of events set to accompany the ninetieth anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus now takes this development to a new level. The Bauhaus’s original aims, however, were of another nature. The rapid growth of an industrial society based on the division of labor called for a new kind of social and cultural response. With the evaporation of the euphoric belief in the all-healing power of technical progress after the disaster of World War I, it was particularly the field of art that provided the young Bauhaus with the means to explore new approaches to a new world. Today, however, it is of the utmost importance to find answers for a society that must come to terms with the legacy of this eventful and momentous century. And in the context of contemporary art, it is the social, societal, and cooperative concerns that, beyond questions of form, establish a link with the original spirit of the Bauhaus. Christine Hill—the Berlinbased American artist and founder of the now legendary

Volksboutique (people’s boutique)—belongs among the artists who have advanced and contributed to the principle of a so-called social sculpture. The Volksboutique, now itself part of contemporary art history, emerged from a secondhand store in Berlin at the beginning of the 1990s and established an approach that has subsequently been much copied by other artists: the principle of the artist as service provider and art actions as participatory projects. Christine Hill’s Volksboutique became an information center and service provider responding to a broad range of issues. The Volksboutique founded an archive of cultural-historical objects, was and is a functioning workshop, and has become a brand in its own right. If the Volksboutique, in its immediate historical context, still represents a direct reference to the Volkseigener Betrieb (people’s enterprise) of the former East Germany, it also indirectly evokes Hannes Meyer’s idea and motto of “people’s needs instead of luxury needs.” In both cases, products should not respond to the requirements of luxury, but provide well-considered, convincingly designed, and above all affordable and high-quality solutions for a better quality of life. The fact that, with the Volksboutique, the cooperative approach of “people’s needs instead of luxury needs” is now experiencing a renaissance in a new context is therefore only consistent. Dr. Ulrike Bestgen, an art historian, is Head of the Neues Museum/ Bauhaus-Museum division of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar. Dr. Werner Möller, an art historian, is a curator at the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau.

Bildunterschrift

Christine Hill, Auszüge aus dem Skizzenbuch (Excerpts from the Sketchbook), pencil on paper, 22.8 x 15.2 cm, collection of the artist On behalf of the Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model exhibition, Christine Hill developed a variation of the Volksboutique entitled Do-It-Yourself Bauhaus. C 26 M 0 Y 100 K 0

“We have no public supporting us,” remarked Paul Klee in his famous 1924 lecture at the Jena Kunstverein (Art Society). And today quality re-editions of Bauhaus objects still belong to the higher price segment—products that indeed not everybody is in a position to own. Luxury goods instead of the promised mass goods: this was the conflict constantly faced by the historical Bauhaus too. And this contradiction seems to live on in the classic reissues. The other side of the commercialization of the Bauhaus concept is its trivialization. The absence of a clear definition of what the “Bauhaus” actually stands for and what its idea is meant to represent has opened the floodgates to all forms of pastiche. These range from humorous interludes such as a nest box in the style of a Bauhaus villa to the dark fantasies of a Bauhaus funeral urn, from the brand of a gothic rock band to the banal use of the Bauhaus label for all kinds of DIY stores and products, model shops, designer objects, and objets d’art.

363

364

Does the Bauhaus still matter today? This question was posed by Thomas Maldonado, director of the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm (HfG), thirty years after the closing of the Bauhaus. Along with Black Mountain College, the HfG was one of the most significant experiments devoted to the study, renewal, and (in part) rejection of the Bauhaus legacy. In view of the persistent, intense interest in the Bauhaus, we must ask ourselves the same question fifty years later: Why does the Bauhaus still ­matter today? If we are to penetrate to the heart of the matter, we need not concern ourselves with the forms and products of the Bauhaus—whether in their trivialized manifestations, such as prefabricated houses in the Bauhaus style, or in those forms that have become fetishes and museum pieces displayed for Bauhaus tourists, or in the licensed production of original Bauhaus designs, or even in the reconstruction of Bauhaus buildings. All of those things are very real, but they represent nothing more than the attempt to derive some gain from a bygone era, from a past generation of design practice. The striking currency of the Bauhaus is not expressed in specific objects or forms but rather in its program, in the ideas and methods propagated by the Bauhaus. Actually, we should refer to the phenomenon in the plural, as the “Bauhauses” rather than the Bauhaus. If the Bauhaus stands apart from the movement of classical modernism and is indeed truly unique, it is because the historical Bau­haus succeeded in blending the diversity and contra­ dictions of modern approaches to design within the frame­ work of a project that was without precedent. Its incredible fertility is attributable not least of all to the fact that painters, graphic designers, architects, typographers, theater artists, media artists, urban planners, product designers, and even scientists, technicians, and engineers collaborated, debated and repeatedly realized joint projects at a single location. We have clearly structured ideas about modernism, the architecture of modern objectivity, abstract art, functional design, and so on. Yet what was unique about the Bauhaus was that it overcame precisely these categories and not only accepted the heterogeneous simultaneity of modern avant-gardes but also put it to practical use. To outline this aspect with reference to the stylistic currents and trends that ultimately proved unsuitable: the Bauhaus was a home to Expressionism, Constructivism, Functionalism, De Stijl, the New Objectivity, even Dada, and many

other movements. Although certain dominant positions emerged during specific phases of Bauhaus history, the truly remarkable fact is that these contradictory positions were all present at one place at the same time. Bauhaus = maximum concentration and interaction of previously isolated phenomena; interaction among different aesthetic disciplines; the interplay of art, science, and technology; the blending of research, teaching, and practical application; a gathering of cultural influences from widely differing countries. The Bauhaus was a radical experiment in the breaking down of boundaries, in de-categorization, and in consolidation. No metaphor describes it more aptly than that of space in flux—in an intellectual sense as well. Bauhaus = maximum dynamic, instability, change: fourteen years of constant upheaval at three locations. The Bauhaus was a laboratory for the exploration of a new realm of possibility that took shape with the new knowledge, the new technologies, and the new ways of thinking that were emerging at that time. Bauhaus teachers and students were typically willing and eager to rethink things from the ground up, (seemingly) without preconceived notions, and reluctant to accept traditionally accepted certainties. What we still find so fascinating today are less the individual solutions themselves than the discovery of countless new possibilities whose potential remains current in many cases even now. An essential aspect of the currency of the Bauhaus is the surplus of utopian ideas in the Bauhaus program. Precisely because of the discrepancy between the goals and the reality of the historical Bauhaus, between ideas and practice, the unfulfilled promise generates the urge to continue even decades later. The failure to fulfill that promise is attributable to the conflicts inherent in the Bauhaus itself, but also to the violent end of the Bauhaus experiment. Preoccupation with the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), the quest for a new human being in a new world, represented only one (problematic) side of the Bauhaus. The other was the diversity of personalities at the Bauhaus, the heterogeneous eccentricity of the people, which stood in striking contrast to the supposed concept of unity. These two poles generated a unique field of tension which brought together different concepts of modernism and the avant-garde that are unlikely to be found in any other artistic movements or organizations—from CIAM (Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne) to Dada. This is an

C 24 M 0 Y 100 K 0

Philipp Oswalt The Bauhaus Today

expression of the ceaseless quest and the absence of certainty, of experiment and the absence of stable ideology. All of that is quite common in contemporary cultural life, has become an accepted attitude, in a certain sense, and would not be worthy of particular mention if it did not involve another essential aspect as well: the concern with utility, the concept of design as a social function, as practical social action. This gives the interdisciplinary approach and the search for new paths a point of orientation, a foundation, and a purpose. An important goal of design at the Bauhaus was to improve the quality of everyday life in the present and to make it affordable for all. The incredibly ambitious objective was to reach the broad masses with innovations as a radical avant-garde and thus to overcome the divide between high and popular culture. Experiments were not an end in themselves but served instead to promote the emancipation of human beings, the quest for approaches to a better present. Although successes were few and far between, this spirit of social responsibility was not confined to theory but was also practiced as well, to the extent that the Bauhaus succeeded in creating products and buildings for industrial firms, cooperatives, and trade unions, as well as for the city of Dessau, thereby creating prototypical solutions under entirely real conditions. The era of classical modernism is long past, yet we still live in the modern era under the influence of an ongoing discussion regarding different concepts of modernism. While the Bauhaus style and its products are now part of our historical heritage, many of the heterogeneous concepts of modernism advanced by the Bauhaus are still relevant today—and not merely in some revamped version, but rather as part of a critical reevaluation that reflects the profound advances and continuous updating of modernism during the last seventy-five years. Indeed, it is this very process of critical self-reflection that has made it possible to draw conclusions from the crises, dead-ends, and errors that mark the pro­ gress of modernism, as well as to identify newly emerging potentials. To experiment also means to risk failure. Much of the criticism leveled at the Bauhaus is justified, and some of its severest critics were Bauhaus people themselves, such as Hannes Meyer und Ernst Kállai. The proclamation of the death of the Bauhaus is tantamount to uncritical glorification, and thus the instrumentalization of the Bauhaus during the Cold War contributed significantly to the paralysis of Bauhaus ideas.

In contending that the Bauhaus ideas are still current today, the author means to suggest that they must be translated into a completely different social context and thus articulated in entirely different practical applications. In advanced, industrialized countries, we are no longer experiencing an age of growth but rather an era of aging and shrinking. Fordist-style industrial societies have given way to post-Fordist service societies. Political and economic structures have changed significantly. Both social and environmental issues now occupy the focus of attention; immaterial values and the individual play an incredibly important role. In our age, an interactive project by the Chaos Computer Club has much more in common with the ideas of the Bauhaus than the latest steel-tube furniture. Bauhaus ideas and methods are useful tools for those concerned with contemporary issues and themes. But the concrete products will be very different from those of the Bauhaus years. Prof. Philipp Oswalt, an architect and journalist, is Director of the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau.

365

a

b

c

d

366

Abbott, Berenice 290 Adler, Bruno 124 Ai, Weiwei 90–92 Albers, Anni 223, 296 Albers, Josef 9, 53, 70, 93–96, 132, 140, 147, 243–46, 271, 306, 325–26, 336, 339, 347–48, 354 Appia, Adolphe 61 Archipenko, Alexander 88 Arndt, Alfred 67–68, 71, 128, 199–202 Arndt, Gertrud 84, 156, 223, 289 Arp, Jean 143, 306 Artaria, Paul 208, 298 Astfalck-Vietz, Marta 289 Auerbach, Ellen 270 Baird, George 244 Baker, Josephine 193 Barr, Alfred 314, 351 Batz, Eugen 261, 351 Baumeister, Willi 26, 128, 209–10 Bayer, Herbert 153–54, 156, 177–80, 188, 192, 202, 229–30, 232, 238, 272, 281–82, 289, 307, 340–41, 352, 358 Beckmann, Max 87 Behne, Adolf 30, 32, 42–43, 56, 98, 110, 303 Behrendt, Walter Curt 117 Behrens, Peter 50, 116, 125, 170, 201 Bergner, Lena 217–20 Bergson, Henri 353 Berlage, Hendrik Petrus 50, 201 Bernoulli, Hans 208 Bijvoet, Bernard 114 Bill, Max 219, 250, 345–46 Binnemann, Robert 231, 265 Boccioni, Umberto 88 Bogler, Friedrich Wilhelm 83 Bogler, Theodor 157–60 Bormann, Heinrich-Siegfried 315 Börner, Helene 83 Bortnyik, Sándor 129 Brandt, Marianne 16–18, 125, 181, 231, 238, 271, 289, 291–94, 336 Braque, Georges 87 Brecht, Bertolt 237 Brenner, Anton 298 Breton, André 169, 306–07 Breuer, Marcel 53, 89–92, 122, 161–64, 168, 170, 192, 198, 202–05, 232, 238, 241, 253, 326, 331, 336, 340 Broner-Ullmann, Monica Bella 245 Bronstein, Max 344 Burchartz, Max 346 Burnham, Daniel Hudson 117 Buscher, Alma 121 Büttner, Otto 227 Cahun, Claude 289 Chagall, Marc 87–8, 170 Chaplin, Charlie 193 Chirico, Giorgio de 88, 306, 308 Collein, Edmund 279–80 Consemüller, Erich 226–27, 241, 253, 343 Cooper, Merian C. 327 Coubine, Othon 87–88 Craig, Edward Gordon 61 Crodel, Charles 40 Cunningham, Imogen 290 d’Ora, Madame 290 Dalí, Salvador 306 Däubler, Theodor 57 Debus, Maximilian 346 Delaunay, Robert 43, 87 Derain, André 87 Determann, Walter 47–50, 66 Dicker, Friedl 69, 124 Diederichs, Eugen 73, 123 Doesburg, Theo van 53, 88, 102, 114, 129, 143–44, 178, 202, 234–35, 306, 351–54 Dorfner, Otto 86, 104, 124–26, 343 Dorner, Alexander 190 Dressler, F. W. 19 Drewes, Werner 307 Driesch, Johannes 306 Duchamp, Marcel 131 Duiker, Johannes 114

e

f

g

h

Ebert, Albert 40 Ebert, Wils 244 Eesteren, Cornelis van 202, 352 Eggeling, Viking 143 Ehrhardt, Alfred 344 Ehrlich, Franz 281 Eisenstein, Sergei M. 191 Éluard, Paul 306 Endell, August 186 Engelmann, Richard 108 Ernst, Max 193, 306–08 Feininger, Andreas 227 Feininger, Lyonel 9, 15, 29–32, 34–36, 55–57, 66, 85–86, 106, 116, 142, 174–76, 192, 202, 216, 226, 337, 339 Feininger, T. Lux 225–28, 231, 312–13 Fieger, Carl 53, 200, 273 Fischer, Curt 202 Forbat, Fred 43, 344 Förster-Nietzsche, Elisabeth 150 Francé, Raoul Heinrich 186 Friedlaender, Marguerite 160, 343 Fuller, Richard Buckminister 139–40 Funkat, Walter 231 Gan, Alexei 139 Gaul, August 38 Gebhard, Max 341 Geiger, Theodor 332 Geist, Hans Friedrich 344 Giedion, Sigfried 138, 304, 306 Giedion-Welcker, Carola 306 Gleizes, Albert 87, 236, 352 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 25, 150, 361–62 Graeff, Werner 69 Graudenz, John 172–73 Gray, Eileen 215 Gris, Juan 87 Gropius, Ise 172, 176, 231, 253, 335, 349 Gropius, Walter 13–18, 25, 27–28, 30–32, 34–36, 38, 42–43, 46, 48, 50–54, 56–57, 65–66, 70, 73, 76–80, 82, 86, 88, 94, 98–99, 101–02, 104, 108–14, 117–18, 121–22, 125, 129, 132, 143, 146, 149–56, 158–59, 162, 164, 166–68, 171–76, 178, 186, 190, 192, 194, 196–97, 200–02, 204, 206, 210, 212, 227–36, 238–42, 244, 250, 259, 272, 276, 288, 292–93, 295, 298, 303, 312, 324, 326, 333–35, 337–41, 349, 351, 354–55, 357 Grosch, Karla 227, 265 Grunow, Gertrud 71–74, 142 Günther, Bertha 212 Hablik, Wenzel 116 Hardt, Ernst 48 Hartwig, Josef 109–10, 122, 185–87, 189, 344 Hauer, Josef Matthias 26, 72, 142 Haupt, Karl Hermann 139 Heiberg, Edvard 298 Heinersdorff, Gottfried 94, 96 Heise, Josef 79 Helm, Dörte 53 Hennig, Albert 325 Hesse, Fritz 232, 240 Hesse, Hermann 27 Heymann, Margarete 160 Heyne, Renate, 213 Hilberseimer, Ludwig 114, 260, 298–300, 325 Hill, Christine 362–63 Hillebrecht, Rudolf 357 Hirschfeld-Mack, Ludwig 143, 343 Hitchcock, Henry Russell 259 Hoffmann, Hubert 220, 344 Hoffmann, Josef 205 Hoffmann-Lederer, Hanns 344, 346 Hölzel, Adolf 25–26, 73 Huszár, Vilmos 187

i

Ioganson, Karl 139 Itten, Johannes 9, 23–26, 28, 34, 36, 53, 63–66, 68–70, 72–73, 76, 79, 81–84, 86, 94, 102, 108, 113, 120–21, 124, 132, 142, 151, 164, 167, 244–45, 282–90, 338, 344, 346, 351–52, 356

j

Jaques-Dalcroze, Emile 72 Jawlensky, Alexej von 82, 88 Johnson, Philip 296, 313–14

j

k

l

m

Joyce, James 101 Jucker, Carl Jacob 16, 165, 167–68 Juda, Annely 234 Jungnick, Hedwig 83 Kadow, Gerhard 346 Kállai, Ernst 260, 333, 336, 340, 365 Kandinsky, Wassily 9, 64, 70, 72, 87–88, 102–06, 120–21, 134, 142, 148, 154, 172–73, 175, 178, 192, 202, 204, 216, 219, 223, 231, 232, 235, 271, 281, 299, 306, 325, 337, 339, 352 Kassák, Lajos 98, 139 Kawakita, Renshichirô 326 Keler, Peter 119–22, 344, 346 Kepes, György 276 Kerkovius, Ida 26, 83, 220 Keyserling, Hermann Graf 130 Klee, Paul 9, 16–17, 41–44, 46, 56, 70, 76, 82, 86, 94, 106, 142, 164, 173–74, 192, 202, 216–20, 232, 234–35, 271, 282, 296, 299, 306, 337, 339, 340, 346, 362 Klein, Paul 125 Kleint, Boris 346 Knoblauch, Adolf 31 Koehler, Bernhard 42–43 Kolbe, Georg 38 Kollhoff, Hans 332 Kossack, Oliver 262–64 Kracauer, Siegfried 333 Krajewski, Max 198 Kramer, Ferdinand 166, 344 Kranz, Kurt 289, 307, 325, 344, 346 Krehan, Max 46, 158 Kubin, Alfred 42, 56 Lang, Fritz 215 Lauweriks, Johannes 50 Le Corbusier 45, 87, 112, 131, 201, 298, 303, 352 Léger, Fernand 87–88 Lindig, Otto 66, 125, 158, 160, 343 Lipchitz, Jacques 87 Lissitzky, El 88, 139, 210, 306, 353 Löber, Wolfgang 160 Loew, Heinz 279, 281 Loos, Adolf 303 Luckhardt, Hans 116 Luckhardt, Wassili 116 Ludwig, Eduard 319–21 Lutz, Rudolf 33, 35, 69 Maeterlinck, Maurice 61 Magritte, René 306 Mahler, Alma 25, 64 Mähly, Hans 208 Malevich, Kazimir 88, 148, 234, 236, 352 Mann, Klaus and Erika 327 Marcks, Gerhard 34, 36–40, 46, 79, 86, 106, 158, 160, 176, 192, 339, 343 Marcoussis, Louis 87–88 Margold, Emanuel Josef 178 Masson, André 306 Matisse, Henri 57, 87 May, Ernst 166, 201 Medunetsky, Konstantin 139 Mendelsohn, Erich 45, 54, 112 Messel, Alfred 53 Meyer, Adolf 50–53, 79, 101, 108, 111–13, 151, 164, 235, 344 Meyer, Hannes 13, 15, 189, 207–10, 216, 219, 227, 232, 238, 247–50, 260, 271–72, 274, 298–300, 302, 304, 306, 324, 334–35, 337, 339–41, 362, 365 Meyer-Amden, Otto 128–30, 175 Meyerhold, Vsevolod E. 61 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 13, 15, 27, 75, 101, 112, 115–18, 182, 215, 232, 255–57, 259, 272–74, 281–82, 296, 298–99, 309–10, 320, 324, 326, 328, 354, 360 Milestone, Lewis 273 Milyutin, Nikolai A. 299 Mirkin, Moses 67–69 Mizutani, Takehiko 243, 245, 324 Modersohn-Becker, Paula 215 Mögelin, Else 16, 156, 344 Moholy, Lucia 137, 197, 201, 234, 271, 287–90, 335, 344 Moholy-Nagy, László 70, 88, 97–100, 106, 110, 132, 137–40, 143, 167–68, 173–75, 178, 180, 186, 202, 211–14, 222, 226, 228, 232, 234–36, 238, 271–72, 275–76, 281, 288–90,

m

n

292–94, 306–07, 326, 339–40, 347–52 Molnár, Farkas 79–80, 143, 151, 170 Mondrian, Piet 148, 234–35, 306, 353–54 Muche, Georg 46, 64–65, 70, 76, 86, 108, 149–52, 159, 170, 174–75, 202, 215–16 Müller-Hummel, Theobald Emil 66, 109 Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm 101 Muthesius, Hermann 53

o

Olbrich, Josef Maria 53 Ostwald, Wilhelm 281 Oswald, Richard 27 Otte, Benita 83–84, 156, 343 Oud, Jacobus Johannes Pieter 236 Ozenfant, Amédée 45, 87, 352

p

Pap, Gyula 167–68, 344 Paulick, Richard 215 Peiffer Watenphul, Max 73, 81–84, 344 Péret, Benjamin 306 Peterhans, Walter 228, 249, 260, 269–72, 325, 334 Pevsner, Antoine 306, 352–53 Picabia, Francis 87, 306 Picasso, Pablo 87 Pohl, Josef 283 Prikker, Jan Thorn 94 Püschel, Konrad 220, 244

r

s

s

Stam, Mart 298–99 Steiner, Rudolf 64, 72 Stenberg, Georgii 139 Stepanova, Varvara 139, 353 Stern, Grete 270–71 Sternberg, Josef von 273 Steyn, Stella 227 Stölzl, Gunta 83–84, 89–92, 122, 221–23, 296, 312–13, 320 Stuckenschmidt, Hans H. 142 Sullivan, Louis 116–17, 186 Survage, Léopold 87–88

t

Tagore, Rabindranath 64 Talbot, William Henry Fox 212 Tatlin, Vladimir 65, 138–39 Taut, Bruno 27, 30, 32, 43, 46, 50, 54, 57, 66, 94, 116–17, 150, 166, 191, 201, 303 Taut, Max 113–14 Teltscher, Georg 36 Téry-Adler, Margit 69 Theis, Emil 239, 242 Thiemann, Hans 305–08 Thiersch, Paul 343 Tietze-Conrad, Erika 25 Tolziner, Philip 299 Tümpel, Wolfgang 125 Tzara, Tristan 143, 306

Natter, Christoph 344 Nauhaus, Wilhelm 125 Neuner, Hannes 346 Neusüss, Floris M. 213 Nietzsche, Friedrich 150, 353

u v

Rancière, Jacques 61 Ray, Man 101, 212–13, 306 Reich, Lilly 299, 310, 360 Reichardt, Grete 223, 303 Reimann, Albert 271 Ribemont-Dessaignes, Georges 306 Richardson, Henry Hobson 53 Richter, Hans 143, 353 Rietveld, Gerrit 114, 131, 163, 205 Rilke, Rainer Maria 314 Rodchenko, Alexander 138–39, 236, 353 Röhl, Karl Peter 109, 143, 344 Rose, Hajo 289 Rossi, Aldo 300 Rossig, Reinhold 297, 299–300 Schad, Christian 212 Scharoun, Hans 295 Schawinsky, Xanti 218, 226–27, 306–07 Scheibe, Richard 38 Scheper, Hinnerk 195–97, 320 Scheyer, Galka 104 Schiller, Friedrich 231 Schleifer, Fritz 147, 344 Schlemmer, Carl 94 Schlemmer, Oskar 14, 25–26, 35, 46, 84, 86, 102, 106, 108, 110, 127–30, 132–36, 144, 147–48, 167–68, 172–75, 186, 202, 204, 216, 227–28, 230–32, 235, 260, 265, 274, 280–82, 308, 311–14, 339, 352 Schmidt, Georg 340 Schmidt, Joost 53, 108, 110, 145–48, 186, 271, 279–82, 301–04 Schmidt, Kurt 36, 132, 141–44 Schmidthammer, Georg 178 Schmidt-Nonne, Helene 218, 281 Schneck, Adolf 166 Schnepel, Walter 168 Schoedsack, Ernest B. 327 Schoenmaekers, M. H. J. 354 Schoenberg, Arnold 72, 170 Schopenhauer, Arthur 353 Schreiber, Fritz 227 Schreyer, Lothar 35, 59–62, 65, 76, 86, 135 Schütte-Lihotzky, Margarete 193 Schwab, Alexander 304, 335 Schwarz, Rudolf 168 Schwerdtfeger, Kurt 108, 143, 344, 346 Schwitters, Kurt 27, 87 Senger, Alexander von 357 Singer, Franz 124 Slothouwer, D. F. 114 Smithson, Alison 250 Smithson, Peter 250 Snelson, Kenneth 139–40 Sommerfeld, Adolf 53–54, 108 Springer, Ferdinand 53

w

C 22 M 0 Y 100 K 0

Index of Names

Umbehr, Otto (Umbo) 271, 344 Vantongerloo, Georges 353–54 Vassiliev, Nicolai 66 Velde, Henry van de 14, 34, 50, 53, 124–25, 150, 154, 166 Voigt, Reingard 219 Volger, Lis 251–52 Wagenfeld, Wilhelm 16, 165, 167–68, 170, 190, 343, 361 Wagner, Martin 191, 201 Walden, Herwarth 61, 88, 98 Weber, Elisabeth 123–24 Weber, Vincent 344 Weill, Kurt 237 Weiner, Tibor 299 Werner, Otto 107–10 Wiene, Robert 45 Wiese, Fritz 125 Wildenhain, Franz Rudolf 160 Wilfred, Thomas 276 Wingler, Hans Maria 19, 82–83, 88, 128, 344 Wittwer, Hans 207–10, 247, 298, 343 Wolfe, Tom 354 Wottitz, Anny 123–26 Wright, Frank Lloyd 53–54, 75, 114, 200–01, 295

y

Yamawaki, Iwao 18, 323–26 Yamawaki, Michiko 324 Yva 290

z

Zabel, Johannes 137–38 Zaubitzer, Carl 86

Bibliography Albers 1972 • Josef Albers. Unpublished handwritten statement, “Re: Untitled Glass Assemblage,” written in 1972. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation Archive, Box 43, Folder 5. Albers/Baird 2007 • Interview with Josef Albers conducted by George Baird. LTM recordings 2007. Albers/Heinersdorff n. d. • Unpublished correspondence between Josef Albers and Gottfried Heinersdorff, Puhl & Wagner. Gott­ fried Heinersdorff Archiv, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin. Anger 1998 • Jenny Anger, “Klees Unterricht in der Webereiwerkstatt des Bauhauses.” In Das Bauhaus webt: Die Textilwerkstatt am Bauhaus. Edited by Magdalena Droste and Manfred Ludewig. Exh. cat. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin et al. Berlin 1998. Arbeitsrat für Kunst 1920 • Arbeitsrat für Kunst, ed. Ruf zum Bauen: Zweite Buchpublikation des Arbeiterrats für Kunst. Berlin 1920. Arndt 1971 • Alfred Arndt. “Wie ich an das Bauhaus in Weimar kam.” In Bauhaus und Bauhäusler: Bekenntnisse und Erinnerungen. Edited by Eckhard Neumann. Bern and Stutt­ gart 1971. Asholt/Fähnders 1995 • Wolfgang Asholt and Walter Fähnders, eds. Manifeste und Proklamationen der europäischen Avantgarde. Stuttgart 1995. Auerbach 1982 • Ellen Auerbach. “Walter Peter­h ans.” In Photographie 1922–1982. Edited by Manfred Heiting. Cologne 1982, pp. 13–22. Avenarius 1907 • Ferdinand Avenarius. “Ausdruckskultur (das Wort zum ersten Mal vorgeschlagen).” In Das Avenarius-Buch: Ein Bild des Mannes aus seinen Gedichten und Aufsätzen. Edited by Wilhelm Stapel. Munich 1916, pp. 88–89.

Badura-Triska 1990 • Eva Badura-Triska, ed. Johannes Itten: Tagebücher Stuttgart 1913–1916, Wien 1916–1919. Vienna 1990. Baljeu 1974 • Joost Baljeu. Theo van Doesburg. New York 1974. Banham 1964 • Reyner Banham. Die Revolution der Architektur: Theorie und Gestaltung im Ersten Maschinenzeitalter. Reinbek 1964. Barcelona 2005 • La Bauhaus de festa, 1919–1933. Edited by the Fundació “la Caixa.” Exh. cat. Fundació “la Caixa,” Barcelona. Barcelona 2005. Barche 1990 • Gisela Barche. “The Photographic Staging of the Image: On Stage Photography at the Bauhaus.” In Photography at the Bauhaus. Edited by Jeannine Fiedler. Cambridge, MA 1990, pp. 238–53. Barr Papers n. d. • Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, 9.F.56.a., The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Barr 1945 • Alfred H. Barr, Jr., “Art in the Third Reich—Preview, 1933.” Magazine of Art (October 1945), p. 214. Bauhaus 1, 1, 1927 • Bauhaus 1, 1 (January– March 1927). Bauhaus 1, 2, 1927 • Bauhaus 1, 2 (April–June 1927). Bauhaus 1, 3, 1927 • Bauhaus 1, 3 (July– September 1927). Bauhaus 1, 4, 1927 • Bauhaus 1, 4 (October– December 1927). Bauhaus, 2, 1, 1928 • Bauhaus. Zeitschrift für Gestaltung 2, 1 (January–March 1928). Bauhaus 2, 2/3, 1928 • Bauhaus. Zeitschrift für Gestaltung 2, 2/3 (April–June/July– September 1928). Bauhaus 2, 4, 1928 • Bauhaus. Zeitschrift für Gestaltung 2, 4 (October–December 1928). Bauhaus 3, 1, 1929 • Bauhaus. Zeitschrift für Gestaltung 3, 1 (January–March 1929). Bauhaus 3, 2, 1929 • Bauhaus. Zeitschrift für Gestaltung 3, 2 (April–June 1929).

Bauhaus 3, 3, 1929 • Bauhaus. Zeitschrift für Gestaltung 3, 3 (July–September 1929). Bauhaus 3, 4, 1929 • Bauhaus. Zeitschrift für Gestaltung 3, 4 (October–December 1929). Bauhaus 4, 1, 1931 • Bauhaus. Zeitschrift für Gestaltung 4, 1 (January–March 1931). Bauhaus 4, 2, 1931 • Bauhaus. Zeitschrift für Gestaltung 4, 2 (April–June 1931). Bauhaus 4, 3, 1931 • Bauhaus. Zeitschrift für Gestaltung 4, 3 (July–September 1931). Bauhaus 4, 4, 1931 • Bauhaus. Zeitschrift für Gestaltung 4, 4 (October–December 1931). Bauhaus-Archiv 2006 • Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, ed. Das Bauhaus-Schachspiel von Josef Hartwig. Berlin 2006. Baumann 2007 • Kirsten Baumann. Bauhaus Dessau: Architektur, Gestaltung, Idee. Berlin 2007. Baumgartner 2006 • Michael Baumgartner.­ “Klee und seine frühen Sammler.” In Paul Klee—Kunst und Karriere: Beiträge des internationalen Symposiums in Bern. Edited by Oskar Bätschmann and Josef Helfenstein. Bern 2000, pp. 93–106. Baumhoff 2001 • Anja Baumhoff. The Gendered World of the Bauhaus: The Politics of Power at the Weimar Republic’s Premier Art Institute, 1919–1932. Frankfurt am Main et al. 2001. Baumhoff 2006 • Anja Baumhoff, “What’s in the Shadow of a Bauhaus Block? Gender Issues in Classical Modernity.” In Practicing Modernity: Female Creativity in the Weimar Republic. Edited by Christiane Schönfeld. Würzburg 2006, pp. 51–67. Bayer 1955 • Herbert Bayer et al., eds. Bauhaus 1919–1928. Third Edition. Stuttgart 1955. Behne 1919 • Adolf Behne. Die Wiederkehr der Kunst. Leipzig 1919. Behne 1922–23 • Adolf Behne. “Der Wettbewerb der Turmhaus-Gesellschaft.” Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst 7 (1922–23), pp. 101–20. Behne 1923 • Adolf Behne. “Das Bauhaus im Weimar.” Die Weltbühne 19, 38 (September 20, 1923). Behne 1980 • Adolf Behne. “Mitteilung an Alle: Werbeprospekt für die Zeitschrift Bauen (1920).” In Arbeitsrat für Kunst, Berlin 1918–1921. Exh. cat. Akademie der Künste. Berlin 1980, p. 100. Behr 1967 • Adalbert Behr. “Das Denkmal für die Märzgefallenen in Weimar.” In Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Hochschule für Architektur und Bauwesen Weimar 14, 5 (1967), pp. 459–64. Behrendt 1923 • Walter Curt Behrendt. “Skyscrapers in Germany.” The Journal of the American Institute of Architects 11 (1923). Benjamin 1963 • Walter Benjamin. Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. Frankfurt am Main 1963. Benjamin 1980 • Walter Benjamin. Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt am Main 1980. Berg 1922 • Max Berg. “Die formale Auffassung des Hochhausgedankens.” Die Bauwelt 13 (May 1922), pp. 359–63. Bergius 1994 • Hanne Bergius. “Fotomontage im Vergleich. Hannah Höch, Marianne Brandt, Alice Lex-Nerlinger.” In Fotografieren hieß teilnehmen: Fotografinnen der Weimarer Republik. Edited by Ute Eskildsen. Exh. cat. Museum Folkwang Essen. Dusseldorf 1994, pp. 42–50. Berlage 1908 • Hendrik Petrus Berlage. Grundlagen und Entwicklung der Architektur. Berlin 1908. Berlin 1977 • Hans Maria Wingler, ed. Kunstschulreform 1900–1933. Exh. cat. BauhausArchiv Berlin. Berlin 1977. Berlin 1982 • Herbert Bayer: Das künstlerische Werk 1918–1938. Edited by Magdalena Droste. Exh. cat. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Berlin 1982. Berlin 1984 • Wassily Kandinsky: Russische Zeit und Bauhausjahre, 1915–1933. Edited by Peter Hahn. Exh. cat. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Berlin 1984.

367

Kandinsky:­Essays über Kunst und Künstler. Edited by Max Bill. Bern 1963. Bittner 2003 • Regina Bittner, “Der Bauhausstil als Lebensstil.” In Bauhausstil: Zwischen International Style und Lifestyle. Edited by Regina Bittner. Berlin 2003, pp. 27–36. Bogler 1959 • Theodor Bogler. Ein Mönch erzählt. Honnef 1959. Bogner/Badura-Triska 1988 • Dieter Bogner and Eva Badura-Triska. Johannes Itten: Meine Symbole, meine Mythologien werden die Formen und Farben sein. Exh. cat. Museum Moderner Kunst Vienna; Kunsthaus Zürich; Museum Folkwang, Essen. Vienna and Zurich 1988. Bois 1981 • Yve-Alain Bois. “Metamorphosen der Axonometrie.” Daidalos 1 (1981), pp. 41–58. Borrmann 1989 • Norbert Borrmann. Paul Schultze-Naumburg, 1869–1949: Maler, Publizist, Architekt. Essen 1989. Botar 2006 • Oliver A. I. Botar. Technical Detours: The Early Moholy-Nagy Reconsidered. New York 2006. Bothe 1994 • Rolf Bothe. “Der Turm des Feuers.” In Das frühe Bauhaus und Johannes Itten. Edited by Rolf Bothe et al. Exh. cat. Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar; BauhausArchiv Berlin; Kunstmuseum Bern. Ostfildern 1994. Bothe 1996 • Rolf Bothe and Michael Siebenbrodt. “La Torre del fuoco di Johannes Itten.” In Bauhaus 1919–1933. Edited by Marco de Michelis and Agnes Kohlmeyer. Exh. cat. Fondazione Antonio Mazzotta Milano. Milan 1996. Bremer 1979 • Hildegard Bremer. Die Bauhausbücher 1925–1930: Eine referierende Bibliographie unter Berücksichtigung von Rezensionen. 1979 (Typescript, BauhausArchiv Berlin). Breuer 1925 • Marcel Breuer. “Die Möbelabteilung des Staatlichen Bauhauses zu Weimar.” Fachblatt für Holzarbeiter 20 (1925), pp. 17–19. Breuer 1928 • Marcel Breuer. “Metallmöbel.” In Innenräume, Räume und Inneneinrichtungsgegenstände aus der Werkbundausstellung “Die Wohnung,” insbesondere aus den Bauten der städtischen Weißenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart. Edited by Werner Gräff i. A. des Deutschen Werkbundes. Stuttgart 1928, pp. 133–34. Breuer 2001 • Gerda Breuer. Die Erfindung des modernen Klassikers: Avantgarde und ewige Aktualität. Ostfildern 2001. Bristol/Cambridge 2005 • Starting at Zero: Black Mountain College 1933–57. Exh. cat. Arnolfini, Bristol; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. Cambridge 2005. Brüning 1995a • Ute Brüning. “Reklame für die erste Bauhausausstellung 1923.” In Das A und O des Bauhauses—Bauhauswerbung: Schriftbilder, Drucksachen, Ausstellungsdesign. Edited by Ute Brüning. Exh. cat. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin; Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart; Gerhard-Marcks-Haus Bremen. Leipzig 1995, pp. 59–61. Brüning 1995b • Ute Brüning. “Bauhausbücher.” In Das A und O des Bauhauses— Bauhauswerbung: Schriftbilder, Drucksachen, Ausstellungsdesign. Edited by Ute Brüning. Exh. cat. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin; Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart; GerhardMarcks-Haus Bremen. Leipzig 1995. Brüning 1999 • Ute Brüning. “Druckerei, Reklame, Werbewerkstatt.” In Bauhaus. Edited by Jeannine Fiedler and Peter Feierabend. Cologne 1999, pp. 488–97. Busch 1977 • Günter Busch, ed. Gerhard Marcks. Das plastische Werk. Berlin 1977.

Clarenbach 1969 • Dietrich Clarenbach. Grenzfälle zwischen Architektur und Plastik im 20. Jahrhundert. Diss. Munich 1969. Cohen 1995 • Jean-Louis Cohen. “Europe Interprets the Skyscraper.” In Jean-Louis Cohen. Scenes of the World to Come: European Architecture and the American Challenge, 1893-1960. Paris 1995, pp. 104–33.

Coke 1982 • Van Deren Coke. AvantgardeFotografie in Deutschland 1919–1939. Munich 1982.

Däubler 1919 • Theodor Däubler. “Lyonel Feininger.” Das junge Deutschland 10 (1919), pp. 272. Darmstadt 1967 • Walter Peterhans: Elementarunterricht und photographische Arbeiten. Edited by Hans Maria Wingler. Exh. cat. ErnstLudwig-Haus, Darmstadt. Darmstadt 1967. Dessau 1988 • Experiment Bauhaus: Das Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin zu Gast im Bauhaus Dessau. Edited by Magdalena Droste and Jeannine Fiedler. Exh. cat. Bauhaus Dessau. Berlin 1988. Dessau 1996 • Hajo Düchting. Farbe am Bauhaus: Synthese und Synästhesie. Exh. cat. Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau. Berlin 1996. Dessau 1997 • Gunta Stölzl—Meisterin am Bauhaus Dessau: Textilien, Textilentwürfe und freie Arbeiten 1915–1983. Edited by Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau. Exh. cat. Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau. Ostfildern 1997. Dessau 2000 • Architektur und Kunst: Das Meisterhaus Kandinsky-Klee in Dessau. Edited by Norbert Michels. Exh. cat. Anhaltische Gemäldegalerie, Dessau. Leipzig 2000. Deutsches Handwerksinstitut 1932 • Deutsches Handwerksinstitut. “Schlussbericht über die Versuchssiedlung Dessau-Törten.” In Kostensenkung durch Bauforschungen: Ergebnisse zur wirtschaftlichen Gestaltung des Baubetriebes. Edited by Edgar Hotz. Berlin 1932, pp. 125–154. Van Doesburg 1922 • Theo van Doesburg. “Der Wille zum Stil.” De Stijl 5, 2 (February 1922), pp. 23–32 and 5, 3 (March 1922), pp. 33–41. Van Doesburg 1925 • Theo van Doesburg. Grundbegriffe der neuen gestaltenden Kunst (Bauhaus book no. 6), Munich 1925. Dolgner 2000 • Angela Dolgner. Wilhelm Nauhaus: Bucheinbände aus sechs Jahrzehnten. Halle 2000. Dorfner 1922 • Otto Dorfner. Vorschläge zum Aufbau des Staatlichen Bauhauses in Weimar (Mai 22). Thüringisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Weimar, Bauhaus-Akte Nr. 3, Bl. 320–327. Dresler 1938 • Adolf Dresler. Deutsche Kunst und ‘entartete Kunst’: Kunstwerk und Zerrbild als Spiegel der Weltanschauung. Munich 1938. Droste 1990 • Magdalena Droste. Bauhaus: 1919–1933. First edition. Cologne 1990. Droste 1997 • Magdalena Droste. Die Bauhaus-Leuchte von Carl Jacob Jucker und Wilhelm Wagenfeld. Frankfurt am Main 1997. Droste 2001 • Magdalena Droste. “Die Möbel von Marcel Breuer.” In Marcel Breuer: Design. Edited by Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Cologne 2001. Droste 2007 • Magdalena Droste. “Aneignung und Abstoßung.” In Bauhaus-Ideen um Itten, Feininger, Klee, Kandinsky: Vom Expressiven zum Konstruktiven. Edited by Brigitte Salmen. Exh. cat. Schlossmuseum Murnau. Murnau 2007, pp. 11–29. Droste 2009a • Magdalena Droste. “Zu Oskar Schlemmers Paracelsus.” In Jahrbuch: Klassik Stiftung Weimar. Göttingen 2009, pp. 123–43. Droste 2009b • Magdalena Droste. “Symbol oder Privatsymbol. Zu Oskar Schlemmers Wandgestaltung am Bauhaus Weimar.” In Bauhausmythen. Edited by Anja Baumhoff and Magdalena Droste. Berlin 2009.

Eberlein 1934 • Kurt Karl Eberlein. Was ist Deutsch in der Deutschen Kunst? (Schriften zur deutschen Lebenssicht). Leipzig 1934. Ehrhardt 1932 • Alfred Ehrhardt. Gestaltungslehre: Die Praxis eines zeitgemäßen Kunstund Werkunterrichts. Weimar 1932. Emmrich 1989 • Angelika Emmrich. “Marcel Breuer: Tischlerlehrling und Geselle des Weimarer Bauhauses 1920–1925.” In Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Hochschule

Fuhrmeister 2001 • Christian Fuhrmeister. Beton, Klinker, Granit—Material, Macht, Politik: Eine Materialikonografie. Berlin 2001.

für Architektur und Bauwesen Weimar 35, 2 (Reihe A), 1989, pp. 79–84. Engelmann/Schädlich 1991 • Christine Engelmann and Christian Schädlich. Die Bauhausbauten in Dessau. Berlin 1991. Erfurth 1983 • Helmut Erfurth. Der Stahlrohrstuhl: Sein Entwicklungsweg durch das Industriedesign. Dessau 1983. Esau 1995 • Erika Esau. “The Künstlerehe­ paar: Ideal and Reality.” In Visions of the “Neue Frau”: Women and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany. Edited by Marsha Meskimmon and Shearer West. Aldershot 1995, pp. 28–41. Essen 1977 • Gerd-Wolfgang Essen. Hans Thiemann—Das malerische Werk: Werkver­ zeichnis 1931–1977. Hamburg 1977. Fehl/Rodríguez-Lores 1997 • Gerhard Fehl and Juan Rodríguez-Lores. “Die Stadt wird in der Landschaft sein und die Landschaft in der Stadt.” In Bandstadt und Bandstruktur als Leitbilder des modernen Städtebaus. Basel et al. 1997. Feininger n. d. • Feininger Papers. Copy of selected letters in the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Feininger 1905–1935 • Lyonel Feininger. Letters to Julia Feininger 1905–1935. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA Feiniger/Muir 2000 and 2008 • T. Lux Feininger. Interviews by Laura Muir. Cambridge, MA, May 24, 2000 and June 17, 2008. Feininger/Tone 2008 • Letter from T. Lux Feininger to Lilian Tone, October 16, 2008. Fiedler 1990a • Jeannine Fiedler, ed. Photography at the Bauhaus. Cambridge, MA 1990. Fiedler 1990b • Jeannine Fiedler. “T. Lux Feininger. ‘I Am a Painter and not a Photographer!’” In Photography at the Bauhaus. Edited by Jeannine Fiedler. Cambridge, MA 1990, pp. 44–53. Fiedler/Buschfeld 1995 • Jeannine Fiedler and Ben Buschfeld. “László Moholy-Nagy: Surfer in der Gutenberg-Galaxis.” In Das A und O des Bauhauses—Bauhauswerbung: Schriftbilder, Drucksachen, Ausstellungsdesign. Edited by Ute Brüning. Exh. cat. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin; Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart; Gerhard-Marcks-Haus Bremen. Leipzig 1995. Fiedler/Feierabend 1999 • Jeannine Fiedler and Peter Feierabend, eds. Bauhaus. Cologne 1999. Findeli 1995a • Alain Findeli. Le Bauhaus de Chicago: L’œuvre pédagogique de László Moholy-Nagy. Paris 1995. Findeli 1995b • Alain Findeli. “László MoholyNagy und das Projekt der Bauhausbücher.” In Das A und O des Bauhauses—Bauhauswerbung: Schriftbilder, Drucksachen, Ausstellungsdesign. Edited by Ute Brüning. Exh. cat. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin; Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart; Gerhard-Marcks-Haus Bremen. Leipzig 1995. Fitschen 2001 • Jürgen Fitschen. “Ernst Barlach, Gerhard Marcks und das Mittelalter.” In Die Gemeinschaft der Heiligen: Der Figurenzyklus an der Katharinenkirche zu Lübeck und das monumentale Werk Ernst Barlachs. Edited by Jürgen Fitschen and Volker Probst. Bremen and Güstrow 2001. Fleischmann 1984 • Gerd Fleischmann, ed. Bauhaus: Drucksachen, Typografie, Reklame. Dusseldorf 1984. Forgács 1995 • Éva Forgács. The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics. Budapest et al. 1995. Frampton 1991 • Kenneth Frampton. Die Architektur der Moderne: Eine kritische Bau­ geschichte. Stuttgart 1991. Francé 1920 • Raoul Heinrich Francé. Die Pflanze als Erfinder. Stuttgart 1920. Franciscono 1971 • Marcel Franciscono. Walter­Gropius and the Creation of the Bauhaus in Weimar: The Ideals and Artistic Theories of Its Founding Years. Urbana 1971. Friedel/Hoberg 2008 • Helmut Friedel and Annegret Hoberg, eds. Wassily Kandinsky. Munich 2008.

C 20 M 0 Y 100 K 0

368

Berlin 1987a • Gunta Stölzl: Weberei am Bauhaus und aus eigener Werkstatt. Edited by Magdalena Droste. Exh. cat. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Berlin 1987. Berlin 1987b • 50 Jahre New Bauhaus: Bauhausnachfolge in Chicago. Edited by BauhausArchiv Berlin. Exh. cat. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Berlin 1987. Berlin 1988a • Experiment Bauhaus. Edited by Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Exh. cat. BauhausArchiv Berlin. Berlin 1988. Berlin 1988b • Der Schrei nach dem Turmhaus. Edited by Florian Zimmermann. Exh. cat. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Berlin 1988. Berlin 1989 • Hannes Meyer 1889–1954: Architekt, Urbanist, Lehrer. Edited by BauhausArchiv Berlin et al. Exh. cat. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Berlin 1989. Berlin 1994 • Adolf Meyer—Der zweite Mann: Ein Architekt im Schatten von Walter Gropius. Edited by Annemarie Jaeggi. Exh. cat. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Berlin 1994. Berlin et al. 1995 • Das A und O des Bauhauses: Bauhauswerbung, Schriftbilder, Drucksachen, Ausstellungsdesign. Edited by Ute Brüning. Exh. cat. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin; Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart; Gerhard-Marcks-Haus Bremen. Leipzig 1995. Berlin 1996 • Das andere Bauhaus: Otto Bart­ ning und die Staatliche Bauhochschule Weimar 1926–1930. Edited by Dörte Nicolaisen. Exh. cat. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Berlin 1996. Berlin et al. 1998 • Das Bauhaus webt: Die Textilwerkstatt am Bauhaus. Edited by Magdalene Droste and Manfred Ludewig. Exh. cat. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin; Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau; Nederlands Textielmuseum Tilburg; Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar. Berlin 1998. Berlin 1999a • In der Vollendung liegt die Schönheit: Der Bauhaus-Meister Alfred Arndt 1898–1976. Exh. cat. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Berlin 1999. Berlin 1999b • Punkt, Linie, Fläche: Druckgraphik am Bauhaus. Edited by Klaus Weber. Exh. cat. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Berlin 1999. Berlin 2004 • Happy Birthday! BauhausGeschenke. Edited by Klaus Weber. Exh. cat. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Berlin 2004. Berlin 2005a • Farbenfroh! Colourful! Die Werkstatt für Wandmalerei am Bauhaus. The Wallpainting Workshop at the Bauhaus. Edited by Renate Scheper. Exh. cat. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Berlin 2005. Berlin 2005b • Tempo, Tempo! Bauhaus Photomontagen von Marianne Brandt. Edited by Elizabeth Otto. Exh. cat. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Berlin 2005. Berlin/Dusseldorf 1986 • Naum Gabo: Sechzig Jahre Konstruktivismus. Edited by Steven A. Nash and Jörn Merker. Exh. cat. Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf. Munich 1986. English edition: Sixty Years of Constructivism. Exh. cat. Dallas Museum of Fine Arts; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Munich 1986. Berliner Tageblatt 1980 • “Berliner Tageblatt.” August 16, 1923. Reprinted in Georg Muche: Das künstlerische Werk 1912–1927, Edited by Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Exh. cat. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Berlin 1980. Bern et al. 1984 • Johannes Itten: Künstler und Lehrer. Edited by Hans Christoph von Tafel. Exh. cat. Kunstmuseum Bern; KaiserWilhelm-Museum, Krefeld; Galerie der Stadt Stuttgart. Bern 1984, p. 61. Bernays 1928 • Edward L. Bernays. Propaganda. New York 1928. German edition: Propaganda: Die Kunst der Public Relations. Freiburg 2007. Beutler 1976 • Christian Beutler. “Zwölf Briefe von Wassily Kandinsky an Hans Thiemann 1933–1939.” In Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch: Westdeutsches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 28 (1976), pp. 155–66. Von Beyme 2005 • Klaus von Beyme. Das Zeitalter der Avantgarden: Kunst und Gesellschaft 1905–1955. Munich 2005. Bill 1963 • Max Bill. “Einführung.” In

Galison 2001 • Peter Galison. “Aufbau Bauhaus: Logischer Positivismus und architektonische Moderne.” In Arch+ 34, 156 (May 2001), pp. 66–79. Geelhaar 1985 • Christian Geelhaar. “Paul Klee.” In Vom Klang der Bilder: Die Musik in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts. Edited by Karin von Maur. Exh. cat. Staatsgalerie Stutt­ gart. Munich 1985, pp. 422–29. Geiger 1932 • Theodor Geiger. Die soziale Schichtung des deutschen Volkes: Soziografischer Versuch auf statistischer Grundlage. Stuttgart 1932, p. 85. Gera 1990 • Kurt Schmidt. Edited by Kunst­ galerie Gera. Exh. cat. Kunstgalerie Gera. Gera 1990. Giedion 1928 • Sigfried Giedion. Bauen in Frankreich: Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Eisen­ beton. Leipzig et al. 1928. Gleizes 1928 • Albert Gleizes. Kubismus (Bauhaus book no. 13), Munich 1928. Grawe 2002 • Gabriele Diana Grawe. Call for Action: Bauhausmitglieder in Nordamerika. Weimar 2002. Gregotti 1986 • Vittorio Gregotti et al., eds. Ludwig Hilberseimer 1885–1967. Milan 1986. Grohn 1991 • Christian Grohn. Die BauhausIdee: Entwurf, Weiterführung, Rezeption. Berlin 1991. Gropius n. d. • Correspondence between Ise and Walter Gropius in the Gropius Estate, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Gropius 1919 • Walter Gropius. Flyer for the Exhibition for Unknown Architects under the title “Der neue Baugedanke.” Das Hohe Ufer 1, 4 (April 1919), pp. 87–88. Gropius 1920 • Walter Gropius. “Neues Bauen.” In Der Holzbau: Beilage zur Deutschen Bauzeitung 54, 2 (1920), p. 5. Gropius 1923 • Walter Gropius. Idee und Aufbau des Staatlichen Bauhauses Weimar. Munich and Weimar 1923. Gropius 1925a • Walter Gropius. Internationale Architektur (Bauhaus book no. 1). Munich 1925. Gropius 1925b • Walter Gropius. Neue Arbeiten der Bauhauswerkstätten (Bauhaus book no. 7). Munich 1925 Gropius 1925c • Walter Gropius. “Grundsätze der Bauhausproduktion.” In idem, Neue Arbeiten der Bauhauswerkstätten (Bauhaus book no. 7). Munich 1925. Gropius 1925d • Walter Gropius. “Wohnhäuser.” Volksblatt für Anhalt (July 5, 1925). Gropius 1930 • Walter Gropius. Bauhausbauten Dessau (Bauhaus book no. 12). Munich 1930. Gropius 1980 • Walter Gropius. “Der freie Volksstaat und die Kunst.” In Arbeitsrat für Kunst, Berlin 1918–1921. Exh. cat. Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Berlin 1980, p. 107. Gropius 1998 • Ise Gropius. Diary. Excerpts, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, inv. no. 1998/56. Grunow 1908 • Gertrud Grunow. Advertisement. Remscheider Zeitung 61, 271 (October 2, 1908). Grunow 1923 • Gertrud Grunow. “Der Aufbau der lebendigen Form, durch Farbe, Form und Ton.” In Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar. 1919–1923. Weimar and Munich 1923. Grunow 1938 • Gertrud Grunow. “Von der Farbe im Runden.” Kunst und Jugend 18 (February 1938). Grunow 2004 • Gertrud Grunow. “Was ist Jaques-Dalcroze dem Sänger?” Cited in René Radrizzani, Die Grunow-Lehre: Die bewegende Kraft von Klang und Farbe. Wilhelmshaven 2004, p. 79. Grunow/Radrizzani 2004 • “Farben und klingender Ton und Statiken.” (Typescript with handwritten additions by Gertrud Grunow, probably circa 1937). Cited in René Radrizzani, Die Grunow-Lehre: Die bewegende Kraft von Klang und Farbe. Wilhelmshaven 2004.

Hahn 1998 • Peter Hahn. “Papileo: Lyonel Feininger als Bauhaus-Meister.” In Lyonel Feininger: Von Gelmeroda nach Manhattan. Edited by Roland März. Exh. cat. Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin; Haus der Kunst, Munich. Berlin 1998, pp. 263–71. Hahn/Krause 2000 • Peter Hahn and Markus Krause, eds. Hans Thiemann und die Berliner Fantasten: Kunst über dem Realen. Berlin 2000. Halle/Karlsruhe 1993 • Burg Giebichenstein. Die hallesche Kunstschule von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart. Edited by Burg Giebichen­ stein, Hochschule für Kunst und Design. Exh. cat. Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg, Halle; Badisches Landesmuseum, Karlsruhe. Halle 1993. Harris 1987 • Mary Emma Harris. The Arts at Black Mountain College. New York 1987. Harrison/Wood 1998 • Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds. Kunsttheorie im 20. Jahrhundert. 2 vols. Ostfildern 1998. Hartwig 1924 • Josef Hartwig. “Neue Bauhaus-Schachspiele.” Junge Menschen 5, 8 (1924), pp. 187–88. Hartwig 1955 • Josef Hartwig. Leben und Meinungen des Bildhauers Josef Hartwig. Frankfurt am Main 1955. Haus 1994 • Andreas Haus, ed. BauhausIdeen 1919–1994: Bibliografie und Beiträge zur Rezeption des Bauhaus-Gedankens. Berlin 1994. Hays 1992 • K. Michael Hays. Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: The Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer. Cambridge, MA 1992. Hemken 1994 • Kai-Uwe Hemken. “Die Zukunft im Räderwerk der Harmonie: Utopievorstellungen zweier Werkbund-Ausstellungen im Jahre 1930.” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 39 (1994), pp. 79–90. Hemken 1995 • Kai-Uwe Hemken, “‘Guillotine der Dichter’ oder Ausstellungsdesign am Bauhaus.” In Das A und O des Bauhauses— Bauhauswerbung: Schriftbilder, Drucksachen, Ausstellungsdesign. Edited by Ute Brüning. Exh. cat. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin; Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart; Gerhard-Marcks-Haus Bremen. Leipzig 1995, pp. 228–33. Hemken 2008 • Kai-Uwe Hemken. “Bioskopisches Sehen—rhizomatischer Blick. Das ‘Neue Sehen’ als Indiz moderner Wahrnehmung.” In Modernisierung des Sehens. Sehweisen zwischen Künsten und Medien. Edited by ­M atthias Bruhn and Kai-Uwe Hemken. Bielefeld 2008, pp. 125–40. Hemken/Stommer 1992 • Kai-Uwe Hemken and Rainer Stommer, “Der ‘De Stijl’-Kurs von Theo van Doesburg in Weimar (1922).” In Konstruktivistische Schöpferische Internationale Arbeitsgemeinschaft 1922–1927: Utopien für eine europäische Kultur. Edited by Bernd Finkeldey. Exh. cat. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf; Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg, Halle. Ostfildern 1992, pp. 169–77. Henderson 1985 • Linda Dalrymple Henderson. “Theo van Doesburg, ‘Die Vierte Dimension’ und die Relativitätstheorie in den zwanziger Jahren.” In Zeit: Die vierte Dimension in der Kunst. Edited by Michel Baudson. Exh. cat. Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; Kunsthalle Mannheim; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna. Weinheim 1985, pp. 195–205. Herzogenrath 1973 • Wulf Herzogenrath. Oskar Schlemmer: Die Wandgestaltung der neuen Architektur. Passau 1973. Hess 1961 • Hans Hess. Lyonel Feininger. New York 1961. Hesse 1963 • Fritz Hesse. Von der Residenz zur Bauhausstadt. Bad Pyrmont and Hanover 1963. Heyne et al. 2009 • Renate Heyne et al., eds. László Moholy-Nagy—The Photograms: A Catalogue Raisonné. Ostfildern 2009. Hilberseimer 1925 • Ludwig Hilberseimer. Großstadtbauten. Hanover 1925.

Hilberseimer 1927 • Ludwig Hilberseimer. Großstadtarchitektur. Stuttgart 1927. Hilberseimer 1929a • Ludwig Hilberseimer. “Kleinstwohnungen.” Bauhaus. Zeitschrift für Gestaltung 3, 2 (1929), pp. 1–4. Hilberseimer 1929b • Ludwig Hilberseimer. “Handwerk und Industrie.” Bauhaus. Zeitschrift für Gestaltung 3, 2 (1929), pp. 21–24. Hilberseimer 1931 • Ludwig Hilberseimer. “Die Kleinstwohnung im treppenlosen Hause.” Bauhaus. Zeitschrift für Gestaltung 4, 1 (1931), pp. 1–2. Hoffmann 1989 • Justin Hoffmann. “Hans Richter: Filmemacher des Konstruktivismus.” In Hans Richter: Malerei und Film. Exh. cat. Deutsches Filmmuseum Frankfurt am Main. Frankfurt am Main 1989, pp. 9–15. Hofmann 1990 • Werner Hofmann, ed. Kurt Kranz. Das unendliche Bild. Hamburg 1990. Hofstaetter 2007 • Constanze Hofstaetter. Karl Peter Röhl und die Moderne—Auf der Suche nach dem “Neuen Menschen”: Zwischen Nachkriegsexpressionismus, frühem Bauhaus und internationalem Konstruktivismus. Petersberg 2007. Huch 1922 • Ricarda Huch. Vom Wesen des Menschen: Natur und Geist. Prien 1922. Hüter 1982 • Karl-Heinz Hüter. Das Bauhaus in Weimar: Studie zur gesellschaftspolitischen Geschichte einer deutschen Kunstschule. Third edition. Berlin 1982.

Isaacs 1983–84 • Reginald Isaacs. Walter Gropius: Der Mensch und sein Werk. Vol. 2. Berlin 1983–84. Itten 1978 • Johannes Itten. Gestaltungs- und Formenlehre: Mein Vorkurs am Bauhaus und später. Ravensburg 1978.

Jaeggi 2003 • Annemarie Jaeggi. “Architektur am frühen Bauhaus.” In Bau einer neuen Welt: Architektonische Visionen des Expressionismus. Edited by Rainer Stamm and Daniel Schreiber. Cologne 2003, pp. 98–103. James-Chakraborty 2006 • Kathleen JamesChakraborty, ed. Bauhaus Culture: From Weimar to the Cold War. Minneapolis 2006. Jehle-Schulte Strathaus 1990 • Ulrike JehleSchulte Strathaus. “Gropius’ Direktionszimmer: Bildstrategie eines Interieurs.” In Bildfälle: Die Moderne im Zwielicht. Edited by Beat Wyss. Zurich and Munich 1990, pp. 82–87.

Kállai 1929 • Ernst Kállai. “Bauhaus Dessau.” In Bauhaus Dessau. Exh. cat. Gewerbemuseum Basel. Basel 1929, pp. 1–3. Kállai 1986 • Ernst Kállai. Zehn Jahre Bauhaus in Vision und Formgesetz: Aufsätze über Kunst und Künstler. Leipzig and Weimar 1986, p. 133. Kandinsky 1926 • Wassily Kandinsky. Punkt und Linie zu Fläche: Beitrag zur Analyse der malerischen Elemente (Bauhaus book no. 9). Munich 1926. Kassák/Moholy-Nagy 1922 • Lajos Kassák and László Moholy-Nagy. Buch neuer Künstler. Vienna 1922. Kerbs 2007 • Diethart Kerbs. Lebenslinien: Deutsche Biografien aus dem 20. Jahrhundert. Essen 2007. Kerkovius 1959 • Ida Kerkovius. Untitled. In Ludwig Grote. Erinnerungen an Paul Klee. Passau 1959, p. 56. Keyserling 1922 • Graf Hermann Keyserling. Schöpferische Erkenntnis. Darmstadt 1922. Kilian 2002 • Markus Kilian. Großstadtarchitektur und New City. Diss. Karlsruhe 2002. Klee 1925 • Paul Klee. Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch (Bauhaus book no. 2). Munich 1925. Klee 1927 • Draft of a letter from Paul Klee to Walter Gropius, September 22, 1927. Klee Family Estate, Bern. Klee 1927–28 • Paul Klee, Pedagogical estate, PN 5 IV/52, 53, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. Klee 1979 • Paul Klee. Briefe an die Familie. 2

vols. Edited by Felix Klee. Cologne 1979 Klee 1999 • Paul Klee. Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre. Basel and Stuttgart 1999. Knoblauch/Feininger 1917 • Adolf Knoblauch and Lyonel Feininger, “Zwiesprache Feininger–Knoblauch.” Der Sturm 8, 6 (1917), pp. 82–86. Konkurrenz 1926 • “Konkurrenz zur Erlangung von Entwürfen für den Neubau der Petersschule in Basel.” Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur, ETH Zurich: 281926-1 ¼ (35-05). Komor Müller 2007 • Caroline Komor Müller. Austausch und Selbstreflexion: Die Freie Malklasse von Paul Klee am Bauhaus Dessau 1927–1931. Lizenziatsarbeit (unpublished), Universität Bern 2007. Krauss 1985 • Rosalind E. Krauss. “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” In The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, MA and London 1985. Krausse 1995 • Joachim Krausse. “Effemerisierung: Wahrnehmung und Konstruktion.” In Wahrnehmung undGeschichte: Markierungen zur Aisthesis materialis. Edited by Bernhard J. Dotzler and Ernst Müller. Berlin 1995, pp. 135–63. Kröll 1974 • Friedhelm Kröll. Bauhaus 1919– 1933: Künstler zwischen Isolation und kollektiver Praxis (Gesellschaft und Kommunikation 17). Diss. Erlangen 1974, Dusseldorf 1974. Kruppa 1992 • Karsten Kruppa. “Marianne Brandt: Annäherung an ein Leben.” In Die Metallwerkstatt am Bauhaus. Edited by Klaus Weber. Exh. cat. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Berlin 1992, pp. 48–55.

Lehrervereinigung 1901 • Lehrervereinigung für die Pflege der künstlerischen Bildung Hamburg, ed. Versuche und Ergebnisse der Lehrervereinigung für die Pflege der künstlerischen Bildung in Hamburg. Second edition. Hamburg 1901. Leiprecht/Seiler 2004 • Helga Leiprecht and Christian Seiler. “‘Wir wollen alle gleich individuell sein.’ Ein Gespräch mit dem Soziologen Sighard Neckel.” Du 69, 743 (February 2004), p. 91. Leipziger Illustrierte Zeitung n. d. • Fotoliste für die Leipziger Illustrierte Zeitung, GN 3/107, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Letsch 1959–60 • Herbert Letsch. “Zur Frage des Klassencharakters der ästhetischen Konzeption des Bauhauskonstruktivismus.” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Hochschule für Architektur und Bauwesen Weimar 6, 2 (1959–60), pp. 143–49. Lobisch 1999 • Mechthild Lobisch, ed. Zwischen van de Velde und Bauhaus: Otto Dorfner und ein wichtiges Kapitel der Einbandkunst. Halle 1999. London et al. 2006 • Christopher Wilk. “The Healthy Body Culture.” In Modernism— Designing a New World: 1914–1939. Edited by Chrisopher Wilk. Exh. cat. Victoria and Albert Museum, London; MARTa Herford; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington. London 2006, pp. 249–95. Lottig 1920 • William Lottig. “Alle Kräfte werden gelöst, gepflegt und entwickelt!” In Vom Kinde aus. Edited by Johannes Gläser. Braunschweig and Hamburg 1920. Luckhardt 1989 • Ulrich Luckhardt. Lyonel Feininger. Munich 1989.

Maasberg/Prinz 2004 • Ute Maasberg and Regina Prinz. Die Neuen kommen! Weibliche Avantgarde in der Architektur der zwanziger Jahre. Hamburg 2004. Milan 1997 • Bauhaus 1919–1933: Da Klee a Kandinsky, da Gropius a Mies van der Rohe. Edited by Marco de Michelis and Agnes Kohlmeyer. Exh. cat. Fondazione Antonio Mazzotta, Milan. Milan 1997. Malevich 1927 • Kazimir Malevich. Die gegenstandslose Welt (Bauhaus book no. 11). Munich 1927.

369

370

Moholy-Nagy 1950 • Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. László Moholy-Nagy: Ein Totalexperiment. Mainz 1972. English edition: Moholy-Nagy: An Experiment in Totality. New York 1950. Moholy-Nagy 1956 • Sybil Moholy-Nagy. Answers to a questionnaire, circa 1956. Museum of Modern Art, New York, Department of Painting and Sculpture, Object Files. Moholy-Nagy 1996 • László Moholy-Nagy. Fotogramme 1922–1943. Exh. cat. Museum Folkwang, Essen. Essen 1996. French edition: Compositions lumineuses 1922–1943. Paris 1995. MoMA Archives 1933 • Press release from September 30, 1933. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. MoMA Archives/NS-Kurier 1933 • Anonymous, “Oskar Schlemmer—Otto Stützel.” Stuttgarter NS-Kurier, March 1933, p. 12. Press clipping in Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, 9.F.56.a. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. MoMA Archives/Schlemmer 1933 • Press clipping titled Oskar Schlemmer, published on March 18, 1933. English translation, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, 9.56.a. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Mondrian 1925 • Piet Mondrian. Neue Gestaltung—Neoplastizismus (Bauhaus book no. 5). Munich 1925. Möller 1995 • Werner Möller for the wallpaper manufacturer Gebr. Rasch GmbH & Co. Bauhaustapete: Reklame und Erfolg einer Marke. Cologne 1995. Moscow 1931 • VOKS, ed. Bauhaus Dessau während der Leitung unter Hannes Meyer 1928–1930. Exh. cat. Museum für moderne Kunst des Westens, Moscow. Moscow 1931. Muche 1965 • Georg Muche. Blickpunkt: Sturm, Dada, Bauhaus, Gegenwart. Tübingen 1965. Müller 2009 • Ulrike Müller. Bauhaus Frauen: Meisterinnen in Kunst, Handwerk und Design. Munich 2009. Müller/Dröge 1995 • Michael Müller and Franz Dröge. Die Macht der Schönheit: Avantgarde und Faschismus oder die Geburt der Massenkultur. Hamburg 1995, p. 48. Müller-Krumbach 2005 • Renate MüllerKrumbach. “Mitwirkung im Widerspruch: Der Utopia-Verlag und das Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar.” Marginalien 1 (2005), pp. 32–44. Munich/Bonn 2008 • Kandinsky: Das druckgrafische Werk. Edited by Helmut Friedel and Annegret Hoberg. Exh. cat. Lenbachhaus, Munich; Kunstmuseum Bonn. Munich 2008.

Natter 1931 • Christoph Natter. Künstlerische Erziehung aus eigengesetzlicher Kraft. 2nd revised edition. Gotha 1931. Nerdinger 1985 • Winfried Nerdinger. Walter Gropius—Der Architekt Walter Gropius: Zeichnungen, Pläne und Fotos aus dem BuschReisinger Museum der Harvard University Art Museum Cambridge, MA und dem BauhausArchiv Berlin. Edited by Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Berlin and Cambridge, MA 1985. Nerdinger 1993 • Winfried Nerdinger, ed. Bauhaus-Moderne im Nationalsozialismus: Zwischen Anbiederung und Verfolgung. Munich 1993. Ness 1974 • June L. Ness, ed. Lyonel Feininger. New York 1974 (and London 1975). Neumann 1967 • Eckhard Neumann. Functional Graphic Design in the 20’s. New York et al. 1967. Neumann 1985 • Eckhard Neumann, ed. Bauhaus und Bauhäusler: Erinnerungen und Bekenntnisse. New expanded edition. Cologne 1985. Neumann 1992 • Dietrich Neumann. “Three Early Designs by Mies van der Rohe.” Perspecta 27 (1992), pp. 77–97. Neumann 1995 • Dietrich Neumann. Die Wolkenkratzer kommen! Deutsche Hochhäuser der Zwanzigerjahre: Debatten, Projekte, Bauten. Braunschweig and Wiesbaden 1995. Neusüss/Heyne 1990 • Floris M. Neusüss

and Renate Heyne, eds. Das Fotogramm in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts—Die andere Seite der Bilder: Fotografie ohne Kamera. Cologne 1990. New York 1980 • T. Lux Feininger: Photographs of the Twenties and Thirties. Exh. cat. Prakapas Gallery, New York. New York 1980. New York 1981 • Christopher Wilk. Marcel Breuer: Furniture and Interiors. Exh. cat. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. New York 1981. New York 2001 • Mies in Berlin. Edited by Terence Riley and Barry Bergdoll. Exh. cat. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. New York 2001. German edition: Munich 2002. Offset: Buch- und Werbekunst 1926 • Offset: Buch- und Werbekunst (Bauhaus publication), 3, 7 (1926). Oldenburgische Landeszeitung 1928 • O. A. (Wk.), “Besuch bei Gropius.” Oldenburgische Landeszeitung (January 1928). BauhausArchiv Berlin GS 10, Mappe 82. Osterwold 1985 • Tilman Osterwold. “Selbstbildnisse: Das Egozentrische der Kunst.” In Das Selbstporträt im Zeitalter der Photographie: Maler und Photographen im Dialog mit sich selbst. Edited by Erika Billeter. Exh. cat. Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts Lausanne; Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart; Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Bern 1985, pp. 27–33. Otterlo/Utrecht 2000 • Theo van Doesburg: Œuvre Catalogue. Edited by Elis Hoek. Exh. cat. Centraal Museum, Utrecht; Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo. Utrecht 2000. Otto 1969 • Gunter Otto. “Kunst und Erziehung im industriellen Zeitalter.” In Erziehungswissenschaftliches Handbuch. Edited by Thomas Ellwein et al. Berlin 1969, pp. 227–81. Otto 2009 • Elizabeth Otto. “A ‘Schooling of the Senses’: Post-Dada Visual Experiments in the Bauhaus Photomontages of László Moholy-Nagy and Marianne Brandt.” New German Critique 107 (Summer 2009). Oud 1926 • Jacobus Johannes Pieter Oud. Holländische Architektur (Bauhaus book no. 10). Munich 1926. Passuth 1985 • Krisztina Passuth. MoholyNagy. New York 1985. Pastor 1985 • Suzanne E. Pastor. “Photography and the Bauhaus.” The Archive (Research Series) 21 (March 1985), pp. 5–25. Pehnt 1971 • Wolfgang Pehnt. “Gropius the Romantic.” The Art Bulletin 53, 3 (September 1971), p. 386. Pehnt 1998 • Wolfgang Pehnt. Die Architektur des Expressionismus. Ostfildern 1998. Peterhans 1967 • Walter Peterhans. “Zum gegenwärtigen Stand der Photographie” (1930). In Walter Peterhans: Elementarunterricht und photographische Arbeiten. Edited by Hans Maria Wingler. Darmstadt 1967, unpaginated. Pfennig 1964 • Reinhard Pfennig. Gegenwart der bildenden Kunst: Erziehung zum bildnerischen Denken. Oldenburg 1964. Pommer 1988 • Richard Pommer et al. In the Shadow of Mies—Ludwig Hilberseimer: Architect, Educator, and Urban Planner. New York 1988. Preis 2001 • Achim Preis, ed. Der Gleichgewichtskreis: Ein Bauhausdokument. Weimar 2001. Prigge 2006 • Walter Prigge. Ikone der Moderne: Das Bauhausgebäude in Dessau. Berlin 2006. Probst/Schädlich 1987 • Hartmut Probst and Christian Schädlich, eds. Walter Gropius (Ausgewählte Schriften, 3). Berlin 1987.

Radewaldt 1986 • Ingrid Radewaldt. Bauhaustextilien 1919–1933. Diss. Hamburg 1986. Rancière 2006 • Jacques Rancière. Die Aufteilung des Sinnlichen: Die Politik der Kunst und ihre Paradoxien. Edited by Maria Muhle. Berlin 2006.

Ray 2001 • Katerina Rüedi Ray. “Bauhaus Hausfraus: Gender Formation in Design Education.” Journal of Architectural Education 55, 2 (2001), pp. 73–80. Rebentisch 2006 • Juliane Rebentisch. “Demokratie und Theater.” In Spieltrieb: Was bringt die Klassik auf die Bühne? Schillers Ästhetik heute. Edited by Felix Ennslin. Berlin 2006, pp. 23–38. Rehm 2005 • Robin Rehm. Das Bauhausgebäude in Dessau: Die ästhetischen Kategorien Zweck Form Inhalt. Berlin 2005. Reichsforschungsgesellschaft 1929 • Reichsforschungsgesellschaft für Wirtschaftlichkeit im Bau- und Wohnungswesen e. V., ed. Bericht über die Versuchssiedlung in Dessau (Mitteilungen der Reichforschungsgesellschaft für Wirtschaftlichkeit im Bau- und Wohnungswesen e. V., Sonderheft 7). Berlin 1929. Richter 1909 • Johannes Richter. Die Entwicklung des kunsterzieherischen Gedankens: Ein Kulturproblem der Gegenwart. Leipzig 1909. Rodchenko 2002 • Alexander Rodchenko. Spacial Constructions/Raumkonstruktionen. Edited by Galerie Gmurzynska. Ostfildern 2002. Rössler 2009a • Patrick Rössler. “Die visuelle Identität des Weimarer Bauhauses: Strategien und Maßnahmen im Corporate Design.” In Jahrbuch 2009: Klassik Stiftung Weimar. Göttingen 2009, pp. 367–84. Rössler 2009b • Patrick Rössler, ed. Bauhauskommunikation. Berlin 2009. Röthel 1970 • Hans Konrad Röthel. Kandinsky: Das graphische Werk. Cologne 1970. Rotzler 1978 • Willy Rotzler, ed. Johannes Itten: Werke und Schriften. Second edition, Zurich 1978. Rucki/Huber 1998 • Isabelle Rucki and Dorothee Huber, eds. Architektenlexikon der Schweiz, 19./20. Jahrhundert. Basel et al. 1998. Rudloff 1989 • Martina Rudloff, “‘Die Persönlichkeit bejahen’: Der künstlerische Weg von der Kriegszeit zum Bauhaus.” In Gerhard Marcks 1889–1981. Edited by Martina Rudloff. Exh. cat. Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle, Cologne; Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin; Gerhard-MarcksHaus, Bremen. Munich 1989. Rykwert 1982 • Joseph Rykwert. “Die 15. Triennale.” In Ornament ist kein Verbrechen: Architektur als Kunst. Edited by Joseph Ryk­ wert. Cologne 1982, pp. 129–30. Saarbrücken 2006 • Paul Klee: Tempel, Städte, Paläste. Edited by Ralph Melcher. Exh. cat. Saarlandmuseum, Saarbrücken. Ostfildern 2006. Sachsse 1985 • Rolf Sachsse. Lucia Moholy: Bauhausfotografin. Berlin 1985. Sachsse/Weinfeld 1987 • Interview by Rolf Sachsse with Jean Weinfeld. Eindhoven, May 7, 1987. Schäfer 1984 • Hans-Dieter Schäfer. Das gespaltene Bewusstsein: Deutsche Kultur und Lebenswirklichkeit 1933–1945. Frankfurt am Main et al. 1984. Scharenberg 2003 • Swantje Scharenberg. “Physical Education at the Bauhaus, 1919–33.” The International Journal of the History of Sport 20, 3 (September 2003), pp. 115–27. Scharrelmann 1913 • Heinrich Scharrelmann. Das Malen und Zeichnen zur Belebung des Elementarunterrichts und der häuslichen Beschäftigung der Kinder. Braunschweig et al. 1913. Schawelka 2003 • Karl Schawelka. “Johannes Itten und die Musik.” In Johannes Itten und die Moderne. Edited by Christa Lichtenstern and Christoph Wagner. Ostfildern 2003, pp. 157–77. Scheidig 1966 • Walther Scheidig. Bauhaus Weimar 1919–1924: Werkstattarbeiten. Leipzig and Munich 1966. Schimpf 2008 • Cornelia Schimpf. Versagen einer Zufluchtsstadt: Kulturpolitik in der Weimarer Republik am Beispiel des Staatlichen Bauhauses in Weimar von 1919–1925. Berlin and Münster 2008.

C 18 M 0 Y 100 K 0

Mannheim 1922 • Der Genius im Kinde: Zeichnungen und Malversuche begabter Kinder. Edited by Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub. Exh. cat. Städtische Kunsthalle, Mannheim. Breslau 1922. Manske 1992 • Beate Manske. “Zwei Lampen sind nie gleich: Wilhelm Wagenfeld in der Metallwerkstatt des Staatlichen Bauhauses.” In Die Metallwerkstatt am Bauhaus. Edited by Klaus Weber. Berlin 1992, pp. 79–91. Marbach 1997 • Ankündigungen oder “Mehr nicht erschienen.” Edited by Friedrich Pfäfflin. Exh. cat. Schiller-Nationalmuseum and Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach. Marbach am Neckar 1997. Markgraf 2006 • Monika Markgraf. Archäologie der Moderne: Sanierung Bauhaus Dessau. Berlin 2006. Marx/Weber 2003 • Andreas Marx and Paul Weber. “Konventioneller Kontext der Moderne: Mies van der Rohes Haus Kempner 1921–23. Ausgangspunkt einer Neubewertung des Hochhauses Friedrichstrasse.” In Berlin in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Jahrbuch des Landesarchivs Berlin). Berlin 2003, pp. 65–107. Von Maur 1972 • Karin von Maur. Oskar Schlemmer: Das plastische Werk. Stuttgart 1972. Meurer/Vinçon 1983 • Bernd Meurer and Hartmut Vinçon. Industrielle Ästhetik: Zur Geschichte und Theorie der Gestaltung. (Werkbund Archiv, 9). Giessen 1983. Meyer 1925 • Adolf Meyer. Ein Versuchshaus des Bauhauses in Weimar (Bauhaus book no. 3). Munich 1925. Meyer 1975 • Jochen Meyer, ed. Briefe an Ernst Hardt: Eine Auswahl aus den Jahren 1898–1947. Marbach am Neckar 1975. Meyer 1985 • Andreas Meyer. “Der ‘Maiglöckchenkopf’ und die Organik der Bildblume: Zur Beziehung von Willi Baumeister und Otto Meyer-Amden.” In Otto Meyer-Amden: Begegnungen mit Oskar Schlemmer, Willi Baumeister, Hermann Huber und anderen Künstlern. Edited by Andreas Meier. Exh. cat. Kunstmuseum Bern; Kunsthalle Tübingen; Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris. Bern 1985, pp. 65–81. Meyer/Baumeister 1926 • Letter from Hannes Meyer to Willy Baumeister, December 1, 1926, Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur, ETH Zürich: 964-966-28K-5. Meyer/Baumeister 1927 • Letter from Hannes Meyer to Willy Baumeister, February 13, 1927, Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur, ETH Zürich: 964-966-28K-7. Meyer-Bergner 1979 • Lena Meyer-Bergner. “Unterricht bei Klee.” Form+Zweck 11, 3 (1979). Meyer-Bergner 1980 • Lena Meyer-Bergner, ed. Bauen und Gesellschaft: Schriften, Briefe, Projekte. Dresden 1980. Mies van der Rohe 1922 • Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. “Hochhäuser.” Frühlicht 1 (1922), pp. 122–24. Milyutin 1930 • Nikolai A. Milyutin. Sozgorod: Die Planung der neuen Stadt. 1930. German edition: Basel et al. 1992. Moholy n. d. • Lucia Moholy. Various untitled typescripts. Lucia Moholy Estate, BauhausArchiv Berlin. Moholy: Kunst n. d. • Lucia Moholy. Die Kunst der Porträtphotographie. Typescript. Lucia Moholy Estate, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Moholy 1926–29 • Lucia Moholy. Diary 1926–29, unpublished manuscript. Lucia Moholy Estate, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Moholy 1958 • Lucia Moholy. Fotografie und Gesellschaft: Gestern, Heute, Morgen. Sender Freies Berlin radio broadcast, October 12, 1958. Typescript. Lucia Moholy Estate, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Moholy-Nagy 1925 • László Moholy-Nagy. Malerei, Photographie, Film (Bauhaus book no. 8). Munich 1925. Moholy-Nagy 1929 • László Moholy-Nagy. Von Material zu Architektur (Bauhaus book no. 14). Munich 1929. Moholy-Nagy 1947 • László Moholy-Nagy. Vision in Motion. Chicago 1947.

Schinköth 2006 • Thomas Schinköth. “Vulkanisches Gelände im Meer des Spießbürgertums: Musik und Bühne am Bauhaus.” In Musikstadt Dessau. Edited by Günther Eisenhardt. Altenburg 2006. Schlemmer 1925a • Oskar Schlemmer. Die Bühne im Bauhaus (Bauhaus book no. 4). Munich 1925. Schlemmer 1925b • Oskar Schlemmer. “Mensch und Kunstfigur.” In idem, Die Bühne im Bauhaus (Bauhaus book no. 4). Munich 1925. Schlemmer 1958 • Tut Schlemmer, ed. Oskar Schlemmer: Briefe und Tagebücher. Munich 1958. English edition: The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer. Middletown 1972. Schlemmer 1969 • Oskar Schlemmer. Der Mensch—Unterricht am Bauhaus: Nachgelassene Aufzeichnungen. Edited by Hans Maria Wingler. Berlin and Mainz 1969. Schlemmer 1990 • Oskar Schlemmer. Idealist der Form: Briefe, Tagebücher, Schriften 1912–1943. Edited by Andreas Hüneke. Leipzig 1990. Schlemmer/Meyer-Amden n. d. • Unpublished correspondence between Oskar Schlemmer and Otto Meyer-Amden. OskarSchlemmer-Archiv, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. Schmidt 1928a • Joost Schmidt. “Schrift?” Bauhaus 2, 2/3 (April–June/July–September 1928), pp. 18–20. Schmidt 1928b • Joost Schmidt. “Plastik … und das am Bauhaus!?!” Bauhaus 2, 2/3 (April–June/July–September 1928), p. 21. Schmidt 1930 • Georg Schmidt. BauhausWanderschau 1930 (Wegleitungen des Kunstgewerbemuseums der Stadt Zürich, 94a). Zurich 1930. Schmidt 1984 • Joost Schmidt. Joost Schmidt: Arbeit und Lehre am Bauhaus 1919–1932. Dusseldorf 1984. Schmidt-Nonne 1997 • Helene SchmidtNonne. “Der Unterricht von Paul Klee in Weimar und Dessau.” In Paul Klee, Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch (Neue Bauhausbücher). Berlin 1997, p. 56. Schmitthenner 1932 • Paul Schmitthenner. Das deutsche Wohnhaus (Baugestaltung. Erste Folge). Stuttgart 1932. Schnaidt 1965 • Claude Schnaidt. Hannes Meyer: Bauten, Projekte und Schriften/Buildings, Projects, and Writings. Stuttgart 1965. Schneider 1992 • Katja Schneider. Burg Giebichenstein: Die Kunstgewerbeschule unter Leitung von Paul Thiersch und Gerhard Marcks 1915–1933. 2 vols. Weinheim 1992. Schöbe 2005 • Lutz Schöbe. “Joost Schmidt: Die sieben Chakras.” In Johannes Itten, Wassily­Kandinsky, Paul Klee: Das Bauhaus und die Esoterik. Edited by Christoph Wagner. Exh. cat. Gustav-Lübcke-Museum, Hamm; Museum im Kulturspeicher, Würzburg. Bielefeld and Leipzig 2005, pp. 107–12. Schreyer 2008 • Christoph Schreyer. “Werkschöpfung ist Weltschöpfung: Wassily Kandinsky und seine Grafikmappe der Kleinen Welten.” In Kandinsky: Das druckgrafische Werk. Edited by Helmut Friedel and Annegret Hoberg. Exh. cat. Lenbachhaus, Munich; Kunstmuseum Bonn. Munich 2008, pp. 53–65. Schubert 1976 • Dietrich Schubert. “Das Denkmal für die Märzgefallenen 1920 von Walter Gropius in Weimar und seine Stellung in der Geschichte der neueren Denkmals.” In Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunstsammlungen 2. Edited by the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg. Hamburg 1976, pp. 199–230. Schultze-Naumburg 1927 • Paul SchultzeNaumburg. Flaches oder geneigtes Dach? Mit einer Rundfrage an deutsche Architekten und deren Antworten. Berlin 1927. Schultze-Naumburg 1928 • Paul SchultzeNaumburg. Kunst und Rasse. Munich 1928. Schultze-Naumburg 1934 • Paul SchultzeNaumburg. Kunst aus Blut und Boden. Leipzig 1934. Schultze-Naumburg 1937 • Paul SchultzeNaumburg. Nordische Schönheit: Ihr Wunschbild im Leben und in der Kunst. Munich 1937

(Second expanded edition Munich and Berlin 1943). Schuster 1993 • Peter Schuster. “Die Nation und ihre Toten: Denkmale des 20. Jahrhunderts.” In Deutsche Nationaldenkmale 1790– 1990. Edited by Sekretariat für Kulturelle Zusammenarbeit Nichttheatertragender Städte und Gemeinden in Nordrhein-Westfalen. Exh. cat. Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten, Marl et al. Bielefeld and Gütersloh 1993, pp. 115–27. Schwab 1930 • Alexander Schwab. Das Buch vom Bauen. Berlin 1930 (unabridged reedition, Dusseldorf 1973). Schwarting 2001 • Andreas Schwarting. “Die Siedlung Dessau-Törten: Bauhistorische Aspekte und Folgerungen für den Umgang mit einem Baudenkmal der klassischen Moderne.” architectura 31 (2001), pp. 27–48. Schwarting 2009 • Andreas Schwarting. Die Siedlung Dessau-Törten: Rationalität als ästhetisches Programm. Dresden 2009. Schwartz 2006 • Frederic J. Schwartz. “Utopia for Sale in the Bauhaus and the Weimar Germany’s Consumer Culture.” In Bauhaus Culture from Weimar to the Cold War. Edited by Kathleen James-Chakraborty. Minnesota 2006, p. 138. Schwerdtfeger 1954 • Kurt Schwerdtfeger. Bildende Kunst und Schule. Hanover 1954. Selle 2007 • Gert Selle. “Eine Lampe aus dem Bauhaus.” In Design im Alltag: Vom Thonetstuhl zum Mikrochip. Edited by Gert Selle. Frankfurt am Main 2007, pp. 49–55. Sembach 1987 • Klaus-Jürgen Sembach. “Über die Tischlampe von Wilhelm Wagenfeld und Karl J. Jucker.” In Täglich in der Hand. Industrieformen von Wilhelm Wagenfeld aus sechs Jahrzehnten. Edited by Beate Manske and Gudrun Scholz. Bremen 1987. Von Senger 1928 • Alexander von Senger. Krisis der Architektur. Zurich et al. 1928. Von Senger 1931 • Alexander von Senger. Die Brandfackel Moskaus. Zurzach 1931. Sennett 2008 • Richard Sennett. Handwerk. Berlin 2008. Sharon n. d. • Arieh Sharon. Klee-Vorträge: Bauhaus-Dessau. Manuscript. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, inv. no. 8390. Siebenbrodt 2000 • Michael Siebenbrodt, ed. Bauhaus Weimar: Entwürfe für die Zukunft. Ostfildern 2000. English edition: Bauhaus Weimar: Designs for the Future. Ostfildern 2000. Skiera 2003 • Ehrenhard Skiera. Reformpädagogik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Munich and Vienna 2003. Smith 2002 • T’ai Smith, “‘Pictures Made of Wool’: The Gender of Labor at the Bauhaus Weaving Workshop (1919–23).” Invisible Culture. An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture 3, 4 (Spring 2002). Smith 2007 • T’ai Smith. Weaving Work at the Bauhaus: The Gender and Engendering of a Medium 1919–1937. Diss. Rochester 2007. Sohn 1997 • Cornelia Sohn. “Wir überleben alle Stürme”: Die Öffentlichkeitsarbeit des Bauhauses. Cologne et al. 1997. Solomonson 2001 • Katherine Solomonson. The Chicago Tribune Tower Competition, Skyscraper Design and Cultural Change in the 1920s. Cambridge et al. 2001. Spitz 2002 • René Spitz. HfG Ulm—Der Blick hinter den Vordergrund: Die politische Geschichte der Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm 1953–1968. Stuttgart and London 2002. English edition: HfG Ulm—The View Behind the Foreground: The Political History of the Ulm School of Design 1953–1968. Stuttgart and London 2002. Stadler/Aloni 2009 • Monika Stadler and Yael Aloni, eds. Gunta Stölzl: Bauhaus-Meister. Ostfildern 2009. Standard-Möbel n. d. • Brochure “StandardMöbel.” Copy, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Stasny 1996 • Peter Stasny. “Dalla ‘necessità interiore’ alla necessità ‘biologica’: didattica della forma e teoria della figurazione” (German original: “Von der ‘inneren’ zur ‘biologischen’ Notwendigkeit. Formlehre und

Gestaltungstheorie am Bauhaus”). In Bauhaus 1919–1933: Da Kandinsky a Klee, da Gropius a Mies van der Rohe. Edited by Marco de Michelis and Agnes Kohlmeyer. Milan 1996, pp. 175–90. Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau 1999 • Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, ed. Das Bauhausgebäude in Dessau 1926–1999. Basel 1999. Stölzl 1926 • Gunta Stölzl. “Weberei am Bauhaus.” In Offset: Buch- und Werbekunst (Bauhaus publication) 3, 7 (1926). Stölzl 1931 • Gunta Stölzl. “Die Entwicklung der Bauhausweberei.” In Bauhaus. Zeitschrift für Gestaltung 4, 2 (1931). Van Straaten 1996 • Evert van Straaten. “Theo van Doesburg.” In Carel Blotkamp, De vervolgjaren van De Stijl 1922–1932. Amsterdam and Antwerpen 1996, pp. 15–66. Stuttgart 1968 • 50 Jahre Bauhaus. Exh. cat. Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart. Stuttgart 1968. Sullivan 1896 • Louis Henry Sullivan. “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered.” Lippincott’s Magazine 11, 57 (1896), pp. 403–09.

Taut 1913 • Bruno Taut. “Eine Notwendigkeit.” Der Sturm (1913), pp. 174f. Taut 1919 • Bruno Taut. Die Stadtkrone. Jena 1919. Taut 1923 • Bruno Taut. “Das Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar.” Bauwelt 14 (1923). Thöner 2002a • Wolfgang Thöner. Das Bauhaus wohnt: Leben und Arbeiten in der Meisterhaussiedlung Dessau. Leipzig 2002. Thöner 2002b • Wolfgang Thöner. “Das Bauhaus in der Krise.” In Die Welt spielt Roulette: Zur Kultur der Moderne in der Krise 1927 bis 1932. Edited by Werner Möller and Elke Mittmann. Frankfurt am Main 2002, pp. 32–45. Tomkins 1980 • Calvin Tomkins. Post- to ­N eo-: The Art World of the 1980s. New York 1980.

UHU 4, 5, 1928 • UHU 4, 5 (February 1928). Ulbricht 2000 • Justus H. Ulbricht. “‘Deutscher Stil’: Über einen Traum von Paul Schultze-Naumburg und anderen.” In Schriften­reihe Saalecker Werkstätten 2 (2000), pp. 13–33. Ulbricht 2009 • Justus H. Ulbricht. “‘Kunstwerk’ versus ‘Zerrbild’: Der Kampf gegen das Bauhaus im Kontext antiavantgardistischer Kunst- und Kulturkritik.” In Jahrbuch 2009. Klassik Stiftung Weimar. Göttingen 2009, pp. 304–25. Utrecht 2000 • Theo van Doesburg en het Bauhaus: De invloed van De Stijl in Duitsland en Midden-Europa. Edited by Sjarel Ex. Exh. cat. Centraal Museum Utrecht. Utrecht 2000.

Veblen 2007 • Thorstein Veblen. Theorie der feinen Leute: Eine ökonomische Untersuchung der Institutionen. Frankfurt am Main 2007. Van de Velde 1918 • Henry van de Velde. Die drei Sünden wider der Schönheit. Zurich 1918. Vienna et al. 1999 • Friedl Dicker-Brandeis: Ein Leben für Kunst und Lehre. Edited by Elena Makarova. Exh. cat. Palais Harrach, Vienna et al. Vienna and Munich 1999. Vogelsang 1994 • Bernd Vogelsang. “Lothar Schreyer und das Scheitern der Weimarer Bauhausbühne.” In Das frühe Bauhaus und Johannes Itten. Ostfildern 1994, pp. 321–63. Volk 1920 • Das Volk 15, 292 (December 14, 1920). Volk 1921 • Das Volk 16, 77 (April 4, 1921).

Wachsmann 1959 • Konrad Wachsmann. Wendepunkt im Bauen. Wiesbaden 1959. Wagenfeld 1948 • Wilhelm Wagenfeld. ­Wesen und Gestalt der Dinge um uns. Potsdam 1948. Wagner 2002 • Christoph Wagner. “Johannes Itten: Leitmotive einer Künstlerbiografie.” In Johannes Itten: Alles in Einem, Alles im Sein.

Edited by Ernest W. Uthemann. Ostfildern 2002, pp. 11–81. Wagner 2005a • Christoph Wagner, ed. Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee: Das Bauhaus und die Esoterik. Bielefeld and Leipzig 2005. Wagner 2005b • Christoph Wagner. “Zwischen Lebensreform und Esoterik: Johannes Ittens Weg ans Bauhaus in Weimar.” In Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee: Das Bauhaus und die Esoterik. Edited by Christoph Wagner. Bielefeld and Leipzig 2005, pp. 16ff., pp. 65–77. Wagner 2009a • Christoph Wagner, ed. Esoterik am Bauhaus: Eine Revision der Moderne? (Regensburger Studien zur Kunstgeschichte, 1). Regensburg 2009. Wagner 2009b • Christoph Wagner. Utopie und historischer Kontext: Beiträge zu Johannes Itten und Paul Klee am Bauhaus. Berlin 2009. Wahl 2001 • Volker Wahl, ed. Meisterratsprotokolle 1919–1925 des Staatlichen Bauhauses Weimar. Weimar 2001. Weber 1988 • Klaus Weber. Karl J. Jucker und Wilhelm Wagenfeld, Tischlampe 1923–24. In Experiment Bauhaus. Berlin 1988, p. 136. Weber 1994a • Klaus Weber. “Kunstwerk— Geistwerk—Handwerk: Die Werkstätten in den ersten Jahren des Bauhauses.” In Das frühe Bauhaus und Johannes Itten. Ostfildern 1994. Weber 1994b • Klaus Weber. “Bauplastik: Eine Neuerwerbung.” Museums-Journal 8, 2 (April 1994). Weber 2005 • Klaus Weber. “Totenbild, Lebensleib und Maske: Lothar Schreyers ‘Totenhäuser.’” In Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee: Das Bauhaus und die Esoterik. Edited by Christoph Wagner. Bielefeld and Leipzig 2005, pp. 91–97. Weimar 1923 • Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar: 1919–1923. Edited by Staatlichen Bauhaus in Weimar and Karl Nierendorf. Weimar and Munich 1923 (reprinted 1980). Weimar 1972 • Walter Determann—1898 bis 1960. Exh. cat. Kunstkabinett, Weimar. Weimar 1972. Weimar et al. 1994 • Das frühe Bauhaus und Johannes Itten. Edited by Rolf Bothe et al. Exh. cat. Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar; Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin; Kunstmuseum Bern. Ostfildern 1994. Weinert 2003 • Manja Weinert. Die Fotomontagen und Foto-Text-Collagen von Marianne Brandt. Munich 2003. Weise 1996 • Anne-Kathrin Weise. “Die Bauhauskünstlerin Marianne Brandt.” In Der Kaßberg. Ein Chemnitzer Lese- und Bilderbuch. Edited by Tilo Richter. Leipzig 1996, pp. 259–70. Weltge-Wortmann 1993 • Sigrid WeltgeWortmann. Bauhaus-Textilien: Kunst und Künstlerinnen der Webwerkstatt, Schaffhausen 1993. English edition: Bauhaus Textiles: Women Artists and the Weaving Workshop. London 1993. Werckmeister 1989 • Otto Karl Werckmeister. The Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 1914–1920. Chicago and London 1989. Werckmeister 1990 • Otto Karl Werckmeister. “Klees Kunstunterricht.” In Kunst und Pädagogik. Erziehungswissenschaft auf dem Weg zur Ästhetik? Edited by Dieter Lenzen. Darmstadt 1990, pp. 28–44. Whitford 1993 • Frank Whitford, ed. Das Bauhaus: Selbstzeugnisse von Meistern und Studenten. Stuttgart 1993. Wick 1982 • Rainer K. Wick. Bauhaus-Pädagogik. Cologne 1982. Wick 1991 • Rainer K. Wick, ed. Das neue Sehen: Von der Fotografie am Bauhaus zur subjektiven Fotografie. Munich 1991. Wick 1992 • Rainer K. Wick. “Notizen zur deutsch-deutschen Bauhaus-Rezeption nach 1945.” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift/Hochschule für Architektur und Bauwesen Weimar 38, 5/6 (1992), pp. 269–72.

371

372

Image Credits

Marianne Brandt: Fotografien am Bauhaus. Ostfildern 2003.

Zentralinstitut für Erziehung und Unterricht in Berlin 1929 • Zentralinstitut für Erziehung und Unterricht in Berlin, ed. Kunsterziehung: Ergebnisse und Anregungen der Kunsterziehungstage in Dresden, Weimar und Hamburg. In Auswahl. Leipzig 1929. Ziegler 1934 • Hans Severus Ziegler. Praktische Kulturarbeit im Dritten Reich: Anregung und Richtlinien für eine gesunde Volksbildung (Nationalsozialistische Bibliothek 22). Munich 1934. Zietsch 2002 • Michael Zietsch. “Das Direktorenzimmer am Bauhaus in Weimar von 1923–24 in einer Gegenüberstellung.” In Thesis, Beiträge zur Architekturgeschichte, Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der BauhausUniversität Weimar, 2/3. Weimar 2002, pp. 94–125. Zurich 2000 • Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller, Design als Kunst einer Wissenschaft. Edited by Joachim Krausse and Claude Lichtenstein. Exh. cat. Museum für Gestaltung Zürich. Baden 2000.

© 2009 for the reproduced works by Eugen Batz, Herbert Bayer, Max Beckmann, Marianne Brandt, Marc Chagall, Albert Gleizes, Walter Gropius, Lyonel Feininger, Josef Hartwig, Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, Ida Kerkovius, Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Lucia Moholy, László Moholy-Nagy, Floris M. Neusüss, Johannes Jacobus Pieter Oud, Gyula Pap, Otto Piene, Hajo Rose, Joost Schmidt, Heidi Specker, Gunta Stölzl, Günther Uecker, and Wilhelm Wagenfeld: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

© 2009 for the reproduced works by Alfred und Gertrud Arndt: Archiv von Alfred und ­G ertrud Arndt / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Hartwig Klappert), 166 (right), 167, 171–74, 179 (left and right, photos: Hermann Kiessling), 185 (photo: Gunter Lepkowski), 187, 188, 195 (photo: Hermann Kiessling), 196, 197 (top, middle, bottom), 199 (photo: Markus Hawlik), 200 (left and right), 201 (left and right), 211, 212 (left), 213, 217, 219 (left and right, photo right: Markus Hawlik), 221 (photo: Fotostudio Bartsch), 222 (photo: Gunter Lepkowksi), 225, 229, 230, 231 (top, middle, bottom), 233, 235, 239, 240 (left and right), 241 (top and bottom), 243 (photo: Fotostudio Bartsch), 244 (top and bottom, photo bottom: Markus Hawlik), 261, 265, 269–71, 275, 279 (photo: Markus Hawlik), 281, 283, 287–89, 293, 298 (right), 299, 301, 302 (left, photo: Gunter Lepkowski), 305 © BauhausArchiv Berlin (photo: Markus Hawlik), 306 (photo: Hermann Kiessling), 307 (photo: Markus Hawlik), 311, 313 (left and right), 315, 323, 333 (top and bottom), 334, 335, 339 (top and bottom), 340, 341, 349, 352 (top), 354, 356–58, 360, 361, 376 (photo: Hartwig Klappert)

© Judith Adler-Moller, Weesen / Switzerland: pp. 68 (right), 123

Bauhaus-Museum Weimar: p. 376 (photo: Maik Schuck)

© V. Bodelschwinghsche Anstalten Bethel, Bielefeld: p. 83 (middle left)

Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Archiv der Moderne: pp. 112, 158 (left and right), 338

© Dr. Stephan Consemüller, Waldrode-Linsengericht: pp. 240 (left), 253

Baumeister collection: p. 129 (left)

© Elfriede Ebert, Freital: pp. 244 (right), 299

Ulrike Brandi: pp. 316, 317

© T. Lux Feininger, Cambridge, MA: pp. 225, 231 (top), 313 (left)

Harvard University Art Museums, Buch-Reisinger-Museum, Cambridge, MA: p. 177

© Ursula Graeff-Hirsch, Mühlheim an der Ruhr: p. 69 (right)

Achim Heine: pp. 284, 285

© Editha Hennig, Zwickau: pp. 324, 325

Wulf Herzogenrath collection, Bremen: p. 147 (left)

© Gisela Kaiser, Erfurt: pp. 223 (bottom), 302 (right)

Alfred Hoh collection, Fürth: p. 57

© Jan Keler, Rostock: pp. 119, 120

Johannes-Itten-Stiftung, Kunstmuseum Bern: pp. 24 (left and right), 25 (bottom),

© Dr. Ursula Kirsten-Collein, Birkenwerder: p. 279

Kazumasa Katsuta, Gallery K. AG, Switzerland: p. 43

© Livia Klee, Bern: pp. 207, 208, 217, 219 (left), 247

Klassik Stiftung Weimar: pp. 33 (photo: © Arnulf Lutz, Stuttgart), 47–49, 63 (photo: Hartwig Klappert), 68 (right), 77, 83 (middle left and middle right, right), 107, 109 (right), 119, 120, 141, 143, 149, 157, 159 (top and bottom), 166 (left), 181, 292

© 2009 for the reproduced works by Josef und Anni Albers: The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

© Elizabeth Krause, Marburg: p. 83 (left, photo: Gunter Lepkowski) © Margaret Katherine Loew, Kundabung / Australia: p. 279 © Arnulf Lutz, Leonberg: p. 68 (left) © Gerhard-Marcks-Stiftung Bremen: pp. 37 (photo: Hartwig Klappert), 39 © Ernst Meyer, Hofheim im Taunus: pp. 78 (left), 111, 155 (right) © Alessandra Pasqualucci, Rome: p. 81 © President and Fellows of Harvard College, Imaging Department: Photo p. 177 © Karl Peter Röhrl Stiftung: p. 107 © Raquel Peralta Ramos, Buenos Aires: p. 271

Oliver Kossack: p. 263 Sammlung Walter Krepl, Ulm: p. 125 Kunsthaus Zurich: p. 23 Kulturhistorisches Museum Rostock: p. 39 Kunstsammlungen Gera: pp. 141, 143 Kunstverlag Maria Laach: pp. 157, 158 (left and right), 159 (top and bottom) Sammlung Hattula Moholy-Nagy: pp. 212 (right), 348 (left)

© Schawinsky-Archiv R. R. Schmid, Cavigliano / Switzerland: p. 306

The Museum of Modern Art, New York: pp. 55, 97, 116 (Mies van der Rohe Archive), 117 (Mies van der Rohe Archive), 142, 255 (Mies van der Rohe Archive), 313 (middle), 352 (bottom), 353

© Ute Jaïna Schlemmer, Oggebbio / Italy: pp. 127, 129 (middle), 133, 135 (left and right), 173 (middle), 235 (top row: middle right), 265, 311, 313 (middle and right)

Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main: pp. 256–57

© Michael Schreyer, Hamburg: pp. 59 (photo: Markus Hawlik), 60, 61 (photo: Gunter ­Lepkowski)

Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz: p. 133 Brigitte Peterhans, Stuttgart: pp. 248, 249 (left and right), 269, 270 (top and bottom), 334

© Ursula Steil, Wuppertal: p. 279

Private collection Berlin: p. 195

© Dr. Alexander H. Volger, Bochum (Wattenscheid): p. 251

Jan Schleifer, Hamburg: p. 147 (left)

© Atsuo Yamawaki, Tokyo: p. 323

Anne-Barbara Sommer: p. 321

Ai Weiwei: pp. 90, 91

Stadtarchiv Weimar: p. 79

Archiv der Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm: p. 345

Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau: pp. 52 (right, photo: © Ernst Meyer, Hofheim im Taunus), 153, 161 (photo: Hartwig Klappert), 162, 189 (photo: Wolfgang Thöner), 203–05, 207, 208, 223 (bottom), 226, 227, 244 (left and right), 247–49, 251, 280, 291, 297, 298 (left), 302 (right), 303 (top and bottom), 319, 324, 325, 336 (photo: Wolfgang Thöner), p. 376 (photo: Doreen Ritzau)

Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin / Museum für Gestaltung: pp. 14, 15 (left and right), 17 (left and right), 18 (left, middle, right), 19 (top and bottom), 29 (photo: Markus Hawlik), 30, 34 (top, middle, bottom; photo middle: © Arnulf Lutz, Stuttgart), 35 (photo: Atelier Schneider), 51, 52 (left), 53, 59 (photo: Markus Hawlik), 60, 61 (photo: Gunter Lepkowski), 64 (left and right, photos: Markus Hawlik), 65, 67 (photo: Hartwig Klappert), 68 (left), 69 (left and right), 71 (photo: Atelier Schneider), 72, 73, 78 (left and right), 81, 83 (left, photo: Gunter Lepkowski), S. 85 (photo: Markus Hawlik), 86, 87, 89 (acquired with the support of the Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung), 95, 98 (photo: Hermann Kiessling), 103 (photo: Atelier Schneider), 105, 107 (photo: Hartwig Klappert), 109 (left), 111 (photo: Gunter Lepkowski), 115 (photo: Markus Hawlik), 123 (photo: Hartwig Klappert), 127, 125 (left), 137, 138, 145, 147 (right, photo: Markus Hawlik), 150, 151, 155 (left and right), 163 (left and right, photo right: Hüttich-Oemler), 165 (photo:

C 16 M 0 Y 100 K 0

Wick 1994 • Rainer K. Wick. “Zwischen Rationalität und Spiritualität: Johannes Ittens Vorkurs am Bauhaus.” In Das frühe Bauhaus und Johannes Itten. Edited by Rolf Bothe. Exh. cat. Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar; BauhausArchiv Berlin; Kunstmuseum Bern. Ostfildern 1994, pp. 117–68. Wick 2000 • Rainer K. Wick. Bauhaus: Kunstschule der Moderne. Ostfildern 2000. English edition: Teaching at the Bauhaus. Ostfildern 2000. Wick 2003 • Rainer K. Wick, ed. Hans Friedrich Geist und die Kunst des Kindes: Bauhaus, Drittes Reich, Nachkriegszeit (Kontext, 5). Wuppertal 2003. Wick 2004 • Rainer K. Wick. Kunstschulreform (Kunst, Gestaltung, Design, 10). Saarbrücken 2004. Wiegand/Karsten 1926 • Letter from the Bauhaus to the patents lawyers Dr. C. Wiegand and Dr. W. Karsten on March 31, 1926 and the letter from the lawyers to the Bauhaus on April 14, 1926. Stadtarchiv Dessau. Wiese 1981 • Fritz Wiese. Der Bucheinband: Historische und neuartige Einbände. Hanover 1981. Willrich 1932 • Wolfgang Willrich. Säuberung des Kunsttempels: Eine kunstpolitische Kampfschrift zur Gesundung deutscher Kunst im Geiste nordischer Art. Munich and Berlin 1937. Wingler 1965 • Hans Maria Wingler. Die Mappenwerke Neue Europäische Graphik. Mainz and Berlin 1965. Wingler 1975 • Hans Maria Wingler. Bauhaus 1919–1933. Third edition. Bramsche 1975. Wingler/Droste 1982 • Hans Maria Wingler and Magdalena Droste. Herbert Bayer: Das künstlerische Werk 1918–1938. Berlin 1982. Winkler 1989 • Klaus-Jürgen Winkler. Der Architekt Hannes Meyer: Anschauungen und Werk. Berlin 1989. Winkler 1993 • Klaus-Jürgen Winkler. Die Architektur am Bauhaus in Weimar. Berlin and Munich 1993. Winkler 1994 • Klaus-Jürgen Winkler. “Zur Architektur am frühen Bauhaus.” In Das frühe Bauhaus und Johannes Itten. Ostfildern 1994, pp. 282–318. Winkler 2003 • Klaus-Jürgen Winkler. Baulehre und Entwerfen am Bauhaus 1919–1933. Weimar 2003. Winkler 2007 • Klaus-Jürgen Winkler, ed. Bauhaus-Alben. 3 vols. Weimar 2006–08. Winkler/Van Bergeijk 2004 • Klaus-Jürgen Winkler and Herman van Bergeijk. Das Märzgefallenen-Denkmal. Weimar 2004. Winkler/Oschmann 1999 • Klaus-Jürgen Winkler and Gerhard Oschmann. Das GropiusZimmer: Geschichte und Rekonstruktion des Direktorenarbeitsraumes am Staatlichen Bauhaus in Weimar 1923–24. Weimar 1999. Wolfe 1984 • Tom Wolfe. Mit dem Bauhaus leben. Frankfurt am Main 1984. English original: From Bauhaus to Our House. New York 1981. Wolgast 1903 • Heinrich Wolgast. Die Bedeutung der Kunst für die Erziehung. Leipzig 1903. Wolsdorff 1980 • Christian Wolsdorff. “Das Haus Am Horn im Spiegel der Presse.” In Georg Muche: Das künstlerische Werk 1912–1927. Edited by Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Exh. cat. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Berlin 1980, pp. 31–45. Wolsdorff 1983 • Christian Wolsdorff. “Die Bauhauslampe: Versuch einer Rekonstruktion ihrer Entstehungsgeschichte.” In Design– Formgebung für jedermann. Typen und Prototypen. Zurich 1983, pp. 48–57. Wolsdorff 2001 • Christian Wolsdorff. Mehr als der bloße Zweck: Mies van der Rohe am Bauhaus 1930–1933. Berlin 2001. Wright 1910 • Frank Lloyd Wright. Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe von Frank Lloyd Wright. Berlin 1910 (two portfolios). Subsequently reprinted in smaller book form, Berlin 1998. Wünsche 1989 • Konrad Wünsche. Bauhaus: Versuche das Leben zu ordnen. Berlin 1989. Wynhoff 2003 • Elisabeth Wynhoff, ed.

Szepműveszeti Múzeum, Budapest: p. 129 (right) Günther Uecker: pp. 266, 267 Jeff Wall: pp. 256–57 Archiv Rainer K. Wick: pp. 344, 346 Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern: p. 41

373

This book is published in conjunction with the exhibition Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model organized by the three German Bauhaus institutions Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, and Klassik Stiftung Weimar in cooperation with The Museum of Modern Art, New York Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin July 22–October 4, 2009

Exhibition Direction Annemarie Jaeggi, Director, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin Omar Akbar, Director, Stiftung ­B auhaus Dessau (until 2008) Philipp Oswalt, Director, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau (from 2009) Hellmut Seemann, President, Klassik Stiftung Weimar Curators (Bauhaus 1919–33) Lutz Schöbe, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau Michael Siebenbrodt, Klassik Stiftung Weimar Wolfgang Thöner, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau Klaus Weber, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin Curators (Bauhaus Reception/courtyard) Ulrike Bestgen, Klassik Stiftung Weimar Werner Möller, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau Moderation Kirsten Baumann, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau (until February 2009) Exhibition scenography chezweitz & roseapple, Berlin Detlef Weitz and Rose Epple with Hans Hagemeister Team: Christian Fehr, Holger Jansen, Jessica Jenkins, Isabel Prugger Coordination: Peter Boragno, ­ Antje Popp Artistic installation Do-It-Yourself Bauhaus: Christine Hill Video installation Ilka and Andreas Ruby Project management Rhoda Riccius, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau Nicole Minten-Jung, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau Katja Szymczak, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau (Registrar) Monika Tritschler, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin (Registrar)

Administration Katherina Gebhardt, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau Finances Manuela Falkenberg, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau Monika Liewecke, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau Communication/marketing Julia Glesner, Klassik Stiftung Weimar (Direction) Saskia Helin, Klassik Stiftung Weimar Silke Oldenburg, Klassik Stiftung Weimar with the support of Boros GmbH, ­Wuppertal/Berlin

Printing Dr. Cantz’sche Druckerei, Ostfildern Binding Conzella Verlagsbuchbinderei, ­ Urban Meister GmbH, Aschheim-Dornach © 2009 Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, Klassik Stiftung Weimar © Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern, and authors

Museum educational service Bärbel Mees, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin Folker Metzger, Klassik Stiftung Weimar x:hibit (guided tours)

© 2009 for the reproduced works by Eugen Batz, Herbert Bayer, Max Beckmann, Marianne Brandt, Marc Chagall, Albert Gleizes, Walter ­Gropius, Lyonel Feininger, Josef Hartwig, Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, Ida Kerkovius, Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Lucia Moholy, László MoholyNagy, Floris M. Neusüss, Johannes Jacobus Pieter Oud, Gyula Pap, Otto Piene, Hajo Rose, Joost Schmidt, Heidi Specker, Gunta Stölzl, Günther Uecker, and Wilhelm Wagenfeld: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Catalogue

© 2009 for the reproduced works by Josef and Anni Albers: The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / VG BildKunst, Bonn

Editor Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Stiftung ­B auhaus Dessau, Klassik Stiftung Weimar

© 2009 for the reproduced works by Alfred and Gertrud Arndt: Archiv von Alfred and Gertrud Arndt / VG BildKunst, Bonn

Managing editor Wolfgang Thöner, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau

Publication of the works of Oskar Schlemmer with the kind permission and support of Janine Schlemmer, Munich.

Conservation assistance Antje Möller, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin Rüdiger Messerschmidt, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau Konrad Katzer, Klassik Stiftung Weimar

Image rights Sabine Hartmann, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin Margot Rumler, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau Copyediting Anne O’Connor Translations Benjamin Carter, Benjamin Letzler, Ian Pepper, John Southard Graphic design chezweitz & roseapple, Berlin Rose Epple with Isabel Prugger and Wolfgang Schneider Typeface Gotham, Gotham Rounded, Gotham Narrow, Archer  Reproductions LVD Gesellschaft für Datenverarbeitung mbH Production Ines Sutter, Hatje Cantz Paper Profimatt, 150 g/m2

Published by Hatje Cantz Verlag Zeppelinstrasse 32 73760 Ostfildern Germany Tel. +49 711 4405-200 Fax +49 711 4405-220 www.hatjecantz.com Trade edition: hardcover with dust jacket, ISBN 978-3-7757-2415-9 (English) ISBN 978-3-7757-2414-2 (German) Museum edition: paperback (available only in the museum) Printed in Germany

In cooperation with

With the support of

Principal sponsors

Additional sponsors

Media partners

Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin/ Museum für Gestaltung Klingelhöferstraße 14 D-10785 Berlin Tel. +49 30 254 002-0 Fax +49 30 254 002-10 www.bauhaus.de

Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau Gropiusallee 38 D-06846 Dessau Tel. +49 340 6508-250 Fax +49 340 6508-226 www.bauhaus-dessau.de

376

C 12 M 0 Y 100 K 0

Klassik Stiftung Weimar Burgplatz 4 D-99423 Weimar Tel. +49 3643 545-0 Fax +49 3643 545-454 www.klassik-stiftung.de