Jonathan Morrison
Bau Wow! Inside the new Bauhaus Museum in Weimar
A century ago a design school started that would upend accepted notions of good design. As a museum opens in Germany, Jonathan Morrison reports on the Bauhaus effect
A hundred years ago, in April 1919, the doors opened for the first time at the Bauhaus in Weimar, central Germany. It’s a pretty city, notable for its literary and musical connections, having been home to two famous Johanns — Sebastian Bach and Wolfgang von Goethe — and a pair of notable Friedrichs, Schiller and Nietzsche.
The doors would close just 14 years later in Berlin, after two moves and three directors. But, despite its fleeting existence, the Bauhaus had a seismic impact on art and architecture, turning the accepted concepts of what constituted good design upside down and instigating trends that remain with us today. Think flat roofs and skylights, primary colours, geometric shapes, minimalism, mass production and form following function. Sometimes austere, usually elegant, the Bauhaus’s ideas and its alumni paved the way for modernism and shaped much of the urban landscape in cities as far afield as Tel Aviv and Chicago. And if we live in a visually and materially obsessed world, where even household items have to be almost works of sculpture, well, you can blame that on the Bauhaus too.
Born from the chaos of the First World War into a time of riots, revolts and Germany’s first experiments with democracy, the Bauhaus was a strangely optimistic revolution of its own, and under its director, the Prussian architect Walter Gropius (who was wounded on the Western Front), aimed to unite all the artistic disciplines under one roof for the first time.
Building on the ideas of William Morris’s earlier Arts and Crafts movement, but with a distinct focus on technology and industry, Gropius wanted to create a new breed of designers and artisans who could turn their hands to anything, from pottery to printing, carpentry to advertising. They were taught to go back to basics, see with fresh eyes, and put their ideas into production in workshops rather than lecture theatres; it was more a philosophy than a syllabus. In fact, the only arty subject that wasn’t taught at the “building house” initially was architecture — even though the Bauhaus name would most come to be associated with that discipline in the future.
The list of the staff reads like a Who’s Who of central European modern art: Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, Lyonel Feininger, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Gerhard Marcks taught at the Bauhaus. And the results were suitably impressive: teachers and pupils began to produce objects and artefacts distinguished by their streamlined design that quickly became highly sought-after and many of which remain collectors’ items today — not least Marcel Breuer’s sinuous Wassily chair, which is still synonymous with sophistication, or the timeless tea infuser by Marianne Brandt.
“There’s something intrinsically pleasing about minimalism, and they always gravitated towards simplification,” says Jayne Obst, a local expert in Weimar who has been studying the movement for 20 years. “You can see their influence today in consumer electronics, in the way we prefer natural lines to ornamentation. They totally reformed the way people lived their lives and the way they still do.”
The school soon acquired a reputation for innovation and its fame spread, but there were plenty of people who turned their noses up at the bohemian ways of life practised by the staff and students, who were encouraged to fraternise. The masked balls and abstract ballets, the liberated women with their bobbed haircuts, ultra-fashionable clothes, gymnastic sessions and Leica cameras, all drew their share of bourgeois detractors. A common threat from German mothers at the time was: “If you don’t behave, I’ll send you to the Bauhaus.”
Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that the Bauhaus would fall foul of increasingly conservative governments — the first time was in 1925 after the left-wing Social Democratic Party lost control of the state parliament to nationalists. Yet after being forced to move to Dessau, an industrial town in central Germany, the Bauhaus soon reached its apogee in an ambitious building that Gropius designed and that announced a radical new style of architecture, with its elegant glass façade and rectilinear form. And there, in Dessau, architecture was taught for the first time.
Gropius left a few years later, in 1928, to pursue an extremely successful career as a full-time architect, and under a new director, Hannes Meyer, the school prospered (and was able to pay for itself largely through sales of wallpaper). But with the Wall Street crash and the rise of national socialism, its days were numbered. Meyer, a communist, was forced out in 1930 and a year later the Nazis won the local elections and shut down the Bauhaus, branding it “cultural bolshevism”.
So the Bauhaus embarked on its final move, taking over an old telephone exchange in Berlin under the leadership of the brilliant modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who would go on to transform the skyline of Chicago with steel and glass, and who took the Bauhaus philosophy to its logical conclusion, and into the next era, with the phrase “less is more”.
(Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat in the Czech Republic ALAMY)
However, it was to be a short-lived incarnation. The Bauhaus was everything the Nazis hated: it was full of Jews and socialists, and was cosmopolitan and international in outlook, avant-garde and futuristic rather than nostalgic and introverted. When Hitler came to power in 1933, the “degenerate” masters of the Bauhaus were offered a choice: they could abandon modernism and become a propaganda tool for the regime, or they could close. They chose to close.
Many of the staff and pupils fled the country: Gropius, Moholy-Nagy and Breuer went first to London, where they stayed at the Bauhaus-inspired Isokon block of flats in Hampstead, and finally to the US. Some, such as Naum Slutzky, the former master goldsmith at the Weimar Bauhaus, opted to stay in England — he was still teaching at Birmingham School of Arts and Crafts in 1964 — while Kandinsky went to France and many others to Israel, creating the “White City” of Tel Aviv in the process.
The Bauhaus-influenced Isokon building in Hampstead (ALAMY)
Others were not so lucky: Franz Ehrlich, a former Bauhaus student who was arrested as a communist by the Nazis, was sent to Buchenwald, where he designed the infamous gates and a home for the camp commandant; he survived. Otti Berger, a talented weaver who had an offer of work from Moholy-Nagy in Chicago and who had returned to Yugoslavia from London to look after her ailing mother, did not; she was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944. Friedl Dicker, an artist and educator, suffered the same fate.
While the implacable hostility of the Nazis saved the Bauhaus’s reputation and led to its alumni being embraced on the international stage in a way that other refugees often were not, the Bauhaus had a darker side too. In recent years there has been a debate over whether female students were deliberately sidelined at the time and forgotten subsequently: Mies van der Rohe, for example, is usually given sole credit for the Barcelona chair when in reality it was designed in collaboration with Lilly Reich, with whom he worked for more than a decade.
Gropius insisted that there would be “no difference between the beautiful and the strong sex”, but while the strong sex went into metalworking and painting, the beautiful sex tended to be pushed into textiles: in fact, 128 of its 462 female students ended up in weaving workshops (notably Anni Albers, who was the subject of a large Tate Modern exhibition that ended in January).
Patrick Rössler, in his book Bauhausmädels: A Tribute to Pioneering Women Artists, points out that “of the only six students ever given the chance to join the teaching body as young masters, five were men and just one a woman: Gunta Stölzl, who was placed in charge of the weaving workshop. There existed various rules within the establishment that substantially limited women’s opportunities for advancement and training.”
Fortunately a museum in Weimar, which opens this weekend, hopes to help to set the record straight, not just by celebrating the works of women such as Brandt, but also by giving the textile creations their due prominence alongside the furniture, architecture, sculpture and paintings.
“The Bauhaus textiles are great art in their own right,” says Ulrike Bestgen, the museum director. “Part of the problem is that people haven’t accepted that, so the women haven’t enjoyed the same respect and reputation as the men.”
The range is certainly extraordinary. And what’s also clear from the exhibits is the extent to which the students and staff were wrestling with problems that feel very familiar today: the role technology should play in everyday life, how people should be housed, how communities should be structured, and yes, how the sexes should interact — they were certainly aware of the disjunctions of their own times.
If the problems feel contemporary, so does so much of the work. That’s the thing about the Bauhaus — it never really went away. Its legacy and ideals endure. And a hundred years on, it’s definitely time to take a fresh look.
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