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In 1954 the artist Asger Jorn wrote to Max Bill, “Bauhaus is the name of an artistic inspiration.” Bill, a former Bauhaus student and the founding director of the newly opened Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, West Germany, a self-anointed successor to the Bauhaus, replied, “Bauhaus is not the name of an artistic inspiration, but the meaning of a movement that represents a well-defined doctrine.” To which Jorn shot back, “If Bauhaus is not the name of an artistic inspiration, it is the name of a doctrine without inspiration — that is to say, dead.”1from the fall/winter '07 issue of the harvard design magazine
This exchange between the orthodox Bill, who would run his school like a monastery, and Jorn, who as a provocation would create something called the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus before going on to cofound the Situationist International a couple years later, was more than just an epistolary joust. Virtually since its founding in 1919, throughout its fourteen-year existence in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin under three successive directors, and in the three quarters of a century since it closed its doors in advance of the Nazis, the Bauhaus has been the object of veneration, hostility, controversy, and myth. It has been variously portrayed as a seminal experiment in pedagogy, a hotbed of radicalism, the standard-bearer of the ethos of functionalism and industrial technology, an aesthetic style, and most broadly, an “idea” synonymous with the spirit of early 20th-century modernity itself. In a new collection of essays thoughtfully edited by Kathleen James-Chakraborty, it is a cultural manifestation closely linked to the political and economic vicissitudes of its times.
Bauhaus Culture from Weimar to the Cold War comprises nine historical essays, all but two written specifically for the volume. Each draws on recent scholarship, and several are based on original archival research. Without purporting to offer a comprehensive narrative, the collection traverses a series of significant topics and themes that span from the school’s prehistory in the debates of the German Werkbund and the institutions of the Prussian state to its Cold War reception and aftermath in the United States and Germany. American readers will encounter much that is new and even revelatory about this familiar institution. Collectively the essays work to dismantle the hagiography that still surrounds the Bauhaus legacy — largely (though not exclusively) a product of the public relations campaign waged by Walter Gropius after coming to the U.S. — and they attest to the tangled interrelations between avant-garde politics and real politics.
Apropos of “real politics,” among the subjects reexamined by several authors in the volume is the Bauhaus’s legendary status as a left-wing, utopian outpost with its origins in Weimar Republic social democracy. As John V. Maciuika’s opening essay makes clear, the reorientation of the applied arts to industrial production, the raising of the inferior status of German goods in international markets, and to this end, the reform of design education were already national priorities from the opening years of the 20th century under the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Likewise, the Bauhaus’s “Bolshevist” reputation was more or less borne out under its second director, Hannes Meyer, who took over the school in 1927. The politics of its other two directors, Gropius (who served from 1919 to 1927) and Mies van der Rohe (from 1930 to 1933), were ambiguous, to say the least. Although Gropius was an ardent supporter of the November 1918 revolution that ushered in the Weimar Republic, he subsequently sought to steer a course between the extremes of left and right, especially in the increasingly hostile and conservative atmosphere that surrounded the school first in Weimar and then in Dessau. In an interesting contribution, James-Chakraborty (who, besides editing the book, is responsible for two essays) compares Gropius to the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde, who had designed and founded the arts and crafts school in Weimar that preceded the Bauhaus and became part of its first campus, and who had also recommended Gropius as its director. James-Chakraborty reveals how Gropius’s status as a German national made him a more acceptable public servant than the cosmopolitan Van de Velde. Ironically, the older architect was in many ways more of a reformer than Gropius, with social views in the tradition of William Morris and a more egalitarian stance on gender issues.
SABENA (Mexico) Pine log bar with three matching stools, on iron frames. Branded mark. Bar: 34" x 98" x 21 1/2"
auction results (hammer prices) in for day one solo rago arts fall '07 modern