Object Lessons From The Bauhaus

By Joan Ockman 12/1/09

View Slideshow Josef Albers: Glass Fragments in Grid Picture, ca. 1921, glass, wire and metal in metal frame, 153⁄8 by 131⁄8 inches. © Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo courtesy Art Resource, New York.; Walter Gropius: Törten Housing Estate, Dessau, 1926-28, ink, spatter paint and gouache on paperboard, 347⁄8 by 421⁄4 inches. Harvard Art Museum, Busch-Reisinger Museum. © ARS/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.;

New York City Bauhaus is the name of an artistic inspiration.
Asger Jorn, letter to Max Bill, January 1954

Bauhaus is not the name of an artistic inspiration, but the meaning of a movement that represents a well-defined doctrine.
Max Bill, letter to Asger Jorn, January 1954

If Bauhaus is not the name of an artistic inspiration, it is the name of a doctrine without inspiration—that is to say, dead.
Asger Jorn, letter to Max Bill, February 1954

What was the Bauhaus really? The question has been raised repeatedly ever since Nazi agents raided the school in April 1933, precipitating its closure by the faculty a few months later. On the 90th anniversary of its founding, and the 20th of the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, a major exhibition organized by three institutions in Germany,1 and now another at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, have relaunched the debate. The answer proffered in MoMA’s “Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity,” assembled by Barry Bergdoll, curator of architecture and design, and Leah Dickerman, curator in the department of painting and sculpture, is that the Bauhaus was, above all, a new form of art education: a radically innovative and progressive school for artists and designers in the modern epoch. This is hardly revelatory, but it’s a valuable frame for rethinking the Bauhaus’s lessons for today. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue advance the argument that under each of its successive architect-directors—Walter Gropius (1919-28), Hannes Meyer (1928-30) and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1930-33)—and in three locations—Weimar (1919-25), Dessau (1925-32) and Berlin (1932-33)—the Bauhaus brought together a diverse group of international artists, designers and architects in “a kind of cultural think tank for the times.”2

But if the Bauhaus may be said to have been the ultimate decantation chamber for early 20th-century modernity, it didn’t just emerge from Gropius’s head after World War I as a full-fledged idea. Nor did its afterlife in the various institutions and schools that carried forward its legacy over the remainder of the century play out neatly. The curators have made the decision not only to leave out its often messy pre- and post-history, but also to circumscribe most of the surrounding context, focusing narrowly on the school’s 14-year existence and its leading pedagogical figures and students. (The catalogue does a better job of situating the school’s development as well as some of its exemplary objects in relation to the cultural background, with many fine essays.)

As Bauhaus scholars have amply documented, the roots of the school’s design reformism lay in the British Arts and Crafts Movement (especially as filtered into Germany in the first decade of the century by the architect, author and cultural ambassador Hermann Muthesius), the European Werkstätten and Werkbund movements, and the school’s immediate predecessor in Weimar, Henry van de Velde’s Kunstgewerbeschule, whose building also housed the Bauhaus during its initial phase. Pedagogically, the school’s anti-academic, experiential philosophy of learning, variously imparted by its different masters, also had well-established antecedents in 19th-century and early 20th-century progressive education movements, including those of Europeans Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Friedrich Froebel, Maria Montessori and Georg Kerchensteiner, as well as John Dewey in the United States. Arguably, what was unprecedented at the Bauhaus was neither the effort to forge a new unity between the fine and applied arts, nor even, subsequently, between esthetic practice and commercial production, but rather the school’s extraordinary gathering of creative talents in the service of these objectives. That it sustained this project for nearly a decade and a half with a total of 33 faculty and 1,250 students over the course of its life, all the while being threatened by reactionary political forces and destabilizing economic ones, is all the more remarkable. Even if the school’s efforts to bring its designs to the marketplace had checkered success, the widespread diffusion of its intellectual and pedagogical program remains a phenomenon.

Apropos of the show’s title, it is worth emphasizing that the workshop per se is hardly a modern form of organization. It harks back to the medieval craft guilds or Bauhütten—brotherhoods of masons and other tradesmen that existed all over Europe from Gothic times, typically bound together by arcane social rituals and unified spiritually around architecture, or more precisely Baukunst, a monumental synthesis of the building arts. The instructors in the Bauhaus workshops, initially split up into formal and practical training, were known as masters rather than professors; students progressed from Lehrlinge (apprentices or trainees) to Gesellen (journeymen) to Jungmeister (young masters).

The transmission of knowledge on the model of the guild workshop also parallels the hieratic relationship between master and acolyte in a religious sect. That the Bauhaus was steeped in both these atmospheres—of craft and cult—in the immediate aftermath of World War I is richly conveyed in the exhibition, which opens with Lyonel Feininger’s famous woodcut made to accompany the school’s founding program. The crystalline image of a Gothic cathedral is charged with the same romantic-utopian afflatus that inspired the revolutionary socialism of several other cultural-political groups formed in the early months of the Weimar Republic, including the Workers Council for Art, the November Group and the circle of architectural fantasists brought together by Bruno Taut and known as the Glass Chain. Handcrafted products by the school’s bookbinding and pottery workshops, including a series of superb vessels by the future monk Theodor Bogler, as well as curious totems like a coffin designed by Lothar Schreyer and Marcel Breuer’s long-lost “African” Chair—a student project created in collaboration with Gunta Stölzl in the weaving workshop—likewise reflect an early Bauhaus whose metaphysical-material concerns were remote from the machine.

Similarly, the Sommerfeld House, a log dwelling for a rich timber merchant and Bauhaus patron, realized in 1920-21 by Gropius with his partner Adolf Meyer, belongs to this late Expressionist mood. Represented in the exhibition by a series of original photographs and a colored drawing, the house was based on a system of wood prefabrication, and its construction was solemnized by a ritualistic topping-out ceremony (regrettably documented only by the invitation produced in the Bauhaus printing workshop). Inside, it was fitted with elaborately carved wall decorations, stained-glass windows and furnishings crafted by Joost Schmidt, Josef Albers, Breuer and other Bauhaus students in a Gesamtkunstwerk collaboration among all the workshops. The first of a series of “worksites,” the house inaugurated the on-site approach to teaching architecture that prevailed until the subject was finally integrated into the curriculum under department head Hannes Meyer in 1927. Along with his Märzgefallenen-Denkmal (Monument to the March Dead), 1921-22—a cantilevered concrete “thunderbolt,” displayed in an early plaster model—the Sommerfeld House reveals a wholly different Gropius from the one associated with both the sachlich Fagus Factory of 1914, which made his early reputation as a functionalist architect, and the Bauhaus building to come in 1925-26 in Dessau.

The most visually arresting image from this period is an abstract painting by Johannes Itten titled Aufstieg und Ruhepunkt (Ascent and Resting Point), 1919. The canvas unexpectedly evokes the Parisian Orphism of the Delaunays or František Kupka, attesting to more complex cross-pollination across the modernist map than conventional narratives (and this show) suggest. The charismatic Itten, whose sacerdotal persona and haptic teaching methods made him the school’s most distinctive figure in these years, also inaugurated the famous Vorkurs in 1919. Subsequently modified under his successors, the half-year-long preliminary course was the portal to the workshops and would serve for most of the next decade as a fundamental initiation rite for every student entering the school.

By 1923, with Germany’s economic stabilization and a more general return to order after WWI, the medievalizing mysticism at the Bauhaus dissipated (a shift also credited to the proximity of Theo van Doesburg, who had installed himself not far from the gates the year before and given popular lectures to Bauhaus students). With Itten’s ousting and replacement by the Hungarian Constructivist László Moholy-Nagy, the school evolved into the more objective-rationalist phase that has always been taken as its seminal contribution to the modern movement. Yet despite Gropius’s subsequent efforts to downplay the romanticism of the early years, the workshop model would prevail as the primary organizational structure through most of the school’s existence.

In the final phase under Mies van der Rohe, when architecture and interior design became the focus of the curriculum, the Vorkurs became optional and the school more “conventionally academic,” according to Bergdoll’s catalogue essay, instituting written examinations for the first time, for example. From the evidence on the walls at MoMA, however, it is clear that imitation of the master—anathema to modernist paradigms of originality—was more than ever the order of the day. The drawings by Mies’s students look as if they could have come directly from his hand (or unapologetically aspired to do so). The self-taught son of a master mason from Aachen, Mies would continue to inculcate the same approach to architectural education after he came to Chicago in 1938 to direct the school at Armour (later Illinois) Institute of Technology, where students spent countless hours making drawings of bricks and perspectives of courtyard houses.

At the same time, the workshop metaphor increasingly merged with that of the laboratory. The latter, of course, evokes scientific problem-solving and experimentation rather than hand labor. Yet what it shares with the workshop is an emphasis on technical processes and a certain exclusivity. (These metaphors have regained currency in many architecture schools today; indeed, as both studios and other parts of the curriculum are being refashioned for an age of digital design and fabrication, “labs” are becoming a new cliché.) Given that Itten and Moholy-Nagy were both fundamentally interested in instilling a systematic and holistic design methodology in their students, the replacement of a monk’s cowl by a machinist’s suit was as much a matter of style as substance.