World in Spectacular Light

Why​ do architecture and furniture of a century ago still look new, while clothes, cars and even people appear so dated? How did modern design – clean lines, white walls, geometric volumes, open plans, glass and steel structures, flat roofs – get locked in? A great deal of the credit (or blame) goes to the Bauhaus, to its buildings, products and pedagogy, and to the propagation of these things in the publications, exhibitions and institutions modelled after it.

Born together with the Weimar Republic in 1919, the Bauhaus school of art and design died with it in 1933, shuttered by the Nazis. In its short life it had no fewer than three locations, moving from old Weimar to industrial Dessau to Berlin; three directors, Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer and Mies van der Rohe; and three heads of its foundation course, Johannes Itten, László Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers. They diverged aesthetically as well as politically: Itten and Albers were intuitive artists pledged to handcraft, while Moholy-Nagy was a technophile; Gropius and Mies were bourgeois professionals, while Meyer was a communist. The artists designated ‘masters’ at the Bauhaus, such as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer, were no less diverse, as were the few women who rose to prominence through the workshops. That rise was rare in art schools of the time; today, however, the textiles of Anni Albers, the photographs of Lucia Moholy and the design objects of Marianne Brandt count among the great icons of the Bauhaus.

What, if anything, held the school together amid all this variety? Certainly it had a programme, as announced in a manifesto written by Gropius in 1919. Illustrated with an Expressionist woodcut of a Gothic cathedral ablaze with stars, it called for a recovery of communal culture through a return to artisanal practice (the Bauhaus was formed in a merger between an academy of fine arts and an arts and crafts school already in Weimar). Its Expressionist aesthetic and socialist outlook were also very much of the moment: the Bauhaus wasn’t the only institution to emerge, in an almost utopian leap of faith, from the wreckage of the First World War. But its direction changed dramatically in the early 1920s once the Dawes loan from the United States kicked in and the economic situation in Germany improved. At this point Gropius reached out to manufacturers for commissions, and announced a transformed project under the banner ‘Art and Technology: A New Unity’. It was then, too, that he replaced Itten with Moholy-Nagy, who revised the foundation course in accordance with the new orientation.

The Bauhaus building in Dessau, photographed by Lucia Moholy (1926)

Although both iterations of the Bauhaus proposed an updated version of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the first aimed to reintegrate the arts as crafts under the umbrella of building (hence the ‘Bauhaus’ or ‘house of building’), while the second foregrounded design as a way to modernise the arts and to co-ordinate them in doing so. Architecture held pride of place in both versions, and all three directors were architects, yet architecture as such wasn’t taught at the school until Meyer arrived in 1927. It was the empty centre around which everything else turned.

If the Bauhaus was only semi-coherent, how did it become so influential? Crucial here is the way it was reduced to a style, which circulated in newspapers, magazines, books and shows. In 1924 Gropius and Moholy-Nagy launched the ‘Bauhaus Book’ series, and some of its fourteen volumes, including Point and Line to Plane by Kandinsky and Pedagogical Sketchbook by Klee, soon became classics of modernist aesthetics. The impact of the list was partly a result of its graphic design: abstract covers in black, white and primary colours with simple blocks of bold type. Just as significant was the typography associated with the school, in particular the ‘universal’ alphabet designed by Herbert Bayer, a student turned teacher who devised a font made up of a few geometric shapes without serifs or capitals (a special shock to German readers). It helped to advance the Bauhaus as a brand that could purport to be international.

Exhibitions spread the gospel of the Bauhaus too. In 1923 a survey of work by students and teachers brought the public into the school at the very moment of its transformation. Every workshop was represented, and the director’s office in the Weimar building (designed by the Belgian Art Nouveau architect Henry van de Velde in 1904-11) was staged with the latest chairs, lights and textiles. But most important to the afterlife of the Bauhaus, at least in the anglophone world, was a retrospective in 1938 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Designed by Bayer and overseen by Gropius with his wife, Ise, both show and catalogue were restricted to the Bauhaus of Gropius’s directorship, highlighting the second period of the mid-1920s, which came to be seen as the Bauhaus, occluding all other phases.

Not all Bauhauslers were happy with the reduction of the school to this profile. In 1929 Meyer, not long after he became director, commented acidly: ‘Bauhaus is fashion. All the ladies at the cocktail parties chatter about Bauhaus constructivism. Their calling cards are in lower-case letters.’ But it wasn’t merely that the Bauhaus was chic. More impactful was its set of concepts and models that could be adapted by others elsewhere. First and foremost was its pedagogical plan, with the foundation course at its core; in time this template displaced the old Beaux Arts curriculum in many art schools. Rather than strict training in academic drawing, students investigated the basic characteristics of materials and mediums old and new. In the first instance this approach might be grasped as a triangulation of principles put forward in Russian Constructivism and Dutch De Stijl. On the one hand, Bauhauslers like Albers and Moholy-Nagy adapted the Constructivist emphasis on ‘truth to materials’, while on the other they assumed De Stijl’s attention to the rapport among the mediums. These influences weren’t accidental: in 1921 Theo van Doesburg, the leader of De Stijl, arrived in Weimar, where he lectured at the Bauhaus; and in 1922 El Lissitzky, an ambassador of the Constructivists, came to Berlin, where he met Moholy-Nagy. Both visitors influenced the reorientation of the Bauhaus in 1923.

More specific to the Bauhaus, and just as influential, was the idea of art as experiment. Although this notion was shared across the school, it was understood in various ways. For some Bauhauslers experiment was pledged to experience: learning came by way of doing and making. Aligned with the American pragmatism of John Dewey (who was read at the Bauhaus), this idea was advanced by Albers, who took it with him in 1933 when he went to teach at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and later at Yale, where his impact was immense. For other Bauhauslers experiment was a matter of research into industrial substances and techniques. Moholy-Nagy took this approach, which he introduced to the US in 1937 when he founded a ‘New Bauhaus’ in Chicago on the invitation of a group of industrialists led by Walter Paepcke, head of the Container Corporation of America. In both variants, art-as-experiment flourished in the vast expansion of American higher education after the Second World War. Artists entered colleges and universities on the analogy of the scientist as much as the humanist; for administrators the studio was as close to the laboratory as to the library carrel. This development is another significant part of the Bauhaus legacy.

Another idea that bridged the gap between pragmatists and technophiles at the Bauhaus was abstraction, which was treated not only as a method but as an imperative, a drive towards purity and transparency, towards a ‘new vision’ of light – a catchword coined by Moholy-Nagy but embraced by Albers as well. Like many other modernists, most Bauhauslers saw abstraction in teleological terms: artistic forms were taken to evolve towards it. One example is the development of the Bayer alphabet. Another is a timeline by Marcel Breuer of the evolution of his own chairs between 1921 and 1926, published as a faux filmstrip which runs from a pointy throne crafted in wood to his sleek ‘club’ chair in tubular steel. The abstractive drive reached down to little things, as when Josef Hartwig redesigned chess pieces as representations of their movements on the board (his bishop is a cross of two diagonals): out with the old symbolism of feudal courts, in with the new formalism of pure function. In his Bauhaus summa, Von Material zu Architektur (1929), translated as The New Vision, Moholy-Nagy sketched the history of art as an evolution from base material through glass architecture to a world awash in spectacular light. For Moholy-Nagy, to abstract was a way to produce art and to historicise it in one and the same Hegelian gesture: modernists guided the spirit of history to an ever brighter future.

Of course, abstraction informed Bauhaus architecture too, in its structures as well as its surfaces. Ludwig Hilberseimer, for instance, worked up his strict designs from simple units of cell and grid, scaling them up from room to apartment to rowhouse to entire city. He understood that this grid logic could be exploited in the interests of capitalist ‘schematisation’, especially in Chicago (where he arrived in 1938), yet he framed it instead as a programme of socialist ‘typification’. The ‘house as a commodity’ wasn’t a problem for him (he took it as a motto) so long as interiors and exteriors could be varied, and so long as the functional and financial efficiencies gained through mass production served the greatest number of people.

When​ Gropius and Moholy-Nagy left the Bauhaus in 1928, others carried on, but everyone had to scramble when the Nazis closed the school five years later. Although some, including Gropius and Mies, lingered in Germany to see if they could manage under the new regime, they soon departed too, eventually landing in the US. Since they weren’t forced to leave, they were more émigrés than refugees. In fact, as Robin Schuldenfrei shows in her excellent Objects in Exile, emigration was an experience of adaptation and success as well as loss and estrangement, at least for the big names. Paradoxically, she argues, the dispersal of the Bauhaus was another way for it to be consolidated: its ‘modernism gained coherence only after it passed through conditions of exile.’

Some Bauhaus proposals were affirmed by the experience of exile, such as the concept of Existenzminimum or ‘minimal dwelling’, which articulated the need to design simple homes for semi-nomadic people with limited furnishings and few possessions. Developed in Germany in the turbulent 1920s, the idea was adapted by Bauhaus émigrés first to interwar England and then to the US. As Schuldenfrei demonstrates, England was a generative waystation for figures like Gropius, Moholy-Nagy and Breuer, who learned to translate their models in a new setting as well as a new language. Schuldenfrei focuses on designs by Gropius and Breuer for Isokon, a company headed by the entrepreneur Jack Pritchard, which based most of its furniture, apartments and rowhouses on elementary modules (Isokon was an acronym for ‘isometric unit construction’). Few of its housing projects were built; one exception, designed by the non-Bauhausler Wells Coates, is the Lawn Road Flats in Belsize Park, which dates from 1934. The company had more success with domestic objects, such as Breuer’s famous nesting tables, which translated his Bauhaus pieces from metal to plywood, a cost-effective move supported by the example of Alvar Aalto, who was already influential in England. Like the cell and the grid, isometric unit construction could be put to a variety of sociopolitical aims: Gropius used it to design for individuals and families, while the Marxist Meyer saw it as a means to aggregate homes for workers in a way that could promote collectivity.

According to Schuldenfrei, some Bauhaus objects gained a special agency in exile, often through photographic reproduction. Her central example is the corpus of photos, produced by Lucia Moholy in the mid-1920s, of the main buildings and master houses at Dessau, all designed by Gropius, as well as signal products like the Breuer chairs and tables. The buildings were left behind, of course, but so too were most of the objects, and it was mostly through her images that some became iconic. Moholy highlighted the geometric rationality of Bauhaus creations, which was critical to their reception as sachlich – usually translated as ‘objective’ or ‘sober’. (Other photos of the Bauhaus buildings, including some by her husband, Moholy-Nagy, were more experimental, steeply angled or severely cropped.) Often Moholy presented Bauhaus buildings as luminescent, to advance the idea that modern construction was also light. She also often posed Bauhaus objects, such as the dome table lamps of Carl Jucker and Wilhelm Wagenfeld, in serial displays, one after the other, to suggest that they were mass-produced, when most were in fact prototypes made by hand.

As a Jewish woman Moholy was in a perilous position after she left the Bauhaus in 1928. Separated from Moholy-Nagy the following year, she became involved with a communist later hunted by the Nazis, and after her divorce in 1934 was effectively stateless. Turned down by the US immigration authorities, she eventually gained British citizenship in 1947, nine years after she first applied. After she fled Berlin in 1933, her glass negatives were left with her friend Gropius, who was still in the city. Later, in the US, he appropriated them for his own use, producing prints without credit, let alone payment, to Moholy; it was 1957 before he returned the material to her, only after a legal battle and a bitter exchange of letters. Gropius featured the photos prominently in the 1938 MoMA show and catalogue, where they contributed mightily to his ideal version of the Bauhaus. ‘Not only did Gropius refuse to acknowledge Moholy’s artistic agency in creating the images,’ Schuldenfrei concludes, ‘he did not acknowledge the crucial role of photography in the history of the Bauhaus more generally, even as he was using it for his own ends.’

A number of the Bauhauslers who arrived in the US, unlike the stranded Moholy, gained important positions: not only Albers as principal art instructor at Black Mountain College and Moholy-Nagy as director of the New Bauhaus, but Gropius as chair of architecture at Harvard and Mies as head of the Illinois Institute of Technology. However arduous at times, emigration was a homecoming for these modernists in the sense that for them the US was always already modern. They had long admired American skyscrapers; in the early 1920s Mies had imagined his own glass towers for Berlin. And along with Le Corbusier, Gropius had used images of grain silos and other utilitarian structures in North America to proselytise for an architecture of clean surfaces and pure volumes (photos were important here too, though some had to be touched up to remove any sign of ornament), and all the architects saw the Americans Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright as key predecessors. They even celebrated Taylorist and Fordist techniques of labour and production, but in this they were hardly alone: Lenin and Gramsci were also fans. The architectural historian Reyner Banham underscored a circularity here: while still in Europe, the Bauhauslers sought models for design in the US, which, after they relocated there, they then developed in actual projects.

Like other émigrés, the Bauhauslers were concerned to adapt, fit in and advance: ‘rapid assimilation’, Schuldenfrei notes, was ‘one palliative for the anxiety created by their uneasy status’. The Germans were especially eager to show their bona fides during the Second World War. The design work Bayer produced for the war effort included dynamic posters for the Container Corporation of America as well as immersive exhibitions for MoMA with titles like Road to Victory and Airways to Peace. Others, like Moholy-Nagy, had to play down old socialist sympathies in order to work with government officials and private businessmen. This was pragmatic, Schuldenfrei insists, but Moholy-Nagy’s fascination with technology and science also served him well in his new capitalist environment. Before his death from leukaemia in 1946 at the age of 51, he produced one last version of the Bauhaus Gesamtkunstwerk, a new vision of total design: ‘There is design in family life, in labour relations, in city planning, in living together as civilised human beings.’ The spirit of history had taken a distinctly American turn, and Moholy-Nagy was all in on its brave new technoscientific world. Certainly, as Schuldenfrei notes, the Bauhauslers who moved to the US ‘showed little desire to return after the war, despite the fact that the rebuilding of Germany would have afforded them many opportunities to practise’.

Schuldenfrei boils her argument down to three claims: ‘the experience of exile informed the modernism subsequently produced by the émigrés’; it ‘stretched across the prewar, wartime and postwar period’; and ‘never far from the core of this modernism was a genuine concern for society.’ Her first two points are persuasive, and they align with a recent shift in modernist studies towards an emphasis on diaspora over nation and on continuities over ruptures. Her third claim is trickier. Doubtless the Bauhauslers had social commitments, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions, or so critics of the Bauhaus, on the left as well as the right, came to believe. By the 1960s a reduced version of modern architecture was well established as the international style of corporate capitalism, and in 1973 the Italian Marxist critic Manfredo Tafuri excoriated the Bauhaus for its totalising insistence on the gridded plan (the title of his polemic says it all – Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development). In 1981 the reactionary American gadfly Tom Wolfe attempted his own takedown, From the Bauhaus to Our House, and by the mid-1980s postmodern architecture was in its heyday. This was the perfect style for the neoliberalism of Reagan and Thatcher, and it helped to turn the Bauhaus into a very bad object.

Perhaps the worm of history has turned again. When I first came to New York, in the late 1970s, knockoffs of Bauhaus furniture were sometimes dumped on the street, but today they are pricey items on eBay and distant descendants can be cheaply bought at Ikea. The tumultuous life of a fictional Bauhausler in American exile is even the subject of a new three-and-a-half hour movie titled The Brutalist. But perhaps this is just a predictable swing in taste. Far more important is the urgent need, given the climate and housing crises, for a recovery of Bauhaus principles of minimum dwelling and socialist typification. Today ‘from the Bauhaus to our house’ may not be a bad path. It may be a necessary one.