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THE BAUHAUS IN HISTORY

by Ben Davis
What does the Bauhaus mean to us, today?

This, more than anything else, is the question provoked by the recent
"Bauhaus" show at the Museum of Modern Art, as well as the various
other exhibitions and symposia that marked the 90th anniversary of
the legendary art school last year. In Artforum, K. Michael Hays
Lyonel Feininger, cover illustration, and answered the question by saying that the Bauhaus represented a
Walter Gropius, text belief in the unifying power of geometry, something we no longer can
Programm des Staatlichen Bauhauses in
Weimar (Program of the state Bauhaus share. In the January Art in America, Joan Ockman replies that the
in Weimar; also known as the Bauhaus school may indeed still be relevant -- but only the Expressionist early
Manifesto) period, so different than what we normally associate with the term
April 1919 "Bauhaus."
Harvard Art Museum, Busch-Reisinger
Museum
Photo by Katya Kallsen
The Bauhaus was more than just an idea, of course, it was an actual
institution. That institution’s historical background figures in each of
these accounts -- to a point. In general, however, what strikes me is
how bloodless most descriptions of the Bauhaus are. History appears
more or less the way it did at the MoMA show, as a timeline outside
the galleries; that is, as ornament, not as integral to understanding
the meaning of the artwork. To truly recover the spark of relevance
of Bauhaus practice, you need to thoroughly dig into what happened
in Germany in the years 1919-1933 -- to put the history back into art
history, so to speak.

Four giant facts that loomed over the founding of the Bauhaus in
1919:

* World War I, 1914-1918. The War killed some two million

Germans, and left Germany’s economy -- then the world’s second
largest -- in shambles. The conflict had begun in 1914 with
substantial working-class support, on all sides. It ended with German
soldiers in revolt against their officers, and a deep hatred of the
leaders who had initiated the hostilities. Many Bauhaus students were
veterans of the war. Walter Gropius, its first director, served on the
Walter Gropius Western Front, was wounded, and won two Iron Crosses.

* The Russian Revolution of 1917. Growing out of war fatigue, a

successful Marxist-led revolution on Germany’s doorstep overthrew a
much-loathed Czar and replaced him, for heroic moments, with
history’s most far-ranging experiment in worker-run government
(soon to be strangled by civil war and reaction). The Russian
example ignited a wide-spread enthusiasm for social experiment and
revolutionary politics, in Germany and elsewhere.

* The German Revolution of 1918. In November, the discredited

German Kaiser fled the country; the German Empire became the
German Republic. Inspired by the October Revolution, the next
months saw power pass over into a woolly collection of grassroots
workers and soldiers councils across the country. Authority was soon
consolidated, however, in a National Assembly dominated by the
disastrously centrist German Social Democratic Party (SPD), socialist
in name, but in practice bent on placating a still-monarchist right-
wing. The workers council movement, however, persisted -- and was

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wildly influential with artists; Gropius became head of the architect-

led Working Council on the Arts in February 1919, which issued an
"Appeal to the Artists of All Countries."

* Months of civil war between a still-monarchist right and a socialist-

inspired left in 1918-1919. The police and army were so penetrated
by radical agitation that the SPD government fell back on the
"Freikorps," irregulars formed from the rump of the German officer
corps, to maintain order. In January 1919, a rebellion in Berlin, the
"Spartacus Uprising," ended with the murder of the left’s most
popular speaker, Karl Liebknecht, and its most capable thinker, Rosa
Luxemburg. In February, Freikorps troops used artillery and mass
arrests to crush the workers movement in Bremen, on the northwest
coast, and the Ruhr, in the west, then went into central Germany to
liquidate various organs of popular power. In March, there was
another upheaval in Berlin. In April, Bavaria declared itself an
independent "Soviet Republic" under workers rule, and was violently
put down (becoming subsequently the cradle of Nazism).

These were the cheerful headlines that formed the backdrop for the
Johannes Itten birth of the Bauhaus. Imagine: Walter Gropius issued the Bauhaus
Manifesto in April 1919, when the hope in the new ultra-democratic
structures was still running hot, when the post-war economic chaos
was acute, when class war was an inescapable fact -- Weimar, where
the Bauhaus was to have its home, had recently been sealed off for a
radius of 10 kilometers by the government, to secure it against the
left!

Gropius’ call to students is not an explicitly political document, but

read in context it echoes with the utopian hopes of the era. The
Bauhaus’ founding appeal is not the clarion call to industrial design
that one might expect, given the school’s legacy -- just the opposite,
in fact: It denounces "designers and decorators," and declares "Art is
not a profession." The manifesto got its topical relevance by decrying
the "isolation" of the contemporary artist. "The complete building is
The Bauhaus band the final aim of the visual arts," the opening lines trumpet. "Their
noblest function was once the decoration of buildings. Today they
exist in isolation, from which they can be rescued only through the
conscious, cooperative effort of all craftsmen." The intense interest
generated by such a holistic art program only makes sense when
understood against a background of social disintegration; the fact
that the manifesto took a stand against "salon art" and for
"cooperative" practice meant it harmonized with the contemporary
revolutionary rhetoric. In later days, Bauhaus recruits would
universally remember the woodcut that illustrated the manifesto -- a
Walter Gropius’ Monument to the March
Dead shining, Expressionistic church by Lyonel Feininger -- as the
"cathedral of socialism."

In his most explicit nod to Marxist language, Gropius declares, "Let

us create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions that
raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist." The
irreconcilable struggle between capital and labor, right and left, was
thus displaced onto an opposition between fine art and handicraft,
substantially easier to resolve. This doctrine found practical outlet in
the cooperative teaching of the early Bauhaus, with each workshop
co-taught by a "technical master," who taught practical skills, and a
"form master," i.e. an artist.

The Bauhaus was always an elite phenomenon -- at its height, it

drew about 200 students a term. But with its promise of a mission for
the arts that responded to the hardships of the day, Gropius
attracted some of the brightest minds, as both students and staff:
Marcel Breuer with textile by Gunta Josef Albers, Marcel Breuer, Herbert Bayer, Marianne Brandt,
Stölzl Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer,
"African" or "Romantic" chair Lothar Schreyer, Gunta Stolzl. In a country that traditionally revered
1921
academic credentials, only Itten had any prior teaching experience

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Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin among the first instructors. In scholarly accounts, it is customary to

Photo by Hartwig Klappert dwell on the naiveté of early Bauhaus pedagogy, such as Kandinsky’s
classes where students were tasked with uncovering supposedly
natural harmonies between shapes and colors. These are often
framed as part of the "original sin" of modernism, with its supposedly
foolhardy hunger for universals (this is the tack the Hal Foster takes
in the MoMA catalogue). But such were the times; as in all politically
turbulent periods -- think of the ‘60s -- people turned to all kinds of
strange spiritual solutions to the problems around them.

Thus, the free-thinking Bauhaus proved a natural point of attraction

for members of the "Wandervogel" back-to-nature movement; Alfred
Arndt recalls tramping into Weimar in 1921, running into a one-time
fellow traveler ensconced at the Bauhaus and falling under the
school’s spell. The most pronounced spiritual ideology, however,
flourished around Itten, the priestly artist whom Gropius recruited to
teach the school’s famous Vorkurs foundation course. In his class,
students learned to get in touch with their creative selves, mediating
Josef Albers on the "inner forms" of Old Master paintings, and making junk
Scherbe ins Gitterbild (Glass fragments constructions intended to put them in tune with the logic of
in grid picture)
ca. 1921
materials. Itten was a disciple of the mystical doctrine known as
Albers Foundation/Art Resource "Mazdaznan," involving complete purging of the self of all negative
Photo by Tim Nighswander thoughts. A large circle of students was indoctrinated in these new-
agey practices, with Itten leading them in group breathing exercises,
fasts, and even the use of a "needle machine" that punctured the
skin to release impurities. The early Bauhaus kitchen prepared food
according to Mazdaznan doctrines (when there was food at all;
students often went to bed hungry).

So it was that the preppy, functionalist Gropius found himself

presiding over a sort of hippy-dippy esthetic commune, awash in
exotic and esoteric ideologies. "Boys had long hair, girls short skirts,"
remembers Tut Schlemmer. "No collars or stockings were worn,
which was shocking and extravagant then." The students played in
clamorous, experimental bands. They created lantern festivals and
parades for which they crafted exquisitely impractical art kites. In
general, they scandalized the population of provincial Weimar.

The state of Thuringia, where Weimar was situated, was not even
fully formed until 1920; it was wracked by political confrontations
between left and right. Fractious politics meant that Gropius’
Gunta Stölzl experiment had to constantly justify itself before town leaders, while
Tapestry at the same time facing the unstinting, militant hostility of the era’s
1922-23
Harvard Art Museum, Busch-Reisinger
own version of the tea-party movement. In 1919, locals had already
Museum branded the Bauhaus as "Spartacist-Jewish." In early 1920, a
Photo by Michael A. Nedzweski newspaper announcement trumpeted the following: "Men and women
of Weimar! Our old and famous Art School is in danger!" A "public
demonstration" against the Bauhaus was called for January 22, 1920.

In March 1920, an attempt at a Freikorps-led coup in Berlin -- the so-

called "Kapp Putsch" -- galvanized the German left. A nationwide
general strike shut down the country, thwarting the coup leaders. In
Weimar, nine workers lost their lives defending the Republic.
Bauhaus students attended their burial in force with colorfully painted
signs and leftist slogans, much to the dismay of Gropius, who was
anxious to maintain a neutral profile. And yet, later that year,
Josef Hartwig
Chess set (model I)
Gropius himself contributed the winning design for a tribute to the
1922 slain workers, Monument to the March Dead, an abstract concrete
Harvard Art Museum, Busch-Reisinger lightning bolt -- a landmark of Expressionist architecture that may
Museum well itself have finalized the idea of avant-garde-as-Bolshevik in the
Photo by Imaging Department minds of Weimar’s fuming burghers.

The Bauhaus Idea always represented a compromise between

conflicting tendencies; a fanciful, utopian spirit was balanced against
a more practical-minded, forward-looking character. Gropius owed
his position as director to the fact that his persona seemed naturally

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to mediate these conflicting tendencies -- the previous director of the

Arts and Crafts School, the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde,
selected Gropius as replacement because he was a proponent of
modern industrial architecture, but also opposed the more extreme
ideology that completely subordinated art to design. However, as his
school’s situation became more embattled, the tensions between
these two poles sharpened. In 1922, as condition of renewed funding
of the Bauhaus, the Weimar government insisted that the school
produce a show to "give account of" its accomplishments.

It was under these pressures that the Bauhaus began to make its
turn towards industrial design and mass production in earnest, away
from the pageantry of Expressionism and Arts and Crafts. It was the
extreme situation that resulted in the sharpness of the detour, which
Vasily Kandinsky was really a repudiation of the entire spirit of the early Bauhaus: The
Schwarze Form (Black form) post-war crisis was deepening; 1923 would be remembered as the
1923
"Year of Hunger." The post-war inflation, which had been bad
Private collection
Courtesy Neue Galerie New York enough, became hyper-inflation -- money ceased to have any
Photo by Jeffrey Sturges meaning from day to day; by the end of the year, the government
was issuing two-trillion-mark notes. The all-important Bauhaus
showcase of 1923 would coincide with the apogee of this crisis.

"Art and Technology -- A New Unity" was the new slogan that
Gropius hit upon to win over the town; "Exactly what we didn’t
want," Feininger told Gerhard Marcks upon seeing the slogan
plastered in the Weimar train station for the Bauhaus exhibition. Yet
Feininger understood the pragmatic logic of the shift: "One thing is
sure -- unless we can produce ‘results’ to show the outside world and
win over the ‘industrialists’, the future of the Bauhaus looks very
bleak indeed," he wrote to his wife Julia. "We now have to aim at
earnings -- at sales and mass production! But that’s anathema to all
of us and a serious obstacle to the development process." Itten, with
his spiritualist outlook, was replaced by the Hungarian Laszlo Moholy-
Nagy, a leftist himself of a Constructivist bent who had fled Hungary
after the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, that country’s own
short-lived experiment in workers’ government, in 1919.

Walter Gropius’ 1923 essay, "The Theory and Organization of the

Bauhaus," offers a window into his thinking at this juncture. It is a
transitional document, representing the architect’s attempt to
reconcile the original rhetoric of the school with a new program that
might appeal to backers. It maintains a vaguely left-ish rhetoric,
proclaiming that as long as the "machine-economy. . . remains an
end in itself rather than a means of freeing the intellect from the
burden of mechanical labor, the individual will remain enslaved and
society will remain disordered." But this is immediately followed by a
statement -- incredible given the economic circumstances -- that "[t]
Herbert Bayer he solution depends on a change in the individual’s attitude toward
Wall-painting design for the stairwell of his work, not on the betterment of his outward circumstances, and
the Weimar Bauhaus building on the the acceptance of this principal is of decisive importance for new
occasion of the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition
1923
creative work." As one perceptive critic stated at the time, "A blunter
Collection Merrill C. Berman rejection of Marxism and kindred Utopias is inconceivable."
Photo by Jim Frank
It was too late, however, to save the Bauhaus at Weimar. Economic
hardship, combined with a French occupation of the Ruhr over
German non-payment of reparations, was ideal for the growth of
cultural reaction. The Nazis had their first big electoral success in
Thuringia; the SPD government that the Bauhaus relied on for
support was deposed. The school’s plight became something of a
cause célèbre, with luminaries like Peter Behrens, Albert Einstein,
Mies van der Rohe, Oskar Kokoschka and Arnold Schonberg signing a
letter decrying the assault on the school. But by the end of 1924, the
writing was on the wall.

And yet, by the time it had to pack up shop, the German currency’s
value had been stabilized by massive American loans (the "Dawes

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Plan"), economic activity began slowly to perk up in Germany, and

the publicity of the forced closing had proved salutary. Different
localities bid against one another to host a relocated Bauhaus.
Dessau, an industrial village that was home to the Junkers aircraft
manufacturing plant, won out. It was in Dessau, under slightly
improved economic circumstances, that Gropius was to build his
famous Bauhaus building, and the classic ideology of the school was
crystallized under Maholy-Nagy’s spell. The co-teaching scheme was
dropped. A Bauhaus Corporation was founded to market products,
with wallpaper eventually being its most successful money-earner.
The wood, stained glass, bookbinding and pottery workshops all
passed into history. The first actual architectural workshop was
eventually established. The communal fraternization between
students and teachers of the early Bauhaus was replaced with
glorified "work study," with pupils serving as cheap labor to help with
product lines.

Still, there is a simultaneously idealistic and pragmatic tone to

Bauhaus design ideology that is the result of a nexus of factors very
Oskar Schlemmer specific to the mid-‘20s Germany. The tremendously influential
Study for "The Triadic Ballet (Das Russian avant-garde had left the indelible impression that left-wing
Triadische Ballett)" art meant orienting on the factory; industrial design could thus serve
ca. 1924
Museum of Modern Art, New York
as channel for the optimism of hopeful Bauhaus youth (in point of
fact, market relations had already been restored in Russia under the
New Economic Policy, and the USSR was beginning its long, tragic
slide towards bureaucracy and terror). On the other hand, Germany
had been saved by American capital, and "Americanism" -- thrift,
efficiency, business -- became fashionable. Herbert Bayer’s plans for
fantastical urban pop-up architecture, clearly inspired by Soviet
propaganda kiosks, but intended to feature advertising for various
consumer products, stand as a symbol of this odd conjuncture, when
the quintessential capitalist use of art -- product and graphic design -
- could be considered radically socialist.

The Bauhaus was founded with a utopian program for architecture in

Marianne Brandt
Coffee and tea set a wrecked country where little actual building was being done. With
1924 the stabilization, the demand for professional labor picked up
Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin considerably. In 1928, Gropius decided to leave the school he had
Photo by Fred Kraus founded to continue his career as an architect, putting in his place
Hannes Meyer, a Swiss veteran of the communal architecture
movement, who would carry forward the torch of progressive design
-- though somewhat less diplomatically than Gropius (Maholy-Nagy
couldn’t stand him, and resigned).

And yet, for both the Bauhaus and for German society in general, the
contradictions of the immediate post-war era had not been resolved,
but only covered over with a big pile of money from the United
States. In 1929, the U.S.’s own economic contradictions erupted into
the open, as the orgy of speculation of the ‘20s came undone in the
Great Crash. The U.S. needed its loans back. Crisis returned in
Paul Klee Germany with a vengeance. Unemployment skyrocketed. A
Maibild (May picture) thoroughly embittered and disoriented German electorate turned
1925 towards Hitler’s National Socialists.
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Image © The Metropolitan Museum of
Art
The rest is well known. As John Willett says, with the rise of the
Nazis, "the entire modern movement in Germany was not merely
doomed but damned." The compromise between free-thinking avant-
garde ideology and big industry on which the Dessau Bauhaus was
based fell apart. Hannes Meyer’s socialist sympathies caused him to
be forced out as director of the Bauhaus, to be replaced by the
relatively apolitical Mies van der Rohe. Mies would try to hold the
famous institution together as it was hounded out of Dessau in 1932
by the Nazis, reviving it in makeshift quarters in Berlin, before it was
finally closed as Hitler came to power in 1933. But it mattered little,
by this point, how the Bauhaus positioned itself: To the Nazis, says
Willett, "any form of association with the SPD or the November

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Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus Building, Revolution was ‘Marxist,’ just as any innovatory ideas in the arts fell
Dessau under the heading of Art- or Cultural-‘Bolshevism.’"

* * *
That is the story of the Bauhaus. What, at last, is the interest in
returning to this history today? The Bauhaus was formed in the
shadow of a potential Marxist revolution; its founding statement
offered the school as solution to many of the same problems that
Walter Gropius also led to the popularity of revolutionary ideology -- the chaos left in
Bauhaus Master Houses, Dessau.
Isometric site plan
the wake of an imperialist war, social disintegration, human
1925-26 alienation. Instead of political revolution, however, the original
Harvard Art Museum, Busch-Reisinger Bauhaus adherents looked to the Arts and Crafts tradition, itself
Museum inspired by the older utopian socialism of people like Owen and
Photo by Imaging Department
Fourier, who believed that they could dream up elegantly designed
communal schemes, islands of unalienated labor in a capitalist world.

In fact, utopian thinking was one of the three great traditions of

European thought that Marx had sought to synthesize (the other two
being German idealism and English political economy). Such schemes
were a genuine inspiration, but if you read the Communist Manifesto,
you find "utopian socialism" critiqued. For these reformers, Marx and
Engels write, "Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive
action; historically created conditions of emancipation to fantastic
ones; and the gradual, spontaneous class organization of the
proletariat to an organization of society especially contrived by these
inventors." Closer to hand in the Germany of 1919, the martyred
Rosa Luxemburg had developed similar objections in her pamphlet
Reform or Revolution, with respect to the vogue for worker’s co-
operative organizations in Germany: The great flaw of communal
Herbert Bayer schemes was that they tried to find a way around the reality of class
Design for a multimedia building struggle; without confronting the actual divisions of society,
1924 inevitably, utopian schemes either remain dilettantish and marginal,
Harvard Art Museum, Busch-Reisinger
or they adapt themselves to the needs of the wealthy, or they are
Museum
Photo by Imaging Department crushed.

In essence, the history of the Bauhaus is the history of an institution

passing inexorably through these three stages. It always remained
something of a progressive phenomenon, in spirit; there is a pivot
point that allowed the school to swing round from the early mystical
attachment to cooperative living to Maholy-Nagy’s ringing assertion
that "Constructivism is the socialism of vision." But what these
different propositions have in common, despite opposed esthetics, is
that they offer artistic solutions to political dilemmas, conceiving
social problems as problems of bad esthetics. They themselves could
not, therefore, put into place the conditions that might realize their
promises: of course the extravagant, impractical community
experiments of the early "Expressionist" Bauhaus were doomed; of
course the ideas of the later, design-oriented Bauhaus were fated to
become a tool for big business, sucking them of all their soul.
Without profound political change, there was no other path open.
Looking back mournfully, much later, Gropius acknowledged that his
Lucia Moholy project was always hobbled by its historical circumstances: "about
László Moholy-Nagy
1925-26
ninety percent of the unprecedented efforts made by all participants
Metropolitan Museum of Art in this undertaking went into countering national and local hostility,
Copy photograph © The Metropolitan and only ten percent remained for actual creative work."
Museum of Art
To recover the spark of relevance of the Bauhaus today, you have to
rediscover the tension that underlay it. Against those who dismiss
the Bauhaus, you must recognize that it was not just a school
dedicated to creating attractive objects; its production is shot
through with the luminosity of political passion. But against those
who idealize avant-garde utopias, it is also important to see that this
was displaced energy, responding to the right questions but unable
to provide the answers to them on its own. In this sense, the
ultimate lesson of the Bauhaus for today is that art cannot afford to
turn away from history.

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BEN DAVIS is associate editor of Artnet Magazine. He can be

reached at

László Moholy-Nagy
Untitled
1926
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Copy photograph © The Metropolitan
Museum of Art

László Moholy-Nagy
A 18
1927
Harvard Art Museum, Busch-Reisinger
Museum
Photo by Katya Kallsen

László Moholy-Nagy
Lichtrequisit einer Elektrischen Bühne
(Light prop for an electric stage)
1930
Harvard Art Museum, Busch-Reisinger

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Museum
Photo by Junius Beebe

Josef Albers
Set of stacking tables
ca. 1927
Albers Foundation/Art Resource
Photo by Tim Nighswander

Marcel Breuer
Wassily Chair
1927-28
Museum of Modern Art

Josef Albers
Paul Klee, Dessau
1929
Museum of Modern Art

Paul Klee
Fire in the Evening
1929
Museum of Modern Art

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Paul Klee
Landschafts-Wagen Nr. 14 (Landscape
wagon no. 14)
1930
Harvard Art Museum
Photo by Katya Kallsen

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe with Lilly

Reich
Side chair (MR 10)
ca. 1931
Manufactured by Bamberg
Metallwerkstätten, Berlin, Neukölln
Courtesy Neue Galerie
Photo by John Wronn
Museum of Modern Art

Oskar Schlemmer
Bauhaus Stairway
1932
Museum of Modern Art

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