Bauhaus. 1919-1933. Michael Siebenbrodt
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second half of the nineteenth century, he postulated the production of things that did justice to the material, that were largely unadorned but still expressive, following the model of the Gothic style. Products made by machines, however, were “surrogates” according to him, soulless, “dead things”. It was left to the writer, designer and founder of the Socialist movement in Great Britain, William Morris (1834–1896), and the Arts and Crafts movement associated with him, to put Ruskin’s critical thoughts into practise and give further momentum to the arts and crafts reform. Morris designed novelties and interior furnishings, avoiding the misled ornamentation of the past. He and the Arts and Crafts movement saw the return to the qualities of manual trades as a way to react against the product design challenges of the Industrial Revolution. The products thus made in specially-founded arts and crafts companies were marked by simplicity, robustness, rusticity and great esteem for the material. Morris, himself a dedicated socialist, connected his design work and the associated reactivation of craftsmanship with a forced, yet illusory social assertion, which consisted of counteracting the decay of society by encouraging communal life, through joyful, manual and largely self-controlled work and the resulting good form. As a result of this, a conflict-free, blissful society should emerge, free from the rule of the machine.
Ruskin, Morris and the English Arts and Crafts movement are closely connected to the beginnings of modernist design in Europe, due to their criticism of the aesthetic appearance of machine-made products and their art reform based on the quality of the products of the manual trades. Allied with this movement were the efforts of the Scottish artist and architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928) and the Secession Movement in Austria with artists like Otto Wagner (1841–1918), Josef Hoffmann (1870–1956), Koloman Moser (1868–1918) and the architect mentioned by Gropius, Josef Maria Olbrich (1867–1908). Olbrich, architect of Vienna’s Secession Building, rejected the traditional, conservative concept of art, which was founded on historicism, and tested, among other things, the idea of the unified work of art by designing new, futuristic buildings and living spaces.
Shortly thereafter, Olbrich also pursued this claim with the members of the Darmstadt Artists Colony, founded in Germany in 1899, of which German architect and designer Peter Behrens (1868–1940) was also a member. Behrens was one of the most influential founders of modern industrial design and modern functional industry culture. Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Swiss architect Le Corbusier were among his collaborators. Peter Behrens is regarded as one of the most important forerunners of functionalism, which developed into one of the most important design principles of the Bauhaus.
In Germany, Richard Riemerschmid (1868–1957) and Bruno Paul (1874–1968) were also part of the group of artists becoming industrial designers by means of their Typenmöbel (batch production furniture) designs for the Dresdner Werkstätten für Handwerkskunst (Dresden Craftsmanship Workshops). The artist Henry van de Velde (1863–1957) followed suit in Belgium and later in Germany. He tried to renew art through manual trades without rejecting technology, then turned to arts and crafts, designing functional objects for industrial production and building houses as an expression of highly-cultivated artistic individuality. Free from the ballast of historic forms, using a system of lines sensitively calculated and derived from nature in order to demonstrate in a subtle manner the structure of an object or house and its functions, the objects designed by van de Velde still did not live up to the design requirements of batch or mass production. Van de Velde, whose Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts, founded in Weimar, was one of the immediate forerunners of the Staatliches Bauhaus, was regarded, like the artists previously mentioned, as one of the most important representatives of Art Deco, a movement of artists who were aware of their responsibility towards society and wanted to avoid the advancing separation of artistic and consumer culture by melding them together into a new unity. The result was an original, yet exclusive concept, which eventually could not live up to the needs of a highly-developed industrial society.
Deutscher Werkbund (German Association of Craftsmen)
Walter Gropius repeatedly emphasised that the Bauhaus emerged from the spirit of the Deutscher Werkbund. Founded by Hermann Muthesius (1861–1927) in Munich in 1907 as an association of artists, architects, businessmen and experts, and carried by designers like Peter Behrens and Walter Gropius, the Deutscher Werkbund tried to create a practical, effective connection between commerce, craftsmanship and industry, and the designing artist. On the basis of a positive assessment of social and technical industry potential and new products such as aircraft, fast trains, washing machines and automobiles, aesthetics were developed which emphasised usefulness and functionality as well as material appropriateness in architecture and consumer devices, in the spirit of an industrial culture for all. Emphasis was also placed on sustainable marketing of the Werkbund products in the media. Despite fundamental agreements among the members of the Werkbund, accord was never reached on specific questions, which ultimately can be traced to the processes of exploitation, alienation and objectification in a modern industrial society, closely connected to the production of goods.
De Stijl, Blauer Reiter (Blue Rider) and Der Sturm
The Dutch artists’ group De Stijl, founded in 1917 with constructivist design principles that were propagated in Weimar by painter Theo van Doesburg (1881–1931), immediately influenced the artistic development of the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus’s study of technology and industry was accelerated by De Stijl, and Gropius’s and other Bauhaus artists’ use of forms was in part aligned with the group for a sustained period of time. In the area of visual arts, the most important artists for the Bauhaus were those whose work was grouped around the Blauer Reiter and the magazine and gallery Der Sturm, founded by musician and art critic Herwarth Walden (1878–1941). These included the painters Paul Klee (1879–1940) and Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), who were later appointed Masters at the Bauhaus. These painters’ specialities lay in the great sensitivity and vividness with which they reacted to the changing society and profound transformation of the scientific view of the world. Design methods considered appropriate responses to the contradictions of the time usually involved the rejection of the outdated concept of faultless rendering as well as a focus on abstraction and expression, cubism and futurism. An in-depth analysis of the artistic means of design as well as an exploration of their innate laws assisted in the search for a new intellectuality by means of cognitive progress on the basis of an enlightened rationality.
Politically, the Bauhaus developed after and in reaction to the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, the 1918 November Revolution in Germany and the end of World War I. The situation after the war and the radical political changes were general premises for the intended renewal of art and architecture. It is evident from Gropius’s programmatic texts that the Bauhaus founder was clearly aware of this connection and that he himself, as many of his contemporaries and later comrades-in-arms, wanted to make a contribution to the creation of a new, democratic society. For Gropius, World War I was more than just a lost war. For him, his world had ended and in 1918, he was looking for radical solutions to the problems of his time. In the end, he was credited with making an attempt in his thinking to unify some of the most important cultural influences, impulses and trends of the past and present and to develop an image of the new world in synthesis. The Bauhaus was solidly anchored to this concept.
The Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar (1919 to 1925)
Probably no other school in Germany was so closely connected to the cultural, political and socio-economic developments of the Weimer Republic as the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus foundation date of 1st April 1919 coincided with the negotiations of the constitutional assembly in the Weimar Hoftheater, which adopted the so-called Weimar Constitution on July 31st. Only a few weeks after Hitler’s seizure of power, on 30th January 1933, police searched the Bauhaus for Communist materials and closed it down, before the Academy was dissolved on 19th July 1933 in a final act of freedom of decision.
In between lay two site changes, in 1925 to Dessau and in 1932 to Berlin, as well as two changes of directorship, in 1928 to Hannes Meyer and in 1930 to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, which were all politically motivated. Local parliaments always played a part in the development of the Bauhaus, the Thuringian Landtag in Weimar until 1925 and the Dessau City Council until 1932, and even longer with political activities and legal proceedings.
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