At the end of World War I, during the heady days of the Weimar Republic, a new art movement was born. It was called Bauhaus and its founding member was Walter Gropius. Elaine S. Hochman, in her book Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism, gives an historical account of this seminal avant-garde school. She says, however, little about the art they produced and instead orients the narrative to the internal and external political problems that they faced.
Long before the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder got coined to describe the aftereffects of combat, Walter Gropius felt traumatized after fighting for Germany in the trenches of World War I. He nearly got killed several times but he turned out to be one cat that never used up all his nine lives. After his tour of duty ended, he thought there must be more to life than war and set out to found a new art movement. He went to the conservative but cultured city of Weimar and took over an already-existing school and renamed it Bauhaus. The approach was less theoretical and more practical in its method of artists experimenting in a workshop setting to bring out their inner states of emotion. In the beginning, Expressionism, Constructivism, and De Stijl were the main inspirations. Though the school did not teach classes in architecture at first, Gropius believed that all art forms signify and culminate in that discipline since its public display made art available to all people. Bauhaus was all about the transformation of society by making art available to every ordinary man or woman on the street. The school attracted some prominent avant-garde artists like Luwig Kircher, Vassily Kandinsky, Josef Albers, Mies van der Rohe, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy who all came to be employed as teachers.
The Weimar Republic was an experiment in liberal democracy and it got off to a turbulent start. The centrist political parties had a difficult time holding the government together while communists, anarchists, and right-wing extremists fought in the streets. The Bauhaus was publicly funded and government battles were fought over what to do with the socialist utopian art institute. Meanwhile, internal strife involving different factions of the faculty and the students made internal management a dilemma as well. Eventually the city of Weimar told them to leave. Hochman’s account of Weimar politics is not always clear; a conscientious reader might want to look up some information about what was going on at that time in Germany to make the book a little less muddled.
In another region of Germany, the city of Dessau invited Gropius to open Bauhaus there. Dessau was a run-down place with high unemployment and rising rates of poverty. The mayor wanted to rebuild it and thought an up-and-coming art school would attract the attention and funding that they desired. It was there that architecture became a prominent part of the Bauhaus curriculum. The school came up with a plan to design student and worker dormitories that were cheap, easy to assemble, aesthetically pleasing, and functional. But the apartments turned out to be awkwardly designed spaces for living and the local population did not take kindly to the special treatment they thought the Bauhaus associates were getting. The political and managerial strife started up again and Walter Gropius was forced to step down. When the Nazis came to power, they closed the school permanently.
Bauhaus artists found a new life in America. They had a major influence in design and architecture. Ironically, their socialist ideals of making mass produced household goods and cheap, functional architecture found fertile ground in the capitalist system of the U.S.A. Anytime you see the smooth cladding of a skyscraper, a factory manufactured suburban house, or the products in a branch of IKEA or Bed Bath and Beyond, you are witnessing the long term effects of Bauhaus.
Hochman’s book gives a detailed account of what went on with Bauhaus. It is primarily a book about politics and educational management. Unfortunately, there is very little she says about any of the art that Bauhaus produced. For such an influential art movement, she does not give it adequate attention, and actually almost no description, of what the art of Bauhaus looked like. She provides no analysis of the architectural style they became famous for nor does she say much about the household consumer goods they also brought into the marketplace. Her thesis is that the activities of Bauhaus reflect the events and attitudes of the Weimar Republic but that should be revised since the book is more about how Bauhaus was thrown back and forth, sometimes violently, by the different political teams of that era without any regard for the practices, intentions, or theories of the Bauhaus artists themselves.
For what it is, Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism gives a detailed account of what happened with this avant-garde art movement, even if it is a dry read. It is, however, not a good introductory text. With so little attention given to their art, it is something that will appeal more to people who are familiar with Bauhaus and the Weimar Republic already.
Hochman, Elaine S. Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism. Fromm International, New York: 1997.
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