Missing Max

As a Walter Gropius “expert”, I should know the Swiss architect/designer Max Bill (1908-94), and alleged inheritor of Gropius’ Bauhaus mantle, backwards and forward. But until as recently as yesterday, he remained a shadowy figure. I knew he was reputed to be significant, but I really didn’t know why. My fog began to lift a little about twenty years ago.

I had just gotten off the plane from Zurich where I had been wowed at their Design School by an exhibition of Robert Maillart’s thinly concrete Alpine bridges, such heavenly spaces that they seemed almost almost too ethereal-looking to risk driving on them. And he had started out making down to earth level bridges lumpishly heavy by contrast. Man, I wondered what epiphany had zoomed him up into his heavenly high risers. I’d been mulling this on the plane, reading the catalog. It had been such a transformation.

And so it happened by a miraculous coincidence that I was mulling that book on the train to Greenwich Village where I was scheduled to interview the perhaps most under-recognized architectural genius of our era, an Argentinian named Emilio Ambasz. He had attracted my attention by his work for ten years as the head of the architecture/design section of NY MOMA. He had circularized, for example, all the auto makers of the world about designing a better taxi. The head of GM mocked his overture with a snippy reply to the effect that GM sold 50,000 taxis last year, young man, and we don’t need your help, a sentiment Ambasz repeated verbatim in the catalog of the subsequent MOMA exhibition, which maneuver drove that GM prexy up a wall and into court. The judge threw out the complaint in minutes.

I had also learned that the head of MOMA’s executive committee, also the president of CBS-TV, warned Ambasz against alienating the business community with such tendentious appeals. Emilio responded by successfully teasing a $5,000 subsidy from Dr. Frank Stanton, then the so-called brains of CBS! I like that kind of steel in a humanist.

So there I was, riffling the catalog, next to the locked elevator to Ambasz’s office when a elegantly dressed young man suddenly appeared. I asked where to find Ambasz. “That’s me,” he coolly smiled as he held the elevator door for me to enter. Just to break the ice, I flashed the book at him. My God, did he unleash!

He told me that as an 18 year old boy in Resistancia, Argentina (where the indigenes had made their last unsuccessful defense against the “conquistadores”), he had found a book by Max Bill in a second hand bookstore that explained how he could be both an engineer and an architect. Reading Max had emboldened him to send an idiosyncratic school application to Princeton where America’s greatest expert on Maillart, Donald Billington, taught. That professor found Emilio’s bizarre application beguiling and admitted him sine die! A year later Billington posed a complex mathematical problem to the freshman student who promptly solved it, standing there. “Emilio,” Billington decided on the spot, "You are now in graduate school!”

So I knew I had to get deeper into Bill, but I just never did. This year, however, is the centennial of his birth, and MARTE up in Herford, Westfallen fielded a show last winter that stressed musical parallels. And the sculptural illustrations were miniature abstracts, totally unmoving. So I just assumed that as Philip C. Johnson had bloated the Gropius rep for his own devious reason, so Grope had hyped Max. Until last night, that is, when Mon Ami, Weimar’s art film house ran a new Swiss film on the entire career of Max, narrated with love and zest by his forty years younger widow.

MARTE had badly distorted his sculpture which is monumental. Only a trip in situ or a brilliant film can turn you on to these huge abstracts. There’s a literally explosive sequence where he’s blasting apart a cliff in Sardinia followed by the excruciatingly complex details of delivery of the raw stone by sea, followed by footage of the idiosyncratic tools he “deployed” (“used” just doesn’t get their complexity) to turn this rough Nature into astonishing shapes. Only a moving picture is up to the demands of “criticizing” this work. That’s a New one for me, film nut that I’ve been for over sixty years!

And I didn’t realize either that the Ulm school was originally financed by one million DM’s of Marshall Plan money. And it looked like our State Department closed it down because of Max’s disagreements on Apartheid as well as the Vietnam war. Max was always a loudmouthed leftie, from the Nazi era forwards. I’ve always been puzzled as well by Gropius’s peculiar reply to the students who begged him to stop the school’s closing. He told them there’s no connection between art and politics!

Both Mies and Gropius were miles behind Max in political courage. They were just shy of being de facto Nice Nazi’s. Max is the heroic man in 20th century design. It’s high time the reporters and scholars caught up with him. His widow may even do it on her own. She makes a superb impression in this film. For details on renting or buying a dvd (19.99 Euros), click.