On November 23, 1921, the continuously beleaguered Walter Gropius sent out an all hands directive: Please make photos of everything we’ve done in the first two years of our school, in or out of the workshops, and (given the still limited state of black and white photography) make color drawings as well of all our creations. He was already worrying about the first international exhibition he was planning for Summer 1923, to give his school the prestige it needed to counteract bad publicity in the local state legislature about his hippie students and their allegedly Bolshevik professors.
Eighty-five years later to the day, Klaus-Jürgen Winkler, Bauhaus Uni professor of the theory and history of architecture, proudly if shyly donned white curatorial gloves to show the local press his new treasure: the first of four albums of those historic photographs that by sheer historical good luck survived after Gropius’s hasty retreat to Dessau-- for the second of the three act farce that was to be his dream’s frustrating course between 1919 and 1933. Then the Nazis closed it down in spite of Mies van der Rohe’s increasingly frantic meetings with Alfred Rosenberg to save the school.
In 1955, because the Weimar Fire Department was getting more and more anxious about the junk that had gathered over the years in the attic of Henry van der Velde’s glorious Jugendstill building (now the HQ of the Bauhaus Uni), a professor sorting through broken furniture, ancient newspapers, and other castoff immemorabilia, found a trove of albums of some 404 of those photos Gropius had asked for—but had left in his hurry to start over in Dessau. The 104 in the first album dealt with Johannes Itten’s highly vaunted “preliminary course”, and the cabinetmaking, wood-turning, and wood-carving workshops
Thus by a blessed fluke, a Bauhaus Uni determined to repossess its heritage, one-upped the potentially grim and serial reapers of a virulently anti-Modernist professor, Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Nazi hostility, and Ossi indifference to the Bauhaus ideals until their Plattenbau boom in the nineteen-seventies made them see that Socialism and Modernism were compatible.
Gropius’s last minute decision to hire Hannes Meyers in 1928 as his successor so he could defect to his private practice in Berlin was very imprudent. (Pius had asked all his full professors to take a 10% salary cut to relieve a budget crisis; most didn’t even reply. And the editor of the local paper accused him of double dipping—taking his Bauhaus salary as well as fees for his architectural supervision of the new workers subdivision, Törten.) He fled to the Berlin he knew he could control in total disgust.
Meyers was a very articulate Communist whom the local authorities, then drifting to the political right, eventually canned in 1930. He then went to Moscow with some Bauhaus associates and their Plattenbau tradition bounced back to the Soviet satellite. Mies, who had to overcome his bad rep with the Nazis as the creator (1926) of a memorial to the two principal leaders of the German Communist party, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg, cracked down hard on the Communist students. To no avail.
These retrieved images will win no photo contests. In Dessau, Lucia Moholy-Nagy and Marianne Brandt would soon show their own brilliance in the new art. But beggars can’t be choosers, especially since they were so close to having been total losers of their beginning visual heritage. The diverse images that remain from Itten’s preliminary course, which was meant at one and the same time, to introduce the students to the basics of artistic language and tell the professors as well which students were good enough to stay the entire course, are obscure and perhaps as meaningless as his obscurantist lectures. Pius (as he was familiarly known) and Itten were soon on an intellectual collision course—the former wanted mass production by fusing art and technology, the latter found such massness an insult to the artist’s vocation. Gropius fired Itten in 1924, and continued with his not yet fully focussed experimental vision.
Oddly, the most interesting photos are those of children’s room furnishings and toys, in which the Bauhaus geometric gospel of square, triangle and circle with the mandatory colors of yellow, red and blue have indeed a childish appeal. Alma Buscher is clearly the laureate of this collection. Hers are the only photos, by the way, that are humanly inhabited—kids eagerly messing around with Buscher’s innovative furniture and implements. And the only really mass produced objects are simple, foldable cots--for kindergarten naps. Easy to set up and easy to pile away when the snoozing was over.
It was one of the anomalies of the Bauhaus that Gropius set a 30% quota on female enrollments—and even forbade them entrance into the architecture program, such as it wasn’t! (This Beruf Verbot was somewhat ameliorated by the fact that there was paradoxically yet no formal architecture program--until Hannes Meyers appointment in 1928!) “Ladies” were shuffled off into “womanly” pursuits such as weaving, where the likes of Gunta Stölzl and Anni Albers eventually far outstripped their male mentors in international reputations. The taint of patriarchalism hangs sadly over this first album of Bauhaus history.
But hang on. There is more. The next three volumes will appear one a year until the Bauhaus’ ninetieth birthday in 2009. Book two will deal with weaving, book binding, wall painting, glass and sculpture workshops. Three with metal and ceramic. Four with the Haus am Horn, the famous exhibition of 1923, theater design and architecture in general. My advance peek at the original albums makes me certain the visual story gets much more interesting.
Meanwhile, Gerd Zimmerman(1946- ), the current Rector, who had the wit to “Brand” a so-so building trades school with the Bauhaus name, and follow the branding with a shrewd broadening of the curriculum to include media, design, and cultural management as well as extending its reach internationally (their prize design professor, Halifax emigrant Jay Rutherford, just returned from a lectureship in Bangalore, India and a vice deanship at the new design school in Bolzano, Italy.) Promising students are encouraged to spend a year in other Euro countries, and professors swap places casually in Beijing and Tokio. Bauhaus Uni is in the thick of the current German drive to create more elite institutions.
Michael Siebenbrodt, an Ossi from the old building trades school, has made a major play directing the Bauhaus Museum, expanding its collections from a meagre 800 to over 8,000. He has not been so successful yet in fulfilling his dream of a new museum large enough to handle everything he’s been collecting. The original name professors (Klee, Kandinsky, Feininger, and Schlemmer) are now too expensive to collect. And also-ran Bauhauslers are not attractive enough to regular tourists. And the state administration is tightening its cultural budget.
Another Ossi, later a Cologne architect, Peter Mittmann, made a local name for himself by saving the Ernst Neufert homestead in nearby Gelmeroda. Neufert was Gropius’s building superintendant for the widely praised Dessau Bauhaus. He was tempted to return in 1927 back to the Weimar building trades school, perhaps with a promise of an evntual directorship. Because Neufert didn’t leave the DDR, a certain ignominy surrounds his reputation unlike the grossly inflated ones of refugees Mies and Gropius. But his books on industrializing architectural construction appeared in 1938 and remain the standard worldwide, still in print in thirteen languages.
One of the things Bauhaus historians must do first is untangle these slanted reputations. Mittmann also created the Neufert Box in 1999 to honor Ernst’s centennial, next to the restored 1928 estate, built on a unique prefab system.The Blue Box uses Neufert’s ideas to create a visually astonishing twelve level exhibition space. The school, which ran itself ragged just staying alive for fourteen years, is now busily finding its proper place in the history of modern architecture. And Bauhaus Uni has taken up the challenge in spades.
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