Hecklecticism

Joseph Maria Olbrich

As much as I relish Tiffany's Art Nouveau vendibles, I find it hard to shift gears on his much too hecklectic program for Laurelton. As a personally very disorderly thinker, I guess I love the assurance of a Gesamtwerk. In any case, that's what several years of living in and around German Jugendstil has done to my sensibility. At the turn of the twentieth century Germany was still a half Bismarcked loose collection of duchies. Each duke or local entrepreneur wanted to create more ideal conditions for manufacturing art in his locale.

The most interesting was Heinrich Sauermann of Flensburg who founded an art school (now a great little museum) to get better designers for his furniture factory. I first visited his lode for an exhibit, "Strasse Kunst", street art, meaning his collection of Jugendstil posters, beginning with the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. In 1899 Duke Ernst Ludwig of Darmstadt, Hesse founded a Kunstler Kolonie, bringing together a handful of geniuses like Olbrich from Austria and Behrens from Dusseldorf.

The colony has morphed into high toned residences (the ones they originally made for themselves!) with the Duke's house as the repository of the best that they thought to create. Last week I went to the celebration of a Van der Velde house (1914) in Weimar which two Munich architects are transforming into a community house to open next summer. (It has been closed for over a decade because it had the curse of being the STASI HQ during the DDR.)

The more I study the Bauhaus (my purpose for being here is to evaluate its history), the more I savour Jugendstil and its lovely local variations (Louis Sullivan, Modernismo, Liberty, Art Nouveau). It's hard to kick an obsession, which hurts so good.