Bauhaus Construct: Fashioning Identity, Discourse and Modernism

Bauhaus Construct

Reconsidering the status and meaning of Bauhaus objects in relation to the multiple re-tellings of the school’s history, this volume positions art objects of the Bauhaus within the theoretical, artistic, historical, and cultural concerns in which they were produced and received. Collectively, its essays take into account the primacy of cultural objects in fashioning a critical history of the school. Featuring contributions from leading scholars in the history of art, architecture, and design, this volume offers an entirely new treatment of the Bauhaus, introducing new archival research and innovative methodologies which reveal how histories of the school have been constructed. Its essays demonstrate how Bauhaus objects are central to the discourse on the school and its key figures, including Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, and ­László Moholy-Nagy, and address the implications this has had on our understanding of the Bauhaus and modernism more generally. Issues such as art and design pedagogy, the practice of photo­ graphy, copyright law, and critical theory are brought into focus in relation to understandings of the iconic design school. At its core, the volume takes into account the inherent pliability of the Bauhaus and its continued relevance. An important resource for anyone studying the Bauhaus, modern art and design. Jeffrey Saletnik is Lecturer and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History and Archeology at Columbia University. Recently he was a fellow of the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. Robin Schuldenfrei is Junior Professor of Art History at Humboldt University, Berlin and Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois–Chicago.

Bauhaus Construct Fashioning Identity, Discourse and Modernism

Edited by Jeffrey Saletnik and Robin Schuldenfrei

First published 2009 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, USA This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2009 selection and editorial matter, Jeffrey Saletnik and Robin Schuldenfrei; individual chapters, the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Every effort has been made to contact copyright-holders. Please advise the publisher of any errors or omissions, and these will be corrected in subsequent editions. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Bauhaus Construct : fashioning identity, discourse and modernism / edited by Jeffrey Saletnik and Robin Schuldenfrei. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Bauhaus. 2. Art, German—20th century. 3. Design—Germany— History—20th century. 4. Avant-garde (Aesthetics)—Germany— History—20th century. I. Saletnik, Jeffrey. II. Schuldenfrei, Robin. N332.G33B4262 2010 709.04—dc22 ISBN 0-203-86867-6 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0-415-77835-2 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-415-77836-0 (pbk) ISBN10: 0-203-86867-6 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-77835-0 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-77836-7 (pbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-86867-6 (ebk)

2009014700

Contents Notes on Contributors

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction Jeffrey Saletnik and Robin Schuldenfrei

1

Part 1: Agents

11

  1 The Bauhaus Manifesto Postwar to Postwar: From the Street to the Wall to the Radio to the Memoir Karen Koehler

13

  2 The Irreproducibility of the Bauhaus Object Robin Schuldenfrei

37

  3 The Disappearing Bauhaus: Architecture and its Public in the Early Federal Republic Frederic J. Schwartz

61

  4 Pedagogic Objects: Josef Albers, Greenbergian Modernism, and the Bauhaus in America Jeffrey Saletnik

83

Part 2: Transference

103

  5 A Refuge for Script: Paul Klee’s “Square Pictures” Annie Bourneuf

105

  6 Lyonel Feininger’s Bauhaus Photographs Laura Muir

125

  7 Excavating Surface: On the Repair and Revision of László Moholy-Nagy’s Z VII (1926) Joyce Tsai   8 Picturing Sculpture: Object, Image and Archive Paul Paret

142 163

v

Contents

Part 3: Object Identity   9 Designing Men: New Visions of Masculinity in the Photomontages of Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, and László Moholy-Nagy Elizabeth Otto

181

183

10 The Bauhaus Object between Authorship and Anonymity Magdalena Droste

205

11 The Identity of Design as Intellectual Property T’ai Smith

226

Coda

245



247

Bauhaus Endgame: Ambiguity, Anxiety, and Discomfort Alina Payne

Illustration Credits

267

Index

271

vi

Contributors Annie Bourneuf is a Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University and a Dedalus Foundation Dissertation Fellow, at work on a dissertation on Paul Klee’s art of the late 1910s. Her forthcoming publications include essays on Walter Benjamin and on Gunta Stölzl. Magdalena Droste has been Chair in Art History at the Technische Universität Cottbus, Germany since 1997. From 1980 to 1997 she worked as a curator at the Bauhaus-Archiv/Museum für Gestaltung. She is the author of two books on the Bauhaus which have been translated into more than ten languages. Karen Koehler is Associate Professor of Architectural History at Hampshire College. She has published on Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus, and connections between architecture, critical theory, and pictures. Her book on the Bauhaus for Phaidon Press is forthcoming in 2010. Laura Muir is Assistant Curator of the Harvard Art Museum/Busch-­ Reisinger Museum, Cambridge, MA. She organized the 2001 exhibition Dancing on the Roof: Photography and the Bauhaus (1923–29) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is currently preparing the first exhibition devoted to Lyonel Feininger’s photographic work. Elizabeth Otto is an Assistant Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Her current research focuses on the gendered valences of represented bodily fragmentation in multiple media of later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany. Paul Paret is Assistant Professor of Art History at The University of Utah in Salt Lake City. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University’s Department of Art and Archaeology. Alina Payne is Professor at Harvard University and holds the Max Planck/ Alexander von Humboldt Prize, 2006. She is the author of several books and edited volumes, including Objects, Ornament and Culture: Modern Architecture and the Rise of a Theory of Objects (forthcoming). vii

Contributors

Jeffrey Saletnik is Lecturer and Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History and Archeology at Columbia University. Recently he was a fellow of the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. He earned his Ph.D. at The University of Chicago. Robin Schuldenfrei is Junior Professor of Art History at Humboldt University, Berlin and Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of ­Illinois-Chicago. She received her Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. Frederic J. Schwartz teaches history of art and architecture at University College London. He is the author of Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany (2005) and The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture Before the First World War (1996). T’ai Smith is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism at Maryland Institute College of Art. She is completing a book on the Bauhaus weaving workshop, gender, and the concept of the medium. Recently, she has begun writing on pseudonyms, anonymity, and intellectual property in modern and contemporary art and design. Joyce Tsai is currently a Predoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, where she is completing her dissertation, László Moholy-Nagy: Painting after Photography. She is a doctoral candidate at The Johns Hopkins University in the Humanities Center and the History of Art Department.

viii

Acknowledgments Many of the essays in this volume were first presented in March 2008 as part of “Bauhaus Palimpsest: the Object of Discourse,” a symposium funded by the Harvard Art Museum’s M. Victor Leventritt Fund. The editors co-organized this symposium with Peter Nisbet, Daimler-Benz Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum and Senior Lecturer in History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. They would like to thank Thomas Lentz, Richard Benefield, Janet Sartor, and especially Peter Nisbet for their generous support at the onset of this project. The editors also would like to express their gratitude for the encouragement and efforts of Barry Bergdoll, Sabine Hartmann, Charles W. Haxthausen, Andres Lepik, Toshiko Mori, and Alina Payne, as well as John Ackerman and Dawna Schuld, both of whom offered sensitive and insightful suggestions throughout the preparation of the manuscript. At Routledge, they thank Francesca Ford and Georgina Johnson-Cook for their guidance and expertise regarding the editing, production, and design of this volume. Finally, they thank the authors for their diligence and for their dedication to this project.

ix

Introduction Jeffrey Saletnik and Robin Schuldenfrei

Among the dozens of photographs taken by Lucia Moholy of the Bauhaus school building, masters’ houses, and director’s house, few are as thought-provoking and evocative as her photograph of a typewriter on a desk in Walter and Ise Gropius’s Dessau living room (Figure 0.1). Other

0.1 Lucia Moholy, Typewriter on desk in Walter Gropius’s house at the Bauhaus, Dessau, 1926, gelatin silver print, printed c. 1950, 14.9 × 11.4 cm 1

Jeffrey Saletnik and Robin Schuldenfrei

photographs admirably capture work and life at the school: straightforward documentary images of the Bauhaus with its flat roof and horizontal ribbon windows, its environs not yet paved and landscaped; images of the masters’ dwellings nestled in a pine grove; photographs of the school’s interior and living quarters, with custom-designed fixtures and furnishings; and straightforward sachlich (objective) images of Bauhaus products set against plain backgrounds, such as Marcel Breuer’s chairs and Josef Hartwig’s chess sets. In another vein, there are also the iconic images of Wassily and Nina Kandinsky sitting starchily at their dining room table, and Walter and Ise Gropius in their living room, he in formal evening clothes including a bow tie. Although photography was a key mode of Bauhaus investigations, it has been not highly valued or interrogated by scholars until recently—yet photography reveals much about the school and its protagonists’ self-representation. What differentiates Lucia Moholy’s image of Gropius’s desktop and typewriter from other images of the Bauhaus is the particular attention paid in it to this one spot and set of objects within a wider object-filled environment. Unlike the subjects of her other photographs, this typewriter was not, of course, produced at the Bauhaus. Rather, Moholy depicts an object that, in a sense, produced the Bauhaus. With this and other typewriters, much of the institutional history of the Bauhaus came into being. It was an industrious object, a means for communication and asserting expertise. The construction of the Bauhaus as concept is akin to a palimp­ sest, having been repeatedly and at times strategically erased and rewritten. On these terms, the Bauhaus can be viewed as a document that reveals both shifting origins and subsequent revisions. In its many iterations, the Bauhaus has been beset by the weight of competing nationalisms, socio-political change, discourses of modernism, and ensuing reactions to them. Its legacy reveals changing attitudes about art-making, pedagogy, production, and authorship. This volume examines how objects produced at the school both reflected and constructed the myriad—and at times conflicting—narratives of the Bauhaus and its discursive practices, in the period of their inception and subsequently in other contexts. In the essays that follow, Bauhaus objects are viewed both as critical repositories that unlock specific pasts in specific moments and as discursively pliable. The status of the object continues to be theorized and questioned by scholars: in terms of its relation to ideas and ideology, its place in subject/object relationships, an object’s “being in the world,” and the relationship between the object and its material qualities.1 The Bauhaus presents an important locus through which to assess these and other larger issues. Bauhaus objects have often been cast as representatives

2

Introduction

of certain well-established expectations that have been joined to the early twentieth-century tradition of the modern. This volume attempts to look afresh at ways in which these objects were agents for change—and, accordingly, themselves changeable—in their own time and in the histories that issued from them and reshaped them in turn. To that end, the essays presented here shed new light on the design school’s complex history and the historical, theoretical, and political forces that molded it. They also offer insight into individual creative practices. Despite the visual suggestiveness of machine-like impersonality, Bauhaus objects are far from being anonymous. This volume therefore interrogates their relationship to identity, whether of their makers or in the fashioning of the history of the Bauhaus. It submits for renewed consideration the question of how Bauhaus objects—“Bauhaus objects” being defined in the broadest sense— maintain their relevance over the course of changing critical values. Lucia Moholy’s photograph which has the typewriter as its object is a reminder of the importance of writing and theoretical discussions at the Bauhaus. It gestures towards the idea that discourse was a primary focus of Bauhaus work. Typewriting, as a symbolic system and means for the communication of authority, can be seen as a crucial tool for conveying the ideas and larger project that the Bauhaus represented.2 Waves of written public relations campaigns were launched, especially in times of crisis—the archives are replete with letters to key cultural and political figures as the school was forced into survival mode time and time again. Before its doors were shut for the final time in Germany, its history was already being written. And in the postwar era, various protagonists strove to mold the Bauhaus’s legacy in alignment with political and social goals, an ongoing discourse that was never fixed to a certain period. Certainly the Bauhaus protagonists unabashedly took the liberty of rewriting their own history of the school, in subtle and not so subtle ways—thereby maintaining a powerful hold on it. In the written paradigm, for example, Hannes Meyer, who realized many of Gropius’s stated goals, is barely a footnote, and Gropius the perennial hero. Several authors in this volume address the stakes of strategic repositionings which were instigated by Bauhaus figures. This is an ongoing phenomenon, in which the continuing theoretical and critical reception of the Bauhaus, as construct, is as useful as an understanding of the school in its original context, if not more so. In the first part of this volume, authors address how Bauhaus masters and Bauhaus objects themselves served as agents for the school throughout its immediate, postwar, cold war, and international incarnations. Karen Koehler explores how Walter Gropius continually returned to the original Bauhaus manifesto document, a “moving object” he employed

3

Jeffrey Saletnik and Robin Schuldenfrei

to recast the school in the postwar era. She notes the manipulative and intentional falsifications of memory—for polemic or for profit—stemming from memory’s multiple forms, and myriad responses to the experience of exile and displacement. Robin Schuldenfrei argues that Bauhaus protag­ onists were willing to call into question the status of the objects the Bauhaus produced—to sacrifice their “aura” and status as “art” in order to achieve their mass reproduction, as would have been necessary to realize the Bauhaus’s stated social goals; yet, in practice the Bauhaus was unable to do so, given qualities inherent in the objects it produced. Frederic J. Schwartz uses postwar critical positions articulated by Theodor W. Adorno and Ernst Bloch to show how the Bauhaus, as a historical legacy in the context of the young German Federal Republic, was a fraught element in discussions of the built environment. The Bauhaus, he argues, seemed to hinder postwar architectural discussions as much as it served to frame them. Jeffrey Saletnik posits that Bauhaus objects were ill received in an American context because they were “pedagogical” by nature and thus possessed an agency out of step with an emphasis upon disinterested viewing in art critical discourse at the time. He points to how the omission of Bauhaus practice from critical discourse was as significant as Gropius’s overarching—perhaps even overbearing—presence in the casting of the Bauhaus in America. These essays explore how the Bauhaus articulated its aims and controlled its public image. They also bring to the fore the agency of ideas in shaping the Bauhaus’s reception over time and consequently defining attitudes about it. Upon first glance, Moholy’s photograph is an object-filled image, in which the tactile qualities of the typewriter underscore the tactile aspects of the other objects on display, namely the Gropius-designed double desk with its overemphasized wood graining and the reflective surface qualities of the Marianne Brandt-designed desk light. And yet, in Typewriter there is no indication of work; rather, the typewriter is shown inactive and in isolation. Significantly, this typewriter did not belong to Walter Gropius, but rather to Ise Gropius. As Ise Gropius wrote to her husband two years before this photograph was taken, “[A typewriter] is a divine device and must be one of our next procurements.”3 Typewriters generally signaled a new role for women in the workplace, made tantalizingly real by Siegfried Kracauer’s evocation of a new variety of office girl trained to type to the ever-swifter beat of a gramophone.4 But especially at the Bauhaus, the manufacture of documents was also the manufacture of doctrine. Ise Gropius’s role therein was essential. As Ise Gropius recalls of her initial time in the Bauhaus orbit, “In those first months my personal contact with the school was light. I did not enter any of the workshops, as my talents lay in the literary field which

4

Introduction

made me a natural collaborator for the endless output of statements, articles and reports that were required of my husband. The fact that I was able to type proved a godsend, and for most of our married life my little typewriter was a steady companion.”5 She noted in a letter to Walter Gropius’s mother in May of 1925 that she was kept so busy attending to Bauhaus business that she had trouble keeping up with her personal correspondence.6 Much of what we know about the Bauhaus is largely that which those who sat before these machines have allowed us to read, and through which, to follow Friedrich Kittler, we hear the filtered voices of the past.7 Beyond the formal properties of the image and its contents, then, Typewriter allows a reading in which Ise Gropius’s role in fashioning the Bauhaus may be brought to the fore. Although she was a public figure, her role remained largely anonymous—yet, when viewed as existing between the message and the machine, Ise Gropius can be seen as an intendant. In an act of transference, she can be understood as transmitting order at the Bauhaus. Essays in the second part of this volume explore innovative, unexpected, and often quite personal instances of transference taking place at the Bauhaus through various close readings of its objects. Annie Bourneuf uses Paul Klee’s “Square Pictures” to examine Klee’s response to the changing parameters of reading culture. By considering the transformations of the book and the page proposed at the school, this essay addresses a perennial question of the relation of Klee’s art to its Bauhaus context. In doing so, Bourneuf illustrates a transference from reading to seeing in the context of a new text-saturated environment where writing was reconceived in relation to other surfaces. Laura Muir explores the private, contemplative nature of Lyonel Feininger’s little-known Bauhaus photographic endeavors. She demonstrates how Feininger used photography in an engaging praxis that led to new directions in his painting practice and, in turn, how his painting affected his photography. Joyce Tsai, in her examination of László Moholy-Nagy’s Z VII, shows the previously unacknowledged degree to which painting practice informed Moholy-Nagy’s interests in effects of light and transformative vision, demonstrating his use of the painted surface as a means through which problems in new media could be worked out. Paul Paret reconsiders a documentary photograph of the Bauhaus sculpture workshop as a “modernist object.” He then highlights transitions from the three-dimensional practice of sculpture to the later twodimensional practice of the workshop, and its metamorphosis into advertising and display. These authors excavate layers of meaning associated with lesser-known Bauhaus objects and show how understudied evidence, such as personal and documentary photographs, broaden understanding of the

5

Jeffrey Saletnik and Robin Schuldenfrei

school, its masters, and the complex functioning of its objects. In these essays, concepts and perspectives are transferred, allowing for new readings and connections, often transliterated between media. They give rise to new productive ambiguities regarding the status of Bauhaus objects. Objects were essential to the construction of individual, critical, and collective identity at the Bauhaus, both as tools and as indices. Often they have multiple identities and iterations: Typewriter, for instance, exists as a glass plate negative from 1926, as an original print from the same year, and as a second print Gropius had made in the early 1950s. This photograph and, more importantly, the negative from which it was printed were the subjects of heated accusations and disagreements about authorship and copyright. In 1954, Lucia Moholy wrote Gropius to ask for his assistance in locating her collection of negatives, which she believed had been lost during World War II. Gropius’s reply is worth quoting at length: Regarding the Bauhaus photos, you obviously have forgotten what happened; long years ago in Berlin, you gave all these negatives to me. I have carefully kept them, had copies made of all of them and have given a full set of copies to the BuschReisinger Museum at Harvard which has built up a special Bauhaus Department which is steadily growing. I have promised them the original negatives with your name attached as soon as I do not need them any more myself. Both Ise and myself remember this clearly. You will imagine that these photos are extremely useful to me and that I have continuously made use of them; so I hope you will not deprive me of them. Wouldn’t it be sufficient if I sent you contact prints of the negatives? There are a great many, but I certainly understand that you want to make use of them yourself. Anyhow it will be a relief for you to know that they are in existence and in good shape. I have never left them out of hand.8 Moholy’s lengthy response in which she accused Gropius of depriving her of her negatives, her “most valued possessions,” was the opening salvo in a protracted battle. She wrote Gropius: I have no doubt that my negatives have been extremely useful to you, and I gather from what you say that you have had copies made of all of them, have continuously made use of them and presumably frequently published and publicly shown them. Moreover, you have, equally without my consent, given a whole

6

Introduction

0.2 Left: Lucia Moholy, Bauhaus masters’ housing, MoholyNagy’s studio window, c. 1926 (verso), 17.2 × 23 cm Right: Lucia Moholy, Bauhaus masters’ housing, Moholy-Nagy’s studio window, c. 1926, gelatin silver print 17.2 × 23 cm

set of copies to the Busch-Reisinger Museum to help them build up a special department. Do you realize what this means to me? … But this is not all. I am appalled to hear that you have promised the museum the original negatives, my negatives, with “my name attached” as if I were long dead—your only stipulation being that you do not need them any more yourself! How can you do such a thing?9 Negatives were returned to Moholy in 1957 and Gropius, for his part, remained adamant that he had done nothing untoward.10 Yet on the verso of some of the original prints given by Moholy to Gropius in 1926, one finds stamped in German: “Photo Lucia Moholy—Dessau, reproduction forbidden without permission.”11 On at least one print “reproduction forbidden without permission” has been crossed out and Gropius’s own stamp has been added, indicating his custody of the photograph (Figure 0.2). This incident between Moholy and Gropius points to conflicting opinions about authorship both at the Bauhaus and thereafter. In the third part of this volume, concerning object identity, questions of the authorship of objects come to the fore. Whereas objects might be prioritized—especially under the directorship of Gropius—as property of “the Bauhaus,” other members claimed and employed them as their individual artistic or material output. Elizabeth Otto emphasizes how the new practice of photomontage was integral to the exploration of masculinity at the Bauhaus through her analysis of montaged gifts exchanged between Bauhäusler (members of the Bauhaus). Drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, Magdalena Droste explores the public and private strategies through which Marcel Breuer, Herbert Bayer, and Marianne Brandt sought to assert and articulate individual authorship at the Bauhaus. T’ai Smith uses a new framework to address the question of object identity at the Bauhaus, namely the legal protection of work through patents, a 7

Jeffrey Saletnik and Robin Schuldenfrei

practice intended to secure—through intellectual property—both authorship and identity. These essays complicate notions of identity which were directly and indirectly related to much discourse and activity surrounding the school—by viewing its practitioners and their objects as both singular and inextricably tied to the Bauhaus collective. As the multiple readings of Typewriter and the essays in this volume indicate, Bauhaus objects can be deployed to re-present numerous tropes through which to reexamine the Bauhaus and the work of those associated with it: the use of technology and machines at the school, photography as an important praxis of Bauhaus members, the idealization of mass production, the implications of making objects by or for one gender, and the connection between process and end-product at the school. In this context, Bauhaus objects are distinctive—pedagogic object, modernist object, consumer object, productive object—and can be employed to address the relationships through which they acquired their meaning for the variable and contested history of the Bauhaus, such as those between objects and text, between objects and protagonists, or between objects and collective identities. Whether material or discursive objects, they can be seen as both revealing and concealing the Bauhaus’s literal and figurative constructs.

Notes   1 See, for instance, Bill Brown, ed., Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), especially the introduction “Thing Theory”; and Fiona Candlin and Rainford Guins, eds, The Object Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2009).   2 See Friedrich A. Kittler’s description of “the language of the typewriter” in his Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (1986; Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 15–16.   3 Ise Gropius to Walter Gropius, 1 October 1924, Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. “[A typewriter] ist eine göttliche Einrichtung und muss eins unserer nächsten Anschaffungsobjekte werden!” Unless otherwise noted, translations are the author’s own.   4 Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany, trans. Quintin Hoare (1930; London: Verso, 1998), 43.   5 Ise Gropius, Diary, 31–2, Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. This passage is from a c. 1968 explanatory text by Ise Gropius that accompanied the diary to the archive.   6 Letter, Ise Gropius to Manon Gropius [Walter Gropius’s mother], May 1925, Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin.   7 See “Introduction,” in Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 1–19. Kittler argues that typewriting standardized writing in a manner that separated body and hand from the act of ­writing and, by extension, from traces of individuality: “Typewriters do not store individuals” (14).   8 Walter Gropius to Lucia Moholy, 25 February 1954, Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin.   9 Lucia Moholy to Walter Gropius, 20 March 1954, Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. 10 Ise Gropius replied to Moholy’s second letter regarding the negatives, “Walter does not

8

Introduction

intend to answer your letter of March 20 [1954] himself because of the insulting insinuations it contains.” The Gropiuses laid blame upon Moholy for any miscommunication about the negatives, noting that they would have returned the negatives to her had she ever asked for them. Indeed, at the end of the letter they offered to have them packed and shipped to her at their expense. Ise Gropius to Lucia Moholy, 3 April 1954, Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. Moholy consulted several lawyers about her rights both to the negatives and to compensation for reproductions without her permission. Bulcraig & Davis Solicitors advised her that, “if the photographs were taken for valuable consideration [payment], the customer can use the prints for any purpose he wishes without the permission of the photographer. The photographer only had the right to the property of the negatives.” Bulcraig & Davis Solicitors to Lucia Moholy, 23 November 1954, Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. 11 “Foto Lucia Moholy-Dessau, Ohne Erlaubnis, Reproduktion verboten.”

9

Part 1 Agents

Chapter 1

The Bauhaus Manifesto Postwar to Postwar From the Street to the Wall to the Radio to the Memoir Karen Koehler This essay will investigate the strange and complex history of the Bauhaus Manifesto—a small, ephemeral document that has functioned as a symbol of the institution for ninety years. A four-paged broadsheet with a woodcut on the cover, the Manifesto has been misidentified, blown out of proportion, and seen as both a seditious and an innocuous piece of paper. From the beginning the Manifesto was problematic, and confusions have persisted through the cold war to the present. In order to unpack this complicated ambivalence, it is important to explore the Manifesto as both a material object and a mode of address—as a woodcut of a fractured and fragmented Cathedral, and as a pedagogical and political treatise that Walter Gropius continued to return to throughout his life (Figure 1.1). As the founder of the Bauhaus, Gropius is the one figure most associated with the school, and although he was replaced as director in 1928 by Hannes Meyer, and later by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Gropius had a clear interest in controlling how the Bauhaus program was historically positioned, and therefore he continued to redraft the history of the school throughout his life. As a German émigré and later as a German-American emissary, he was also compelled to rewrite his own biography. This revisionist project (both that of Gropius and that of current scholarship) makes it clear that one must always be on the alert to scrutinize Bauhaus facts and fictions, as well as to acknowledge the interstices between the two. To that end, this essay considers the Bauhaus Manifesto as a moving object, emerging and (re)emerging at a series of extremely potent 13

Karen Koehler

historical junctures: 1919, 1923, 1938, 1944, 1947, and 1957. However, it is important to view these sightings as more than a mere chronology, and instead as part of a mutable historical and theoretical dialogue in which these later versions of the Manifesto—both visual and textual—were always operating with a memory of the previous one.

1.1 Lyonel Feininger, Cover of the “Bauhaus Proclamation,” 1919, woodcut printed in black ink on green wove paper, 117⁄8 × 75⁄16 in 14

The Bauhaus Manifesto Postwar to Postwar

Working through the Past Any work of art history is one of reconstruction. At our best, we examine the layered lives of objects, and consider successive and diverse historical moments with precision: we analyze materials formally, and as social, political, economic, and cultural constructs. If we see the work of art as the product of a specific historical moment (that is to say, situated synchronically) then its continued life is nonetheless based in some measure on its autonomy and authenticity—its diachronic perpetuation as a work of art, worthy of our attention and capable of acquiring new meaning. Yet, the specific history of the Manifesto—and of Bauhaus historiography, generally—challenge us to do more: to work creatively with the dialectical notion that art is both tied to and separate from its social construct. In part, this is because the story of the Bauhaus is inextricably fused with the complicated function that history and memory play for Germany. In part, it is because the Bauhaus itself presented us with an imperfect paradigm—as a real school made up of classrooms, teachers and students, yet also as an idea, as something timeless and without physical substance. Is it possible to situate specific Bauhaus things in this highly charged conglomerate of realities and abstractions? Certain critical theorists, themselves part of Germany’s historical trajectory in the twentieth century, offer fertile methodologies. A specialized interpretation of dialecticism, drawn from Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, is perhaps a methodology that can be applied to, yet is also determined by, the Manifesto itself.1 The process of uncovering the strata of Bauhaus objects, what the editors of this book refer to as a “Bauhaus palimpsest,” is akin to Adorno’s questioning of “origins”—of the impulse to “trace” aesthetic forms as a reinforcement of their autonomous stature.2 It is tempting to view a Bauhaus palimpsest as something made of subsequent historical or interpretive layers, or as passive forms, that one could simply excavate to reveal an original meaning made at the moment of conception—what Adorno refers to as “sedimented content.”3 It is important to search for historic specificity, and to situate works of art as truthfully as possible into their original context. But Adorno’s dialectic challenges us to do more than that. Works of art exist as suspended moments, according to Adorno; yet the meaning of any individual work of art, and moreover of the concept of “art” itself, is located in an evolving constellation of elements. Art’s essence cannot be deduced from the original, Adorno warns us, “as if the first work were a foundation from which everything that followed were constructed and would collapse if shaken.”4 Aesthetic forms can be traced back to their origins (in this case, to Berlin in 1919), but the idea of a pure artistic essence

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is still in opposition to itself, that is, to its historically positioned original. Furthermore, the dialectic here is legitimized, for Adorno, only by what art became with regard to what it wanted to become.5 What did the Bauhaus Manifesto become with regard to what it wanted to become? It is tempting to conclude that the closing of the Bauhaus by the National Socialists, the diplomatic moves of Gropius, and the postmodernist discrediting of any perceived Bauhaus utopia all lead to the conclusion that the Manifesto (and its author) was a failure. However, what if it is ultimately the wanting to become something, the declaration, which mattered? According to Adorno, “Artworks recuperate, neutralized, what was once literally and directly experienced in life… Artworks do not lie, [they] do not feign the literalness that speaks out of them.”6 Furthermore, if the processes of layered historicity, of the critical reconstruction of artworks, are viewed as a form of remembering—and if those works are in fact German artworks made in the Weimar period, viewed through the lens of World War II and the cold war—then it is essential that we as writers and as historians recognize that we are knowingly raising the specter of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, of the loaded postwar practice of “working through the past.”7 Evidence suggests that Gropius surely needed to.

The Bauhaus Manifesto, 1919 In 1919, in the immediate aftermath of the revolutionary end to World War I and the subsequent civil war between the Spartacists and the Reformists, the newly formed Bauhaus in Weimar issued its Manifesto, the Programm des Staatlichen Bauhauses in Weimar. On the first page is a proclamation, in which Gropius wrote of a need to bring an end to the class distinctions that existed between the handcrafts and the fine arts, and asked all artists to join him in creating the complete building: The ultimate aim of all visual arts is the complete building! To embellish buildings was once the noblest function of the fine arts. They were the indispensable components of great architecture. Today the arts exist in isolation, from which they can be rescued through the conscious, cooperative effort of all craftsmen … Architects, sculptors, painters, we must all return to the crafts!… Let us then create a new guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist! Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise 16

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toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.8 This twentieth-century version of a broadsheet was illustrated by Lyonel Feininger, whose woodcut of a faceted, fragmented Cathedral on the title page was a visualization of the ideas expressed within the text—an illustration of the “crystal symbol of a new faith.” Yet it was, as well, a historically charged image—an architectural symbol of the Germanic past that had been faceted and fragmented. Gropius and Feininger chose to construct a symbol, part rubble, part crystal, that was meant to be an inspiration to young artists to build a new Germany out of the refractory bits and pieces of Germany’s past—to build a cathedral of the future. The Cathedral is symbolically perhaps the single most important image for the early years of the school, yet the Manifesto was first and foremost a pamphlet, a genre of printed material that played a crucial political role in 1918–1919. There are two known versions. In the first preliminary design, which was not published and distributed, the woodcut appears with the words “Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar” printed below (Figure 1.2). In the second print—widely distributed to art schools, magazines, and newspapers—the cathedral is much larger, covering the entire paper, and there is no wording on the cover at all (Figure 1.1). Most importantly, the treatment of the building has changed considerably—the cubofuturist fragmentation is much more insistent and all-encompassing. In the preliminary design, the use of space around the image sets it apart, while including the title, the name of the school, immediately below the image suggests that it represents the actual building where the Bauhaus was to be housed, or perhaps the type of structure the school would design. In the published print the framing device is removed, and the cathedral becomes a metaphor rather than a representation. Throughout the Revolution the streets were covered with posters. Leaflets were being passed out on every street corner, and newspapers published special editions to inform their readers of the constantly changing political situation. Programs and manifestos blanketed Berlin in particular—some of them put out by artists’ groups such as the Novembergruppe and the Arbeitsrat für Kunst, others by political factions.9 The German Revolution was initially free of bloodshed, but full of pamphleteering and printing. However, by the winter of 1918–1919, political events had taken a turn. Civil war broke out between the socialist factions that had overthrown the Kaiser only months before. At one point in the street fighting, the radicals occupied the Vorwärts building—where the Social Democrats were printing their materials, and now the stacked-up piles

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of printed matter took on another role: that of the barricade. When the Revolution was first taking place, documents show that the question of how best to use leafleting was under discussion by all the different political factions, and when Feininger and Gropius issued the Bauhaus Manifesto in April 1919,

1.2 Lyonel Feininger, Preliminary design for Bauhaus Manifesto, 1919, woodcut with letterpress on green paper, 129⁄16 × 15½ in 18

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they directly engaged themselves and the Bauhaus in this war of printers’ ink, for it was in Berlin, not in Weimar, that Gropius issued the Manifesto. In these various pamphlets and leaflets, the writers speak of a future society that will grow from the chaos of the postwar situation, and change social relationships—the type of architectural vision that Gropius wrote about in the Bauhaus Manifesto, and the type of architectural vision that Feininger sought to express, thematically and stylistically, in his Cathedral woodcut. If one reaches back to see the preliminary design as an underlayer for the Manifesto, it is possible to make use of Jacques Derrida’s study of memory and repression in Freud, and to use Derrida’s description of the Wunderblock, the Mystic, or Magic, Writing Pad. This well-known toy allows children to make a drawing with a stylus on a thin piece of plastic or vellum, placed on top of a waxy, darkened or carbonized pad underneath; when the child pulls up the top layer, the image is erased, although remnants of the original forms are sometimes visible on the pad beneath.10 Like the traces left on the Magic Pad, Feininger’s original design is embedded in the Manifesto, but no longer seen. In his hundreds of drawings of German churches from the war years, some straightforward, others abstracted, one can see him working through a language of fragmentation, and these sketches lend credence to this Derridean concept, of churches embedded beneath churches. These images function like unseen underdrawings, informing the Manifesto, its meanings, and its presentation each and every time it is reproduced or reinterpreted. Furthermore, in this study of Freud, Derrida explores the idea of the “breach,” what he calls the “tracing of a trail.”11 For Freud, via Derrida, a “tracing” happens when one follows a memory (both neurologically and metaphorically) and then breaks away from the memory’s path, because of barriers or obstacles. In this breakage, for Derrida, all memory becomes a form of resistance, whether or not it is ultimately erased. The idea of the breach is a useful tool to discuss how Bauhaus objects operate over time; precisely because this process works through a series of particular historical moments where memory and resistance (political and biographical) have pronounced agency.

The Cathedral of Socialism, 1923 When the Bauhaus opened in the spring of 1919, the sphere of activity moved from the streets of Berlin to the classroom in Weimar. The making of street literature was replaced by an emphasis on private work. Yet, both the language and the format of the Manifesto continued to resonate. From the very beginning conservative, nationalist groups attacked the Bauhaus, for both its modern art and its leftist ideologies. The school was attacked on racial, political, and aesthetic grounds, called internationalist, Spartacist, Jewish, 19

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and anti-German, and blamed for nothing less than the disintegration of German culture. Pamphleteering played a role in these charges of “cultural bolshevism”: the presence at the Bauhaus of an Arbeitsrat für Kunst leaflet was offered as evidence of the Bauhaus as a Spartacist outpost.12 Under pressure from state authorities, the Bauhaus mounted their exhibition “Art and Technology: A New Unity” and the Manifesto again emerged. Before the exhibition opened, Oskar Schlemmer, director of the Bauhaus Theatre, prepared at Gropius’s request a pamphlet for the exhibition. Included was a section that referred to the Bauhaus as a “cathedral of socialism.”13 “The Bauhaus,” Schlemmer wrote, “founded after the catastrophe of the war, in the chaos of the revolution… is becoming the rallying point for all those who, with faith in the future and willingness to storm the heavens, wish to build the cathedral of socialism.”14 That he would identify the school in this way, just as they were working to undo the charges brought against them, is somewhat astounding. He goes on: “The triumphs of industry and technology before the war and the orgies in the name of destruction during it, called to life that impassioned romanticism that was a flaming protest against the materialism and the mechanization of art and life. The misery of the time was also a spiritual anguish.”15 As they prepared for the exhibition, from 1922 to 1923, there were charges and countercharges between Gropius and a faction of the staff, including Schlemmer’s brother Carl. The controversy concluded with a series of firings and ultimately a libel suit filed by Gropius. According to Elaine Hochman, there were also behind-the-scenes allegiances being formed by the Bauhaus with leftist political factions in the state government.16 It is unclear what Oskar Schlemmer’s motives were in 1923, and the sentiments are particularly confusing in that Gropius was trying to move the public perception of the Bauhaus into a new direction—a collaboration between art and technology, based on the design of prototypes for mass production. Schlemmer wrote: “It is in pictures, and always in pictures, where the decisive values take refuge,” and he goes on to rail against the “speed and supertension of commercialism.” It is a strange and ambiguous treatise that concludes: …we can do no more than to ponder the total plan, lay the foundations, and prepare the building stones. But We exist! We have the will! We are producing!17 Gropius retrieved as many of the leaflets as he could and destroyed them, although a few complete copies made their way to the

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1.3 Oskar Schlemmer, Erste BauhausAustellung in Weimar, 1923, letterpress on paper, 8 × 1113⁄16 in

public.18 The final pamphlet that was released for the exhibition was printed without Schlemmer’s text (Figure 1.3). Yet, in the eyes of the rightist state authorities and the rabid opposition groups, the Bauhaus had made an admission simply by using the phrase “cathedral of socialism”; and the Manifesto has continued to be confused with this unfortunate sound bite to this day.19 In a more immediate context, it is clear that the episode had a resonance for Schlemmer. Four years later he wrote of the episode in his diary, and complained that it was “meaningless and malicious to lift the sentence from context and present it as the manifesto of the Bauhaus.” He goes on to defend his wording: didn’t the majority of the German people want to build the Cathedral of Socialism in 1918? Weren’t the revolution and the constitutional democracy launched in the name of a people’s state? And what is a people’s state other than socialism? Furthermore: does socialism necessarily imply the Social Democrats or the Communist Party? Isn’t socialism a concept, an ethic, not limited to any specific party?20 As we know, the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925. New buildings promised new beginnings, yet the charges of cultural bolshevism followed the school amid a darkening political climate. By 1928, Gropius had resigned and when the National Socialists took over the Dessau government in 1932, they closed the Bauhaus. After opening briefly in Berlin, the Bauhaus was shut down again, following a sham search for subversive pamphlets in 1933.21 21

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The Museum of Modern Art in New York, 1938 In 1934, Gropius left Germany for England and then emigrated to the United States in 1937, when he was invited to lead the architecture program at Harvard. Precisely at the moment when he came to the United States, the House Un-American Activities Committee began to monitor the movements of communists, socialists, and foreigners in the United States, while extremists like the radio evangelist Father Coughlin found an audience for his message of anti-Semitism, and the pro-Nazi organization of German immigrants, the German-American Bund, marched openly at rallies throughout the USA. In 1938, the Austrian Anschluss and Kristallnacht took place and the importation of thousands of Jews to concentration camps had begun. The Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted an exhibition entitled “The Bauhaus, 1919–1928” in 1938, an exhibition of the work of German artists, many who had been declared degenerate, Marxist, communist, Jewish, and bolshevist by Hitler in the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich the previous year.22 As a result, antiGerman propaganda was everywhere, although officially the United States was still seeking a diplomatic solution to German aggression. These exigencies of international relations in the years preceding the outbreak of World War II prescribed the display of the objects and the catalogue description of them. According to Alfred Barr, director of the museum, “As we could have guessed, we have reports that the exhibition is considered Jewish.”23 He wanted to make a statement about why the Nazis persecuted the Bauhaus, and to state how many Jews were on the faculty. Barr proposed writing a statement that “although the Bauhaus welcomed Jewish students, there were no Jews on its faculty (or only two Jews) or whatever.”24 Gropius refused to allow such a statement to be written. While Barr feared the response of his American critics, Gropius was keenly aware of his position as a German in this country on the eve of the war. Originally scheduled to open in the spring, the exhibition was postponed due to difficulties bringing objects out of Germany, and fear of political retribution for those Bauhaus teachers, students, and defenders living under the Nazis. Due to the challenges of shipping work, the exhibition was largely a display of paintings and other objects already in the collection of the museum or the artists themselves, supplemented to a large extent by photographs of objects. The Bauhaus graphic artist Herbert Bayer and his wife were able to courier some work, and used the exhibition as a means to procure the unfortunately elusive American visa.25 One of the many visual translations in this exhibition, the

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1.4 Installation view of the exhibition, “Bauhaus: 1919–1928,” The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 7 December 1938 through 30 January 1939 (IN82.7)

Bauhaus Manifesto was represented by an enlarged photograph, hung on the wall as if it were a painting, roughly ten times the size of the original leaflet (Figure 1.4). Besides completely distorting the scale and format of the Manifesto, the preliminary design was blown up, not the more final version that was actually distributed in 1919. In a strange deviation of Walter Benjamin’s argument that mass-produced objects are devoid of the aura of the original, the Bauhaus Manifesto—a broadsheet originally printed in multiple versions and distributed to newspapers and former art schools— was made into a mechanically reproduced photograph, yet shown as if it were an original object. The catalogue reproduced the same preliminary design, and as a consequence, for many years, surveys of modern art and architecture, as well as some more specialized studies of the Bauhaus continued to illustrate the wrong image—and this is representative of the many historiographic ramifications of the 1938 exhibition and catalogue. Even the exclamation points that are part of the original German were removed from the text of the Manifesto in the catalogue. The stridency of the Manifesto is tamed: no longer a piece of street literature, no longer a cubistic woodcut, less of a call to action. In the 1930s and 1940s there were over one hundred articles written by and about Gropius in English-language scholarly and professional 23

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journals; publications such as Architectural Forum, Architectural Review, Architectural Record, and Pencil Points included articles by and about the architect, while magazines such as Country Life, Industrial Arts, and The Educator’s Yearbook also published his work. There was press coverage about his arrival in the United States, his job at Harvard, and his projects. The contents of these articles and reviews are exceptionally diverse, ranging from theoretical treatises and long biographical histories to brief, principally illustrated notices about his projects. Again and again and again he tells the story of the Bauhaus, while carefully sidestepping issues of socialist politics or Nazi persecution. The political situation loomed in the background of many of these articles, either implicitly or explicitly. For most of the war years, Gropius never directly engaged in a discussion of his position as an enemy alien, and rightly so. His essays remain passionate about the Bauhaus, yet his politics are like an erased text. There has been a breach.

America, the Haven, 1944 In 1944, Gropius makes an about-face, and allows a propagandistic radio play about him, America, the Haven, to be made for the United States War Information Bureau. A typescript of the play tells the fabricated tale of Gropius on a train, reminiscing about his days in Germany, while a lonesome train whistle wails in the background.26 Written by Jay Bennett, and lasting about fifteen minutes, the radio play starts with these words from an announcer: Along with other democratic lands, America has been a traditional haven for the dispossessed. And with the last decade, a newly dispossessed have sought refuge here and in other free countries. They are men and women whose only crime was the incorruptibility of their minds. Here in America they guard the culture of their homelands, a culture that is their people’s past and their hope for the future and today we should like to tell you about such a man. The eminent architect and industrial designer … Doctor Walter Gropius.27 The narrator speaks softly, as he describes Gropius beginning his exilic life: “The train has crossed the border. Germany was behind him … He sat close to the window—his wife silent behind him … The sun was hot and strong in the sky … and yet he felt cold.” A voice speaks: “My heart, my heart is mournful, yet joyously sounds the May.”28 “The words of Heine kept repeating themselves in his mind,” the narrator 24

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continues, “My heart, my heart is mournful.” As the sound of the train whistle starts again in the distance, the narrator’s voice comes back: “Walter Gropius, architect. Born in the happy year of 1883, died in this blank year of 1934, died in that split second of time when the train crossed the border … carrying him into exile. … Died? He smiled grimly at the thought. No, he was very much alive. Alive in the past … and alive in the present because of the past. For out of the past he felt would come the inspiration and courage to carry on. He must find it. Otherwise this train he was on was a train to nowhere.”29 Gropius begins to reminisce in order to find a pattern to his life, so that he could “see his life not as a series of isolated achievements, but as a complete ordered whole.”30 The play goes on to tell the story of when Walter told his father he wanted to be an architect, because “to build is a happy thing. … To build for his fellow man.” Next we hear of an exchange between Gropius and the night watchman at the Fagus building (a factory he designed in 1911–1913) as the sound of crickets is heard in the background. The watchman wants Gropius to know how much he loves the building, because: “It’s like you were to say to people: Here is a good place where men and machines get together. … Here is a place where there is peace and happiness, and the good feelings that comes from sweating on something that is useful.” The script then turns to the creation of the Bauhaus, and a series of harsh voices come in: “Your architecture is oriental!” “You are a profaner of German culture!” “You are teaching architectural socialism!”31 According to the narrator, Gropius’s “hands clenched” when he heard the words “architectural socialism.”32 Soon the setting moves back to Gropius sitting on the train, the music is becoming louder in the background, and he is telling his wife that they will live, and they will return. “I am an exile,” he confesses to his wife, “and yet I shall live. I will continue with my work. … For there is a trust placed in me. A cultural trust. And I shall keep it.”33 The play concludes with Gropius planning for “when the world will be at peace again … when the world will begin its great task of building anew.”34

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We know from the exchanges between Gropius and the Agency that this story, geared towards German working-class soldiers, was recognized by all of the authors as a work of fiction and of propaganda. According to a letter from Leon Meadow, Chief of the Special Features Section of the Radio Program of the Office of War Information, clearly written in response to a former protest by Gropius: I should have taken the opportunity then to present somewhat more specifically the details of time and place concerning the use of this script. Without such information, you are necessarily compelled to form your judgment somewhat out of context. It is planned to use this material as part of a series at a time when various liberated areas have been restored to some comparative degree of normalcy. I agree that the broadcasting of such a show in the immediate future would meet with unfavorable reaction from listeners still very much concerned with the brutal exigencies of war time conditions. At a later period, however, it is felt here that our basic cultural story interests can be projected plausibly and dramatically with materials such as the radio show. It would have been our desire ordinarily to do such a show as this in a half-hour period. But programming needs … demand that we limit ourselves almost completely to fifteen minute periods. And whereas, in a half-hour show, we certainly would have devoted more time to material of a factual nature, a fifteen minute program demands a rather different approach in order to hold the listeners’ attention. It must use a dramatic device—and within the framework of such a device—attempt at least to project a feeling of the whole truth, if not all the facts themselves.35 Mr. Meadow went on to say that “certainly out of the wealth of materials with which you supplied Mr. Bennett, more facts and less sentiment could have gone into this script.”36 He then asked for a small statement on the current state of architecture. Gropius replied with a list of small editorial changes and included his statement as a one-page enclosure. His 1944 “manifesto” echoed yet clearly diverged from his 1919 text, in both tone and content: For contemporary architecture has struck roots at last. After three decades of rejuvenation in trial and error its scope has gradually widened out into the vast problem of replanning man’s physical surroundings as fully integrated entities. … Foreshadowing a new society with a collective conscience, architecture

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emerges from a period of spiritual impoverishment as a new social art. Visions of that new world begin to crystallize. Gropius concluded that science will bring in a new architectural language, which “by its veracity and realism … will safeguard this new and bold architectural spirit.”37 It is unclear exactly how this statement was to make its way into the radio program, or if it was simply an appeasement to Gropius. By the 1940s, the radio has joined the pamphlet as a form of manifesto-making: sound has become the counterpart of image. For example, in a pamphlet called “The Unconquered People,” about European resistance movements, made by the Office of War Information for American audiences in 1942, the author tells us that radios are “Verboten” (Figure 1.5). Yet, “regardless of the consequences, people of the occupied

1.5 Edmund Duffy, Cover illustration, The Unconquered People, 1943 27

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countries continue to listen to short-wave broadcasts from the Allies. A deep hunger for truth draws them to these voices from the free world. This is a struggle of ears,” the ears of the resistance listening to the broadcast, and those of the Gestapo listening-in to catch them.38 It is unclear if the radio play about Gropius was ever produced by the Office of War Information, or ever played to a retreating German infantry or liberated populace. It is challenging to know how to position this strange piece of propaganda. Is it capitulation, self-preservation, opportunism, or naivety? What we do know is that there are multiple forms of memory, and myriad responses to the experience of exile and displacement. Between the extremes of acute trauma and forgetting as a form of psychic survival, and of manipulative and intentional falsifications of memory for polemic or for profit, there are untold stratifications. There is no question that Gropius had a comfortable position at Harvard, and one can argue over whether he was an exile or an émigré.39 Gropius was an enemy alien until 1944, the year of the radio play, at which point he became an American citizen. As Kentgens-Craig has shown, there are tragicomic FBI files, in which anonymous neighbors refer to Gropius as a spy, storing weapons in the basement of his house. There are also letters to the US Department of Justice, indicating that Gropius was required to file his itinerary every time he left Cambridge.40 Even after the war, by which point Gropius was a US citizen, he was not allowed to contribute to the design of the United Nations complex in New York, because Germany was not a member of the UN.41 To paraphrase Adorno, the radio story may be a conscious fiction, but it does not lie about its context in 1944. The narrator tells us that Gropius helped save German culture by leaving—and we see here the future set-up: after the war, the United States would control the national discourse in Germany by controlling the mnemonic devices. Furthermore, although he left Europe, Gropius would want to be considered part of the resistance.

Apollo in the Democracy, 1947–1957 A decade later, in 1957, in a defeated and divided Germany, Gropius gave a speech in Hamburg (when he won the Goethepreis) about the role of the architect as an “Apollo in the Democracy.”42 Is this new call to action a nostalgic homecoming, the product of a clever adman working with the State Department, or an authentic belief in the power of architecture? “My theme,” he begins, “concerns itself with the creation of beauty and with the measure of its reverberations in the democratic society.” By the word “democracy” he means: 28

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neither the antique Greek form of government which rested upon the power of a comparatively small elite group of free citizens over a solid foundation of slave labor, nor do I mean the politically stressed European, American or Russian special forms of present democracy … the form of life which, without political identification, is slowly spreading over the whole world, establishing itself upon the foundation of increasing industrialization, growing communication and information services, and the broad admission of the masses to higher education and the right to vote. What is the relationship of this form of life to art and architecture today. 43 Clearly Gropius is here referencing the concept of “the civil society,” an idea that had begun to gain great currency in Germany in the postwar period. The desire was to make sense of German actions during the war, by seeing the Holocaust as a rupture of civilization, a failure not of the Germans but of humanity. By seeing the Holocaust as a bureaucratically organized and industrially realized form of mass extermination, it was therefore a failure of civilization, not of the individual. If Nazism existed below the purview of the state, than this same kind of self-realization can also exist in the alternative, as a democratic self-organization of citizens. In 1957 Gropius saw a different villain than the “hierarchy of class distinctions” that he targeted in 1919. The danger lies in the “triumphal march of the sciences.” It is this that “has crowded out the magical in our lives—the poet and the prophet have become the stepchildren of the over-practical man of purpose, who, blinded by the success of mechanized civilization, shuts himself off.” “We live in a world of ‘unending transformation’ ” Gropius stated, and “the human heart has not been able to cope with this tempo.” Society was in a state of balance just a few generations ago, and art and architecture developed slowly and organically as different branches of culture. Then with the beginning of the age of science and the development of the machine, the old social forms crumbled. Gropius put it simply: “The tools of civilization outgrew us.”44 In the context of the competing discourse in Germany in the years after World War II and the Occupation of Germany by the United States and the Allies, it becomes clear that Gropius was taking up a position here. Gropius can be seen as aligning himself with the charge that Nazism was a social deviance—and the product of what was called “the special path,” the result of Germany’s particular history (that of late industrialization and statehood). “Modern man” he wrote, “leans mechanistically on quantity instead of quality and serves utilitarian ends instead of building

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up a new faith.”45 The phrase “building up a faith” echoed the Manifesto, yet it is no longer a crystal symbol, forged from the hands of a million workers that Gropius imagined; it is no longer art in unity with technology as it was redefined in 1923, or art asserting its authenticity. There was still a want of spiritual satisfaction; but for Gropius in 1957 art was now in conflict with science: “No society of the past ever found its significant expression without the participation of its artists: cultural problems cannot be solved by intellectual processes or political actions alone. I am speaking here of the great problem of reawakening in every individual the lost ability to create and understand form.”46 Like the Manifesto, his speech in Hamburg in 1957 is a call to action—but he was not speaking in a revolutionary tone; his new role was that of the diplomat. The way to create change, Gropius stated, was through education. We must learn to go beyond the individual to the “suprapersonal” and learn to work collaboratively—to create, he wrote, total works of architecture that embraced the entire environment from the simplest utensil to the complicated city, searching after new truths in cooperation with other like-minded artists.47 Again, he drew attention to the operations of a civil society. But did Gropius really ask us to join him? When he first gave this speech, Gropius was being honored for his work as an architect and an educator. Did he, in fact, reject the very idea of a collaborative society, and want us to see him as a hero who saved German culture by going into exile? It was not Gropius’s first postwar homecoming. In 1947 he was appointed by the US Department of the Army to serve as a consultant for planning the reconstruction of Germany. Returning to Germany for the first time since his exile, reporting to the American Military Governor of Germany, Gropius wrote to his wife that “Berlin is a has been! A desecrated corpse! … the people bent down, bitter, hopeless.”48 After his tour of the country, Gropius reported that he felt that simply to rebuild would not be enough—that there had to be an overall effort to remake Germany economically, physically, and emotionally. “Apollo in the Democracy” is closely tied to this immediate postwar period, particularly to the controlled, imposed memories that are part of what came to be known as “re-education.”49 Re-education was a catchall phrase for the Occupation in general, the idea that the entire country of Germany had to be forced to think differently. According to official US proclamations, “German education must be so organized … so as to establish an affirmative program of reorientation designed to encourage the development of democratic ideas and institutions … The reconstruction of the cultural life of Germany must be in large measure the work of the Germans themselves and must be fostered,

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not only on a regional but also on a national scale.”50 It was thought that this would be done by leaders in education, art, and professional organizations who would be persons concerned with the “reorientation of [the] German people towards peace and democracy … Whenever possible, preference shall be given to persons who have demonstrated their opposition to Nazism.” 51 The stated goal of the occupying Allies (although perhaps not their practice) was to “encourage humanitarian feelings, [and] freedom of thought and expression … to aid the German people … to redirect their own social institutions and to revive the values of German culture.”52 In keeping with Thomas Mann’s famous postwar claim that there were two Germanys, the Allies wanted to promote the idea of Germany as a cultural entity, not a political one. In this, Germany could be rebuilt and recuperated as a cultural state, yet humiliated and incapacitated as a political one.53 Many other postwar intellectuals promoted re-education along these lines. In 1946 historian Friedrich Meinecke called for the creation of “Goethe communities” that would be organized, if at all possible, in churches.54 In these communities, readings of poetry and music would revive Germany’s tradition of humanism in the spirit of Goethe’s and Schil­ ler’s Weimar. Also in 1946, the philosopher Karl Jaspers directly addressed the question of collective guilt, and insisted that Germany must acknowledge and incorporate its guilt into any future German culture, within a new civil society. Jaspers believed that the university as an institution could recreate a dialogue between the sciences and the spirit, between science and the humanities. For Jaspers, “science without wisdom is meaningless, wisdom without science is unreal.”55 When Gropius spoke of the Apollo, it was ten years later, in 1957, and he was receiving one of many awards from various German state and local governments. His lectures in Germany in the 1950s drew thousands; he was treated as someone who saved German architectural culture by going into exile. It was, in fact, his Americanization that allowed him to be seen so reverently in Germany at this time. He was completely free from any possible charges of collaboration with the Nazis, something that many German architects could not claim. Gropius was at this time surely straddling two worlds (European and American) and two generations (prewar and postwar). Germany in 1957 was a country on the mend; West Germany was experiencing a period of rapid growth, but it was still a world divided. There were significant tensions between Germany and the different powers controlling different geographical spheres—the European, American, and Russian—precisely those “democracies” that Gropius referred to in his opening passage. He claimed that these nations are equally in crisis,

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unable to recognize beauty. Yet he also mentioned them all, in Germany, in 1957. It is impossible to know what he meant precisely in doing this; yet it is surely significant that he did. Was Gropius the diplomat strategically acknowledging that they all had power in Germany? Or, was he somehow chastising them all? In the 1950s, there was an ongoing struggle in western Europe between Communism and anti-communism. Although many did not join official Communist parties, and many others changed course when the full extent of Stalin’s purges became publicized, there was a fascination among European intellectuals with working-class issues and left-wing politics, and this struggle spilled into both political and intellectual spheres. To answer this, cultural and artistic organizations in Europe and in the US worked to counter Marxist intellectuals. The first Congress for Cultural Freedom was held in Berlin in 1950, eventually growing to open up offices in 35 countries worldwide—although attention was focused on France, Italy, and Germany. The Congress was publicly underwritten by the Ford Foundation, and covertly underwritten by the CIA. In the 1950s, the US Information Agency had taken over the propaganda campaign in Europe, eventually employing 13,000 people and spending $129 million on the battle for sympathies of the intelligentsia.56 Although surely an oversimplification, Tony Judt writes that many Europeans after the war saw the world in terms of binary oppositions: black vs. white, good vs. evil, freedom vs. slavery, workers vs. aristocrats, fascist vs. communist, fascist vs. democratic.57 The most important designation was resistance vs. collaboration. The old Europe had been discredited; unquestioning belief in the good of humankind had been destroyed. When Adorno claimed that “To write poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric” he was, in fact, not calling for the end of art but calling for a reevaluation of aesthetic value in a postwar world.58 In “Apollo in the Democracy,” Gropius dismissed the antique Greek form of government, where a small elite group of free citizens existed on a foundation of slave labor. He also rejected the “stressed European, American or Russian … forms of democracy” and called instead for a new “form of life which, without political identification … [was] spreading over the whole world, establishing itself upon the foundation of increasing industrialization, growing communication and information services.”59 Gropius was attempting to position his comments somewhere within this intellectual divide. When he spoke of a lost sense of balance and unity, and decried that civilized man had lost his totality, he was, perhaps, recognizing and engaging in this ideological debate, albeit with a kind of duplicity. As the savior of German architectural culture, he can ally himself with the heroic resistance. But as the American statesman, he avoids the implications

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of Communist sympathies, so closely allied with much of the European resistance movements. Gropius’s “Apollo” speech was published first in a new art magazine, Zodiac, in 1957. The text was published again in 1968, the year before his death, as the lead piece in a collection of his writings, which taken together make a kind of essayistic memoir. The book appeared with the subtitle: “The Cultural Obligation of the Architect,” as if to echo Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist call for commitment.60 Art was not to be just beautiful, or just activist, entirely independent or wholly assigned to a social context and function. Art affirmed its aesthetic autonomy through its negation: as a consequence of its social purpose. As Gropius nostalgically stated, he wanted his writings to represent a commentary on what he calls the incessant search to create an architectural environment for twentieth-century man … Only when we intrinsically learn to see things in their broader context, only when we have a sensitivity to the beautiful awakened in all of us, will the chain reaction necessary for the betterment of our world take place … That which is useful furthers itself, for the many produce it, and no one can do without it … the beautiful must be furthered, for few create it, and many need it.61 Do we collectively help build a better world, like his million workers of 1919, or do we appreciate the beauty of others who do it? Gropius’s program for postwar reconstruction has moved from a call for collective creative action at the end of World War I to a desire for a sensitive kind of viewing at the end of World War II. He shifted the mode of address from the world of the political to the world of the cultural; he recognized the two Germanys and chose where and how to re-educate. Yet, despite the repositioning of the audience, the Adornian dialectic has remained true: in “Apollo” and in the Manifesto, from postwar to postwar, we see a tension between the authentic and the contingent, between the layers of history and the need to erase them in response to immediate needs. By placing his Apollo into the context of détente it is evident that the rubble of the Bauhaus Manifesto was simultaneously celebrated and camouflaged in this postwar treatise.

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Acknowledgments I want to thank the editors Robin Schuldenfrei and Jeffrey Saletnik for their thoughtful contributions to this essay, as well as my colleagues Monique Roelofs and Barton Byg for their suggestions to look to Adorno and Derrida to unravel the layers of the Manifesto.

Notes   1 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). For extended studies of the relationship between the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and modern architecture, see, for example, Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Modernity: A Critique (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999) and Frederic J. Schwartz, Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).   2 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 2–5.   3 Ibid., 5.   4 Ibid., 2.   5 Ibid., 3.   6 Ibid., 5.   7 Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” in Can One Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedeman (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 4–18. The debate over Vergangenheitsbewältigung has been a volatile topic since the end of the war, and continues to this day; the literature on the topic is vast. See, for example, Norbert Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik. Die Anfänge der Bundesrepublik und die NS-Vergangenheit (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1996); Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).   8 Walter Gropius, “Programm des Staatlichen Bauhauses in Weimar,” 1919, in Hans Maria Wingler, The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, trans. Wolfgang Jabs and Basil Gilbert (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969).   9 Katherine Ida Rigby, An Alle Künstler! War Revolution Weimar (San Diego: San Diego University Press, 1983); Joan Weinstein, The End of Expressionism: Art and the November Revolution in Germany, 1918–1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). For contemporaneous studies see: Oscar Gehrig, Plakatkunst und Revolution (Berlin: Wasmuth, 1919); Adolf Behne, Paul Landau and Herbert Löwing, Das politische Plakat (Charlottenburg: Verlag “Das Plakat,” 1919). 10 Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 199. 11 Ibid., 200. 12 Ministry of Culture in Weimar, “Results of the Investigation Concerning the Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar,” Supplement to the “Dispute over the Staatliche Bauhaus,” Weimar, 1920, in Hans Maria Wingler, The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, ed. Joseph Stein, trans. Wolfgang Jabs and Basil Gilbert (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 42. 13 For a discussion of how the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk in the 1919 Manifesto was transformed by the 1923 exhibition, see Eva Forgács, Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics, trans. John Bákti (Budapest: Central European Press, 1995), 98–117. For other documents related to the exhibition, see Wingler, Bauhaus, 64–8, and Frank Whitford, ed., The Bauhaus Masters and Students by Themselves (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1993), 141–57.

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14 Oskar Schlemmer, “The Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar, Manifesto from the Publicity Pamphlet ‘The First Bauhaus Exhibition in Weimar July to September 1923’,” in Wingler, Bauhaus, 65–6. 15 Ibid. 16 See Elaine Hochman, Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism (New York: Fromm International, 1997), 147–51. Unfortunately, this book does not reference original documents. 17 Oskar Schlemmer, “Staatliche Bauhaus.” 18 Reginald Isaacs, Walter Gropius (Boston: Bullfinch, 1991), 102; Wingler, Bauhaus, 65. 19 See, for example, Deborah Wye, Artists and Prints: Masterworks from The Museum of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2004), 67. 20 Oskar Schlemmer, The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer, ed. Tut Schlemmer, trans. Krishna Winston (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1972), 200. 21 See Hans Kessler, “Letter to his mother, Berlin April 14, 1933,” in Whitford, Bauhaus Masters, 302. 22 Artists from the “Communist Bauhaus” were prominently featured in the Degenerate Art exhibition. See Stephanie Barron, ed., Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1990), 49–80. 23 Alfred Barr to Walter Gropius, 10 December 1938, Exhibition File “The Bauhaus 1919–1928,” Exhibition no. 82, Department of Registration, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. 24 Ibid. For a more detailed discussion of the 1938 exhibition, see Karen Koehler, “The Bauhaus 1919–1928: Gropius in Exile and the Museum of Modern Art, 1938,” in Art, Culture, and Media Under the Third Reich, ed. Richard Etlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 287–315. 25 See Arthur A. Cohen, Herbert Bayer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 41–2. 26 Walter Gropius Archive, Houghton Manuscript Library, Harvard University, by permission of Houghton Library, Harvard University (hereafter WGA), bMSGer 208 (1654): item 1, letter from US Office of War Information, 1944, including mimeograph copy of the radio script America, The Haven #5; item 2, letter to Office of War Information, 1944, with enclosure. 27 “America, the Haven,” bMSGer 208 (1654) in WGA. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Leon Meadow to Walter Gropius, 10 May 1944, bMSGer 208 (1654) in WGA. 36 Ibid. 37 Walter Gropius to Leon Meadow, 16 June 1944 (carbon copy with enclosure), bMSGer 208 (1654) in WGA. This is essentially the same statement that he also wrote for an exhibition, America Builds, in 1944, bMSGer 208 (65), WGA. 38 United States Office of War Information, The Unconquered People (Washington, DC: OWI, 1942), 7. For more on the use of radio as wartime propaganda, see Lawrence Soley, Radio Warfare: OSS and CIA Subversive Propaganda (New York: Praeger, 1989); Allan M. Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information 1942–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978); Holly Cowan Shulman, The Voice of American Propaganda and Democracy 1941–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990). 39 See Peter Hahn, “Bauhaus and Exile: Bauhaus Architects and Designers between the Old World and the New,” and Kathleen James, “Changing the Agenda from German Modernism

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to U.S. Internationalism,” in Exiles and Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler, ed. Stephanie Barron (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997), 211–24, 235–52. 40 Margret Kentgens-Craig, The Bauhaus and America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 238–40. For examples of correspondence between Gropius and the State Department, see bMSGer (1652), WGA. 41 Eric Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism 1928–1960 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 160. 42 Isaacs, Walter Gropius, 280–1. 43 Gropius, “Apollo in the Democracy,” [1957] bMSGer (230), WGA. First published in Zodiac 1 (October 1957): 9–14; later, Gropius dates the speech to 1956, in his collected essays Apollo in the Democracy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 3–14. 44 Gropius, Apollo in the Democracy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 5. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., 8. 47 Ibid., 9. 48 Isaacs, Walter Gropius, 259. 49 Jaimey Fisher, Disciplining Germany: Youth, Reeducation, and Reconstruction after the Second World War (Detroit: Wayne State Press, 2007); Konrad H. Jarausch, Recivilizing Germans 1945–1995, trans. Brandon Hunziker (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2006); Jeffrey K. Olick, In the House of the Hangman: The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943–49 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 50 “Military Government Regulations, Aim of Education” (March 1947) in United States Department of State, Germany 1947–49: The Story in Documents (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1950), 541–2. 51 “Visits of German Nationals to the United States and of Persons from the United States to Germany: Policy Statement” (October, 1946), ibid., 611–12. 52 Ibid., 614. 53 Thomas Mann, Germany and the Germans (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1945). 54 Friedrich Meinecke, The German Catastrophe, trans. Sidney Fay (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950). 55 Fisher, Disciplining Germany, 146. 56 Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 222–3. 57 Ibid., 197–225. 58 Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society” (1949), in Adorno, Can One Live After Auschwitz?, 162. 59 Gropius, Apollo in the Democracy, 3. 60 Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949). 61 Gropius, Apollo in the Democracy, vii.

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Chapter 2

The Irreproducibility of the Bauhaus Object Robin Schuldenfrei

Objects produced at the Bauhaus occupy an uneasy juncture between the canonical history of modern art and architecture, period culture, and issues such as the production and consumption of modernism.1 In 1923, Walter Gropius articulated the aims of the Bauhaus with the proclamation, “art and technology—a new unity,” which advanced the use of new materials, more stripped-down forms, and a spare, functional aesthetic. His successor Hannes Meyer pronounced instead: “people’s needs instead of luxury needs”

2.1 Otto Rittweger and Wolfgang Tümpel, Stands with Tea Infusers, 1924, German silver (Photograph by Lucia Moholy, 1925, printed c. 1950), gelatin silver print 37

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(Volksbedarf statt Luxusbedarf)—but would he have been moved to make such a declaration if Gropius had successfully carried out his stated aims? The failure of Gropius’s Bauhaus to merge art and technology—to move from the production of individual, luxury objects to mass reproduction—is the subject of this essay. To be discussed are the objects produced under Gropius from 1923 to 1928, the period of his overtures to industry. This repertoire of specialized objects—including silver and ebony tea services, modern chess sets, and children’s toys, to name just a few canonical works—represents a paradigmatic example by which to examine the relationship between modernism’s discourse and its material results. Expensive in their day, original Bauhaus products are now art objects displayed in museum vitrines as individual works of art. Often hailed for the mythic merging of forward-thinking ideas and modern production techniques, they are asked to illustrate modernism’s unflinching belief in the powers of industry. And they are presented as objects of discourse, the material evidence of a series of debates on handcraftsmanship, machine production, and taste. This essay considers and contextualizes the ways in which the Bauhaus produced its modern objects and the extent to which, despite its egalitarian ideals, the school ultimately spoke to—and designed for—an elite. The products of the Bauhaus, ostensibly intended for mass production, were expensive, difficult to fabricate, and never sold on a widespread basis, reflecting the economic realities of producing and purchasing modern objects. Essential to this discussion is the problem of reproduction itself. Engaging Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” this chapter will recognize that, ideologically, the Bauhaus protagonists were willing to call the status of the objects the Bauhaus produced into question—to sacrifice their “aura” and status as “art” in order to achieve their mass reproduction; yet, in practice the Bauhaus was unable to do so.2 This failure was due to the limits to the reproducibility of Bauhaus objects—themselves a product of their place in the Weimar social order that they also sought to transform.

Luxury Objects Upon first glance the small teapot designed and executed in 1924 by Marianne Brandt at the Bauhaus evinces all of the concepts that modernism proclaimed—Sachlichkeit, functionality, hygiene, and the use of modern materials and construction methods (Figure 2.2).3 To all appearances it is a thoroughly modern object. Surface decoration has been eschewed in favor of pared-down, machine-like geometrical shapes that form the round lid, the semicircular handle, and the crossed base. But although it suggests machine production, it was laboriously hand-wrought in the Bauhaus 38

The Irreproducibility of the Bauhaus Object

2.2 Marianne Brandt, Tea Infuser and Strainer, 1924, silver, Katalog der Muster, Bauhaus GmbH, 1925, photomechanical print in black and orange inks on white paper (Graphic design by Herbert Bayer)

workshop at great cost. This diminutive pot’s handle and knob are ebony, and it was only available in silver when ordered through the Bauhaus GmbH catalogue.4 Out of the numerous objects designed at the school, its presence among the other twelve products selected in 1925–1926 for inclusion in the product catalogue suggests that it was deemed representative of the Bauhaus. Yet, it could not be inexpensively mass-produced in these materials, nor was it intended to be; as the catalogue notes, it featured “exacting handcraftsmanship.” In any case, its smooth form and the meticulous joins of its body to its spout and base lacked the surface ornamentation that hid imperfections that occurred in cheaply produced factory goods of this period, resulting in an object that would have been very difficult to industrially fabricate with precision. Thus, it could be serially produced by hand in the metal workshop in limited quantities, but it was not—in form, material, or price—suitable for mass reproduction. It was, in short, a luxury object in need of an elite consumer—and not only one who could afford it, but one who understood both its modern form and its underlying ideas.5 Bauhaus goods were also highly legible expressions of affluence. 39

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Though the Bauhaus proposed to utilize industry to make goods that even the masses could afford, it played to a privileged audience—especially members of the industrial and educated upper middle class (respectively the Wirtschaftsbürgertum and Bildungsbürgertum). Despite the rise of German industrialism, accompanied by the ascent of technical firms such as AEG, Siemens, and numerous smaller rivals, the objects produced by the Bauhaus were not items associated with the machine age, such as advanced electrical goods. Equally revealing, the school’s products did not advocate an entirely new way of living, unlike designs of its contemporaries, such as Grete Lihotzky’s mass-produced Frankfurt Kitchen of 1926 (a minuscule modern kitchen designed for maximum efficiency which limited the number of steps needed to perform tasks, following the scientific principles of Frederick Winslow Taylor) or Hannes Meyer’s Coop-Zimmer (a radically pared-down single room supplied with standard elements to meet the absolute minimum needs for dwelling; see Figure 12.4, page 256). Gropius’s stated aims for the workshops, from about 1923 onwards, reiterated the Bauhaus’s desire to develop “standard types for all practical commodities of everyday use.”6 And yet, given this charge, why were there no Bauhaus forks, an ordinary product that could be easily molded or stamped out in large quantities at low cost? Instead the school remained committed to producing the types of traditional, conventional objects—chess sets, teapots, tea services, tea containers, ashtrays, and armchairs—that already had a place in upper-class homes (Figure 2.3).

2.3 Bauhaus vitrine, Ausstellung Europäisches Kunstgewerbe, 1927, GrassiMuseum, Leipzig 40

The Irreproducibility of the Bauhaus Object

2.4 Above: Wilhelm Wagenfeld (designer; executed by Josef Knau), Kugelförmige Kannen (Sphereshaped jugs), 1924, silver-plated brass, German silver lids and hinges (Photograph by Lucia Moholy, 1924, printed c. 1950) Below: German Werkbund (designer unknown), Warenbuch silver jugs, c. 1915

Bauhaus objects employed a stripped-down vocabulary of forms while reducing applied ornament; the result was an object that was modern and yet familiar.7 One can see this process at work in Wilhelm Wagenfeld’s 1924 Bauhaus design for a set of small, sphere-shaped jugs, which rework some Werkbund Warenbuch-endorsed silver versions available at least as early as 1915 (Figure 2.4).8 The earlier jugs featured delicate, reedcovered handles and a hand-hammered arts and crafts finish; the Bauhaus counterparts were simplified and more geometric but had the same general form and function. Material costs were reduced in the Bauhaus versions by employing silver-plated brass and German silver—which, tellingly, maintained the appearance of real silver.9 But older, luxurious materials such as silver and ebony also remained part of the Bauhaus repertoire throughout the 1920s. A Bauhaus egg cooker from 1926 had an ebony handle, for example. A number of objects, such as Brandt’s teapot (ME 8) and tea service with water pot (ME 24), were advertised in silver, obviously a luxury material (Figures 2.2, 2.5). Already expensive because they were

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2.5 Marianne Brandt, Tea service with Water pot, 1924, silver with ebony handles, Katalog der Muster, Bauhaus GmbH, 1925, photomechanical print in black and orange inks on white paper (Graphic design by Herbert Bayer)

handmade, objects in finer materials raised costs significantly, allowing quality to take precedence over the goods’ accessibility to a broader public. In other words, the Bauhaus did not reinvent products, but simply introduced known objects in new “modern” forms and occasionally new materials. It did not wish to alienate its potential consumers with modernism, but rather to accommodate their perceived needs and already articulated desires for a certain repertoire of goods, which were then given a modernist treatment. Under Gropius, even through the late 1920s, the school introduced very little that was unfamiliar, and relied on established, traditional luxury objects prevalent in the upper echelons of culture. Rather than overwhelm its audience with wholly new ideas and goods, the Bauhaus created its new market through consensualist means, remaining committed to designing the types of weighty, representative objects that the bourgeoisie might be enticed to buy. In doing so, the Bauhaus appealed to what Benjamin described as the authority of traditional art objects, that is, the authority that they retained through their relationship to a tradition and in the context of established social rituals. Traditional Kunstgewerbe (decorative arts) objects such as the tea service with its array of accoutrements (tea infuser, water pot, creamer, sugar bowl) maintained this autonomous authority through their role in the customs that guided patterns of life in bourgeois homes. These social rituals continued to maintain a distance between the object and its user—the aura, the “unique apparition of a distance, however near it may

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The Irreproducibility of the Bauhaus Object

be”—that sustained traditional authority.10 Technological reproducibility, on the other hand, “emancipates the work of art from its parasitic subservience to ritual.”11 For the Bauhaus to have engaged in successful mass reproduction of standard objects of everyday use, it would have been necessary that objects—rather than shoring up their withering aura through an appeal to tradition—instead be produced in such a manner that they successfully reached the masses. Bauhaus goods were also prohibitively expensive. To put their prices in perspective, it is important to note that the average income for a working-class (Arbeiter) family in 1927 was about 64 Marks per week and for a white-collar (Angestellten) family, around 91 Marks per week.12 Marcel Breuer’s “Wassily” chair, not in leather but merely in fabric, cost 60 Marks, around a week’s worth of wages for a worker.13 The silver Bauhaus cookie tin (Keksdose) cost 160 Marks, the teapot cost 90 Marks, and the five-piece tea service in German silver cost 180 Marks, three times a worker’s weekly wage (Figures 2.3, 2.5). As Bauhaus artist Otto Rittweger noted in 1926: “Today it is more difficult than ever for the vast majority of people who would like to possess such a [Bauhaus] service to actually afford one.”14 Comparatively, a non-Bauhaus, generic nickeled coffee set cost only 10 Marks. Bauhaus objects were not consumed by the masses; in 1925, even if they could have afforded a Bauhaus lamp, 81 percent of the inhabitants in Berlin’s working-class areas lived without electricity.15 Indeed, the start-up costs of mass production or the high projected sale prices often kept goods from ever being produced. On several occasions, Gropius commented that the costs for producing the objects were higher than what the market could bear and that the selling price of Bauhaus goods was artificially high in order to meet costs associated with balancing the Bauhaus budget and the purchase of raw materials in small quantities rather than in bulk.16 Objects from the metal workshop were especially unaffordable as both labor and material costs were high, but goods from the other workshops were also costly, and it was often the more expensive objects that were promoted. For example, there were two categories of Bauhaus chess sets: the standard version “intended for use” (Gebrauchsspiel), and the “luxury” version (Luxusspiel), which was made by hand or in small batches, using rare and costly types of wood.17 While the standard wood chess set was priced at 51 Marks, the walnut version cost 155 Marks.18 The Luxusspiel was marketed early on through a series of postcards, two of which featured the word Luxus prominently in the advertising copy (Figure 2.6). Gropius had to contend with the accusation that the products of the Bauhaus were simply another form of expensive, artistic luxury

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2.6 Postcard advertising Josef Hartwig’s Bauhaus chess set, 1924, lithograph (Graphic design by Joost Schmidt)

similar to the output of other schools of arts and crafts (Kunstgewerbe).19 He was careful to articulate that the Bauhaus was involved in creating artistic objects within the present economic paradigm, but asserted early on that its work was not involved in “artistic luxury affairs” (künstlerische Luxus­ angelegenheit).20 László Moholy-Nagy, around 1928, conceived of a dia­logue between a “well-meaning critic” of the Bauhaus and a “representative of the Bauhaus.” In it, the critic charges that Bauhaus objects have become luxury objects, accessible only to a few.21 To this, the representative of the Bauhaus replies that during the initial phases the objects were so expensive that only a few wealthy people were able to buy them, but that the luxury product itself was merely an intermediate link in the development towards becoming an object of everyday use.22 This intriguing line of reasoning— that the objects were part of an evolution from luxury to accessibility—does not appear to have gained wider currency. During Gropius’s tenure, a tension existed between concurrent realities: the production of serial objects by hand, the ideal of the prototype, and the desire for mass production. By never fully reaching the mass production stage, because of their cost and nature, the Bauhaus’s products ultimately remained luxury objects. Following Benjamin’s formulation, the very act of the mass reproduction and dissemination of Bauhaus goods—rather than small, serialized production of multiple copies made by hand—would have allowed them to be brought out of the rarified realm of luxury and tradition: It might be stated as a general formula that the technology of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition. By replicating the work many times over, it substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence. And in permitting

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The Irreproducibility of the Bauhaus Object

the reproduction to reach the recipient in his or her own situation, it actualizes that which is reproduced.23 The cost and exclusivity of Bauhaus objects were related to the fact that they were turned out in small batches, mainly to fill specific commissions, in a workshop system. As Benjamin observes, In principle, the work of art has always been reproducible. Objects made by humans could always be copied by humans. Replicas were made by pupils in practicing for their craft, by masters in disseminating their works, and, finally, by third parties in pursuit of profit. But the technological reproduction of artworks is something new.24 At the Bauhaus, the move to technological reproduction would have had to entail the object’s overcoming of its tradition-grounded formal qualities so as to be determined instead by its inherent reproducibility; in Benjamin’s words, “the work reproduced becomes the reproduction of a work designed for reproducibility.”25 Thus in terms of the Bauhaus project, the fact that Bauhaus objects were visually modern was less important than the fact that they were never reproduced in any significant numbers.

Bauhaus Modern on Display In addition to the school building in Dessau, which not only housed the school but showcased its ideas, the nearby houses of the school’s masters were on view and played a very public role in setting the context for Bauhaus objects, eliciting interest in the media and the public alike (Figure 2.7). Like the Bauhaus objects, Gropius’s director’s house and the three double masters’ houses advertise an aesthetic of mass reproducibility but in fact are also an example of limited serial production. It is not insignificant that their inhabitants often referred to them as “villas”; they represented a rarified form of dwelling and were meant to function as lived-in showpieces for the school’s theories and ideals, allowing the Bauhaus to exhibit the products of its workshops in an instructive and architecturally appropriate domestic setting. Ise Gropius’s diary charts an unending stream of important visitors representing an elevated, educated segment of the population—from trade organizations and cultural groups to politicians, modern architects, artists, cultural critics, period intellectuals, and professors.26 Even a year after they had been completed, there seemed to be no indication that interest in the houses was waning, as Lyonel Feininger wrote exasperatedly to his wife in the fall of 1927: “What is going on here is beyond

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2.7 Above: Walter Gropius (Architect), Bauhaus Masters’ Housing, Interior of Moholy-Nagy House, Dessau, 1925–1926, gelatin silver print (Photograph by Lucia Moholy, c. 1925) Below: Tea corner in the Gropius House, Dessau, 1925–1926, gelatin silver print (Photograph by Lucia Moholy, 1926)

belief and almost beyond endurance. Crowds of idlers slowly amble along Burgkühnauer Allee, from morning to night, goggling at our houses, not to speak of trespassing in our gardens to stare in the windows.”27 According to Dessau Mayor Fritz Hesse, between 1927 and 1930 the Bauhaus buildings received over 20,000 visitors.28 This indicates that their modern design and contents were not quickly assimilated into the general culture but remained objects of fascination. The director’s house, in particular, functioned as an “exhibition house,” playing a very public role. As Feininger wrote to his wife, “Gropius’s house, of course, is miraculous. The furniture and the entire setup are intended as representative.”29 The house boasted an appliance-filled kitchen with labor-saving conveniences, such as an automatic soap-infused sprayer for the dishes, an early clothes washer, and a centrifuge dryer. But these devices were for the hired help, an expected domestic arrangement 46

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for a couple of their social standing. Period films celebrating the house depict a uniformed maid at work while Ise Gropius drinks tea with friends in the living room “tea corner” (Figure 2.7). Serviced by hot and cold running water and an electric tea kettle, it aptly illustrates the merging of bourgeois habits and precious objects with modern technology and convenience, with little pretense towards universal application. The dining room featured Bauhaus furniture made out of costly nickel-plated tubular steel, an adjustable plate warmer, and other electrical appliances that could be plugged in directly to the floor outlets conveniently placed in the center of the room, adjacent to the table. A fan installed in the living room was connected to the central heating system behind the wall, so that warmed, but fresh, air could be brought in during the winter. Gropius’s 1930 book Bauhausbauten Dessau acknowledged that this feature, like many others in the house, was an extravagance, and predicted that “today a lot still functions as luxury, that will be the norm the day after tomorrow!”30 At a time when modern architects looked to mass production for interior fittings, and when massproduced, plain porcelain sinks were readily available, Gropius’s bathroom featured a luxurious richly marble-veined double sink, flanked by glass-lined walls. The Bauhausbauten book erased the marble veining from the sink to make it appear more industrial and less luxurious. Perhaps tellingly, Gropius employed a chauffeur and his house was the only one with a garage. Generally, the house was not portrayed for what it really was—a prohibitively expensive design for the powerful director of the Bauhaus.

Productive Operations As early as April 1922 and continuing into 1923, the Bauhaus masters and Gropius had discussed the necessity of organizing the workshops into a productive operation (Produktiv-Betrieb), and indicated that they viewed the school itself as a locus of productive operations (Produktiv-Apparat).31 Gropius envisioned products from Bauhaus prototypes, reproduced via methods of standardization and large-scale sales as the only way that goods could be offered at a reasonable price.32 The Bauhaus’s embrace of an industrial means of production was the result of external political and economic as well as internal pressures. This proposed shift in the activities and overall orientation of the workshops, clearly articulated by Gropius, was founded on an astonishingly immodest premise: to sway the industrial powers of 1920s Germany.33 Although factory production was the stated desire after 1923, throughout the entire history of the school, small orders were filled for specific patrons in response to requests via correspondence and personal 47

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visits to the Bauhaus.34 From small objects to furnishings for entire apartments, original pieces were produced, not just in the Weimar period as might be expected, when original crafts were the mainstay, but throughout the Dessau period too.35 Students were expected to spend a specific number of hours in their chosen workshop with a portion of that time devoted to formal instruction and the acquisition of technical skills, but orders for Bauhaus goods also had to be filled. A general lack of production capacity in the workshops due to labor, financial, and materials shortages, meant that orders were constantly delayed or only partially supplied. In 1924 the Bauhaus manager Emil Lange wrote Gropius a long letter containing recommendations for making the workshops economically sound.36 Lange does not suggest reviewing the overall design process, the internal production costs, or whether the products were appealing to potential buyers; to the contrary, he expresses frustration with the caprice of buyers and the unpredictability in their ordering patterns, apparently showing little acumen about the market and tools of selling. This lack of attunement to consumer desire was a continual problem. But more importantly, the Bauhaus continued to be oriented toward workshop production rather than to what successful mass reproduction would have had to entail. During 1924 and 1925 the Bauhaus took important measures to shore up its finances and implemented some basic operations to organize its fairly autonomous workshops into a more comprehensive entity for the purposes of selling designs. The first mention of a “Bauhaus-AG” appears in conjunction with the possible uses of profits from the school’s 1923 exhibition.37 In January 1924, Gropius began lengthy proceedings with the government over the founding of a separate Bauhaus company, the Bauhaus GmbH.38 In a long meeting on 18 February 1924 Gropius laid out plans for an economically feasible Bauhaus corporation, discussing its relationship to the workshops, provisions for student employment, and payment— either by piecework or wages.39 At this stage, the general plan was not to outsource production to other companies, but rather to internally organize the labor and productivity of the workshops according to what Gropius called the “free market” (freie Wirtschaft). An agreement template was drawn up that gave the Bauhaus GmbH the rights to all objects made at the school and stipulated that the designer was not to make similar objects on his own.40 In return, the company would pay for every approved design and give the designer up to 30 percent of the resulting profits.41 The company hired a business manager, Walter Haas, to act as a conduit between the Bauhaus and industry, to market the prototypes designed in the workshops, and to oversee the reproduction of objects. The Bauhaus printed up stationery and invoices for the GmbH, which was legally a separate entity.

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Under the aegis of the Bauhaus GmbH, the school began to organize its products into one comprehensive sales catalogue, known as the Katalog der Muster.42 There are two versions. A single sheet, probably designed by Moholy-Nagy, appeared with just four selected products, perhaps those viewed as most marketable. A multi-page, orange and black version, designed by Herbert Bayer with photographs by Lucia Moholy, appeared in November of 1925 (Figures 2.2, 2.5). This catalogue was a loose-leaf booklet, organized by workshop, in which each product or product group could be removed and function as a stand-alone information sheet. A separate price list, which could be periodically updated, possibly accompanied it. The objects could be ordered individually from the Bauhaus GmbH, although the hope was for mass production through the company itself. Presented as single objects on individual leaflets, the products in the Katalog der Muster are not offered as part of a comprehensive Bauhaus collection, in that the objects are organized by workshop rather than by use or intended room. The images project the clean, clutter-free ideal of modernism, but the design also reflects the straightforwardness of standard product catalogues of the period. There is a careful estrangement of the objects from their surroundings. The images, through their coldness and detachment, highlight the alluring, surface qualities of the individual objects rather than their potential for use. Whereas in an earlier period the workshops had been guided by an ideal of working in tandem to create an integrated interior—as took place in the 1920 Sommerfeld House or the Haus am Horn exhibition house in 1923—the Katalog der Muster represents a shift to the pursuit of the single object, or type-object, for wider production. As Gropius stated unequivocally, the workshops’ mandate was to create standard types for practical commodities. Yet the objects selected for the catalogue represent some of the school’s most elite objects and arguably many of its least practical ones—a full silver tea service, the tea container and tea balls, the chess set, and several ashtrays which, among other objects, would not have been easily stamped out or otherwise mass-produced by machine. Furthermore, several designs note “most exacting” (genaueste) or “finest handcraftsmanship” (feinste Handarbeit), calling into question whether some of the objects in the catalogue were ever intended for mass production. The “Inventory of Work and Ownership Rights of the Workshops,” made prior to the move to Dessau, serves as a good indication of what the Bauhaus had produced by April of 1925, and lists the objects that it theoretically could have selected from when assembling the Katalog der Muster.43 Simpler, arguably more easily mass-producible objects on the 49

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list, such as tablecloths, pillows, scarves, or drapes being produced in the weaving workshop, are notably absent from the catalogue. Another method by which the Bauhaus sought to draw German industrialists to its goods was through participation in trade shows, especially the twice-yearly Leipzig Trade Fair, at which the school exhibited objects regularly from 1924 to 1931, selling goods and taking orders to be filled by the workshops.44 As with the Katalog der Muster, the Leipzig activities underscore the ambiguity of the Bauhaus’s program: the products represented elite, one-off goods to be sold for profit as well as prototypes intended for mass production. In 1927, four years after Gropius’s turn to industry, the Bauhaus was selected to represent Germany at the Ausstellung Europäisches Kunstgewerbe (European Applied Arts Exhibition), held in conjunction with the regular Leipzig fair (Figure 2.3). Chosen not as a producer of modern, rational goods intended for industry but rather for their fine craftsmanship, the handmade, luxurious nature of the goods comes to the fore. Bauhaus objects, including a hammered, silver-lined fish poaching dish, were put on display in the same room as Meissen porcelain and other expensive goods made in Germany. This conjunction illustrates the Bauhaus’s difficult position of trying to be modern while existing within the context of Kunstgewerbe, the applied arts, with the skilled training in the traditional crafts that it required. The workshops continued to occupy an unclear position between their role as producers of the unique art object and as designers of prototypes for mass reproduction. Although industrial production and the formation of an alliance between the Bauhaus and industry was a carefully articulated goal, even an underlying principle, which Gropius reiterated in speeches and writings and which is implied in the “industrial” aesthetics of the objects, there is little evidence beyond the Katalog der Muster and trade fair exhibitions that clear steps toward the formalization of relations with industry were taken.45 As years passed, the situation began to appear dire, as MoholyNagy admitted in 1928: “Designs for vessels and appliances, with which we have been occupied for years, have so far not been sold to industry.”46 Outside visitors, such as art theorist Rudolf Arnheim, similarly noted: “Certainly the Bauhaus has not yet come so far as to be able to supply industry with conclusively standard patterns.”47 A contract finally materialized in 1927 with the metalworks factory Paul Stotz AG of Stuttgart to manufacture and distribute the glass lamp, although it was not fulfilled.48 Later, relations with the manufacturers Körting & Mathiesen and Schwintzer & Gräff brought lighting to the market in significant numbers for the first time in the Bauhaus’s history.49 In the end, only four workshops were ever able to deliver models to industry—carpentry, weaving, metal, and wall

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painting—and Gropius’s ideal of working closely with manufacturers never materialized.50 Only three firms began negotiations during his tenure; the rest came during that of his successors, mainly Hannes Meyer. Practically speaking, Bauhaus objects were not mass-produced in any number, nor picked up by industry in general. It is important to differentiate between objects that were genuinely mass-reproducible and the visual propagation of an idea of modern, reproducible products. This idea of paring objects down to their essences appealed to students and masters at the Bauhaus as a visual and conceptual task—though outside the school the objects met with limited success. Bauhaus objects did not transform function but rather attempted to distill the object’s essential function, as in the visually pared-down tea extraction pot which was refined until it poured well (Figure 2.2). Yet, designed to make a very strong cup of tea, its contents needed to be diluted with hot water from yet another vessel—resulting in the proliferation, rather than reduction, of household objects. What remained important to the Bauhaus, if not the consuming public, was the aesthetic of simple, machine-like forms, the elevation of function, and the idea of mass reproduction. Buyers, in any case, were skeptical. Even though Gropius stressed that the Bauhaus workshops were addressing the “necessities of life of the majority of people” and viewed the home and its furnishings as “mass consumer goods,” and though the school wanted to limit designs to “characteristic, primary forms and colors, readily accessible to everyone,” the masses themselves did not embrace the modern goods.51 Convincing them to value a teapot’s severe reduction in form and decoration for its attendant Bauhaus ideology was arguably as much of a hindrance as its price tag. These objects were not received with wide enthusiasm outside an elite of left-wing artistic and intellectual circles, the members of which understood the principles of the school and its objects, or what was sometimes termed the “Intellektuell-Sachliches”—even among those who could afford them.52 A list of workshop commissions completed in 1926 notes mainly avant-garde art galleries as patrons.53 Photographs of industrialists’ interiors, for example, reveal homes amply laden with modern paintings and sculpture yet virtually no modern design objects. Surprisingly, modern interiors, such as those by Marcel Breuer, do not feature Bauhaus objects on their tables or shelves with any frequency either.54 It is very difficult, outside of its own buildings and photographs, to find the products of the Bauhaus in domestic settings. As Grete Lihotzky, in her important 1927 essay “Rationalization in the Household,” ends her devastating critique: “Years of effort on the part of the German Werkbund and individual architects, countless articles and lectures demanding clarity,

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simplicity, and efficiency in furnishings, as well as a turn away from the traditional kitsch of the last fifty years, have had almost no effect whatsoever.”55 Other sources, too, indicate that Bauhaus objects were estranged from public taste; according to a critic for the Frankfurter Zeitung the Bauhaus was “even further from the general taste of the public than the Werkbund.”56 The legacy of the Bauhaus’s products lies more with an idea and a few canonical objects than with any widespread material reality or mass adoption of modern objects.

Production/Reproduction How then should these issues of production figure in the assessment of the Bauhaus’s significance? Should the Bauhaus be viewed as an entity that failed to produce objects that buyers wanted to consume or that manufacturers wanted to produce? Should Bauhaus objects be understood as unique, authentic works of art—which may be their historical fate, judging by their scarcity and their status in art museums today? Walter Benjamin’s postulation that “what withers in the age of the technological reproducibility of the work of art is the latter’s aura” is useful for reflecting on the status of these objects within the conditions of production of their time.57 The status of art and art objects, including objects intended for use, in such an age was precisely the question that Gropius faced at the Bauhaus. As proclaimed by his slogan “art and technology—a new unity,” his emphasis was on both art and technology, and specifically their relation to each other. The nineteenth-century heritage of Kunstgewerbe and its postWorld War I revival shaped the school’s earliest incarnation, which explicitly attempted to recover that heritage via the high-quality art object of the craftsman. This heritage continued to shape subsequent activities at the school, although Gropius carefully sought to elude what he termed “dilettantism of the handicrafts” (kunstgewerblichen Dilettantismus).58 Simultaneously he worked to counter the “ersatz” and low-quality products of an industrializing Germany. The potential for degradation of Bauhaus designs through the reproduction process was of continual concern to Gropius, who offered the reassurance that a decline in the quality of the product’s material and construction, as a result of mechanical reproduction, would be countered by all available means.59 Gropius thus sought to mass-produce well-designed objects by industrial methods without ever wholly freeing the school from the Kunstgewerbe legacy of the design of the singular work of art produced in small numbers. According to Benjamin’s theory, given the reality of small batches in the workshops, these objects would 52

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have safeguarded their own, autonomous authority, grounded in tradition, and resisted being taken up and appropriated by the masses. However, a loss of aura and authority would necessarily have resulted if the Bauhaus had succeeded in factory mass reproduction. These issues of production and reproduction of art, architecture, and objects were a subject of period concern among theorists and critics, such as Benjamin and the architectural critic Adolf Behne, artists such as Moholy-Nagy, and architects such as Gropius.60 Each had different, specific ideas, but the terms and the overarching concern—the relationship of the authentic art object to the modern means of production—formed an important commonality of period discourse. In his 1917 essay, “The Reproductive Age” (Das reproduktive Zeitalter), Behne argued that, unlike with earlier authentic artworks, technological reproduction caused the essential effect—Wirkung—of the original to be lost, and yet the aesthetic values of the work of art were transferred to the reproductive process itself.61 Moholy-Nagy’s 1922 essay “Production-Reproduction” went further, specifying the goal of making reproductive processes useful for creative activities.62 Benjamin identified the loss of authenticity and aura and the turn to mass reproduction as inevitable consequences of the modern transformation in conditions of production, which nonetheless bore great artistic and political potential, while Moholy-Nagy, and the Bauhaus generally, actively endorsed mass reproduction as an art practice. Perhaps the Bauhaus should be assessed in terms not of production, but of reproduction—the stage at which it failed most visibly to realize its aims.63 As Gropius shifted the emphasis of the Bauhaus towards mass reproduction, along with other basic operations he instituted, he was reacting not to a change in the availability of industrial technology, but rather to a change in ideas about process. In an attempt to broaden consumption, the Bauhaus needed to move from concentrating on production (where it arguably did well, generating many functionally and aesthetically successful designs in a relatively short period of time) to reproduction. As this examination has shown, reproduction, as both a practical process and a theoretical construct, is precisely where a material and economic failure took place; at the same time, theoretical signification can be read from this historical episode. In evaluating the Bauhaus, it is the emphasis laid on the process of reproduction that is important and imbued with social significance in the context of the period. As K. Michael Hays has pointed out, Benjamin’s analysis reveals that as one approaches those mediums that are inherently multiple and reproducible, not only does the authenticity of the object, its here and now, lose its value as a repository of meaning, but also the

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reproductive technique as procedure takes on the features of a system of signification. Meaning arises from the multiple forces of social practice rather than the formal qualities of the auratic art object.64 Thus the potential significance of the Bauhaus project under Gropius lies less in the objects themselves that were produced than in the Bauhaus’s grappling with the problem of reproducibility. The members of the Bauhaus saw their larger project not just as art practice but as a part of social practice, as MoholyNagy wrote: “We hope that from the inspirations of the Bauhaus, such results will come forth as will be useful to a new social order.”65 This social function, for Benjamin and for the Bauhaus, occurred when the art object was reproduced in such a way that what it would lose in aura it would make up for by reaching society at large, becoming available for its use. For Benjamin, the social function of art was revolutionized as soon as the criterion of authenticity ceased to be applicable to artistic production.66 The actual objects designed by the Bauhaus, however, were not consonant with what was needed to achieve its goals for reproduction, as their elite qualities stymied the social project. In their relationship to society, the object-types the Bauhaus produced—such as silver tea services—were insufficient; their luxury character limited their reproducibility, perhaps equally as much as their costly fabrication and materials. As a result of this disjunction, Bauhaus objects can be read as material indices of the social problematic of mass reproducibility. Benjamin pinpoints the transformation that occurs in the modern age from the autonomous authority of the art object itself to its social determination by its inherent technological reproducibility. That Gropius’s Bauhaus embraced mass reproduction as a system and a goal is meaningful even if it was unable to realize this goal to any significant, material degree. As Josef Albers noted, “The greatest success of the Bauhaus was to win over and interest industry. We realized this aim only to a small degree.”67 Indeed, the idea of a relationship with industry remained the Bauhaus’s greatest achievement, even if it was hardly realized. The Bauhaus inserted itself into this system of signification through the ideal of reproduction, and it was willing to sacrifice the auratic or authentic qualities of its objects to do so. An essential legacy of Bauhaus objects is the mythical aspiration of good design for the masses, achieved through an alignment with industrial production. And meaning can be derived from this ideal even if it never occurred at the level of actual Bauhaus products. Through their very failure as objects of reproduction and mass consumption, the products of the Bauhaus paradoxically retained both their authenticity and their aura, for, in an age of mechanical reproduction—that is, of the definitive withering of aura—an individual Bauhaus object, such

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as a Brandt teapot, remains a work of art. To acknowledge this by conceding these objects’ elite, luxury status, however, calls into question the received, mythological account of the Bauhaus’s contribution to the trajectory of modernism. It also re-poses the question of what designing objects for mass reproduction—and socially transformative use by society, by the masses—might entail.

Acknowledgments This essay has benefited from thoughtful suggestions by John Ackerman, Annie Bourneuf, Charles W. Haxthausen, Jennifer Hock, and Klaus Weber, whom I would like to thank. I also thank Peter Nisbet and Laura Muir at the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University, and Sabine Hartmann at the Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin.

Notes   1 For related discussion of these concerns, see especially Frederic J. Schwartz, “Utopia for Sale: The Bauhaus and Weimar Germany’s Consumer Culture,” in Bauhaus Culture: From Weimar to the Cold War, ed. Kathleen James-Chakraborty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 115–38; and Anna Rowland, “Business Management at the Weimar Bauhaus,” Journal of Design History 1, no. 3–4 (1988), 153–75.   2 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, vol. 3, 1935–1938 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 2002), 101–36. Benjamin composed this essay in the autumn of 1935; the version used here is the 1936 second version which the editors note represents the form in which Benjamin originally wished to see the work published. A third, revised version remained unfinished at Benjamin’s death and was published posthumously. See also Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 2008). When Benjamin makes his famous proclamation, “What withers in the age of the technological reproducibility of the work of art is the latter’s aura,” he immediately follows it with: “This process is symptomatic; its significance extends far beyond the realm of art” (emphasis added, 104). He begins his essay, in a similar vein, with Marx, noting that it “has taken more than half a century for the change in the conditions of production to be manifested in all areas of culture” (emphasis added, 101). In the essay, Benjamin largely discusses this process as it manifests itself in images and film. However it is clear throughout that the significance of the phenomena he explicates is not limited to these areas of culture alone; Benjamin also specifically addresses architecture, literature, medicine, music, and coins. Moreover, Benjamin uses a number of different terms to refer to his subject, not only “artwork” (Kunstwerk), but also object of art (Gegenstand der Kunst), object (Objekt), thing (Sache), all of which have been predominantly translated as “artwork,” perhaps contributing to a common perception that Benjamin is only talking about the visual arts. The distinct importance of architecture at a late stage in Benjamin’s discussion—which brings it into particular proximity with film and makes “the laws of its reception … the most instructive” in relation to new forms of mass participation in art—lies in the fact that buildings are received in a twofold manner: by perception and by use (120). The significance of

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Benjamin’s essay for understanding the problem of the reproducibility of Bauhaus objects will hang precisely on the potential for technologically reproducible objects to make themselves available for mass use. On production and reproduction in architecture and art, see Beatriz Colomina, ed., Architectureproduction (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988), especially K. Michael Hays, “Reproduction and Negation: The Cognitive Project of the Avant-Garde,” 153–79; Charles W. Haxthausen, “Reproduction/Repetition: Walter Benjamin/Carl Einstein,” October 107, no. 47 (winter, 2004): 47–74; Esther Leslie, “Walter Benjamin: Traces of Craft,” Journal of Design History 11, no. 1 (1998): 5–13; and Andrew Benjamin, ed., Walter Benjamin and Art (London: Continuum, 2005). For contacts between Walter Benjamin and Moholy-Nagy during the latter’s years at the Bauhaus—and Moholy-Nagy’s influence upon Benjamin—see “Walter Benjamin and the Avant-Garde,” in Frederic J. Schwartz, Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), especially pp. 42–50. In other writings Benjamin devotes sustained attention to domestic objects as part of the same constellation of themes also found in the “Work of Art” essay. See, for example, “Louis-Philippe, or the Interior,” section 4, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, vol. 3, 38–9, and June 8 entry in “May–June 1931,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, vol. 2, 1927–1934 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1999), 479–80.   3 Sachlichkeit presents difficulties in translation; it could be translated as “factualness” or “objectiveness.” As Rosemarie Bletter has pointed out, the term simultaneously suggests the “world of real objects” and that of “conceptual rationalism.” See Bletter, introduction to Adolf Behne, The Modern Functional Building (Santa Monica: The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1996), 48.   4 A nearly identical version, MT 49, was available from the Bauhaus in brass or red brass with a silver-plated interior and a silver strainer, but it was not among the chosen objects featured in the Katalog der Muster. Klaus Weber, curator at the Bauhaus-Archiv/Museum für Gestaltung, notes that there are presently only seven known period examples of this teapot. Correspondence with author, 9 March 2009.   5 This was also the case for the other objects featured in the Bauhaus catalogue, as well as for the overwhelming majority of the products of the Bauhaus in this period.   6 Walter Gropius, “Bauhaus Produktion,” Qualität 4, no. 7–8 (Juli/August 1925): 130. Translation from a nearly identical version of the essay in Hans Maria Wingler, The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, ed. Joseph Stein, trans. Wolfgang Jabs and Basil Gilbert (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 110. Gropius continued to recall this purpose long after leaving: “The creation of standard types for the articles of daily use was their main concern. These workshops were essentially laboratories in which the models for such products were carefully evolved and constantly improved.” Walter Gropius, “Education Toward Creative Design,” American Architect and Architecture (May 1937): 28.   7 For invaluable research on the entire span of production in the Bauhaus’s metal workshops and their main artisans, see Klaus Weber, ed., Die Metallwerkstatt am Bauhaus (Berlin: Kupfergraben Verlagsgesellschaft, 1992).   8 The 1915 Werkbund Book of Wares (Warenbuch) was a selection of domestic German goods that met the Werkbund’s design standards. See Heide Rezepa-Zabel, Deutsches Warenbuch Reprint und Dokumentation: Gediegenes Gerät fürs Haus (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 2005).   9 German silver, or Neusilber, as it was called in German, had the appearance of silver but was a surrogate made of an alloy of copper, zinc, and nickel. 10 Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 104–6.

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11 Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 106. 12 Die Lebenshaltung von 2,000 Arbeiter-, Angestellten-, und Beamten-Haushaltungen: Erhebungen von Wirtschaftsrechnungen im Deutschen Reich von Jahre 1927–1928, Einzelschriften zur Statistik des deutschen Reichs, no. 22 (Berlin: R. Hobbing, 1932). Specific industries paid significantly less; for example, a male spinner in the textile industry earned 44 Marks per week in 1927, while a female spinner earned 28 Marks per week and unskilled workers earned even less. Statistischen Reichsamt, Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich (Berlin: Verlag von Reimar Hobbing, 1930). For the day-to-day struggle on this wage, see Deutscher Textilarbeiterverband, ed., Mein Arbeitstag, Mein Wochenende. 150 Berichte von Textilarbeiterinnen (Berlin: Textilpraxis Verlag, 1930), 187–9; and “Die Misere des ‘neuen Mittelstands’,” Die Weltbühne 24, no. 4 (22 January 1929): 130–4. 13 Standard-möbel catalogue, 1927, n.p., Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. 14 Otto Rittweger, Vivos Voco 5, no. 8–9 (1926): 293–4; translated in Posthumous Works Designed While Living: Metallwerkstatt Bauhaus 20’s/90’s, ed. Bruno Pedretti (Milan: Electa, 1995), 34–5. 15 Die Grundstücks- und Wohnungsaufnahme sowie die Volks-, Berufs- und Betriebszahlung in Berlin im Jahre 1925 (Berlin, 1928), table 8; quoted in Nicholas Bullock, “First the Kitchen: Then the Façade,” Journal of Design History 1, no. 3–4 (1988): 188. 16 For example, see Dr Necker and Walter Gropius, “Bericht über die wirtschaftlichen Aussichten des Bauhauses,” 19 October 1924, typed manuscript, pp. 1–2, Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. 17 Anne Bobzin and Klaus Weber, Das Bauhaus-Schachspiel von Josef Hartwig (Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv, 2006), 17–21. 18 Ausstellung “Die Form,” 1924, exhibition checklist with prices, Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. 19 For example, the Czech architect and critic Karel Teige chastised the Bauhaus early on for its emphasis on the crafts: “Today, the crafts are nothing but a luxury, supported by the bourgeoisie with their individualism and snobbery and their purely decorative point of view.” Karel Teige, Stavba (1924); translated in Bauhaus, 1919–1928, ed. Herbert Bayer, Walter Gropius, and Ise Gropius (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1938; reprint, Boston: Charles T. Branford Co., 1952), 91. 20 Walter Gropius, Weimar, to Staatsminister Greil, 11 November 1922, p. 2, Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. Unless otherwise noted, translations are the author’s own. 21 László Moholy-Nagy (presumed), “Dialogue between a Well-meaning Critic and a Representative of the Bauhaus, Weimar-Dessau,” c. 1928; translated in Krisztina Passuth, MoholyNagy (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 400. The identity of the author of this document has not been conclusively established; the document is in the possession of Moholy-Nagy’s daughter, Hattula Moholy-Nagy and presumed to be written by Moholy-Nagy. 22 Ibid., 401. 23 Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 104. 24 Ibid., 102. 25 Ibid., 106. 26 Ise Gropius, Diary, Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. 27 Lyonel Feininger, Dessau, to Julia Feininger, 2 October 1927, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge; translated in Lyonel Feininger, Lyonel Feininger, ed. June L. Ness (New York: Praeger, 1974), 158. 28 Fritz Hesse, Von der Residenz zur Bauhausstadt (Hannover: Schmorl & von Seefeld, 1963), 238. 29 Lyonel Feininger, Dessau, to Julia Feininger, 6 August 1926, Houghton Library; translated in Feininger, Feininger, 152. 30 Walter Gropius, Bauhausbauten Dessau (München: A. Langen, 1930), 112. 31 Protokoll, Sitzung der Meister und Werkstättenleiter des Staatlichen Bauhauses, 7 April 1922, Weimar, Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin; Protokoll des Bauhausrates, 22 October 1923, in Die

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Meisterratsprotokolle des Staatlichen Bauhauses Weimar 1919 bis 1925, ed. Volker Wahl (Weimar: Verlag Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 2001), 319. “Produktiv-Betrieb” can also be translated as “productive company,” but it is not clear from the original context if a company is specifically meant at this early date. 32 Gropius, “Bauhaus Produktion,” 135; translated in Wingler, Bauhaus, 110. 33 Walter Gropius, “Education Toward Creative Design,” American Architect and Architecture 150 (May 1937): 28. Although this was written years later, it succinctly captures the direction of this period: “The aim of this training was to produce designers who were able, by their intimate knowledge of material and working processes to influence the industrial production of our time.” 34 Word of mouth and personal recommendation between customers accounted for much of this small-scale work, such as a request for a silver tea caddy from Herr Architekt Bernard in December of 1924 and an order from Herr Regierungsrat Döpel in January 1925 for a silver pin “like the one the metal workshop had made for the kindergarten teachers.” Rowland, “Business Management,” 154. 35 The archives of the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau hold original records, including letters, bills of sale, and drawings of commissions. Notable Dessau commissions include Erich Dieckmann’s work for Hinnerk and Lou Scheper in 1925, which included chairs, stools, tables, desks, cupboards, and bookshelves; Dieckmann’s designs for the home of Pauline Schwickert; and Breuer’s furniture and kitchen cabinetry for the Wohnung Ludwig Grote at the Palais Reina in Dessau of 1927. For a full range of rare photographs of interiors, see Christian Wolsdorff, Bauhaus-Möbel: eine Legende wird besichtigt/Bauhaus Furniture: A Legend Reviewed (Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv, 2002). 36 Emil Lange to Gropius, Weimar, 16 February 1924, typescript, Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. 37 Protokoll, Formenmeister-Besprechung, 18 October 1923, in Wahl, Meisterratsprotokolle, 319. Originally the minutes were written with “GmbH,” which was then struck out and replaced with “AG,” possibly indicating some question of what designation the company should have. AG, for Aktiengesellschaft, is a public limited company, while GmbH, or Gesell­ schaft mit beschränkter Haftung, represents a limited liability company. 38 Wahl, Meisterratsprotokolle, 520–1. 39 Protokoll der Sitzung des Bauhausrates, 18 February 1924, 20 February 1924, in Wahl, Meisterratsprotokolle, 323–4. The meeting lasted 3½ hours. 40 Vertrag zwischen dem Bauhaus und Bauhausangehörigen, n.d., typescript, p. 1 verso, Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. Several designers, when they left the Bauhaus, continued to fill orders for their designs personally, notably Josef Hartwig, who continued to produce his famous chess set. This document was designed to prevent this in the future. 41 Protokoll der Sitzung des Bauhausrates, 18 February 1924, 20 February 1924, Thüringisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Weimar. The “Work Plan of the Metal Workshop” (c. 1925–1926) also codifies payment, noting that either a single-payment compensation or royalties will be paid for models used in series production. Translated in Wingler, Bauhaus, 111. 42 This small catalogue lacks a formal name in the literature, and even the Bauhaus Archive has not reached a consensus on what to call it. In the Bauhaus exhibition and accompanying catalogue, Das A und O des Bauhauses: Bauhauswerbung: Schriftbilder, Drucksachen, Ausstellungsdesign, Ute Brüning refers to it as the “Katalog der Muster,” while Klaus Weber in Die Metallwerkstatt am Bauhaus refers to it as the “Musterkatalog der Bauhausprodukte.” In the period, the journal Bauhaus referred to a page from it as a “prospectus page” (Prospektseite) of the Bauhaus GmbH. Bauhaus, no. 1 (1926): 6. Because the title page of the loose-leaf sheets that make up the catalogue states, “Katalog der Muster,” that title will be used here. In English it has been translated as “Catalog of Designs” (Schwartz, “Utopia for Sale,” 124) and “Bauhaus Sample Catalog” (collection accession file, Harvard Art Museum/Busch-Reisinger Museum).

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43 Reproduced in Wingler, Bauhaus, 98–101. 44 For more on the role of trade shows in the display and sale of Bauhaus objects in the Weimar period, as well as efforts by the Bauhaus to bring early goods to market, see Rowland, “Business Management,” especially pp. 163–7. 45 The basic plan of the Bauhaus to produce machine prototypes rather than the standard fare of a regular school of applied art was also reported in countless newspaper articles. For a typical example, see Dr Grote, “Das Weimarer Bauhaus und seine Aufgaben in Dessau,” Anhaltische Rundschau, 11 March 1925: 1. 46 László Moholy-Nagy, “Eine bedeutsame Aussprache: Konferenz der Vertreter des Bauhauses Dessau und des Edelmetallgewerbes am 9. März 1928 in Leipzig,” Deutsche Goldschmiede-Zeitung, no. 13 (1928): 123. 47 Rudolf Arnheim, “Das Bauhaus in Dessau,” Die Weltbühne 23, no. 22 (31 May 1927): 921; translated in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 451. 48 Bauhaus, no. 4 (1927): 5. It was also reported that a related catalogue was in production. However, this relationship appears to have been short-lived, as the lamp division folded, causing the Bauhaus to begin anew in the search for a manufacturer. See Ise Gropius, Diary, 30 November 1927, 205–6. 49 A new contract for lighting came through in February of 1928, as noted in Ise Gropius’s diary (10 February 1928, 224). In the July 1928 issue, Bauhaus announced that both lighting companies Körting & Mathiesen and Schwintzer & Gräff were producing Bauhaus designs. See “Industrie und Bauhaus,” Bauhaus, no. 2–3 (1928): 33. For a full account of the Bauhaus’s relationship with Körting & Mathiesen and the line of modern lighting produced by the company from Bauhaus prototypes, see Justus Binroth et al., Bauhausleuchten? Kandemlicht! Die Zusammenarbeit des Bauhauses mit der Leipziger Firma Kandem/Bauhaus Lighting? Kandem Light! The Collaboration of the Bauhaus with the Leipzig Company Kandem (Leipzig: Grassi Museum, Museum für Kunsthandwerk Leipzig; Stuttgart: Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2002). This arrangement, while fulfilling Gropius’s aims for the school, did so in an anonymous manner, because except for one mention in 1931, Körting & Mathiesen did not acknowledge the association of its Kandem line with the Bauhaus until its 75th anniversary, in 1964; see Ulrich Krüger, “Leutzsch Lighting: On the Collaboration of Körting & Mathiesen AG in Leipzig-Leutzsch with the Bauhaus in Dessau,” in Binroth, Bauhausleuchten?, 11. 50 Christian Wolsdorff, “Bauhaus-Produkte: Zusammenarbeit mit der Industrie,” in Bauhaus Berlin: Auflösung Dessau 1932, Schließung Berlin 1933, Bauhäusler und Drittes Reich, ed. Peter Hahn (Weingarten: Kunstverlag Weingarten, 1985), 183. The pottery workshop also began to make contacts with—and supply models to—industry (porcelain and stoneware) but did not accompany the Bauhaus to Dessau, and ceased to exist. 51 Gropius, “Bauhaus Produktion,” 130; translated in Wingler, Bauhaus, 110. 52 Like Sachlichkeit, “Intellektuell-Sachliches” presents difficulties in translation; it could be translated as “intellectual factualness” or “intellectual objectiveness.” 53 Bauhaus, no. 1 (1926): 3. 54 Among the hundreds of photographs of Berlin interiors, both known and anonymous dwellings, at the Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin, there are relatively few modern interiors, and in these interiors, Bauhaus domestic objects are in scant evidence, while Breuer’s tubular steel chairs and Bauhaus furniture are fairly common. For example, the Breuer-designed apartment interior for Edwin Piscator, 1927, featured Bauhaus furniture and lighting fixtures but not its other products. 55 Grete Lihotzky, “Rationalisierung im Haushalt,” Das neue Frankfurt, no. 5 (1926–1927): 120; translated in Kaes, Jay, and Dimendberg, Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 463. 56 Fritz Wichert, “Ein Haus, das Sehnsucht weckt,” Frankfurter Zeitung, 10 October 1923.

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57 Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 104. 58 Gropius, “Bauhaus Produktion,” 135–6; translated in Wingler, Bauhaus, 110. 59 Ibid., 136. 60 Benjamin was a member of artistic and architectural circles in Berlin and was certainly conversant with key concepts of the day. He was part of a group that met often at Hans Richter’s house, which included Raoul Hausmann, Tristan Tzara, Frederich Kiesler, and Hans (Jean) Arp, which would launch the magazine G in 1923, led by Richter, Lissitzky, Van Doesburg, and Mies. 61 Arnd Bohm, “Artful Reproduction: Benjamin’s Appropriation of Adolf Behne’s ‘Das reproduktive Zeitalter’ in the Kunstwerk-Essay,” The Germanic Review 68, no. 4 (1993): 149. Cf. Adolf Behne, “Das reproduktive Zeitalter,” Marsyas (1917): 219–25. 62 Moholy-Nagy, “Production-Reproduction,” De Stijl, no. 7 (1922): 97–101; translated in Passuth, Moholy-Nagy, 289. 63 The slippage in this essay between the terms “mass production” and (mass) “reproduction” reflects this problem: to speak of mass production is really to speak of mass reproduction— as Benjamin’s essay illuminates—but the standard usage of the former term highlights the tendency to conceive it in the terms of production alone. 64 Hays, “Reproduction and Negation,” 163. Emphasis original. 65 Moholy-Nagy, “Dialogue”; translated in Passuth, Moholy-Nagy, 400. 66 Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 106. 67 Josef Albers, “Thirteen years at the Bauhaus,” in Bauhaus and Bauhaus People, ed. Eckhard Neumann (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1970), 171.

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Chapter 3

The Disappearing Bauhaus Architecture and its Public in the Early Federal Republic Frederic J. Schwartz Keetenheuve saw in his mind’s eye the miner arriving home at the new estate that the committee had discussed, that they had calculated, that they had legislated. … The miner entered the minimum number of square meters that the experts had allotted to him. … They were overcome by tedium, a silent tedium that sometimes manifested itself in violence, in suicide, in seemingly inexplicable family conflict, but it was simply the incessant noise of the estate, the proximity to so many others, the disgust at the odors of the kitchens and the toilets. Wolfgang Koeppen, The Hothouse (1953)1 On 23 October 1965, Theodor W. Adorno and Ernst Bloch spoke as invited guests at the Deutscher Werkbund’s conference, that year on the topic of “Education through Form.” In his address, titled “Functionalism Today,” Adorno struck a deeply critical note: “The deep unease the style of the German reconstruction instills in me, who is no less subjected to it than an expert, moves me to ask about its cause.”2 Among other examples Adorno was referring, no doubt, to his own place of work: the new building for the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, designed by Alois Giefer and Hermann Mäckler and finished in 1951. His conclusion: “There’s nothing so bleak as the mediocre modernism of the German reconstruction. A critical analysis of it by an expert in the field is needed.”3 Bloch was no less critical: in his lecture on “Education, Engineering Form, Ornament” he wrote

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3.1 Alois Giefer and Hermann Mäckler, Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt am Main, 1950–1951

of the contemporary “termite existence in box houses … Forms are no longer differentiated humanely … all are rendered uniform in the domineering form of the glass box.”4 Both point a finger at the Bauhaus. The presence of Adorno and Bloch at the Werkbund’s conference has been interpreted by historians as symptomatic of a larger turn against the architecture of the postwar West German reconstruction (Wiederaufbau) and the legacy of the Bauhaus. A closer look at these texts and the context in which they were presented, however, suggests a far more complex, and far more interesting, situation. The argument presented here will have two parts. First, I will suggest that Adorno and Bloch articulated positions that in fact failed to resonate with their audience—though not because of the prestige of the institution they criticized. For despite the prestige of the Bauhaus and the hegemony of functionalism in the architectural profession—this is the second part of the argument—I will try to show that the Bauhaus, as a historical legacy and as a trope for an acceptable German architecture, was always a problematic element in the public discussions of the built environment in the young Federal Republic. As a historical reference point it seems the Bauhaus often generated irritation, contradiction and friction after the war, even among those now considered “modernists.” In other words, the Bauhaus seemed to interfere with postwar architectural discussions as much as it served to organize them. In looking at not only Bloch and Adorno but also the interventions of other prominent intellectuals in discussions of design, this essay

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will trace the shifting debates in philosophy, sociology and psychology about the reconstruction of Germany and the changing way the built environment could effectively be discussed as political matter. It will also focus on the discursive resistances in this process—resistances that were often due to anxieties about the complicity of architecture as a practice, a profession, and a discourse during the years of dictatorship and war. The aim is not simply a reception history of the Bauhaus and the “functionalist” position in the third quarter of the twentieth century, but rather to develop a different way of understanding the political stakes of architecture in postwar West Germany. At issue are the attempts to find adequate objects of discourse that allowed for matters of concern to a later architectural culture to be identified, elaborated, and analyzed. The vicissitudes of the Bauhaus as a legacy reveal much about the development of a postwar public sphere and the (always problematic) attempts to make issues of architecture and design the site of the public production of knowledge. They were talking about homes for mine workers now, about new settlements near the slag heaps, and an expert had calculated how many square meters each occupant needed, and a second expert had determined how cheaply the walls could be made. Korodin [from the CDU] owned stock in the mining company. The workers dug out the coal, and somehow their labours appeared in Korodin’s bank account.5 What is notable about Bloch’s address is its grand historical sweep. Bloch traces the emergence of what he calls the present “latecapitalist rat-race and alienation,” the general “train-station character of our existence.”6 It is a well-known tale. He starts with the way ornament was implicated in the class dynamic of the Gründerzeit or Gilded Age, where the petty bourgeoisie and the parvenus imitated the ruling class; he sees in the work of Adolf Loos a valid critique of the abuse of architectural form, a critique that was “partially indebted to socialism,” but one that stayed in the realm of style.7 The asceticism of “functional form” (Zweckform) became a style itself, one that lost its connection to its moral and political origins and itself became a brand new, functional fig leaf for social relations that had hardly changed. He pleads for a renewal of ornament—not of the rote figures of traditional decoration but as “formative fantasy” (bildende Phantasie). This fantasy could be reunited with the undeniable fantasy behind modern technology, a sublation of different aspects of modernity that could lead to a built environment, and a social order, that would be more humane. It is an extraordinary essay—“grand Bloch music” is what Adorno called his friend’s philosophy—but what chord, one might ask,

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would Bloch have struck with this audience?8 References to the present are vague and unspecific; and the reference points of his account were very old indeed. To say “we are still stuck … in the Gründerzeit” was to make a valid point, but it is hard to imagine that many of his listeners had this period in recent memory.9 The bases of Bloch’s history were the architectural fashions (Stilmoden), the search for a true style, the breakthrough of Kandinsky and the Blaue Reiter, Adolf Loos and Paul Scheerbart, all matters more than a half-century old. And though postwar architects were keen to reestablish connections with prewar history, Bloch goes back to the time before World War I. Indeed, much of his argument, and many of his formulations, had already appeared in the first edition of his Spirit of Utopia (Geist der Utopie) from 1918. Bloch does not address the specificity of the fifteen-year-old Federal Republic and its culture. For all the actuality of Bloch as a father-figure for the new left, this must have sounded like a dusty history lesson. In any case, his address seems to have had few echoes in later architectural discussions. Adorno’s “Functionalism Today” is the more ambitious contribution to the conference; as an intellectual performance, it is a tour de force. Adorno excuses himself for going beyond his own métier, that of music; but he claims a direct kinship with the Sachlichkeit of the Bauhaus and the Werkbund through his involvement with Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School of music. He begins by breaking down the distinction between ornament and function by drawing it through a historical dialectic. Function, he says, is not only external but is first and foremost a matter of immanent, artistic function, within the logic of the work itself. And what was once functional can become, internally, unnecessary, superfluous, indeed ornamental, when its logic is no longer necessary to internal coherence. The functional and the functionless are historically intertwined. He seems here to allude to Semper when he writes of ornament as “scars of superseded modes of production”; the nonfunctional here is given a new valence as the “sublimation” of function.10 Nor is the inherent functionlessness of the autonomous work of art in modernity in any way “ornamental,” itself being a silent protest against the lowest common denominator of function as domination—of nature, of classes, of humans. Adorno continues to break down distinctions and interweave them anew. Function is not always technical, but also social. Rationality would include them; any other sort of “function” is an illusion. And yet society itself is irrational, though not in a way that can be corrected by the narrowly conceived instrumental rationality around which the problematic of architecture has come, he says, to turn. Functionalism represents the worst of both worlds: having become degraded to a “style” as consistent

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and false as any previous one; and in its narrow attention to purpose, it has become something “monotonous, meager, narrowly practical.”11 Functional form has transformed dialectically from rational to utterly irrational. The supposed opposition of technique and fantasy, discipline and freedom, is similarly collapsed. To fulfill a function without reducing the subject to a function of it, any design must focus on the surplus, the Mehr, must go beyond function, material, and technique: “Fantasy means: innervating this ‘more.’ ”12 An object, free and for the free subject, comes from the process of “finding an answer to the wordless question that material and forms pose in the mute language of the thing.”13 As ever, Adorno circles around the unnamable, the utopian, a truth just beyond reach and even more beyond words. As long as the object is bound by the petrified logic of the commodity, its abstraction, any uses it serves can never escape the system based on domination. The only hope is fantasy, the nonuseful, or the useful for uses not yet named, one that can reveal other functions and make objects human. But the current state is far from this; Adorno sees no easy solution: “[N]othing is so aesthetically unbearable as the present form of Function, enslaved to its opposite and deformed by it to the core.”14 There is much more to be said about this essay. What is relevant here is again the problem of anachronism. While claiming to react to the “Wiederaufbaustil,” his reference points are Loos, the Jugendstil, the Bauhaus. These were history (the only contemporary architect mentioned by name is Hans Scharoun). If Bloch’s account has what could be called a historic center of gravity of perhaps 1910, Adorno’s does not extend much beyond 1930; what he speaks about was hardly “Functionalism Today.” And furthermore, what he offers is hardly an adequate analysis of the architecture of the earlier “New Building” (Neues Bauen): Adorno’s critique would apply to a very small sector of the architecture of the heroic days of functionalism; it is in fact a mere caricature of it. The caricature of functionalism, of the Bauhaus style, and the criticism of contemporary architecture by means of it was a sensitive issue, a sore point for architects of the postwar period. When, for example, the sociologist and long-time friend of the Werkbund Alfred Weber inadvertently touched this raw nerve, he was quickly put in his place. The occasion was the second of the prominent Darmstadt Colloquia, one organized largely by Werkbund members on the topic of “Man and Space.” Weber attacked the assumptions of architecture as living machine, disparaging it as “applied hygiene,” as polemically uninviting, purely intellectual; he attacked its limited palate of “damned white,” what he characterized as its disingenuous claims for purity, and its putative intention of being nothing more than “functional building.” He made exception only for Otto Bartning’s postwar churches,

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dismissing the rest of the architecture as he did the new plans for the United Nations headquarters in New York, as “upright cigar boxes.”15 Weber was very nearly shouted down.16 A representative of the younger generation, Hermann Mäckler, returned the attack: “Herr Professor Weber really doesn’t know … much about what’s been built in the last few years. … What he’s attacking is the form and color of the twenties.” He put paid similarly to characterizations of contemporary architectural space as “hard,” “crystalline” or “cool.”17 Weber backed down, but the problem here was not simply a misunderstanding of modern and contemporary architecture. In fact, this well-intentioned and relatively well-informed sociologist reveals something very important about the architecture of the Wiederaufbau. The issue was not one of practice, of style or form. What the incident suggests is that there was no stable discourse by which to discuss and debate the built environment as a matter of public concern, a discourse like the one that had earlier centered on the Bauhaus. We find many examples of this problem, and the most prominent one concerns precisely the Bauhaus. It was Rudolf Schwarz, one of the most talented and articulate architects of the period, who sank into the quicksand of this shifting and unstable discursive terrain, sparking a thoroughly unproductive controversy, the so-called “Bauhaus Debate.”18 In 1953, Schwarz attacked the legacy of the school, seeing the strict formal guidelines and method he associated with it as a form of “anti-intellectual terrorism,” one he found as dictatorial as the strictures of the “thousandyear Reich.”19 Now at one level this makes no sense at all: an architect who worked in the modernist mode attacked what had emerged as the very image of modernism. It reeked of personal rancor, but was not. In fact, his attack was less on the architectural practice of the school than the way it set the terms of architectural debate: he criticizes not so much the Bauhaus per se as what he called “the Bauhaus literati.”20 His objection was that architects were forced not to design, but to speak, in a certain way: not in “German, but in the jargon of the Communist International.”21 The Bauhäusler “didn’t want a dialog, but a dictatorship.”22 We should attend carefully to the title of his article, a quote from Goethe: “Make things, Artist, don’t talk” (Bilde Künstler, rede nicht). It is unfortunate that he did not follow his own advice; as it transpired, any attack on the legacy of the Bauhaus was, at the time, impossible. The Bauhaus had come to stand synechdochically for much that had been demonized during the years of fascism and war. But it is important that Schwarz’s concerns were not stylistic but about the terms of architectural debate, the way architecture would be discussed. The fact that

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talking was a problem is clear sign of the instability of the discursive conditions, the inability of architects and commentators to find clear reference points, a set of concepts agreed upon, a way of making architecture understandable, part of public discussion, an area that could be discussed by nonexperts. Now there were clear and identifiable discourses of architecture at the time. Modernism and the Bauhaus were assimilated into a cold-war ideology and cultural politics that promoted figures such as Walter Gropius as democratic, Western, and free; and many of the discussions referred to here are suffused with this cold-war rhetoric.23 It has also been established how architects compromised by successful careers in the Third Reich managed to reposition themselves, institutionally and discursively, as experts with specialized knowledge devoid of politics and ideology who were exclusively qualified to make valid statements about cities and their reconstruction, buildings and their forms.24 But beyond these institutions, governmental and professional, with their specific and overlapping protocols for sense and legitimacy, there were other reasons to talk. For architecture to be discussed by an informed public, for it to be an area of life over which a public could form opinions, which they could influence and integrate into their experience, there similarly needed to be a stable set of terms on which all could agree. Like all other matters of general concern, architecture needs to be the site of a public production of knowledge and politics; and we have clear indications that this could not happen in the early years of the Federal Republic. And this perhaps explains the despair of Wolfgang Koeppen’s fictional SPD parliamentarian Keetenheuve from The Hothouse (Das Treibhaus), his novel of Bonn in the early years of the Federal Republic. The issues Keetenheuven raises, registering so quickly the tremors of contemporary architectural politics, are urgent but irreducible to common denominators, inassimilable to the new, shifting, and suspect language of bourgeois democracy, opaque to history but devoid of any convincing vision of the future. They accepted the proposals of the experts; they approved the minimum expenditure, the minimum number of square meters, the minimum dwelling.25 Back to the Bauhaus, to “functionalism,” to the caricatures of Weber, Adorno, even Bloch, caricatures that were clearly inadequate but remarkably stubborn and persistent. The point that needs to be made here is that the caricature was not entirely incorrect but represents one form in which architecture could be represented in public. “Bauhaus

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Functionalism” was a myth—unnuanced and largely incorrect—but the myth as a historical fact had a profound reality. Indeed, one could describe “functionalism” not as a style, an approach, even a stable or identifiable practice of architecture, but as a specific historical way in which architecture found a place in knowledge, politics and public discussion. I have traced elsewhere the way architecture before World War I was a stable object of discourse, one fit into a totality defined as culture, one spoken about by a subject who saw himself as bourgeois, as a consumer and not a producer, one who sought access to a totality defined as culture.26 The terms now seem odd and foreign, but they allowed the experience of a specific public to be described and analyzed at a high level; they enabled both debate and consensus. The public discourse was one that included prominent economists, sociologists and politicians; its site was cultural reviews and writings on architecture addressed to a public, such as the important yearbooks (Jahrbücher) published by the Deutscher Werkbund. In these, the objects of discussion concerned less statics and plumbing than “spirit,” “style,” “types,” and “culture.” We find later examples of writing of this kind, but, as a discourse conferring legitimacy and existing in symbiosis with professional and bureaucratic institutions, it died with the Wilhelmine period. Though there were certainly institutional, educational and bureaucratic continuities with the postwar period, this way of speaking disappeared as an effective public language. A period of instability followed. Certain architects in the late 1910s and early 1920s retreated into small magazines with a limited circulation, discussions that were considerably less public. The objects of knowledge were also unstable: was it a new man? a new culture? socialism?27 As young architects became successful and gained bureaucratic positions, their language turned to matters that were measurable and quantifiable. These matters were always important for architects, but now they became the public face of the avant-garde. It was a positivist discourse that developed at the same time as the professionalization of the avantgarde and the development of the international lobbying organization Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM). The language of planned economies, of statistical matters of living standards and physical requirements, all this now served as the public (and not merely bureaucratic or professional) terms of architecture. Though there were strong reactions against this discursive formation at the time, prominent members of a generation found that it served them well to confer legitimacy—served, in other words, as a form of self-representation. This convergence of architectural idiom and public face,

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3.2 Hans Leistikow, Color lithograph poster for the CIAM/Werkbund exhibition Die Wohnung für das Existenzminimum, showing plan of a two-storey house in the Siedlung Praunheim, Frankfurt am Main

temporary and shaky though it was, was an important achievement. But it had an afterlife in defining the Bauhaus and the Neues Bauen, as a style and a set of personnel for many years. Thus Adorno’s elision of the Existenzminimum (“minimum dwelling” or “subsistence living,” the subject of the second congress of the CIAM in Frankfurt, 1929) and functionalism: Practical form can only lead to freedom if it sheds this fundamental barbarism, if it ceases to subject the human, whose needs 69

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it is meant to serve, to the sadistic jabs of the sharp edges, the meanly calculated rooms, staircases and so on. Nearly every consumer has felt painfully for himself the impracticality of the ruthlessly practical.28 Yes, this was a caricature; but Adorno’s elision of functionalism and positivist planning was a response to the carefully crafted discursive position of architecture in the second half of the 1920s, to the way it found a convincing and seemingly lasting place in knowledge, politics and public discussion. He thought he could see right through the whole thing: it was full of poison and microbes. How were these settlements any different from the National Socialist settlements for the large families they wanted, or from the SA and SS colonies, only cheaper, smaller, grimmer and shabbier? And when you looked at the blueprints, it was the same Nazi style they were still building in, and when you looked at the names of the architects, it was the Nazi architects who were still building.29 Such a self-evident way of relating practice to a public was always embattled, but it simply did not exist after the Second World War. Consider the situation around 1950. When Hans Schwippert presented his project for a high school at the Darmstadt Colloquium (Darmstädter Gespräch) in 1951, we see this uneasy relation of form to language. The architecture is, we would say, International Style; others would have said “functionalist” or “Bauhaus.” It is an unornamented architecture of flat roofs, clearly exposed

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3.3 Hans Schwippert, Project for a high school in Darmstadt, 1951. From Bartning, Mensch und Raum

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grid of the reinforced concrete frame, and nonhierarchical repeated modules, a logical rectangle around two courtyards. He contrasts his “massive form” (große Form) with Scharoun’s “loose form” (Auflösung) for another school project, bringing in the terms Auflockerung (loosening or dispersal) and Gliederung (structure) that would inform architectural discussions, but the rest of his description sounds very strange. The rhetoric is not cold and technical, but refers to the “creative community” he tries to create with his design; he tries to create here an “inner community of togetherness.” This is not an education machine, but instead a “monastery” that will create a union of “the teachers, the school, the whole.”30 On the same occasion, Franz Schuster—like Schwippert, later to build at the 1957 Interbau building exhibition in the Berlin Hansaviertel—presented a functionalist design for a kindergarten. The day before, he had framed his contribution to the “Man and Space” discussions in tones pathetic and expressionist. The times, he wrote, “will recreate the ties to those nearest to us, to the Volk, to the community, to humanity, to the unnamable, which will help us overcome the hopeless isolation and the homelessness of man.”31 In 1948, Schuster had published his The Style of our Time (Der Stil unserer Zeit), where he wrote about architecture using the well-worn figure of the symphony: Those who have particular abilities must not stifle the others, or annihilate them … What each of these talented individuals brings … is not a credit to him alone. It is one’s own choice to sit at the drafting table. What we achieve will follow a plan that arises out of the strictest order and rules. Like the most free of all arts, music, the model for all others, the work of the individual will fall in line with the meaning of the whole.32 When Schuster quoted from his own book, the response included some applause but even more nervousness and interruptions. The closeness of his rhetoric to that of the Third Reich obviously made his audience nervous. Whatever the architect’s designs, whatever his politics, this was obviously not an effective way of discussing architectural concerns in public. To get a sense of how architectural discussions developed, we need to look briefly at specifically public representations and debates: the famous Darmstadt Colloquia, with prominent intellectuals, that were broadcast live and published in full; publications of the Werkbund and their conferences, which were widely reported in the press; the sort of radio discussions that later appeared in book form; and other publicistic interventions.

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The first Darmstadt Colloquium, on “The Image of Man in our Time,” did not thematize architecture per se but is important because of the controversy surrounding the keynote speaker, the art historian Hans Sedlmayr.33 Sedlmayr had been a convinced National Socialist and had criticized modernist art from this perspective during the regime (though, to be fair, he had taken modernism far more seriously than most of his persuasion). After the war, his position did not change in content—his talk in Darmstadt was on “The Dangers of Modern Art”—but the terms on which his argument was based were now explicitly Christian, in particular Catholic. But this change of reference points did not work; his criticisms, when they began uncomfortably to echo the Nazi demonization of modernism as “degenerate,” prompted whistles, heckling and calls of “Heil Hitler!”. The abstract artist Willi Baumeister fanned the flames by laconically claiming to have nothing against “former [Nazi] party members.” The event was a fiasco, and this despite the fact that many shared Sedlmayr’s position, and indeed his dubious past.34 To prevent such incidents, later colloquia were chaired with iron discipline (so much so that it was joked that they had become “Darmstadt Monologs”). But it was clear that new languages had to be found; neither those of the right nor those of the left seemed to work, and it was clear that history had be negotiated with considerable care. This was no mere matter of etiquette or rhetoric. Instead it seems that the conceptual figures and detours involved with the avoidance of history would come to be constitutive to the possibilities of thought for several years, and occasionally in productive ways. The next colloquium in Darmstadt, in 1951, was on architecture; called “Man and Space,” it was organized by the Werkbund and accompanied by a major exhibition. The keynote address was by Martin Heidegger; this was where he first presented his important work “Building Thinking Dwelling.” Heidegger’s point is well known: that in Germanic languages the word Bauen emerges, etymologically, from the word for dwelling. His conclusions are also familiar: 1. 2. 3.

Building is really dwelling. Dwelling is the manner in which mortals are on the earth. Building as dwelling unfolds into the building that cultivates growing things and the building that erects buildings.35

This is not the place to delve into Heidegger’s philosophy of Dasein, or, as Adorno puts it, his “jargon of authenticity.”36 What should be clear, though, is that as a contribution to discussions of the built environment in 1951, this is an extraordinary intervention. Indeed Heidegger refers to the

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context of contemporary architecture: Wohnen or dwelling, he says, does not simply mean that we have accommodation. In today’s housing shortage even this much is reassuring and to the good; residential buildings do indeed provide shelter; the accommodation today may even be well planned, easy to keep, attractively cheap, open to air, light, and sun, but—does this housing in itself hold any guarantee that dwelling occurs in them?37 And later: What is the state of dwelling in our precarious age? On all sides we hear talk about the housing shortage, and with good reason … We try to fill the need by providing housing, by promoting the building of housing, through regulation of the architectural industry. But: However hard and bitter, however hampering and threatening the lack of housing remains, the real plight of dwelling does not lie in the mere lack of housing. The real plight of dwelling is indeed older than the two world wars with their destruction. … The real plight of dwelling lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell. What if man’s homelessness consisted in this, that man still does not even think of the real plight of dwelling as the plight? Yet as soon as man gives thought to his homelessness, it is a misery no longer. Rightly considered and kept well in mind, it is the sole summons that calls mortals into their dwelling.38 For someone whose past bore remarkable similarities to Sedlmayr’s, such seemingly reassuring words sound disingenuous indeed. Only one member of the audience—Dolf Sternberger—saw fit to invoke the realities of the “the deportations, the resettlements, the refugees in their camps, the expulsions and the displaced persons.”39 But drawing such a grand arc over the horrendous realities of the immediate past of so many millions did not, apparently, seem offensive. Even Hans Schwippert fell into the metaphysical vocabulary by which architecture was now discussed, speaking immediately after Heidegger not of the needs of housing but biblically of the “commandment to build” (Gebot des Bauens).40 Hans Scharoun too was deeply affected.41 (This was only a year after the Sedlmayr debacle; it is indicative of the momentum that rehabilitation and restoration had achieved in the Western zones.)

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Heidegger’s address to the architects is emblematic in three ways of architectural discussions for the decade and a half before Adorno and Bloch addressed a similar audience. First, as we have seen, history and its specificities had no place in these discussions. It is in fact notable how few references there are to particular buildings of the past; and this is in stark contrast to architectural discussions before and after World War I. And as history disappeared as a basis for these discussions, its place was taken by anthropology. Ambitious statements about the nature of an undifferentiated and generalized human being replaced references to historical, political, economic and social specificities. When history was invoked, it was the history of the species, not of a war-torn Europe. José Ortega y Gasset also spoke at the Man and Space colloquium, on “The Myth of Man Behind Technology.”42 It is not the horizon of war and destruction that situates his discussion of technology, but the necessity of technique for a man situated as a vulnerable species in a hostile nature. Man is referred to as a biologically disadvantaged species (Mängelwesen), echoing the philosophical anthropology of Arnold Gehlen and Helmuth Plessner and biologists such as Alfred Portmann.43 Indeed, if there is a defining characteristic of the discussions of architecture and design in the 1950s, it is that the subject is not style and culture, as it was before World War I, and not social housing, as in the 1920s, but man in an abstract, or at least ahistorical, sense. Speaking on “The Tasks of the Werkbund” at the yearly meeting of the group in 1953, the architect Heinrich Lauterbach declared the aim to be the “continued attempt of each of us to achieve the human integration of the things around us into a proper form” and the overcoming of the present “unintegrated reality of man.”44 These habits of thought even characterize the writings that emerged from the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, otherwise known for a more hard-nosed approach to technology. Speaking before the Werkbund in 1956, Ulm docent and philosopher Max Bense, who helped introduce cybernetics and information technology to the increasingly technocratic Ulm, situates his approach within these coordinates: The premises for an understanding of the position of man in the civilization and culture of the technical world are to be found in the scientific principles of modern anthropology—that in his evolution, man emerged from the originally closed functional circuit of animal instinct and security and began to develop an open functional system of information and therefore a lack of security.45 The second important shift signaled by Heidegger resonates in

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3.4 Reyner Banham and Martin Heidegger at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm, in 1959

these passages: it is the movement of the centre of gravity from building (Bauen) or form-giving (Gestaltung) to its phenomenological counterpart, dwelling or Wohnen. We can describe this as a sort of centrifugal conception of an object into a larger world, or a building considered not in terms of the qualities of the object but its creation of an environment. “Man and Space” came to be the rubric not for discussions of the practical essentials of living but for anthropological, poetic or phenomenological explorations by the likes of Otto Friedrich Bollnow, student of Heidegger and, according to Adorno, a jargonist of authenticity.46 But we should not simply dismiss this tendency. The reversal of container and contained, the necessity to think the one in terms of the other, became a basic trope of design discourse in a thoroughly productive way. Its repetition is noteworthy. “Thinking about design,” wrote Wilhelm Wagenfeld in an article in Werk und Zeit of 1957 … is less a matter of the object itself than its purpose and function, less about the form than the space encompassed by it. It’s not the handle of a teapot that is important, but the hand that grasps it; it’s not the glass that closes the circle it draws us into, but rather the wine that we’re drinking.47 This was not just a commonplace, but a pivot or fulcrum of the kind of thought that emerged under the discursive constraints of the time. Listen to two statements by Schwippert. In the first, he echoes Heidegger and stays within the limits of his thought, limits masked by the timeless and mysteriously resonant grammar of the intransitive verb: We made a good drinking glass. With this glass we wanted to help people lead a better, more beautiful life. But then … we began to fancy that we not only could improve people’s lives

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with the help of this glass, but that the glass itself had the power to improve the people. A fallacy … We need to grasp the human situation and return to the original humility of our task. But what happened? Well, we made good glasses … but we no longer know the secret of drinking. Much good housing has been built and furnished, but we no longer know what dwelling is.48 The second continues with the image now so familiar to us but reveals the extraordinary, indeed constitutive potential of the trope of reversal introduced by Heidegger: In fifty years we’ve managed to make quite respectable drinking glasses… But in the meantime two things have happened. First, we’ve forgotten … how to appreciate what’s inside; and second, the wine’s got worse and worse, and we can no longer drink the water. … What good is the glass now? We’ve often wondered … if we should be speaking about using, and not making. In the end it’s probably the case that culture is determined by the manner of consuming as much as by the manner of producing, and that this use needs a sort of education that is utterly lost under the terror or hurried innovation and the goading of aesthetic novelty.49 We could put it this way: if an anthropology of design was, in some ways, a response to the problems of a sociology and a history of it, when the limits of anthropology were reached, the path seemed to lead quite quickly to a politics. The cramped and contorted thought of Heidegger, which turned the material social world inside out into meta­ physics, provided the impetus to address what he had so fastidiously avoided. Heidegger had identified a problem—dwelling—but could not conceive the tools by which to analyze it. By 1959, and with increasing speed thereafter, those engaged in architectural debates filled in the gaps. The problem, they said quite straightforwardly, was the restorative capitalism of the West German economic miracle, the ugly economy of the young Federal Republic. It was an important committee, it had important questions to discuss, it was supposed to build homes for the people (den Menschen). But how complicated that was! … questions of the War Compensation Act, of the availability of capital, of tax legislation were to be borne in mind, the effect on interest rates had to be considered, the accommodation of displaced persons, the 76

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allowance for bomb victims, the rights of property owners, the care of the crippled, the laws of the Federal states and those of the cities might be infringed upon, and how could the poor be provided for if no one was willing to make any sacrifices, how could one expropriate anything when the Constitution explicitly affirmed private ownership? 50 The sudden political turn of the formative trope of postwar architectural discourse is extraordinary. Things began in the Werkbund, with the 1959 Werkbund congress on the destruction of the countryside (Die große Landzerstörung) which identified the problems of city planning in the laws about land ownership. The freedom to dispose of land in one’s possession was an untouchable aspect of the capitalist mirror West Germany held up to its communist counterpart; but it led to land speculation, the draining of the cities and the inability to plan them properly, to rising housing costs and the commodification of domestic space. It seems that the Heideggerian trope encouraged a thoroughgoing social and phenomenological analysis of the once reified categories of design or building by means of the problem of dwelling. Public discussions of architecture now bore titles such as The Art of Being at Home (Die Kunst zu Hause zu sein), with contributions by such figures as the new Werkbund coordinator, the sociologist Hans Paul Bahrdt, Ernst Bloch, and Alexander Mitscherlich, whose essay was titled, more clearly, “On the Impossibility of Being at Home.”51 Mitscherlich’s crucial pamphlet Our Inhospitable Cities (Die Unwirtlichkeit unserer Städte) now focused not on what architects could or should do, or what they had done wrong, but instead on what they could not do under the present social system.52 In his contribution to a symposium with the Adornian title Damaged Life (Das beschädigte Leben), the young Ulrich Conrads explicitly invoked Heidegger in turning to consider the material and political conditions of contemporary architecture, conditions of “unreason.”53 This was again a turn to a public, to what they might have hoped represented the public sphere. Architects had not only found a stable public discourse, a set of concepts and objects by which citizens could make sense of the built environment and conceive solutions to problems identified, but they understood their work as precisely public relations work. Die Kunst zu Hause zu sein was, like many other anthologies, published in the wake of the public broadcast of the contributions, in this case over the Hessisches Rundfunk. Mitscherlich, Bahrdt, Ulrich Conrads and others joined in issuing the Bochum Declaration (Bochumer Erklärung), which they presented to the opposition Social Democratic Party (SPD).54 And the

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3.5 Ulrich Conrads (?) speaking at the Bochumer Erklärung, 16 September 1965. Willy Brandt is seated in the first row, third from left. From Hammer, Die Bochumer Erklärung

architects turned now explicitly against earlier strategies in which architects claimed expert professional knowledge. In Werk und Zeit we read of the “danger that these questions will be judged by the politicians and bureaucrats as to be a matter for the relevant experts … We think it is worth trying to present the issue of the destruction of the countryside as a matter that transcends professional expertise, as an issue of fundamental importance in a broad cultural and political circles.”55 It was thus an extraordinary moment in 1965, when Adorno and Bloch addressed the Werkbund; indeed it was less than six weeks after the Bochumer Erklärung, and five weeks after the bitter parliamentary election lost by the SPD. Adorno and Bloch spoke about objects, not the environment around; they spoke about history, not the demands of the present; they expressed “unease,” not rage; they called for the experts instead of sending them away; they offered philosophy and not politics. They would have sounded, I think, very anachronistic indeed. We could end by trying to characterize this moment, by trying to understand what seems to have been the shared fate of architecture and philosophy. In architecture, the famous glass ran over as the whole dialectic of object and contents seemed to challenge the very existence of its institutional forms. For a brief moment, objects evaporated as process came to the fore; the centripetal concerns of the object, of design, seemed less urgent than the centrifugal consideration of the world around it. The traditional expert knowledge of the architect and designer looked superseded. It was a moment when a renegotiation of architecture as practice, as knowledge, and its relation to society seemed possible. The Werkbund seemed on the verge of dissolution. In 1969 it changed the subtitle of its organ, Werk und Zeit, from Monthly Journal of the German Werkbund (Monatszeitung des Deutschen Werkbunds) to Monthly Journal of Environmental Design (Monatszeitung für Umweltgestaltung).56 The organizational form seemed to have been burst, from architecture to the world. In 1971, the older generation no longer felt it could tolerate the direction in which

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3.6 (left and right) Walter Gropius and protesting students at the Bauhaus exhibition, Stuttgart, 1968

the Werkbund was going; Hans Schwippert, Hans Schmitt-Rost, Wend Fischer, and Richard Scherpe left the journal.57 Perhaps the limits of architecture were coming into view. But architecture continued. For a moment, the Werkbund and the legacy of the Bauhaus seemed redundant, but they lived on, we could say, because the moment to realize their goals was missed. The social organization of knowledge, building and politics were strong enough to resist their complete reorganization, or new ones could not be conceived. The logic and momentum of discourse ran up against the dead weight of institutions. At this point, the Bauhaus reappeared as just such dead weight. When a depoliticized version of the school was presented in a massive fiftieth anniversary exhibition in Stuttgart, students of the sinking Ulm Hochschule für Gestaltung nearby called for the demands of the present to take precedence over the celebration of a closed history. Gropius appeared, expressing solidarity but warning the students not to allow politics to take over the now shrinking concerns of the object. Architecture and revolution were again shown to be mutually exclusive. And this moment, undefined and frightening, when much balanced on the edge of a knife, turned into the beginning of postmodernism, instead of any of the other beginnings it could have been. The goal of the Bauhaus—the attempt to reorganize life, with all its political resonances, to reconfigure the relation of objects to practice—stayed put in the past, as a figure of the alternative to a history clearly gone wrong. Or it remained in the future. For what it is worth, even on the left this seemed prudent. Habermas rejected the “left fascism” of Rudi Dutschke for rational debate.58 And Adorno too. It is the introduction to his Negative Dialectics to which I have alluded: “Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed.”59 When confronted with his own students who sought to realize his teachings but threatened to unleash energies of revolt that he had seen, in his own lifetime, so horribly abused, he clearly felt the moment had already

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3.7 Max Scheler, Removal of protesting students from the Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt, 1969

been missed or had not yet arrived. On 31 January 1969, he found his own workplace, Hermann Mäckler and Alois Giefer’s Institute for Social Research, overflowing with the messy and ill-thought-through energies of revolt in the form of 76 protesting students who refused to leave.60 Though Adorno cared little for the building, he felt it needed to be emptied. He called in the police, and he stayed with philosophy.

Notes   1 Wolfgang Koeppen, Das Treibhaus (1953; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 123.   2 Theodor W. Adorno, “Funktionalismus heute,” in Ohne Leitbild: Parva Aesthetica (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1967), 104. A translation of Adorno’s essay by Jane O. Newman and John H. Smith appears in Oppositions no. 17 (Summer 1979): 31–41 and is reprinted in Neil Leach, ed., Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 1997), 6–19. I have used my own translations here.   3 Adorno, “Funktionalismus heute,” 114.   4 Bloch, “Bildung, Ingenieurform, Ornament,” Werk und Zeit 14, no. 11/12 (1965): 2. Bloch’s essay, translated by Newman and Smith, similarly appears in Oppositions no. 17 (Summer 1979), 45–51, and in Leach, Rethinking Architecture, 43–50; again, translations here are my own.   5 Koeppen, Das Treibhaus, 122.   6 Bloch, “Bildung, Ingenieurform, Ornament,” 3.   7 Ibid., 2.   8 Theodor W. Adorno, “Große Blochmusik,” Neue Deutsche Hefte 69 (1960/61): 14–26.

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  9 Bloch, “Bildung, Ingenieurform, Ornament,” 2. 10 Adorno, “Funktionalismus heute,” 107. 11 Ibid., 114. 12 Ibid., 118. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 124. 15 Otto Bartning, ed., Mensch und Raum: Darmstädter Gespräch 1951 (Darmstadt: Neue Darmstädter Verlagsanstalt, 1952), 96–7. 16 The published protocols record some “applause” but far more “laughter,” “whistles,” “objections,” and statements of “Get out! Stop!” Ibid., 97. 17 Ibid., 97–8. 18 On the “Bauhaus-Debatte,” see Paul Betts, The Authority of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 85; Greg Castillo, “The Bauhaus in Cold War Germany,” in Bauhaus Culture: From Weimar to the Cold War, ed. Kathleen James-Chakraborty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 188–9; Ulrich Conrads, Magdalena Droste, Winfried Nerdinger and Hilde Strohl, eds, Die Bauhaus-Debatte 1953: Dokumente einer verdrängten Kontroverse (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1994); and Wolfgang Pehnt, Rudolf Schwarz 1897–1961: Architekt einer anderen Moderne (Ostfildern: Hatje, 1997), 137–42. 19 Rudolf Schwarz, “ ‘Bilde Künstler, rede nicht’: Eine (weitere) Betrachtung zum Thema Bauen und Schreiben,” Baukunst und Werkform 6, no. 1 (January 1953), 9–17, reprinted in Die Bauhaus-Debatte 1953, 34–47, here page 35. 20 Die Bauhaus-Debatte 1953, 35. 21 Ibid., 46. 22 Ibid., 45. 23 See Paul Betts, “The Bauhaus as Cold War Legend: West German Modernism Revisited,” German Politics and Society 14, no. 2 (1996): 75–100; Betts, The Authority of Everyday Objects; and Castillo, “The Bauhaus in Cold War Germany.” 24 See Werner Durth’s magisterial Deutsche Architekten: Biographische Verflechtungen, 1900– 1970 (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1986). 25 Koeppen, Das Treibhaus, 124. 26 In The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture Before the First World War (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996). 27 See my “Form follows Fetish: Adolf Behne and the Problem of Sachlichkeit,” Oxford Art Journal 21, no. 2 (1998): 72–6. 28 Adorno, “Funktionalismus heute,” 110–11. 29 Koeppen, Das Treibhaus, 125. 30 Bartning, Mensch und Raum, 173–81. 31 Ibid., 120. 32 Ibid., 123. 33 On Sedlmayr, see Norbert Schneider, “Hans Sedlmayr (1896–1984),” in Altmeister moderner Kunstgeschichte, ed. H. Dilly (Berlin: Reimer, 1990), 267–88. 34 Hans Gerhard Evers, ed., Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit: Darmstädter Gespräch 1950 (Darmstadt: Neue Darmstädter Verlagsanstalt, 1950), 59, 135. 35 Martin Heidegger, “Bauen Wohnen Denken,” in Mensch und Raum, 74; “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 148. Karsten Harries discusses Heidegger’s paper in the context of the Darmstädter Gespräch in The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 152–66. 36 Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. K. Tarnowski and F. Will (1964; London:

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Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973). Despite Adorno’s rejection of Heidegger’s Seinsphilosophie, it overlaps frequently with aspects of Adorno’s own: see Silke Kapp, “Asyl für Obdachlose, oder Zwischen Frankfurter Küche und Frankfurter Schule,” Zeitschrift für kritische Theorie no. 18/19 (2004). 37 Bartning, Mensch und Raum, 72; Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 145–6 (translation modified). 38 Bartning, Mensch und Raum, 84; Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 161 (translation modified). 39 Bartning, Mensch und Raum, 126. 40 Ibid., 86. 41 A brief but balanced discussion of Scharoun’s interest in Heidegger’s thought appears in Peter Blundell Jones, Hans Scharoun (London: Phaidon, 1995), 136. See also J. Christoph Bürkle, Hans Scharoun (Zürich: Artemis, 1993), 96. 42 Bartning, Mensch und Raum, 111–17. 43 Ibid., 114. 44 Heinrich Lauterbach, “Über die Aufgabe des Werkbundes,” in Zwischen Kunst und Industrie: Der Deutsche Werkbund, ed. Wend Fischer (München: Die Neue Sammlung, 1975), 413–14. 45 Max Bense, “Kunst in künstlicher Welt,” Werk und Zeit 5, no. 11 (1956): 3. 46 Otto Friedrich Bollnow, Mensch und Raum (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1963). Bollnow is mentioned often in Adorno’s Jargon der Eigentlichkeit. 47 Wilhelm Wagenfeld, “Industriemesse contra Museum,” Werk und Zeit 6, no. 6 (1957), repr. in Fischer, Zwischen Kunst und Industrie, 436–37. 48 Hans Schwippert, “Warum Werkbund?,” Werk und Zeit 5, no. 5 (1956), repr. in Fischer, Zwischen Kunst und Industrie, 428. 49 Hans Schwippert, Begrüßung und Einführung zur Tagung “Die große Landzerstörung,” Werk und Zeit 8, no. 12 (1959): 1, repr. in Fischer, Zwischen Kunst und Industrie, 447. 50 Koeppen, Das Treibhaus, 120. 51 Gert Kalow, ed., Die Kunst zu Hause zu sein. Eine Senderreihe des hessischen Rundfunks (München: Piper, 1965), 147–61. 52 Alexander Mitscherlich, Die Unwirtlichkeit unserer Städte: Anstiftung zum Unfrieden (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1965). 53 Ulrich Conrads, “Städtebau zwischen Unvernunft und Hoffnung,” in Das beschädigte Leben: Diagnose und Therapie in einer Welt unabsehbarer Veränderungen, ed. A. Mitscherlich (Grenzach: Hoffmann-La Roche, 1969), 148. 54 Konrad Jule Hammer, ed., Die Bochumer Erklärung 16. September 1965 (Berlin: Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, 1965). 55 Walter Rossow, “Die ‘Landzerstörung’ und der Werkbund,” Werk und Zeit 11, no. 3 (1962): 3. 56 Werk und Zeit 18, no. 7 (1969): 1. 57 “Veränderungen in der Herausgeberschaft und in der Redaktion,” Werk und Zeit 20, no. 7 (1991): 1. 58 Rolf Wiggershaus, Die Frankfurter Schule, 3. Aufl. (München: dtv, 1991), 687. 59 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (1966; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 3. 60 Wiggershaus, Die Frankfurter Schule, 702; Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno. Eine Biographie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), 705–6.

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Chapter 4

Pedagogic Objects Josef Albers, Greenbergian Modernism, and the Bauhaus in America Jeffrey Saletnik

To reject mechanical or habitual application is to promote inductive studies recognizing practice before theory, trial and error before insight. In short, we believe in learning by experience, which naturally lasts longer than anything learned by reading or hearing only. Josef Albers1 As a teacher, Josef Albers encouraged a relational approach to material that prioritized active engagement with matter through comparative and counterintuitive applications: he stressed “observing eyes, flexible minds, and skilled hands.”2 Such activity starkly contrasts with conceptions that one’s medium possesses inherent qualities, the properties of which it is the task of the artist to elucidate. The sensory-integrated practices of Bauhaus preliminary instruction, although still essential to the training of artists and designers, were denuded of value in their American context due in part to the specialized tendencies that came to dominate American art criticism following World War II. The prioritization of medium specificity common in Greenbergian art criticism posited an autonomous art object incongruent with attitudes about the functioning of creative media as propagated by Albers. Albers advanced a mode of material inquiry in his practice that viewed matter as potential; significantly, he encouraged the creation of objects that functioned pedagogically insofar as their materiality made connections beyond the work itself. As had been the case at the

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Bauhaus, Albers gave precedence to process. This was cultivated through the methods and practices of preliminary instruction, to which Albers had been exposed as a student and which he was later responsible for teaching at the Bauhaus, and which he introduced at several institutions in the United States, including Black Mountain College and Yale University.3 This essay situates Albers’s practice—and, by extension, attitudes about the functioning of objects held at the Bauhaus—in the context of key art critical values in mid-twentieth-century America, in particular those of Clement Greenberg. In comparing Albers’s critical reception to that of Barnett Newman and Hans Hofmann, it highlights not only differences in terms of how Albers and his American contemporaries were understood through a Greenbergian lens, but also how Albers’s Bauhausindebted approach to the medium and the object were supplanted by a formalist agenda to which neither he nor the Bauhaus adhered. This displacement becomes evident when one examines the inductive practices which Albers employed in the classroom and through which he expressed attitudes about the object as demonstration piece. At stake is a fundamental difference between disinterested and engaged viewing, but also a theoretical elision of practice by “medium,” which undermines the role of the Bauhaus in twentieth-century American art. As arguably the most potent voice writing about art in mid-twentieth-century America, Greenberg is unique: his criticism holds a discursive weight with which historians and critics still contend. Greenbergian notions of meaningful art practice—and responses to them—have contributed significantly to perceptions of what it means to have been a modern artist in America. Thus, while objects created by Bauhaus artists attracted some critical attention, the Bauhaus prioritization of practical experiment was largely discounted. When we consider the consequences of excluding Bauhaus practices in art critical discourse, it becomes evident that this omission was historically as significant as Walter Gropius’s overarching—perhaps even overbearing—presence in the casting of the Bauhaus in America. The effects of discursive omission also lay bare the degree to which art critical values and structures are inherently exclusionary, in particular with regard to expectations about the function of art objects, art viewing, and art making. Greenberg seldom chose to write about Albers and other Bauhaus artists and designers, a fact that is significant to the history of the school’s American reception since the art critic considered the Bauhaus— and much so-called German art—to be outside parlance on meaningful art practice. As he wrote, it was Kandinsky’s “bad luck” to have come to French modernism having “had to go through German modernism first.”4 Indeed, the Bauhaus and individuals associated with it were subjects of lesser

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critical importance in mid-twentieth-century American criticism, an absence noted by Greenberg’s foe, Harold Rosenberg, who lamented that “the twentieth century is rich in personages—the Bauhaus masters, Gertrude Stein— whose creations are rarely looked at or read.”5 More than mere antipathy toward German art, however, Bauhaus-indebted approaches to making and viewing were out of step with Greenbergian formalist values. The disinterested relationship between work and viewer implicit in Greenberg’s criticism as well as his advocacy for self-reflexive relationships between surface and support foreclosed the practice of many Bauhaus masters and students from his modernist discourse. Many Bauhaus objects required an active and engaged viewer and, in some instances, a user. And under Albers’s tutelage in particular, students were presented with the medium as a means for exploration, the boundaries of which were to be investigated toward productive ends.6 In contrast, Greenberg deemed artistic practice as a quest for discovering what was “unique in the nature of [an art’s] medium” as representing the “proper area of competence of each art.”7 To assert that the terms of Greenbergian modernism contributed to the obfuscation of the Bauhaus is meant not as a value judgment nor to claim that Greenberg’s was the only significant voice writing on art at the time, nor to oversimplify the context in which Bauhaus ideas were introduced in America. Indeed, rebuking Greenberg has been quite commonplace since the late 1960s and 1970s.8 The art criticism of Rosenberg and Meyer Schapiro was similarly influential in mid-twentieth-century America and contributed to the school’s art critical reception.9 For instance, the Bauhaus was implicated in Schapiro’s view that the “taste for industry, technology and science” in the 1920s led to an art of “coolness and mechanical control” that now seemed “less interesting and even distasteful” in light of the “artist’s active presence” upon the surfaces of contemporary abstract painting.10 And significantly, an array of forces including political attitudes toward Germany immediately preceding and during World War II, cold war anxieties about socialism, and hostility to so-called modern architecture and design guided how the Bauhaus was received in the United States.11 It is productive to isolate Greenberg in both this nexus and that of mid-twentieth-century art criticism because many of the terms that were characteristic of his criticism were similarly key concerns at the Bauhaus; the medium and materiality were essential to the pedagogic program at the design school. Yet the kinds of questions the critic asked of art were antithetical to Bauhaus practice. When Greenberg did mention the Bauhaus he invoked the word Bauhaus as value-laden catchall for “hardness,” “flat silhouettes,” and “firm contours” or—much in keeping with the neo-Kantian tenor of

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4.1 Josef Albers Variant/Adobe, Red Front, 1947, oil on Masonite®, 22 x 26 in

his criticism—objected to the notion that there was some larger content or purpose for work either produced at the school or in its wake. About Albers’s exhibitions at the Egan and Janis galleries in 1949 he wrote: Alas, Albers must be accounted another victim of Bauhaus modernism, with its doctrinism [and] its inability to rise above merely decorative motifs. It is a shame, for an original gift is present in this case that is much superior to all that. One has to regret that Albers has so rarely allowed the warmth and true plastic feeling we see in his color to dissolve the ruled rectangles in which all these potential virtues are imprisoned.12 When writing about Barnett Newman in 1952, however, the critic assumed a quite different stance, claiming that Newman’s “emphasis is predomin­ antly on color, which in his case is sensuous without being soft, and his effect is usually much warmer and more painterly” than what one expects given the geometry of his work. He continued, claiming, “Newman does not intend to startle or shock,” ultimately stating that in “the presence of these canvases one realizes immediately [my emphasis] that he is faced by major art.”13 At the Egan and Janis exhibitions Albers displayed a range of works made between the 1920s and late 1940s. Among the more recent of these, Greenberg would have seen paintings similar to Variant/Adobe, Red Front (Figure 4.1).14 The artist’s surfaces are not as rigid as Greenberg suggests. Albers’s asymmetrically arranged planes of color appear to penetrate one another, so as to obfuscate the points at which they intersect. This is not unlike what one observes in Newman’s Adam (Figure 4.2), as its bands of color move beyond the bounds of the artist’s characteristic, linear “zip.” In both paintings, one observes the transmutation of boundaries where colors meet. In the case of Albers’s work, this is achieved through the positioning and combination of color: although difficult to ascertain in 86

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black-and-white reproduction, colors often appear to be layered upon one another or transparent, yet are not; one color seems to be more saturated than another, yet the two are actually the same tone. Although Greenberg objected to the work as “merely decorative” and saw its geometry as threatening to the modernist program, Albers used this structure to demonstrate the interaction of color as relational. This interaction only became apparent upon prolonged viewing and, significantly, found meaning when one turned one’s gaze away from the painting, newly aware of the interaction of color in one’s daily experience. Newman, in contrast, aspired to achieve the sublime, specifically directing the viewer to engage his work at a close distance, so that one might be enveloped by the canvas.15 As he posted in the Betty Parsons Gallery upon the exhibition of (the then untitled) Adam and other work in 1951, “there is a tendency to look at large

4.2 Barnett Newman Adam, 1951–1952, oil on canvas, 96 x 80 in 87

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pictures from a distance. The large pictures in this exhibition are intended to be seen from a short distance.”16 Greenberg had no truck with Albers’s work insomuch as his practice itself was pedagogic and thus didactic. His frustration with Albers, however, had little to do with the artist’s teaching per se and everything to do with his art. In contrast, the critic’s overall attitude was favorable with regard to the work of Hans Hofmann, whom he acknowledged as “probably the most important art teacher of our time.”17 Greenberg’s focus remained the surface of Hofmann’s painting; as the critic wrote, “His painting is all painting; none of it publicity, mode, or literature.”18 He praised Hofmann because the artist’s views about art were in keeping with his own; indeed, they influenced his criticism.19 The artist included the following statement—replete with what would come to be known as Greenbergian language—in the 1937–1938 brochure for the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts: the organic elements of painting are the flatness of the surface used and its plastic medium, color. the pictorial development which retains the character of these elements in an equilibrium of volume and forces produces the plastic effect of “pictorial space.” “realistic space,” that of optical illusion, is contrary in its character to an instinctive use of the medium.20 Hofmann and Albers differ in terms of the intentionality of their objects: the work of the former is self-referential, whereas the work of the latter imposes itself upon the viewer—it expects that we see differently, not that we revel in its painterly effects per se. This, in part, is why Greenberg would be drawn to Hofmann, yet cast Albers as “doctrinaire.” Greenberg saw no place for pedagogic objects meant to draw one’s attention to the act of viewing, as did those produced by Albers and others affiliated with the Bauhaus.21 Rather, Greenberg saw it as his role to guide viewing habits; to serve both the artist-conduit and the disinterested viewer. Albers rendered instability, a perceptually shifting surface through his choice of color and proportion; if not these colors in this combination one would not experience the same visual effect.22 Like Variant/ Adobe, Red Front, Albers’s Homage to the Square, Black Setting (Figure 4.3) demonstrates the interaction of color. Albers shows how this combin­ ation of color creates a pulsating visual effect, as a white square appears to move to the fore, only seemingly to recede when overtaken by a cyan square before moving to the fore once again. The work exhibits an unresolvable relationship in which color remains in flux, highlighting that what one actually sees is light rather than surface. In contrast and much to 88

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4.3 Josef Albers, Homage to the Square, Black Setting, 1951, oil on Masonite®, 32 × 32 in

Greenberg’s pleasure, Hofmann utilized the properties of painting to enliven the medium, not to educate the viewer. In Hofmann’s Goliath (Figure 4.4), his so-called “push-pull” technique creates a sense of depth without employing illusion; red, yellow, and blue quadrangles appear to float above

4.4 Hans Hofmann, Goliath, 1960, oil on canvas, 841⁄8 × 60 in 89

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the surface. An array of multi-colored, brushy gestures—rendered on the same, flat picture plane—create dimension and depth. Albers does not attempt to deny that his surfaces are painted; the marks of his hand are evident. And insomuch as one looks at Hofmann’s painting, one also perceives it. But there is both an immediacy and a stasis to Hofmann’s floating quadrangles quite dissimilar to Homage to the Square, Black Setting. Unlike Albers’s play with the process of perception, Hofmann’s painting addresses problems particular to painting and is testament to the artist’s facility in manipulating material in accordance with the “plastic medium” of color and the “flatness of the surface.”23 Just as Greenberg was by no means the only art critical voice in mid-century America, Albers was not the only target of this vein of criticism. Albers’s practice, however, is an effective means of introducing a larger problem regarding the reception of the Bauhaus in America. In holding up the Bauhaus and American modernism, the Albers–Greenberg dynamic reveals a disconnection between Bauhaus-indebted practices and American art critical values. In a purely formal sense, eschewing narrative and mimesis in favor of the plastic qualities of two- and three-dimensional visual objects themselves—as could be said about the appearance of many Bauhaus objects, such as Marianne Brandt’s Tea Infuser and Strainer (Figure 2.2, page 39)—seems in keeping with Greenberg’s views insofar as they are indebted to European modernist traditions. Brandt’s design consists of a combination of basic geometric forms, and its visual vocabulary is unador­ ned. Indeed, artist-designers affiliated with the Bauhaus were likely among the unnamed “purists” to whom Greenberg made reference when he called for literature to be expunged from visual art so as to quell the dominance of narrative, which forced the nonliterary arts to “deny their own nature.”24 But while Greenberg acknowledged the “Dutch and Germans” as among those responsible for realizing the full potential of “abstract purism,” he also blamed them for consolidating it into “a school, dogma and credo,” claiming that they sterilized the expressive factors of abstraction as a result.25 For Greenberg, the powerful expressiveness of abstraction (to invoke Charles Harrison) was the formal system itself.26 Art was impotent: neither utopian nor dystopian, apolitical, and certainly lacking function. Both Bauhaus-indebted instructional methods and Greenbergian modernism involve the search for essential elements and emphasize structural and material coherence. Yet Greenberg implies that the inherent physical properties of the artistic medium should help define how artists use their material in accordance, for instance, with the flatness of the painting surface—Jackson Pollock’s splatter and Helen Frankenthaler’s stains

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correspond to the “nature” of painting.27 Thus, the medium is granted a kind of agency, such that it guides the artist in the creative act. Although a Bauhaus-indebted approach to material and materiality encourages stud­ ents to seek answers to design problems from and through an exploration of material properties, the individual, by contrast, possesses the agency to employ this knowledge to numerous ends. The “nature” of the material world does not prescribe, but rather informs its use. Yet due to the predominance of Greenberg’s critical voice, Bauhaus practices often have been received through a Greenbergian lens. Contemporary critiques of Bauhaus-indebted teaching strategies frequently invoke the terms that Greenberg brought to the forefront of mid-twentieth-century art critical discourse. It has been common to proclaim that the “medium-centered” teaching methods of the Bauhaus are obsolete, as has Thierry de Duve, who stated that teaching at the Bauhaus was “based on the reduction of practice to the fundamental elements of a syntax immanent to the medium” and if its methods function in light of contemporary mixed-media, conceptual art practice, they do so “in spite of themselves.” 28 According to de Duve’s view, and in keeping with Rosalind Krauss’s more general assertion that contemporary artists work in a “postmedium” condition,29 artists are no longer bound to the confines of the medium, notwithstanding the question of whether they ever were. The critical negation of Bauhaus instructional methods in the United States, as perpetuated by Greenbergian criteria, serves as testament to the pervas­ iveness of the critic’s views. But more, and likely much to Albers’s dismay, the degree to which the Bauhaus was caught in a web of responses to Greenbergian discursive structures—despite never having been embraced therein—also speaks to the degree to which the language of criticism guides understandings of practice.

Learning by Induction Although Greenberg would cast the school generically as a style, visual unity was not a Bauhaus priority; rather, the Bauhaus emphasized the activities of art making and approached the medium as an active tool— as praxis. By categorizing Bauhaus objects according to a priori aesthetic criteria, Greenbergian medium specificity overlooks the role of objects as essential to Bauhaus practice, as means to an end rather than an end themselves. In contrast to the critic’s deductive reasoning, Albers saw meaning as induced through practice. At the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale University his instruction was productive; it was about complicating understanding rather than reduction and refinement, and his teaching 91

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methods were geared toward general design principles, such as (and notably for Albers) color interaction, which he understood as a means of visual organization. Albers would describe his instructional approach as that of creating “visual empathy” through which one gained “the ability to read the meaning of form and order” and to “articulate” this knowledge in terms of the “conditions of formulation.”30 At the Bauhaus, he made reference to his method as induktives Lernverfahren (and as “inductive studies” in America), a movement from detailed study to general principles. 31 Thus, the acquisition of basic skills was first sought in isolation from their application, with the understanding that the individual parts (i.e. the building blocks of design) precede their combination and the formation of a whole. Accordingly, Albers’s pedagogic emphasis lay in practical, concrete exercises; in “learning through conscious practice.”32 Yet his classroom was a forum for active demonstration, not free experimentation. This activity of building up from basic knowledge runs in opposition to a Greenbergian approach based in overarching fundamental principles. The attention Albers paid to perceptual fundamentals was in keeping with the goals of preliminary instruction under his predecessors at the Bauhaus, Johannes Itten and László Moholy-Nagy, yet his approach diverged from Itten’s emphasis upon the body as site for sensory stimulus and Moholy-Nagy’s prioritization of sensory communication.33 Albers encouraged students to investigate the properties of material in his material study (Werklehre) so as to explore their structural potential, which—in light of the increasingly prevalent rhetoric of industry at the Bauhaus—was tethered to the creation of “commercial form” and the “union of purpose and material.”34 His approach to the medium was pragmatic, as were his teaching methods. Albers’s students were encouraged to investigate material by subverting expectations—to demonstrate potential, rather than to define function. At the Bauhaus, he chose to focus primarily upon two- and threedimensional studies in material, which he separated into the categories: “Material” studies, which involved “construction” and “Materie” exercises (also known as matière and the term used henceforth), which involved “combination.”35 In the first of these methods, material studies, students were charged to construct structures with a single material, such as corrugated cardboard, metal sheets, wire, glass, and plastic. Among the most common assignments—one that remains a mainstay in many art and design curricula—were paper studies in which students were to explore the properties of paper, only allowed to cut or fold it so as to create forms that highlighted the material’s structural possibilities (Figure 4.5).36 About these exercises and Albers’s teaching generally Hannes Beckmann recalled:

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4.5 Albers and students manipulating a sheet of paper at Black Mountain College in 1946

I remember vividly the first day of the [Preliminary Course]. Josef Albers entered the room, carrying with him a bunch of newspapers. … “Ladies and gentlemen [Albers said], we are poor, not rich. We can’t afford to waste materials or time. … All art starts with a material, and therefore we have first to investigate what our material can do. So, at the beginning we will experiment without aiming at making a product. At the moment we prefer cleverness to beauty. … Our studies should lead to constructive thinking. … I want you now to take the newspapers … and try to make something out of them that is more than you have now. I want you to respect the material and use it in a way that makes sense—preserve its inherent characteristics. If you can do without tools like knives and scissors, and without glue, [all] the better.”37 Results varied considerably and, according to Beckmann, the student who simply folded the paper such that it could stand on its side was singled out, for he demonstrated how paper—a pliable material—could be made stiff.38 He had enabled one to see the material differently. The relational aspect of Albers’s instruction was expressed most explicitly in the second of these methods, matière exercises. Albers often had students make lists of contrasts such as dark/light, warm/cold, soft/hard and would then ask that they formulate associations between these terms and material qualities generally or charge them to demonstrate contrasting relationships in advanced exercises: for instance, the creation of positive 93

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and negative space using a single material.39 Matière involved the combination of material available in the Bauhaus workshops: strips of cellophane, wire mesh, fabric, nails, and thus purposeful rather than found matter. Students were to demonstrate comparative qualities—elastic/stiff, planar/ linear, straight/bent—and categorize material according to Struktur, Faktur, and Textur.40 Like material studies, matière were meant to enable new ways of seeing and observation through one’s active engagement with the material world. The exercises were a means of determining, as Albers wrote: … which formal qualities predominate today—harmony or balance, rhythm or scale, geometric or arithmetic proportion, symmetry or asymmetry, rosette or row—and in conjunction with that, what holds more interest—complicated or elementary form, multiplicity or simplicity, composition or construction, mysticism or hygiene, volume or line, beauty or prudence, ancestral portraits or toilets.41 The activity of making matière was distinct from the act of discussing what trends could be identified among them. They were at once a means of material understanding, yet also a platform for exchange: they were intended to be didactic objects. Albers’s stated goals for his Werklehre were to provide students with an overview of many materials and a feeling for design concerns; to encourage economy, responsibility, discipline, and criticism through independent discovery; and to determine with which material they might like to work as they continued their studies.42 The means were as signific­ ant as these ends. Albers included a discussion of “methode” among his course outline, lectured on the topic of “creative education,” and published “Werklicher Formunterricht,” an essay in which he laid out his views on education as a balance of discipline and freedom, experimentation, and the encouragement of controlled mistakes.43 The dialectics of education— literally the process of drawing out, rather than imposing information and knowledge—became even more pronounced in the radically new context of Black Mountain College, where the importance of facilitating exchange among students was essential to the collaborative nature of the institution and its educational program. Unlike the Bauhaus, Black Mountain offered students a largely self-directed education in literature, music, visual art, the sciences, and other disciplines under the rubric of general education. Although Albers seldom engaged the nonvisual overtly in his teaching at the Bauhaus—as did Itten and Moholy-Nagy—he was adamant that the essential principles of material and design could be applied across disciplines. Unlike Greenberg’s modernism, with its emphasis upon

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differences between the arts, Albers’s pedagogical method stressed common principles that united the arts and encouraged that learning take place through “parallelism” rather than “separatism.” In reference to the curri­ culum at Black Mountain he wrote: To speak in professional terms: We should discover for instance that music, too, has to do with proportion and the values of line and volume; also that literature can be static and dynamic, and can have staccatos and crescendos, and poems can have color; that the play on the stage has not only dramatic climax but also an optical and an acoustical one; that there are musical qualities in all art—that every work of art is built (composed), has order, consciously or unconsciously.44 This was more than mere rhetoric at the college; students were asked to address the interpenetration of the arts in their examinations. One of ten required questions on the “Qualifying Examination” in 1948—when Albers was college rector—was: “Discuss the interrelationships of painting, musical composition and architectural structure. Choose your examples and compare them.”45 It is taken as given that interrelationships exist and merely left to the student to articulate them. Although oriented toward visual understanding, Albers’s instruction at the college addressed widely applicable fundamental principles: proportion, line, volume, and color as well as static and dynamic form. His students—many of whom took his courses as part of their general education—were to apply these principles to their own work and in their own fields of study as they saw fit. This is not to say that Albers did not recognize differences among creative media. In a lecture on abstract art given soon after his arrival in the United States he used medium-based qualities to indicate “a development toward the pure arts,” the aims of which were that music be “primarily a combination of tones,” painting be “a combination of colors,” and dance be a “combination of movements.”46 But he continued: Let us say this in artistic terms: we want more Composition Combination Construction Dynamic and static Weight and qualities Rhythm and balance And so on.

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Although here Albers maintains a distinction between the temporal and visual arts, he did not value the formal qualities of tone, color, and movement per se, as did Greenberg. Rather, his aim in making these remarks was to advocate how abstraction was implicit to life itself. He stated, “A life is more than nature, so is art more than life. Because art is spirit—that means an essential seeing—instead of imitation we need translation.”47 Indeed, Albers did not seek to prescribe the conditions of visual experience or aspire—as did Kandinsky, Mondrian, and others for whom “essential seeing” was key—to craft wholly abstract vocabularies of visual form. Rather, his teaching demonstrated the terms of translation by prioritizing process over form. Albers’s curricular aspirations remained consistent, regardless of the course in question. An undated synopsis of the curriculum for the 1948–1949 academic term at Black Mountain includes detailed descriptions of his drawing and painting courses, which were taught throughout the year, as well as courses in basic design, color, and structural sculpture, taught alternating every other semester.48 Six statements as to how art courses relate to the college curriculum precede the descriptions of the goals for each course. The courses are open to “artists and non-artists.” They are not “directly concerned with self expression or completed work,” but rather they are laboratory classes that aim “first at observation and articulation, that is, conscious seeing,” and emphasize the “control of means, hand, [and] tools,” as well as the collaborative, comparative nature of peer review and critique as fostering “self-criticism and judgment.”49 His final statement addressed the concept of art as a course of study: “Art here means more a process and way of living than a product or its production. Art as an educational means aims at an intensive use of our senses and a broader and deeper vision of our self and of the world.”50 Although adamant that no finished work was made in his classroom, the exercises produced in his courses were highly valued, so much so that they were routinely displayed as part of senior exhibitions, and thus the demonstration of one’s process was tantamount to finished products made outside the classroom. Color instruction, for which Albers is perhaps most widely known, exemplified how the emphasis on perceptual estrangement in his teaching was meant to bring hierarchies of visual order to consciousness.51 In the course students used foliage, paper, and other materials available to them in their studies; they did not mix pigments to create a new, composite color, and thus his color instruction was a comparative rather than an additive process (Figure 4.6). Exercises were meant to attune students to perceptual phenomena and, by extension, the

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4.6 Albers and students in the Color Course at Yale University in 1952

interaction of color as relational and unfixed. As was so in his other courses, students employed a process of trial and error, often placing countless pieces of “Color-aid” paper in combination with one another until arriving at the desired, at times unexpected visual effect. They would manipulate color so as to create a sense of volume or weight, various surface and optical effects such as the illusion of fluted edges, the appearance of transparency, or the optical effect of one color assuming the qualities of another. Indeed, Albers desired to achieve these same effects in his own painting practice (Figures 4.1 and 4.3), in which he emphasized perceptual exchange between colors in lieu of establishing conceptual unity. Indeed, the inductive studies Albers employed in his teaching were quite opposed to Greenberg’s modernism: they were meant to be non-mediumspecific, purposeful, and largely self-determined. And, significantly, objects produced in Albers’s courses were intended to be didactic; they functioned as demonstration pieces, as did Albers’s own work. The discourse in which Greenberg established himself was spec­ifically one of writing about viewing, predicated upon a language of form­al­ist abstraction as tethered to the structural properties of the medium and its specializing effects. In a sense Greenberg was a teacher;52 the critic directed his reader in how to see—and evaluate—works of art.53 Although he believed that aesthetic experience was intuitive, Greenberg saw the critic’s role as that of inviting “the reader to look at works of art [so as] to see if he agrees with the critic.”54 At the Bauhaus, seeing was integral to

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preliminary instruction, yet Bauhaus pedagogic methods and practices cast vision as but one of many senses at the service of making. For Greenberg, the maker’s goal was to capitalize on the characteristic qualities inherent in the medium with which he worked, as if he were in service to a tradition of painting or sculpture. Albers encouraged the crafting of an apparatus that drew attention away from the physical object and the subversion of perceptual expectations as a means of design innovation. The competing applications of (Platonic) idealized seeing as facilitated by Greenberg and the propagation of an (Aristotelian) embodied vision at the Bauhaus have distinct genealogies, yet the former often has superseded the latter in art critical discourse. This was especially the case as the Bauhaus was received in an American context, where Bauhaus objects and practices came into contact with the terms of Greenbergian formalism and medium fixation.

Acknowledgments This essay was assisted by a grant from the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies with funds provided by the Freie Universität Berlin. I would like to thank Brenda Danilo­ witz and Jessica Csoma at The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, as well as Dawna Schuld and Christa Robbins.

Notes   1 Josef Albers, Search Versus Re-Search (Hartford, CT: Trinity College Press, 1969), 13.   2 Ibid., 36.   3 After receiving his teaching certification in primary education, Albers taught primary school between 1908 and 1913. From 1913 to 1915 he studied at the Königliche Kunstschule in Berlin, from which he received certification as an art teacher. He later attended the Kunstgewerbeschule in Essen and Königliche Bayerische Akademie der Bildenden Kunst in Munich before enrolling at the Bauhaus in 1920, where he attended Johannes Itten’s Preliminary Course and participated in the stained-glass workshop. In 1923 he began teaching material study (Werk­ lehre), an aspect of preliminary instruction, assuming full responsibility for preliminary instruction from 1928 to 1933. Upon his emigration to the United States, Albers taught at Black Mountain College from 1933 to 1949 and at Yale University from 1950 to 1960. He served as visiting or guest instructor at many institutions, including the Cincinnati Art Academy, Pratt Institute, Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, University of Oregon, Syracuse University, and the University of South Florida. He also lectured extensively throughout the Americas. See Frederick A. Horowitz and Brenda Danilowitz, Josef Albers: To Open Eyes (London: Phaidon, 2006) for a comprehensive study of Albers’s teaching of design, drawing, color, and painting at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale University.   4 See Clement Greenberg, “Kandinsky,” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 111–14. Greenberg did devote considerable and attention to the work of Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee.   5 Harold Rosenberg, “Thoughts in Off Season,” in Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 247.

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  6 T’ai Smith addresses concepts of the medium held in the weaving workshop in context of intellectual debates in Germany, through which “weaving as medium” was formulated. See Weaving Work at the Bauhaus: The Gendering and Engendering of a Medium, 1919–1937 (Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 2006).   7 Greenberg claimed that “each art” had to “use the characteristic of [its] discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.” See Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Clement Greenberg: the Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, vol. 4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 85–93.   8 Among Greenberg’s notable detractors have been Leo Steinberg, Lucy Lippard, Rosalind Krauss, and T. J. Clark. More recently in Clement Greenberg Between the Lines, trans. Brian Holmes (Paris: Éditions Dis Voir, 1996), Thierry de Duve has suggested that the time for responses to Greenberg has passed and that there exists a need for a reappraisal of the critic. Caroline A. Jones investigates the fashioning of Greenberg’s unique subjectivity in her Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).   9 Harold Rosenberg wrote of the Bauhaus in terms of collage as outgrowth of preliminary instruction, one of few critics to note how Bauhaus-indebted pedagogic methods were of import beyond the classroom. See “Collage: Philosophy of Put-Togetherness,” in Rosenberg, Art on the Edge, 173–80. 10 See Meyer Schapiro, “Recent Abstract Painting,” in Modern Art: 19th & 20th Centuries (New York: George Braziller, 1978), 213–32. 11 In The Bauhaus and America: First Contacts, 1919–1936 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), Margret Kentgens-Craig discusses the formation of the International Style as among the factors that led to the suppression of the Bauhaus Weltanschauung. Karen Koehler investigates how the 1938 Bauhaus 1919–1928 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art “negotiated events of world history” through the “self-imposed censorship” of its organizers, including Walter Gropius and Herbert Bayer in “The Bauhaus, 1919–1928: Gropius in Exile and the Museum of Modern Art, N.Y., 1938,” in Art, Culture, and Media Under the Third Reich, ed. Richard A. Eltin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 287–315. See also Gabriele Diana Grawe, Call for Action: Mitglieder des Bauhauses in Nordamerika (Weimar: Verlag und Databank für Geisteswissenschaften, 2002). 12 Clement Greenberg, “Review of exhibitions of Adolf Gottlieb, Jackson Pollock, and Josef Albers,” in Clement Greenberg: the Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 285. 13 Clement Greenberg, “Feeling Is All,” reprinted as “Partisan Review ‘Art Chronicle’, 1952,” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 150. Greenberg writes: “even if his pictures do consist of only one or two (sometimes more) rectilinear and parallel bands of color against a flat field.” His mention of “shock” is likely a direct reference to critical writings on Newman that pre-dated Greenberg’s essay. See Melissa Ho, “Chron­ ology,” in Barnett Newman, ed. Ann Temkin (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2002), 325. 14 Albers showed work made between the 1920s and late 1940s at the Egan exhibition, entitled “Paintings in Black Grey White.” The exhibition at the Janis Gallery, “Paintings titled Variants,” comprised more recent work. Albers did not begin to make his iconic Homage to the Square paintings until 1950. 15 As Newman wrote about his painting, “The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic lens of history.” See Barnett Newman, “The Sublime is Now,” Tiger’s Eye 1,

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no. 6. (December 1948): 51–3, reprinted in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Art in Theory: 1900–1990 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 574. 16 See Ann Temkin, “Barnett Newman on Exhibition,” in Temkin, Barnett Newman, 41. 17 Among Hofmann’s students were Red Grooms, Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and Louise Nevelson. Albers’s students included Robert Rauschenberg, Eva Hesse, and Richard Serra. 18 Clement Greenberg, “Review of an Exhibition of Hans Hofmann and a Reconsideration of Mondrian’s Theories,” The Nation 7 (April 1945), in Clement Greenberg: the Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 18. 19 Greenberg wrote, “Hoffman [sic] has not yet published his views, but they have already directly and indirectly influenced many, including this writer—who owes more to the initial illumination received from Hofmann’s lectures than to any other source.” Ibid. 20 Punctuation is Hofmann’s. “Brochure, Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts, New York, 1937– 38,” in Cynthia Goodman, Hans Hofmann (New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 1990), 164–5. 21 One could, for instance, make a similar claim about the practice of László Moholy-Nagy, in particular his interest in light. 22 So important were the precise colors and proportions used to Albers, he would often list the pigments as well as their manufacturer on the verso of his paintings. 23 For Greenberg, “[Hofmann] … grasped the issues at stake better than did Roger Fry and better than Mondrian, Kandinsky, Lhote, Ozenfant, and all the others who have tried to ‘explicate’ the recent revolution in painting.” Greenberg, “Review of an Exhibition,” 18. 24 See Clement Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laocoon,” in Clement Greenberg: the Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 23–37. 25 Ibid. 26 See Charles Harrison, Essays on Art and Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), among other texts. 27 In a 1964 catalogue essay for an exhibition Greenberg curated, “Post Painterly Abstraction,” he discussed some of the exhibiting artists as reacting against painterly abstraction, claiming: “Their reaction against it does not constitute a return to the past, a going back to where Synthetic Cubism or geometrical painting left off. … They are included [in the exhibition] because they have won their “hardness” from the “softness” of Painterly Abstraction; they have not inherited it from Mondrian, the Bauhaus, Suprematism, or anything else that came before.” Clement Greenberg, “Post Painterly Abstraction,” in Clement Greenberg: the Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 192. 28 Thierry de Duve, “When Form Has Become Attitude – And Beyond,” in The Artist and the Academy: Issues in Fine Art Education and the Wider Cultural Context, ed. Stephen Foster and Nicholas de Ville (Southampton, UK: John Hansard Gallery, 1994), 31. 29 See Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999). 30 Albers, Search Versus Re-Search, 10. 31 “Werklehre Albers” (1927). The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, CT. Albers continues to note that this was achieved through communal critique of one’s work (gemeinsame kritik der arbeiten). See also Albers, Search Versus Re-Search, 13. 32 John Dewey’s “learning by doing” approach to instruction as tethered directly to activity was known to Albers—especially subsequent to his emigration—and became essential to his conception of education. See John Dewey, Art and Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934) and Josef Albers, “Art as Experience,” Progressive Education, 12 (October 1935): 391–3. 33 For an extensive analysis of teaching practice at the Bauhaus, including that of Johannes

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Itten, László Moholy-Nagy, and Josef Albers, see Rainer K. Wick, Teaching at the Bauhaus (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2000). 34 Undated translation/notes based upon Albers’s essay “Werklicher Formunterricht,” Black Mountain College Records, 1933–1956, North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh, NC. 35 I focus on Albers’s three-dimensional studies here. Albers’s two-dimensional course assignments enabled students to explore visual relationships through drawing and collage studies. One such study was known as a “reordering” exercise, in which familiar material, such as pages from the newspaper, were cut into strips and rearranged as collage to achieve various optical effects. Like Moholy-Nagy, he also used photographic techniques in his instruction. See Horowitz and Danilowitz, Josef Albers, 112–22. 36 About the study depicted in Figure 4.5, Albers remarked: “[This photograph] shows a mutual and manual examination of a volume-space study, more specifically a ‘structural organization’ study. A multi-sided pyramid is formed by folding a single, undivided sheet of paper. The problem is to determine the proper relationship of the cut bottom edge to both the plane basis of the plywood board and the varying angulature of the pyramid’s slopes.” Albers, Search Versus Re-Search, 82–3. 37 Hannes Beckmann, “Formative Years,” in Bauhaus and Bauhaus People, ed. Eckhard Neumann (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1970), 196. 38 Ibid. 39 Rainer K. Wick has shown that Albers’s contrast exercises were largely indebted to Itten’s employment of similar methods at the Bauhaus. See Wick, Teaching at the Bauhaus. See also Rolf Bothe, Peter Hahn and Hans Christoph von Tavel, eds, Das frühe Bauhaus und Johannes Itten (Ostfildern-Ruit: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1994). 40 László Moholy-Nagy also had students organize arrays of matter in elaborate tactile charts, and analyze materials according to categories. Struktur was the internal composition of a material (its physical consistency), Textur corresponded to the material’s outward appearance (the visible surface), and Faktur or “surface aspect” was the perceptible result or effect of man’s treatment of a material (the maker’s manipulation and markings). Among the cat­egories, the latter was most significant as it related to how one would use material to achieve a desired sensory result. See László Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision (New York: George Wittenborn, Inc., 1947). Albers, however, claimed that Moholy-Nagy failed to acknowledge his role in establishing this categorization system, which the latter claimed as his own. See Horowitz and Danilowitz, Josef Albers, 255, note 69. 41 Josef Albers, “Werklicher Formunterricht,” Bauhaus 2, no. 2/3 (1928): 3–7, in Hans Maria Wingler, The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, ed. Joseph Stein, trans. Wolfgang Jabs and Basil Gilbert (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 142. 42 “Werklehre Albers” (1927). Albers clearly lays out the theme (thema) of the course, his method (methode) to achieve it, and his course goals (ziel) in this document. 43 Albers presented a lecture at the Sixth International Congress for Drawing, Art Education, and Applied Art in Prague, 1928. See note 41. 44 Albers, “Art as Experience,” 391. 45 “Qualifying Examination, First Day, March 4, 1948, 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.” The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, CT. 46 “ ‘Abstract Art,’ Speech made in Asheville, NC, by J. Albers, August 1935.” Josef Albers Papers. Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, New Haven, CT. 47 Ibid. 48 “Art Courses,” undated typescript for 1948–1949 courses at Black Mountain College. The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, CT. At Yale University Albers taught only a color and a drawing course. 49 Ibid.

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50 Ibid. 51 Albers published his canonic Interaction of Color as a boxed set with 80 color folios and commentary in 1963 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963) and a smaller version of the work in 1971 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1971), which has seen several revisions and reprintings, most recently in 2006. 52 I use teacher intentionally to distinguish Greenberg from Albers, an educator who, in keeping with the definition of the term, facilitated a “process of rearing” as opposed to the directedness and presumed instructional authority of teaching. 53 This was evident in Greenberg’s teaching. The critic taught “The Development of Modernist Painting,” “Sculpture from Their Origins to the Present Time,” and a course on criticism and Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment at Black Mountain in summer 1950. Albers had left the college in 1949 and thus did not come in contact with the critic directly. See Mary Emma Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). 54 Clement Greenberg in conversation with Karlheinz Lüdeking, “Clement Greenberg: Modernism or Barbarism,” in Clement Greenberg: Late Writings, ed. Robert C. Morgan (Minnea­ polis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 217.

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Chapter 5

A Refuge for Script Paul Klee’s “Square Pictures” Annie Bourneuf

Painting as Page It has often been said that Paul Klee’s paintings are more like pages from a book than like other paintings.1 This is the analogy Clement Greenberg uses to talk about how different Klee’s work is from Picasso’s. Picasso’s paintings “move about in actual physical space”—”take place among other events and other objects”—whereas “Klee’s live in a more fictive medium and require of the spectator a greater dislocation, a greater shift.”2 Picasso’s painting is architectural, monumental, public; Klee’s is the opposite: “Klee’s private lyricism is more sympathetic to those who live in industrial countries … where the scope of art is essentially private.”3 Summing up these differences, Greenberg writes: “The difference is that [Picasso] sees the picture as a wall, while Klee sees it as a page.”4 The same analogy appears in one of the best more recent accounts of Klee’s painting—Joseph Leo Koerner’s essay, “Paul Klee and the Image of the Book.”5 For Koerner, it is not simply that Klee sees the picture as a page, but that Klee figures the picture as a page in order to investigate the book as a metaphor and as an object in crisis in modern culture. Modern culture, writes Koerner, is the crisis of the book, which, “no longer … capable of holding the totality which is its claim … becomes an object among other objects, mute and material.”6 Koerner sees this crisis as registered above all in the way Klee’s painting deploys the material “thingness” of the book and of writing.7 The line of inquiry Koerner opens up, considering Klee’s paintings as sustaining a dialogue with the book both as a metaphor and a particular kind of material object, is of great importance for the analysis of Klee’s art:

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Klee does indeed figure his paintings as pages to speak to a crisis of the book in modern culture.8 But his engagement with the book might best be probed if we look more closely at how his contemporaries and colleagues spoke of the problematic situation of the book at the time. What neither Greenberg nor Koerner mention is that both book and page were under a great deal of pressure at the Bauhaus, where Klee taught for a full decade, from 1921 to 1931, while making many of the paintings they describe as page-like.9 Proposals for the transformation of reading and writing circulated at the Bauhaus that would either displace or fundamentally alter the page as Klee’s art would appear to conceive it. The book was no longer necessarily seen as the chief and characteristic home of the printed page; attention shifted to unbound, ephemeral forms of printed matter—the poster, the brochure, the newspaper, the magazine. Nor was the printed page necessarily seen as the chief and characteristic home of writing. Writing was reconceived in relation to other surfaces: film screen, shop sign, neon light, and, indeed, the wall—the countermodel, according to Greenberg, to Klee’s painting-as-page. The typographical avant-garde aimed to remake reading into a public, collective activity, into something very different from the silent absorption of solitary individual readers, their noses in their books. They asked whether writing were neces­sarily a matter of horizontal lines of letters to be read left to right, top to bottom—and, going still further, whether writing might become no longer a matter of letters at all, but of photographs and pictographs, potentially accessible to all rather than only to those literate in the language of a given text. In short, the page was called into question at the Bauhaus, both as a surface for writing, for conventional symbols to be read in a particular and codified order, and as a space, discontinuous with its surroundings, for private contemplative reading. A future was imagined in which the page would no longer have those qualities for the sake of which Klee seems to adopt it as a model for his painting. By considering the transformations of the book and the page proposed at the Bauhaus, this essay attempts to bring the perennial question of the relation of Klee’s art to its Bauhaus context into sharper focus.

Picture-writing “Everything indicates that the book in [its] traditional form is nearing its end,” wrote Walter Benjamin in One-Way Street, his 1928 booklet of his “aphorisms, jokes, dreams.”10 Benjamin devotes a long section of his own pointedly untraditional book to speaking of the crisis of the book and his 106

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utopian predictions of a future for writing outside its bounds. Benjamin describes the mass media—advertising, newspapers, and film—as saturating everyday urban life with a writing outside the book that interferes with the modern subject’s vision in such a way as to diminish his or her ability to enter the book: “[B]efore a contemporary finds his way clear to opening a book, his eyes have been exposed to such a blizzard of changing, colorful, conflicting letters that the chances of his penetrating the archaic stillness of the book are slight.”11 When “script (Schrift)—having found, in the book, a refuge in which it can lead an autonomous existence—is pitilessly dragged out into the street,” its character changes, writes Benjamin. In film and advertising, writing loses its autonomy. The bodily orientation of reader to text changes; readers hold books horizontally before them, but newspapers vertically— and “film and advertising force the printed word entirely into the dictatorial perpendicular.” Writing gains a new “picture-like-ness” (Bildlichkeit), a new visualness, which Benjamin predicts will soon lead to a new “picture-­ writing” (Bilderschrift). Benjamin implies that this picture-writing’s audience will be the collective, not the individual. Benjamin’s speculations on the situation of writing in the 1920s are particularly pertinent to Klee’s art, both because his great interest in Klee is closely bound up with his interest in the potential picture-like-ness of writing and because his thinking in One-Way Street responds to the publications of Klee’s Bauhaus colleague László Moholy-Nagy on the future of writing.12 Even before Walter Gropius appointed Moholy-Nagy as master of the preliminary course (Vorkurs) in the spring of 1923, the book was already an object of concern at the Bauhaus. Both Johannes Itten, the previous master of the Vorkurs, and Lothar Schreyer, master of the theater workshop until 1923, produced printed works that played with the picturelike-ness of written words.13 When Klee began teaching at the Bauhaus in 1921, he was to lecture on design theory (Gestaltungslehre) and, fittingly, to take over the bookbinding workshop. This workshop was discontinued in 1922, due to both personal friction between Klee and the workshop master and the difficulty of fitting bookbinding into any program of modernization.14 But it was only when Moholy-Nagy came in 1923 that a radical transformation of writing and the book was theorized at the Bauhaus. Soon after his arrival, in the first book he designed—the catalogue accompanying the school’s exhibition in the summer of 1923—MoholyNagy published a short article on the “New Typography.”15 In this article, Moholy-Nagy announces that his “New Typography” aims not merely to make texts in the existing language visually clearer and more penetrating.

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Instead, he writes, the new typography will eventually lead to a whole “new typographic language.” As we can see both in programmatic statements about the New Typography and in the printed matter Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, and others produced according to their principles, the Bauhaus project of reforming typography was ambitious.16 The “New Typography” aimed to pave the way towards a new language, a new pictographic writing for collective reading.17 Even what may now appear as the merely modish mannerisms of Bauhaus typography are attempts to reimagine reading and writing—for instance, Moholy-Nagy writes about the use of all-lower-case type as bridging the chasm between writing and speech, which knows no distinction between upper and lower case.18 Moholy-Nagy’s Painting, Photography, Film (1925; revised edition 1927), the eighth volume in the series of Bauhaus Books published by the school, is an attempt to show what the book of the future would be like—the book transformed by its incorporation of photography and of the effects of advertising and film into something very different from the sheltering “refuge” for the autonomy of script that is the traditional book.19 Johannes Molzahn, summing up the aims of the New Typography, proclaimed: “Stop reading! Look!”20 Much of this typography, preparing for the picture-writing to come, aimed to make reading more like looking—moving away from the old typography’s scripting of the reader’s gaze, left to right and top to bottom, away from the arbitrariness of the letters of the alphabet, towards a new “reading” that would be as free, natural, and universal as vision was understood to be. As we will see, some of Klee’s paintings of this period may be understood as, in part, a highly ambivalent response to this project: some push in the opposite direction, pushing seeing towards a temporal “reading” of signs in a definite, scripted order.

The Letter in the Square In 1923, concurrent with Moholy-Nagy’s statement on the New Typography, Klee initiated his series of what are known as his “square pictures,” all-over grids of colored rectangles. The first one he registered in his oeuvre catalogue (Figure 5.1) sets out the rules of the series.21 The painting, a smallish piece of paper, is coated with black paint against which the colored squares covering the surface glow. The grid functions as a “mapping of the space inside the frame onto itself”: the painting’s rectangular center, made of smaller units and brighter colors than the rest, reads as a painting within a painting.22 This inside area is visibly more tightly structured; its squares of color are arranged according to a reversed mirroring pattern with but one 108

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deviation, at the very center of the canvas, whereas the outside, framing area, organized by a simpler symmetry, includes many more deviations. These paintings seem to speak of nothing outside themselves, of their patterned relations among their parts. But they precipitate out of Klee’s own probing of the problem of “picture-writing” back in the mid1910s—concerns perhaps reactivated in 1923 by Moholy-Nagy’s use of the concept of “picture-writing.” As we will see, both Moholy-Nagy and Klee see what Moholy-Nagy calls “primeval picture-writing” (urzeitlichen Bildschriften) as the original form of writing, and reject yet preserve aspects of it in their very different sublations of the hieroglyph.23 Seeing Klee’s Bauhaus-era work in relation to the New Typography brings out important

5.1 Paul Klee, freundlicher Blick (1923/54), oil on paper on cardboard 31.7 × 22.2 cm Private collection 109

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aspects of his concern with linear, temporal viewing, with the “movement” that is the central motif of his teaching and concern of his paintings during those years. This essay does not argue that the square pictures are a direct response to Moholy-Nagy’s 1923 text—the chronology is unclear and Klee, unsurprisingly, wrote nothing about his views on the New Typography.24 Yet Moholy-Nagy’s text can illuminate what is at stake in these paintings. In his 1923 statement, Moholy-Nagy speaks of the changes the New Typography will bring about—exactness of communication, collective rather than individual reception, the full incorporation of photography— by sketching a historical development from “primeval picture-writing” to present-day alphabetic writing and beyond to the “new typographic language.” Moholy-Nagy compares the photographs that will be integral to this new language to hieroglyphs, “the unexact primeval picture-writing of the Egyptians” (die unexakte Urbildschrift der Ägypter); but, writes Moholy-Nagy, while each reader interpreted the old hieroglyphs differently, according to “tradition and personal aptitude,” the photographs of the new language will enable entirely exact expression, substituting for those “still individually interpretable concepts and expressions” remaining in presentday language.25 Klee’s square pictures of 1923 also work out of the hieroglyph, but in a very different way. As vertically oriented all-over grids of colored rectangles stretched tightly over the surface, they take up the compositional form of his solution to the problem of “picture-writing” five years earlier. In 1916, Klee began making what he called “watercolored writing” or, later, “color-writing”—watercolors organized around lines of verse, in which the armature of the letters delineates areas to be “colored in” with watercolor (Figure 5.2).26 The first were built around excerpts of German translations of Chinese poems; his initial conception of the series revolved around the fantasy of the Chinese character as a true pictogram, melding the symbolic and iconic, seen as much as read.27 This fantasy of the Chinese character is based on the German Romantic theory of the hieroglyph as a primeval union of picture and writing, an inexhaustible fount of meaning, resistant to any final reading, untranslatable.28 The translations Klee used came from Hans Heilmann’s 1905 anthology, which began with a lengthy prefatory lament about the utter failure of the translations to approach the hieroglyphic multivalence of the Chinese character, which is, wrote Heilmann, drawing and writing at once.29 This conception of an original unity of writing and drawing, lost in the Latin alphabet but preserved in Chinese, was important for Klee, who spoke of “the prehistoric times of peoples, when writing and drawing still coincided.”30 This appears to have

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5.2 Paul Klee, Hoch und stralend steht der Mond. Ich habe meine Lampe ausgeblasen, und tausend Gedanken erheben sich von meines Herzensgrund. Meine Augen strömen über von Tränen (1916/20), watercolor and pen on paper on cardboard (a) 2.7 × 23.8 cm (b) 7.7 × 23.8 cm, Sammlung Ernst und Hildy Beyeler, Basel

been the impetus for his color-writings, attempts to improve Heilmann’s translations by using color to incorporate something of the iconicity of the Chinese poems as described in the preface. In 1918, however, Klee’s conception of these works shifted. No longer projecting pictogrammatic reconciliation onto another language, Klee’s watercolor Once emerged from the gray of night … (Figure 5.3) instead uses the rectangular units of a modular grid to mediate between writing and painting. Importantly, this painting is not based on any of Heilmann’s translations, but on a poem of Klee’s own composition. And it no longer attempts to unite writing and painting on the level of mode of signification. Instead, it takes up the material and procedural similarities between painting and writing, comparing the colored square to the letter as discrete units that make meaning only in relation to others. The resulting grid of colors and letters of Once emerged is, then, antithetical to the earlier color-writings. Rather than depicting a hieroglyphic unity of word and picture, this watercolor throws the difference between words and pictures back upon the viewer. The very similarity of reading writing and looking at a picture makes it impossible for the viewer to simultaneously read the poem as a poem and view the painting as a painting. Reading and looking oscillate back and forth through a figure– ground reversal—either the scaffolding of the letters or the colors spanning it come to the fore. Moholy-Nagy’s 1923 article warns specifically against typefaces that force letters into “a predetermined form such as the square”—precisely

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5.3 Paul Klee, Einst dem Grau der Nacht enttaucht ... (1918/17), watercolor, pen and pencil on paper on cardboard 22.6 × 15.8 cm, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

the means by which Klee mediates between the letters of the words and the structure of the picture.31 Moholy-Nagy’s warning comes in the context of a more general point: “Readability—the message must never suffer under an aesthetic assumed a priori.” Indeed, Once emerged sets up a conflict between readability and the viewing of the watercolor as an aesthetic whole. We might see Klee’s square pictures as returning to the grid of colored squares of Once emerged to go much farther in this direction.32 112

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In the square pictures, readability suffers to such a degree under an a priori aesthetic that there is, so to speak, no message to be read in them at all.

“The eye follows paths established for it” Despite their relation to the text-grid of Once emerged, it may seem perverse to think of the square pictures as either readable or unreadable, so often has the grid in early-twentieth-century painting been seen as a “barrier … between the arts of vision and those of language.”33 But one of Klee’s very first square pictures, Centrifugal Memorial Page (1923) (Figure 5.4), strongly suggests that readability and unreadability are at stake in these pictures. Jürgen Glaesemer and Eva-Maria Triska’s standard accounts of the square pictures explain them by connecting them to Klee’s theoretical writings; indeed, Triska writes about them as exemplifying the close connection between Klee’s painting and the body of theory he developed while teaching at the Bauhaus. The very convincing connections Glaesemer and Triska draw are indispensable but also insufficient, for they make Klee’s paintings and writings into a closed circuit. According to these accounts, the square pictures are to be understood in terms of the color “movements” Klee described in his Bauhaus lectures and in the second of the Bauhaus Books that Moholy-Nagy designed, Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925), which was based on his lectures.34 In 1921, Klee developed a series of layered watercolor gradations that he saw in terms of such movement; the square pictures attempt to create similar “color-movements,” but using oils, which, because of their relative opacity, require a very different approach.35 In the square pictures, Klee spreads, as it were, the layers of the watercolors over the surface—the one-square-beside-the-other of these paintings substitutes for the one-layer-on-top-of-the-other of the watercolors.36 The relations between the colors are understood as establishing vectors—dark to light, cool to warm—of just the kind Klee describes in his lectures and his Pedagogical Sketchbook.37 These paths are usually echoed by those generated by the coded reversals and mirroring devices he elaborated in his pedagogical writings (Figure 5.5).38 Together, these systematic relations between the colored squares of the grid lay down tracks for the viewer’s gaze, like the watercolor gradations or the graphic lines that Klee describes as movements for the viewer to retrace.39 As Klee writes in the Pedagogical Sketchbook: The work … is, in terms of production as well as reception: movement. … In terms of reception, this is due to the limitation

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5.4 Paul Klee, centrifugales Gedenkblatt (1923/171), watercolor on primed paper on cardboard, 54.7 × 41.7 cm, Museum Ludwig, Köln, Leihgabe Sammlung Ludwig

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of the perceiving eye. The limitation of the eye is the impossibility of seeing even a surface of quite small dimensions sharply at the same time. The eye must graze away [abgrasen] the surface, grazing away and sharpening one part after the other. … The eye follows the paths established for it in the work.40 These accounts interpret Klee’s square pictures as laying down paths for the eye in this sense, by means of the color relations between the squares. Yve-Alain Bois has called Klee’s concern that the viewer’s eye follow the artwork’s “paths,” his linear, temporal model of reception, “dogmatic, authoritarian.”41 Commenting on the passage just cited, Bois writes that Klee does not even seem to trust his own model of viewing, for his paintings attempt to force it: using devices such as arrows and color

5.5 Paul Klee, Specielle Ordnung. Umkehrungen, Spiegelungen, Pedagogical Estate (Special Order), colored pencil and pencil on paper 33 × 21 cm, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, PN 30M60/68 115

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gradations, Klee “tells you where to look, and in what order.”42 By drawing our attention to Klee’s controlling shepherding of the gaze, Bois puts us in a position to ask a question that drops out in accounts that explain Klee’s painting in terms of his own theoretical writings: Why is Klee so invested in this model of looking as sequential “grazing,” one part after the other? It is significant that in an earlier version of this analogy, from his lecture notes, Klee writes that the eye “like a grazing animal, feels the surface, not only from top to bottom, but also from left to right.”43 Once emerged and the Centrifugal Memorial Page both suggest that Klee’s notion of “grazing,” his scripting of the viewer’s gaze, is modeled on reading.

A Memorial Page The reversed mirroring pattern and the emphasis on the painting’s central rectangle place the Centrifugal Memorial Page in the square pictures series. But this Memorial Page (Gedenkblatt), unlike the other square pictures, is readable in places.44 Nested in its center are the lower-case letters “ei,” written in a handmade imitation of a printed typeface—which might be read as a word fragment, sound notation, or an all-lower-case Ei (egg). Then, in two twinned yellow squares of the periphery, two names are written less tidily: “PAUL ERNST” (Klee’s given names) and “ANNA WENNE.”45 Then, almost entirely unreadable, there are the dark horizontal lines of newsprint, for, as Klee’s title reinforces again, the page is quite literally the basis of this square picture. Only short phrases show through, here and there—Liküre hochwertig! (“High-quality liqueurs!”), Haut- und Geschlechts­leiden (“skin and venereal diseases”). To make this Memorial Page, Klee took a page of a broadsheet newspaper and made it very difficult to read, turning it upside-down and painting it over, first with chalk ground and then translucent watercolor. The unreadable newspaper’s organization provides the underlying matrix for the colored squares, the boundaries of which follow, in many places, the visible, if illegible, horizontals of the text and verticals separating the columns. The painting compares the “paths” established by the pattern of squares—indeed a centrifugal spiraling out from the center—to the highly codified “paths” newspaper layout provides for its readers, guiding them along by cues such as the size and typeface of headlines, the downward movement of columns, conventions correlating a story’s importance to its position on the page, along with the basic left-toright and top-to-bottom of European languages. The painting’s interest in reading as a convention-governed movement of the gaze, as a model for what Klee appears to conceive as the similar but more flexible movements of looking at a picture, comes out 116

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5.6 Paul Klee, Schaufenster für Damenunterkleidung (1922/125), watercolor and pen on paper on cardboard 41.9 × 27 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Berggruen Klee Collection

most clearly in the peculiar name Anna Wenne. This name—apparently Klee’s invention—appears in one other place in his work, a watercolor of the previous year called Display Window for Ladies’ Underclothing (Figure 5.6). Anna Wenne’s name is written, like a proprietor’s, across this painting that calls itself a Display Window, a showcase for goods for sale and a surface for writing out on the street. The legibility of Anna Wenne’s

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name would suffer less than most from one condition of writing on a shop window—that it may be viewed from inside the store, reversed. The reversability of Anna Wenne’s name—two palindromes (“ANNA” and “ENNE”) separated by the optical palindrome of the symmetrical letter W in the middle—outdoes even that of Anna Blume, Kurt Schwitters’ imaginary muse, whose palindromic qualities he celebrates in his famous poem of 1919.46 Anna Wenne similarly invites readers to read her backwards and forwards, and thereby to reflect on reading as a movement, with a direction. Her name asks in miniature what the Centrifugal Memorial Page urges as a whole: that the movement of reading be considered as a model for the kind of movement for which Klee wants his paintings to make paths. This painting takes up newspaper reading as a model for the kind of sequential looking that the square pictures as a group solicit—a kind of looking-as-reading. Klee’s square pictures of 1923 and the next few years might be viewed, then, as so many “memorial pages”—as memorials not only in the form of pages, but memorials to the page. They may be seen as a highly ambivalent response to reimaginings of reading at the Bauhaus that put a tremendous amount of pressure on the autonomy and privacy of the page of the book, which had long served as Klee’s model for the autonomy and privacy of his paintings. In a passage about the precarious situation of the autonomous object in Painting, Photography, Film, Moholy-Nagy takes the book as the exemplar of such autonomy, speaking of “the controversial easel painting or separate optical structure (in the sense that a book is an autonomous structure with a justification for existence independent of nature or architecture).”47 Based on the Old Typography’s grid of text, the grids of Klee’s square pictures test the easel painting as a place for a sequential looking that is like reading, and, by extension, as a refuge for private contemplation, understood as less and less possible in relation to script in books.

Acknowledgments I wish above all to thank Brigid Doherty for her acute comments and patient criticism. This essay benefited greatly from the insights and encouragement of Noam M. Elcott, Charles W. Haxthausen, Jennifer King, Benjamin Lytal, and Joyce Tsai. I am very grateful as well for the help of Christine Hopfengart, Fabienne Eggelhöfer, Heidi Frautschi, Marianne Keller, and Eva Wiederkehr Sladeczek at the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, and of Julia Friedrich at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. A Fulbright–Institute of International Education/Swiss Government grant supported me while I researched and wrote this essay.

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Notes   1 Indeed, through Klee’s own classification of his work, this analogy has entered the apparatus of Klee scholarship. Klee compared his works to pages in the very categories he used to classify his work in the oeuvre catalogue in which he inventoried his production from 1911 on. From 1932 on, he does away entirely with the categories of watercolor and drawing and speaks instead, idiosyncratically, of colored or uncolored Blätter—pages, leaves, or sheets. Eva Wiederkehr Sladeczek, “Der handschriftliche Œuvre-Katalog von Paul Klee,” in Paul Klee: Kunst und Karriere. Beiträge des Internationalen Symposiums in Bern, ed. Oskar Bätschmann and Josef Helfenstein (Bern: Stämpfli, 2000), 150. When the Paul Klee-Stiftung, founded in 1947 (seven years after Klee’s death), inventoried its holdings, it borrowed from the language of Klee’s own oeuvre catalogue by dividing Klee’s work up into drawings, farbige Blätter (usually translated as “colored sheets”), and paintings. See Jürgen Glaesemer’s foreword to his catalogue, Paul Klee: Die farbigen Werke im Kunstmuseum Bern. Gemälde, farbige Blätter, Hinterglasbilder und Plastiken (Bern: Kornfeld und Cie, 1976), 8. While it is not uncommon in German to refer to works of graphic art as graphische Blätter, Klee’s insistence on referring to his watercolors as Blätter is unusual.   2 Clement Greenberg, untitled essay in Five Essays on Paul Klee, ed. Merle Armitage (New York: Duell Sloan and Pearce, 1950), 49, and “Art Chronicle: On Paul Klee (1870–1940),” in Greenberg: Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 71. The four other essays collected in Armitage’s volume were written by Howard Devree, Nancy Wilson Ross, James Johnson Sweeney, and Armitage himself. “Art Chronicle: On Paul Klee (1870–1940)”—Greenberg’s first essay on a single artist—was originally published in the Partisan Review, May–June 1941. I am grateful to Charles W. Haxthausen for pointing out the importance of these texts and showing me his fascinating essay, “Ad Marginem? Klee und die amerikanische Kunstgeschichtsschreibung,” forthcoming in Paul Klee et la France, ed. Gregor Wedekind (Paris: Éditions de la maison des sciences de l’homme, 2009).   3 Greenberg, Five Essays, 52–3. Haxthausen argues that not only did Klee, like all the painters on the faculty, continue to paint “private” easel paintings at the Bauhaus, but he painted easel paintings that were “parodies of murals” (such as his Wandbild aus dem Tempel der Sehnsucht “dorthin” [1922/30] and Wandbild [1924/128])—parodies of the hopes that many at the Bauhaus attached to murals as a way for painting, integrated into architecture, to regain a public function. One might thus see the “privacy” of Klee’s art not as simply detached from this project of restoring public function to painting, but as a critical response to it. Haxthausen, “Between Representation and Parody: Klee’s ‘Auratic’ Pictures,” The Study of Art History 1, no. 3 (2001): 19–21.   4 Greenberg, Five Essays, 52.   5 See also Foucault’s argument that Klee’s art abolishes one of the foundational principles of Western painting since the Renaissance, “the separation between plastic representation (which implies resemblance) and linguistic reference (which excludes it),” in part by making the space of his pictures “simultaneously page and canvas,” in his book on Magritte, This Is Not a Pipe, trans. James Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 32–3. For a critique of both Koerner’s and Foucault’s interpretations of Klee’s work, see Regine Prange, “Das utopische Kalligram: Klees ‘Zeichen’ und der Surrealismus,” in Paul Klee: Kunst und Karriere, 206–10. Prange claims that Koerner’s essay suppresses “modernity and its rupture with classical artistic pictorial representation” to maintain the possibility of iconological interpretation, falling into the trap of Klee’s own metaphorics of what she calls “the utopian calligram” (207): Koerner is, she argues, caught up in “[t]he neoromantic totality concepts of modernity,” which, following from Friedrich Schlegel’s idea of the hieroglyph,

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attempt to shore up classical pictorial representation (225). I would argue that a strong account of Klee’s work must engage with his metaphorics, his “primitivist iconography” (225), and that Koerner’s essay does so in exemplary fashion.   6 Joseph Leo Koerner, “Paul Klee and the Image of the Book,” in Rainer Crone and Joseph Leo Koerner, Paul Klee: Legends of the Sign (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 48–49, 53.   7 Ibid., 55.   8 Among a very large number of possible examples, see, for instance, Concentrierter Roman (1916/74), Inschrift (1918/207), the two versions of Er küsse mich mit seines Mundes Kuss (1921/142 and 1921/179), Buchstabenbild (1924/116), Zerstörtes Aegypten (1924/178), Ein Blatt aus dem Städtebuch (1928/46), Offenes Buch (1930/99), Abstracte Schrift (1931/284), Pflanzen-Schriftbild (1932/61), and Bilderbuch (1937/140), as well as the other works discussed by Koerner.   9 This pressure was not only a Bauhaus phenomenon; avant-garde typographers outside the school shared the concerns described. For an overview of the frequent discussions in Weimar Germany about a much broader “book crisis,” see the first chapter of Gideon Reuveni’s Reading Germany: Literature and Consumer Culture in Germany before 1933 (Oxford: Berghahn, 2006). 10 Benjamin, One-Way Street, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, vol. 1, 1913–1926 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1996), 456–7; Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, vol. 4, ed. Tillman Rexroth (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 102–4. All subsequent Benjamin citations in the text are taken from this short section of One-Way Street, titled “Attested Auditor of Books.” See Benjamin’s description of One-Way Street in his letter to Gershom Scholem of 22 December 1924, Walter Benjamin: Briefe, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor Adorno, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966), 367. In the first section of One-Way Street, Benjamin states that “[s]ignificant literary effectiveness” will result from the cultivation of “inconspicuous forms” such as “leaflets, brochures, newspaper articles, and posters,” rather than “the pretentious, universal gesture of the book” (Selected Writings, 444; Gesammelte Schriften, 85). For an illuminating discussion of how One-Way Street positions itself as one of these “inconspicuous forms,” and of how Benjamin took up the theories of Moholy-Nagy and other New Typographers regarding the future of reading, see Frederic J. Schwartz, “The Eye of the Expert: Walter Benjamin and the Avant Garde,” Art History 24, no. 3 (June 2001): 402–12. Benjamin’s interest in the material makeup of texts long predates his involvement with the typographical avant-garde. Scholem, speaking of the 1918–1919 period when he and Benjamin were living in Switzerland, remembered that “[t]he enthusiasm with which [Benjamin] was capable of discussing bindings, paper, and typefaces in those years frequently got on my nerves” (Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship [Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981], 71.) 11 Benjamin, One-Way Street, in Selected Writings, 456. 12 I discuss Benjamin’s interest in Klee’s work in a forthcoming article in Grey Room, “ ‘Radically Uncolorful Painting’: Walter Benjamin and the Problem of Cubism” and in my Ph.D. dissertation in progress on Klee’s work of the late 1910s. 13 For instance, Itten, “Analysen alter Meister,” in Utopia: Dokumente der Wirklichkeit, ed. Bruno Adler (Weimar: Utopia Verlag, 1921), or Lothar Schreyer, Kreuzigung. Spielgang. Werk VI (Hamburg: Kampfbühne, 1920). See the excellent catalogue, Ute Brüning, ed., Das A und O des Bauhauses. Bauhauswerbung: Schriftbilder, Drucksachen, Ausstellungsdesign, (Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv, 1995). 14 See Klee’s letters to his wife of 14 and 19 April 1921 on the bookbinding workshop, in Klee, Briefe an die Familie 1893–1940, ed. Felix Klee, vol. 2 (Cologne: DuMont, 1979), 974–5. 15 Moholy-Nagy’s one-page article, “Die neue Typographie,” was originally published in

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Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar, 1919–23 (Weimar and Munich: Bauhausverlag, 1923). It is reproduced in facsimile in Bauhaus. Drucksachen, Typografie, Reklame, ed. Gerd Fleischmann (Stuttgart: Oktagon, 1995), 14; an English translation is available in Moholy-Nagy, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (London: Penguin Press, 1971), 75. 16 Besides Das A und O des Bauhauses and Bauhaus, see “Typographie in der Reklame-Werkstatt,” in bauhaus utopien. Arbeiten auf Papier, ed. Wulf Herzogenrath (Cologne: Edition Cantz, 1988), 103–16, and Ute Brüning, “Die Druck- und Reklamewerkstatt: Von Typographie zur Werbung,” in Experiment Bauhaus (Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv, 1988). 17 Otto Neurath’s “picture statistics,” which he presented to an enthusiastic audience of Bauhäusler in 1929, surely represent the most ambitious attempt to devise such a new pictographic writing for collective reading during the 1920s. See Peter Galison, “Aufbau/Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and Architectural Modernism,” Critical Inquiry 16, no. 4 (Summer 1990): 709–52; Robin Kinross, “Otto Neurath et la communication visuelle,” in Le Cercle de Vienne: doctrines et controverses, ed. Jan Sebestik and Antonia Soulez (Paris: Klincksiek, 1986), 271–88; Friedrich Stadler, ed., Arbeiterbildung in der Zwischenkriegszeit Otto Neurath–Gerd Arntz (Vienna: Österreichisches Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum, 1982); and Lynette Roth, Painting as a Weapon: Progressive Cologne 1920–33: Seiwert–Hoerle–Arntz (Cologne: Walther König, 2008). See also Constanze Hofstaetter, Karl Peter Röhl und die Moderne (Petersberg: Imhof, 2007), on the pictograms devised in the late 1920s by the Bauhäusler Karl Peter Röhl. 18 Moholy-Nagy, “bauhaus und typografie,” in Hans M. Wingler, Das Bauhaus, 1919–1933: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin (Bramsche: Gebr. Rasch, 1962), 124; originally published in the Anhaltische Rundschau (Dessau), 14 September 1925. 19 See Brigid Doherty’s analysis in “Photography, Typography, and the Modernization of Reading,” in A New History of German Literature, ed. David E. Wellbery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 2004), 733–8. 20 Johannes Molzahn, “Nicht mehr lesen! Sehen!,” Das Kunstblatt 12 (1928): 78–82, translation in Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 648–9. Molzahn emphasizes the complete incorporation of photography into the illustrated magazines and newspapers of the future. 21 Besides freundlicher Blick (1923/54), the “square pictures” of 1923 include Harmonie blau–orange (1923/58), Architektur (1923/62), Statisch-Dynamische Steigerung (1923/67), Bildarchitectur rot gelb blau (1923/80), Buntes Beet (1923/109), centrifugales Gedenkblatt (1923/171), and Harmonie aus Vierecken mit Rot, Gelb, Blau, Weiss, und Schwarz (1923/238); Klee continued the series through the 1920s and beyond. Klee did not use the term Quadratbild for these works in his oeuvre catalogue—when he did not simply note the materials and format used, he referred to them as Tafelbilder, Ölgemälde or, in the case of the centrifugales Gedenkblatt, “grosses Aquarell.” See Paul Klee Foundation, ed., Paul Klee: catalogue raisonné, vol. 4 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998–2004). The standard accounts of these works are Jürgen Glaesemer, Die farbigen Werke im Kunstmuseum Bern, 177–82, Eva-Maria Triska, “Die Quadratbilder Paul Klees—ein Beispiel für das Verhältnis seiner Theorie zu seinem Werk,” in Paul Klee. Das Werk der Jahre 1919–1933 (Cologne: Kunst­halle Köln, 1979), 45–78, and Triska, “Die Quadratbilder Paul Klees” (Ph.D. diss., University of Vienna, 1980). See also K. Porter Aichele, “Paul Klee’s ‘Rhythmisches’: A Recapitulation of the Bauhaus Years,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 57, no. 1 (1994): 75–89, and Christian Rümelin’s discussion in Paul Klee: Leben und Werk, (Munich: Beck, 2004), 78–82. Will Groh­ mann called these works Klee’s “magic squares,” opening up the important questions of the relation of these paintings to the use of “magic squares” in musical composition; see Grohmann, Paul Klee (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1955), 213–21, and Nancy Perloff, “Klee

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and Webern: Speculations on Modernist Theories of Composition,” The Musical Quarterly 69, no. 2 (Spring 1983): 180–208. 22 See Rosalind Krauss on “centripetal” readings of the grid structures of modernist painting, “Grids,” October 9 (Summer 1979): 60–2. She does not mention Klee in the article. 23 Moholy-Nagy, “Die neue Typographie.” 24 Klee makes no explicit references in his letters or other writings to the New Typography— nor to many other subjects of heated discussion at the Bauhaus. It was his habit to stand apart from such debates; see Georg Muche’s description of Klee’s aloofness in Erinner­ ungen an Paul Klee, ed. Ludwig Grote (Munich: Prestel, 1959), 44. Hence his reputation as the “Bauhaus Buddha,” as in Ernst Kállai’s 1929 caricature. 25 In the 1910s and 1920s, many commentators spoke of the proliferation of images brought about by the technological media, in the illustrated press, advertising, and, above all, film, as the return of hieroglyphic writing. As Miriam Hansen writes, “The comparison between cinema and hieroglyphics appears rather early and frequently in discourse on film throughout the silent era … In most commentaries … the comparison between cinema and hieroglyphics is celebratory, if not apologetic; the underlying concept of hieroglyphics is one of a language of mystical correspondence and visual self-evidence, reincarnated in the new universal language of film.” Hansen, “Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing: Adorno, Derrida, Kracauer,” New German Critique 56, Special Issue on Theodor W. Adorno (Spring–Summer 1992): 58. The American poet Vachel Lindsay, in his Art of the Moving Picture (New York: Macmillan, 1915), compared the new visual forms of the American mass media to Egyptian hieroglyphs: “American civilization grows more hieroglyphic every day. The cartoons of Darling, the advertisements in the back of the magazines and on the bill-boards and in the street cars, the acres of photographs in the Sunday newspapers, make us into a hieroglyphic civilization far nearer to Egypt than to England.” Cited in Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 77–8. As Hansen points out in “Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing,” the metaphor of the hieroglyph was also used by the avant-garde to theorize montage; for instance, in “Beyond the Shot” (1929), Sergei Eisenstein recounts the legendary history of the Chinese character, which he terms the ieroglif (hieroglyph), from the origin of representational characters to their combination into compound symbols, which he identifies with filmic montage. The Eisenstein Reader, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. Richard Taylor and William Powell (London: British Film Institute, 1998), 82–3. 26 Klee designated several of the six 1916 watercolors which he based on excerpts of Chinese poems in translation as “watercolored writing” (Aquarellierte Schrift) in his oeuvre catalogue; see Paul Klee: catalogue raisonné, vol. 2. All six of the watercolors were shown at Klee’s February 1917 exhibition at Der Sturm gallery, Klee’s breakthrough to critical acclaim. On 13 February 1918, Klee wrote in a letter to his mother that he will “also make attempts with writing (color-writing)” (auch mit Schrift Versuche machen (Farbenschrift)), probably referring to his watercolor Once emerged from the grey of night. Klee, Briefe an die Familie, vol. 2, 905. Klee’s term, Farbenschrift, would seem most obviously to imply a writing, a script, made of color, but Schrift can also mean writing in the sense of treatise or work. Thus, for instance, in a letter to Goethe on 20 March 1806, the composer Karl Friedrich Zelter referred to Goethe’s Farbenlehre (then in preparation) as the Farbenschrift. Klee, who was fascinated by the Farbenlehre, had in his library the complete published correspondence between Goethe and Zelter; he may well have understood his Farbenschrift as a sort of Farbenlehre, a theory or doctrine of color in the form of color-writing. The very idea of a color-writing in a strong sense, in which color would signify as writing, has the potential to upset writing as a system. It is interesting in this context to look at the writings of Ferdinand de Saussure, Klee’s compatriot and near-contemporary, on the necessary and absolute insignificance for

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writing as a system of its material mode of production, including its color: “the means of the sign’s production is completely irrelevant, because it does not affect the system. … Whether I write letters in black or white … is of no importance for their signification,” Cours de linguistique générale (Paris: Payot, 1962), 165–6. 27 Klee was far from alone among his German-speaking contemporaries in drawing on such translations of Chinese poetry; Kafka wrote enthusiastically to Max Brod about Heilmann’s translations in 1920, Webern set a poem of Wang Seng Yu’s to music in 1914, and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde was based on another set of German translations of Chinese poems. The interest in Chinese characters, in particular, may be traced back to Leibniz’s interest in them as a possible model for a characteristica universalis, a universal ideographic language. The early-twentieth-century surge of interest in translations of Chinese literature and in the problems attending such translations was not at all confined to the German-speaking world—Apollinaire, Pound, and others were involved with the subject. “The concept of Chinese writing,” writes Jacques Derrida, “thus functioned as a sort of European hallucination … this functioning obeyed a rigorous necessity,” Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 80; see chapter 3, “Of Grammatology as a Positive Science.” 28 See Steven C. Schaber, “Novalis’ Theory of the Work of Art as Hieroglyph,” Germanic Review 48 (1973): 35–43; Liselotte Dieckmann, “The Metaphor of Hieroglyphics in German Romanticism,” Comparative Literature 7, no. 4 (Autumn 1955): 306–12; and Dieckmann, Hieroglyphics: The History of a Literary Symbol (St. Louis, MO: Washington University Press, 1970). 29 Heilmann, Chinesische Lyrik vom 12. Jahrhundert v. Chr. bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: Piper, 1905). “The ideographic pictures of the writing address themselves to the eye,” writes Heilmann, “even before they become words. … Once they have become words, however, they do not cease but rather truly first begin to have a painterly effect” (xxxiii). 30 Klee, Beiträge zur bildnerischen Formlehre, vol. 2, Anhang zum faksimilierten Originalmanuskript, Transkription und Einleitung von Glaesemer (Basel and Stuttgart: Schwabe, 1979), 15. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 31 Many did attempt, during the early years at the Bauhaus, to create typefaces based on the square and other elementary geometric forms; see Robin Kinross, “Das Bauhaus im Kontext der Neuen Typographie,” in Brüning, Das A und O des Bauhauses, 9, and Ute Brüning, “Kalligraphie und Konstruktion,” ibid., 35. See Moholy-Nagy’s later, more measured words on such attempts in “Zeitgemäße Typografie. Ziele, Praxis, Kritik” (1926), in Fleischmann, Bauhaus, 19. 32 Koerner also suggests that the square pictures might be seen as precipitating out from Once emerged, describing them as “painting at its furthest remove from any narrative or illustrative elements, and yet the grid that makes up Once emerged suggests that what might now be abstract once (einst) was more bookish,” 65. 33 Krauss, “Grids,” 50. 34 See Klee, Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch, originally published as volume 2 of the series of bauhausbücher, available in a facsimile edition (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2003), 48–51. The very form of the Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch represents a collaboration between Klee and MoholyNagy, who designed the book. 35 As Glaesemer writes, “For instance, the technique of layering glazes to make color gradations can only be applied to a very limited degree in oil painting. Without much success he attempted … to extend this transparent way of painting to opaque paints by mixing the techniques of watercolor and oil painting,” until Klee arrived at the very different solution the square pictures offered to the problem of creating color-movements (Die farbigen Werke, 177–8). 36 Glaesemer writes that Klee’s “attempts to put progressive color-movements to use in oil

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painting as well led finally, as if of their own accord, to the genre of ‘square pictures’,“ ibid., 178. Glaesemer lays out with exemplary clarity the relation between the layered watercolor technique Klee developed in 1921 and his theoretical writings (ibid., 167–70), as well as that between the layered watercolors and the square pictures (177–80). See also Triska, “Die Quadratbilder Paul Klees,” 49, 62–3. 37 Besides the already cited pages of the Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch, see also Klee’s teaching notes or “Pedagogical Estate” (the Pädagogischer Nachlass in the collection of the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern), such as PN 26, M45, 45–7, and the illustration in Glaesemer, 167. 38 See PN 30, M60/68 and 71, reproduced in Paul Klee: Die Kunst des Sichtbarmachens. Materialien zu Klees Unterricht am Bauhaus, ed. Michael Baumgartner and Christine Flechtner (Bern: Benteli, 2000), 78–9. See also Susanne Friedli, “Specielle Ordnung (PN 30 M60),” in the same catalogue, 69–74. 39 Klee, Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch, 6–8. Klee, Schriften: Rezensionen und Aufsätze, ed. Christian Geelhaar (Cologne: DuMont, 1976), 172–3. 40 Klee, Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch, 23. 41 Yve-Alain Bois, “ ‘Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail’: Reading Twombly,” in Abstraction, Gesture, Écriture: Paintings from the Daros Collection (Zurich: Scalo, 1999), 64–5. 42 Ibid. 43 Klee, Beiträge, 98. Also suggestive in this respect is the word Klee wrote in pencil at the top of Once emerged, along the uppermost of the ruled lines he drew on the cardboard mount for the inscription of the title: Bahn (track, path). 44 Klee made a number of works between 1917 and 1924 which he termed memorial pages (Gedenkblätter) or commemorative sheets (Erinnerungsblätter), such as Erinnerungsblatt an eine Empfängnis (1918/75), Gedenkblatt mit dem eisernen Kreuz (1918/125), and Gedenkblatt (an Gersthofen) (1918/196); as Otto Karl Werckmeister has pointed out, these works may be connected to the mass-produced Gedenkblätter, “picture prints with a framed blank space in which to inscribe the name of a soldier killed in action, which army authorities sent as formal notifications to his relatives.” Werckmeister, The Making of Paul Klee’s Career 1914–1920 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 139. Other artists working in Germany during the war and its aftermath, from Käthe Kollwitz to George Grosz, also drew upon the Gedenkblatt in a wide variety of ways. Perhaps particularly pertinent to Klee’s Centrifugal Memorial Page as a memorial to reading is the Berlin Dadaist Johannes Baader’s collage with photomontage Gutenberggedenkblatt (1919), also known as the Ehrenporträt von Charlie Chaplin. 45 Richard Verdi, Klee and Nature (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 206. 46 “Weißt Du es Anna, weißt Du es schon,/Man kann Dich auch von hinten lesen … Du bist von hinten, wie von vorne:/A—N—N—A,” writes Schwitters in “An Anna Blume.” Schwitters, Das literarische Werk, ed. Friedhelm Lach, vol. 1 (Cologne: DuMont, 1973), 58–9. On the relation between Anna Wenne and Anna Blume, see Paul Bauschatz’s insightful article, “Paul Klee’s Anna Wenne and the Work of Art,” Art History 19, no. 1 (March 1996): 86–92. 47 Moholy-Nagy, Painting, Photography, Film, trans. J. Seligman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 16. Malerei, Fotografie, Film (1927 edition), facsimile republication (Mainz: Florian Kupferberg, 1967), 14.

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Lyonel Feininger’s Bauhaus Photographs Laura Muir

If the Bauhaus has proved an unwieldy historical subject, the role of photography at the school is perhaps even harder to pin down because of its unofficial status and the variety of modes in which it was practiced. Although there was no formal workshop devoted to photography before 1929, the innovative explorations of the many Bauhaus artists who experimented with the medium during the 1920s constitute one of the most vital episodes in the history of photography.1 As objects, the photographs themselves are similarly elusive, neither adhering to a single “Bauhaus style” nor representing the type of functional object typically associated with the established workshops. Created free from the requirements of any formal course, but deeply inspired by the school’s spirit of artistic innovation and fascination with technology, the photographs are among the most powerful expressions of the whole Bauhaus experiment. Photography’s rise in popularity at the school coincided with the arrival in 1923 of the young constructivist artist László Moholy-Nagy, whose own photographic experiments and writings on art and technology exemplified the new direction in which Walter Gropius hoped to take the school. For the older painters on the faculty who had helped Gropius to shape the initial course of the Bauhaus, this development, which threatened to dramatically reduce their role at the school, was deeply unsettling.2 One painter voiced his concerns in a 1925 letter in which he comments on an article Moholy-Nagy had recently published: “Nothing but optics, mechanics, taking the ‘old’ painting out of service … he talks of movies … projections, and movement, and even of mechanically produced ‘optical 125

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slides’ … but why attach the name of art to this mechanization of all visual things …?”3 Within a few years of writing these words, Lyonel Feininger experienced a surprising change of heart. By 1928 the 58-year-old painter was himself pursuing photography as an important mode of artistic expression. Despite his initial skepticism, Feininger enthusiastically embraced the technical complexities of this “mechanical” medium, investigating them through an array of experimental techniques. In the fall of 1928 and spring of 1929, Feininger photographed the Bauhaus and its environs in all weather conditions and often at night before retreating to the darkroom to continue his explorations with the enlarger and through negative printing. Shared only with family and a few trusted friends, this intriguing body of work has remained largely unknown and has never been fully explored.4 A study of it reveals that Feininger’s quiet pursuit of photography played a surprisingly important role in his creative life during this period. Fein­ inger found in photography an invigorating and artistically liberating activity that, in turn, inspired him to explore new directions in his painting practice. His approach to photography drew inspiration from his experience as both painter and printmaker as well as from the dazzling photographic techniques promoted by Moholy-Nagy and practiced by many of the other amateur photographers at the Bauhaus. In contrast to their characteristically lighthearted images, Feininger’s photographs are mostly uninhabited, contemplative, and dreamlike, revealing an unfamiliar and intensely personal view of the Bauhaus while reflecting his enchantment with the unique possibilities of a new medium. When Gropius invited Feininger to join the Bauhaus in 1919 as his first faculty appointment, the painter was considered to be one of the most important modern artists in Germany. After beginning his career as a cartoonist in the 1890s, the American-born artist had gone on to achieve considerable fame for his luminous cubist-inspired paintings of German towns and churches and, shortly before coming to the school, for his work in the medium of woodcut. At the Weimar Bauhaus, Feininger became head of the printing and graphics workshop and directed the publication of the Bauhaus print portfolios. He also continued to exhibit and sell his work, achieving a degree of financial security over the next few years that no longer made it necessary for him to teach.5 When the school moved to Dessau, Gropius arranged for Feininger to retain the title of Bauhaus Master but without teaching obligations. In July 1926 Feininger moved into No. 3 Burgkühnauer Allee, half of one of the two-family masters’ houses designed by Gropius, the other half of which was occupied by MoholyNagy and his wife Lucia Moholy.

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By the time Moholy-Nagy and the Feiningers became neighbors, the young Hungarian artist’s influence at the school had grown considerably. In addition to promoting an interest in technology through his teaching of the preliminary course and direction of the metal workshop, he was exerting tremendous influence through his extracurricular experiments with photography and theoretical writings about the medium. He encouraged artists to think of photography not simply as a means of reproducing and recording, but as a way of producing entirely new art.6 He argued that phot­ ography had the power to provoke a fresh rapport with the visual world— a “new vision”—by rendering the familiar unfamiliar through unexpected viewpoints, extreme close-ups, radical cropping, negative printing, and the photogram technique, all of which he demonstrated in his seminal Painting, Photography, Film, published as the eighth Bauhaus Book in 1925.7 Photography also became the focus of intense interest for many other Bauhaus artists. Inspired by Moholy-Nagy’s experiments, as well as the striking imagery of the new illustrated newspapers and avant-garde film, students and teachers alike used it to document their daily lives and conduct a variety of innovative experiments. One of the most exceptional of these amateur talents was Lux Feininger, Lyonel’s youngest son. A student at the Dessau Bauhaus from 1926 to 1932, Lux spent his free time playing in the school’s jazz band and roaming the campus with his camera, recording exuberant views of student life. Lyonel’s eldest son, Andreas, who was living at home while studying architecture at the Anhaltischen Bauschule in the nearby town of Zerbst and later while working for an architectural firm in Dessau, also took up the camera during this period and would go on to pursue photography as a career. In 1927 he built a darkroom in the basement of their house and became particularly interested in darkroom manipulations.8 Lyonel’s middle son, Laurence, took up the camera around this time as well. In a June 1928 letter to Alfred Barr, Feininger reported: “All three boys are good amateurs with the camera and of course do their own developing and printing, on which so much depends.”9 Feininger followed his sons’ photographic activities with great interest, and their enthusiasm undoubtedly contributed to his own shift in attitude toward the medium. Lux Feininger recalls that his father “got turned on to [photography] by my brother and myself. Our photographing rather copiously gave him somehow the idea he would like to do it too … I was merely doing my own photography and he was very interested, constantly wanted to see what I had done and he began …”10 Feininger’s feelings about Moholy-Nagy had also warmed in the intervening years as a personal relationship developed. Upon learning of his colleague’s departure from the school in June 1928, Feininger wrote to his wife Julia:

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That is really a gap that will not be filled easily. … All the many people that were welcomed next door at No. 2 with hearty cheers! The friendly and powerful voice of Moholy that pierced through the wall between our studios during his conferences! He cared about the exchange and circulation of Bauhaus ideas and was the most amiable and helpful, and most vital person.11 By the fall of 1928 Feininger had acquired a camera (the “beloved” Voigtländer Bergheil, which took 4.5 × 6 cm glass-plate negatives) and began making a series of photographs around the neighborhood at night.12 On 31 October 1928, he wrote to Julia about a recent outing: At nightfall I set out with my camera firmly attached to the tripod and made about 12 exposures of night scenes with lanterns and lighted windows. Dessau has changed countenance for me since I have been prowling about a good deal with the camera, intensely observing.13 The intriguing detail that Feininger’s first serious foray into photography took place at night might in part be explained by the fact that during the day he painted, leaving evenings free for him to draw, make prints, or pursue other artistic activities that did not require natural light.14 While practical necessity may have played a part, photographing after dark was in fact perfectly suited to the solitary and private nature of Feininger’s project. Unlike most of the other amateur photographers at the school, who were interested in recording their fellow students and their high-spirited activities during the daylight hours, Feininger, who was now relatively estranged from the daily life of the Bauhaus, preferred to find his subjects in the evening when the streets were deserted. At night, he could also engage in this activity without drawing attention to himself. The fact that during this initial period Feininger did not venture much beyond the street where the masters’ houses were located also suggests the kind of circumspection with which he approached his work with photography. Feininger may also have been inspired by other contemporary artistic explorations of the night. Night imagery and the effects of artific­ ial lights were a source of intense fascination for the modernist architects, painters, filmmakers, and photographers of the period. In spite of the technical challenges it posed (focus, exposure times), night photo­ graphy become increasingly popular in the 1920s as urban electrification became more widespread. It was also among the techniques that MoholyNagy promoted in his 1925 Bauhaus Book, Painting, Photography, Film, with which Feininger was certainly familiar. The examples Moholy-Nagy

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reproduced record urban settings with streaming headlights captured by long exposures and the exaggerated reflections of streetlamps in puddles and on wet pavement.15 While these photographs use the stark contrasts of the night to evoke the dynamism and energy of the modern city with its cars, trams, and illuminated signage, Feininger’s photographs emphasize the stillness and ambiguities of the night, qualities that had attracted him to the subject long before he ever took up the camera. A small charcoal drawing from 1906 depicting a dark deserted street illuminated by a single streetlamp reveals his early interest in the theme while looking ahead to his photographs along the empty Burgkühnauer Allee.16 In one particularly haunting image from this series he 6.1 Lyonel Feininger, Untitled (Night View of Trees and Streetlamp, Burgkühnauer Allee, Dessau), 1928, gelatin silver print, 17.7 × 23.7cm

explores the atmospheric effects of street lights on a foggy November evening (Figure 6.1). By concealing his light source behind a tree, he avoided the technical problem of halation, a flaring caused from the light reflecting back from the negative’s emulsion support.17 This strategy enabled him to capture the ghostly effects of the light radiating through the damp air as well as the slim silhouettes of the trees in the foreground, recalling Caspar David Friedrich’s atmospheric night scenes in which figures and trees are often silhouetted against the light of a softly glowing

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moon.18 Feininger has often been discussed as an heir to the Romantic tradition in German painting, particularly in connection to his seascapes and depictions of Gothic architecture,19 but the affinity between his night photographs and the pensive nocturnal scenes of the German Romantic painters is also worth noting. Despite the modernity of his medium, setting, and source of illumination, Feininger’s photographs are permeated by the same misty air, contemplative mood, and mysterious quality of light. In contrast to more contemporaneous preoccupations with the night by artists such as George Grosz, Ludwig Meidner, and Otto Dix who stressed its negative, threatening, and chaotic aspects in works addressing societal ills and anxieties,20 Feininger’s work echoes the Romantics’ positive attitude toward the night.21 He sought to convey its tranquillity and the way it transformed his everyday surroundings into something alluringly unfamiliar— a quality the Romantics described as the “estrangement effect.”22 In this respect, Feininger’s photographs are perhaps most closely aligned with the night explorations of the French surrealists, anticipating the uncanny and enigmatic photographs that Brassaï would make, beginning in 1929, of deserted Parisian parks and streets during the course of his own nocturnal wanderings.23 The themes of light and photography are brought together in another photograph from this series, in which Feininger records the brightly lit window of Moholy-Nagy’s former studio (Figure 6.2). Made several months after his neighbor’s departure, the quotation marks Fein­ inger inscribed around the words “Moholy’s Atelierfenster” in the title indicate that, although Josef and Anni Albers now occupied this half of the masters’ house, it was still powerfully associated with the previous resident.24 The warm glow emanating from the studio suggests both the presence of the artist as well as human creativity. The large lighted window also suggests the materials and processes of photography. The window panes evoke the rectangular glass-plate negatives that Fein­ inger was using in his camera, and the creative moment when they are exposed to light to record an image. Feininger’s elegant meditation on the absence of his former colleague and the medium with which he was so closely associated might also be seen as an innovative kind of portrait and perhaps as an acknowledgment of the fact that it was only after Moholy-Nagy’s departure that Feininger was able to embark on his own experiments with photography. The defamiliarizing and bold graphic effects that attracted Fein­ inger to night photography also drew him to the technique of negative printing. Moholy-Nagy had praised the technique’s transformative effects in his essay “Photography is Creation with Light,” which Feininger would

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likely have seen when it appeared in early 1928 in an issue of the Bauhaus magazine with one of Moholy-Nagy’s own photographs illustrating the technique.25 Later that year, perhaps working in the darkroom alongside his son Andreas, who was also experimenting with the technique, Feininger began to produce his own negative images, printing standard negatives onto diapositive plates from which enlargements could be made.26 Twice removed from the reality of the daytime, his negative image of one of the masters’ houses (Figure 6.3) reverses the already distorted tonalities of the night view.27 The sky becomes light and the brightly lit studio window

6.2 Lyonel Feininger, “Moholy’s Studio Window” around 10 p.m., 1928, gelatin silver print, 17.8 × 12.8 cm 131

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becomes a nebulous black mass, while the darkened stairwell window is transformed into a delicate trellis of glowing lines. Negative printing also served as a new means of exploring some of the effects that had fascinated Feininger a decade earlier during his intense engagement with the woodcut—a medium, like photography, that Feininger was drawn to for its flexibility, expressivity, and possibilities for experimentation.28 Both techniques emphasized bold forms, stark contrasts between black and white, and the play of positive–negative effects. Both required the creation of a matrix from which a print was made, and both involved an inversion of that image. While the “negative” image carved into the woodblock remained an invisible part of the process, the negative print made it visible. In his woodcuts Feininger would frequently pair corresponding areas of black and white, evoking light and shadow as well as the negative–positive transformation of the woodblock process (see, for example, his treatment of the spaces around the cathedral’s doors and buttresses and in the sky above in his 1919 print for the cover of the Bauhaus proclamation (Figure 1.1, page 14). With its total reversal of tonalities, the negative print allowed Feininger to take the graphic, abstract, and disorienting effects of the woodcut a step further in images

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6.3 Lyonel Feininger, Untitled (Negative Image of a Master’s House, Burgkühnauer Allee, Dessau), 1928–1929, gelatin silver print, 17.7 × 23.8 cm

Lyonel Feininger’s Bauhaus Photographs

6.4 Lyonel Feininger, Bauhaus, 26 March 1929, gelatin silver print, 17.9 × 24 cm

that were perhaps all the more satisfying for having been extracted from the real world. On 22 March 1929, after several months of actively photographing, Feininger finally approached Gropius’s Bauhaus building as a subject. The evening before, he had been photographing at the Dessau railway station and written to his wife Julia that the night had been “magically beautiful,” the moon “high up in the sky … almost full, in a haze. …”29 On his way home Feininger probably would have passed by the northeastern side of the Bauhaus building, and perhaps the sight of it in the moonlight inspired him to return the following evening with his tripod and a fresh supply of negatives.30 Four nights later he embarked on a more extensive campaign. Starting at dusk and working into the night, he circled the campus, photo­ graphing the building from all directions, this time getting much closer and shooting from unusual angles. When he photographed the east side of the studio building, for example, he positioned his camera near one corner and angled it upward in order to achieve a dramatic worm’s-eye view and dia­ gonal composition that accentuates the geometry of the building and the way its distinctive balconies are illuminated from below (Figure 6.4). Feininger gave about a dozen of these views to Gropius, who 133

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had left the Bauhaus and moved to Berlin in 1928. Gropius, who was in the process of collecting images for his Bauhaus Buildings Dessau, published in 1930 as the twelfth Bauhaus Book, selected two of Feininger’s photographs for the volume (Figure 6.4 and a vertical image depicting the south side of the studio building).31 Among the only night views in the book, Fein­ inger’s pictures are juxtaposed with daytime images of the same subject by the Bauhaus photographer Erich Consemüller and the Moscow-based photographer Wutke.32 These pairings underscore the fact that most of the photographs of the building from this period were made during the daytime and focus either on student life or the way the architecture gleamed in the sunlight. A growing interest in photographing modernist architecture after dark is reflected in only one other set of images in the book, by an unidentified photographer, in which every light is ablaze.33 An accompanying caption notes how well the night illumination reveals the building’s construction. Feininger, however, used the night to create a more personal and expressive portrait of the Bauhaus. He was less interested in recording the details of the architecture than he was in conveying a mood. In his night photographs the famous glass walls and windows are randomly lit, emphasizing less the structure of the building than the individuals and their activities taking place within it, while accentuating his own position outside of it. Gropius’s book also reproduces many photographs of the Bauhaus that he commissioned from Lucia Moholy.34 Certainly aware of her project, Feininger sought to accomplish something quite different. Photographing the building on his own initiative and after Gropius’s departure, Feininger’s pictures of the former director’s achievement are more contemplative than celebratory. The twilight softens the hard geometry of the architecture and transforms the Bauhaus into a serene, dreamlike world— a fantasy that belies the reality of the turbulent period that ensued after Gropius’s departure in 1928 and during the controversial directorship of Hannes Meyer. In 1929 Feininger painted a view of a modern apartment building at dusk (Lighted Windows I), its dark rectangular mass pierced by brightly lit windows, one shining upward like a beacon into a delicate blue-green sky.35 It is likely that this is the small night picture “composed after a photo­ graph” that Julia Feininger refers to in a letter she wrote to her husband on 17 May 1929.36 Although one of Feininger’s night views of the Bauhaus probably did not serve as a study for this work, the theme of a modern building illuminated by randomly lit windows and the still, quiet mood of the painting are strikingly similar. The fact that Feininger was drawing inspiration from his work with photography is not at all surprising. Upon making his earliest photographs, he had declared “Dessau has changed

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countenance for me”37 and a few months later he asserted that “photography has taken the way I see to a new level …”38 He believed that the camera helped him to see the world with fresh eyes, revealing subjects that had previously gone unnoticed and proposing new ways of approaching them, which naturally led him to consider how it might enhance his painting practice. Later that spring, after receiving a commission to paint a view of the city of Halle, Feininger began photographing its architectural landmarks with the specific intention of using the photographs as studies for paintings. After amassing a group of negatives, he wrote to Julia: “I shall have about 100 enlargements to make! Not a bad result of my endeavors in Halle. I find I can paint very well after compositions from photos. I shall have splendid material for important new paintings.”39 About a month prior to leaving for Halle, in the late afternoon of 1 April 1929, Feininger pointed his camera out his studio window in order to photograph a stand of pine trees in his front lawn.40 Feininger had been struck by the graphic potential of these trees upon arriving in Dessau in 1926, writing to Julia about how pleasantly situated the masters’ houses were in a “sun-filtered pine wood” and remarked on the “rhythm of the slender upright stems.”41 The camera proved an ideal means by which to capture this temporary convergence of trees and light and the remarkable warp-and-weft-like pattern it created. His bird’s-eye view enabled him to record the trees’ long shadows on the ground while flattening the space and giving the image a slightly vertiginous quality. In one photograph from this series (Figure 6.5) he introduces a third element: the narrow trapezoidal band of the front walk, interrupting the vertical and horizontal lines with a bold diagonal, which further emphasizes the abstract geometry of the scene. If Feininger’s painting Lighted Windows I was composed after a photograph, we might consider the possibility that this photograph was inspired by a painting. The diagonal path through the woods, overhead viewpoint, and complex network of lines in the photograph are also present in Feininger’s 1915 painting Avenue of Trees (Figure 6.6), which hung in the living room of his master’s house.42 Feininger would have seen it every day and perhaps recognized elements of it in the view outside his studio window, finding in nature the kind of precise linearity that he used in his paintings in order to transform the real world into a more abstract version of itself. In returning to the real world with this photograph, Feininger retained the geometry and formal rigor of the painting, but replaced its crystalline coolness with the new elements of airy space and warm natural light. By early May 1929 Feininger was in Halle and beginning

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preparations for his new painting commission. On 16 May he wrote to Alfred Barr: I have been taking photos of the principal sites. … When I have copies I must send you some views. … I am very much wedded to my little camera, and having begun very late in life to photograph and to do my own chemical work, I am all the more intensely devoted to the process. I enclose a few enlarged copies of various subjects taken in Dessau [three night views and one negative print], hoping they will interest you.43 During Barr and Jere Abbott’s visit to the Bauhaus in December 1927 and in subsequent correspondence, both men had been enthusiastic about Lux’s photography.44 It was perhaps this show of interest that encouraged Feininger to send each of them a sampling of his own work.45 Despite this openness to sharing his photographs with people he respected, Fein­ inger did not pursue more public exposure for it. His photographic work was essentially a private endeavor, and it was the private nature of the project—working alone at night, in the darkroom, and in cold and damp weather—that gave him such freedom to experiment. Because it was not

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6.5 Lyonel Feininger, Untitled (Trees and Shadows, Burgkühnauer Allee, Dessau), 1 April 1929, gelatin silver print, 17.7 × 23.7 cm

Lyonel Feininger’s Bauhaus Photographs

6.6 Lyonel Feininger, Avenue of Trees, 1915, oil on canvas, 80.5 × 100.5 cm

his primary work or source of income, it was also never a source of the pressure and depressions that painting sometimes caused him. Instead it became a kind of stimulating, almost therapeutic activity that he turned to when he was unable to paint. In October 1928 Feininger wrote to Julia: “I mainly have been out with my small camera, which has been the most bearable of activities. … I have made some progress on my music, but not with painting—my vitality is too low for that.”46 A few days later he writes that he has been photographing again and “while out walking my jittery spirits are calmed and I am restored enough to make a start at painting. I see now that to paint is still better than to take photographs – but the latter is also stimulating in a way of its own.”47 The push and pull that Feininger experienced between painting and photography had a counterpart in his wife’s determined promotion of his career as a painter and her uneasiness about his attachment to the camera. Feininger’s slightly awkward assurance that “to paint is still better than to take photographs” was less a reflection of his own feelings than an attempt to allay her concerns. Lux Feininger recalls that his mother was “almost morbidly sensitive to any public references of linking Feininger’s art 137

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to photographs. My father was unwilling to cause her discomfort and thus kept pretty quiet about his activities along those lines.”48 The publication of his photographs in Gropius’s Bauhaus Buildings Dessau was an exceptional occurrence and his work, unlike that of his sons’, was never included in any of the period’s many publications or exhibitions devoted to avant-garde photography. It is possible that Feininger, who printed his photographs with great care, signing, dating, and titling many of them like any other work of art, might have pursued this if not for the obstacle presented by his wife’s intense disapproval. In deference to her wishes, he kept his photographic work to himself, and, as a result, it has remained virtually unknown.49 Feininger’s photographs are curious Bauhaus objects. Although he employed the same experimental techniques associated with “Bauhaus photography,” his subjects existed for the most part outside of the school and its bustling activity. When he photographed the building, it was after dark when the campus was deserted. Instead of playful and spirited, his images are introspective and otherworldly. These photographs, however, probably would never have come into being if the medium had not become the focus of such concentrated interest at the school and within Feininger’s own household. They also provide insight into Moholy-Nagy’s influence, exemplifying not only the techniques he promoted, but also, and perhaps most significantly, his belief that photography represented a new way of seeing and experiencing the world. For the painter who took up the camera late in life, photography provided not only artistic stimulation but also a new sense of vitality. The irony of Feininger’s devotion to a medium that was widely seen to have displaced painting is complicated by his ongoing commitment to painting and the fact that his work with photography seems in fact to have energized and enriched that practice at a critical moment. The story of Feininger’s photographs is inseparable from his experience as an artist at the Bauhaus and the story of the school itself. The photographs are the product of an institution and individual in transition, reflecting Feininger’s anxieties about how the Bauhaus was changing, how he fit in, and were ultimately, perhaps, a means of reconciling his artistic vision with the new order.

Notes   1 For an overview of this subject, see Jeannine Fiedler, ed., Photography at the Bauhaus (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).   2 For a discussion of this transitional moment, see Rose-Carol Washton Long, “From Metaphysics to Material Culture: Painting and Photography at the Bauhaus,” in Bauhaus Culture: From Weimar to the Cold War, ed. Kathleen James-Chakraborty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 43–62.

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  3 Lyonel Feininger, letter to Julia Feininger, 9 March 1925, Lyonel Feininger Papers, bMSGer 146.1 (1986), Houghton Library, Harvard University.   4 Sixteen of Feininger’s Bauhaus photographs are part of the Walter Gropius bequest at the Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. Almost all of his other surviving photographs, some 500 vintage prints, are in the collection of Harvard University’s Houghton Library, along with his papers. Feininger’s negatives (glass-plate and film) as well as a collection of his slides (c. 18,000 objects in total), made during the course of what became an almost thirty-year engagement with the medium, are part of the Lyonel Feininger Archive at the Harvard Art Museum/Busch-Reisinger Museum, which also contains paintings, watercolors, finished drawings, and over 5,000 sketches by the artist. Although a handful of Feininger’s photographs have appeared in various publications devoted to his work, they have been used primarily as illustrations in chronologies or as comparatives to his paintings. The only photographs to have been extensively reproduced are those that Feininger made in the city of Halle between 1929 and 1931 as a means of selecting motifs and as studies for a painting commission. These photographs are thoughtfully discussed in connection with Feininger’s Halle painting series in Wolfgang Büche’s Lyonel Feininger: Halle-Bilder, Die Natur-Notizen (Leipzig: Beck & Eggeling Kunstverlag, 2000) and Lyonel Feininger: Die Halle-Bilder (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1991), which includes a brief essay (pp. 90–5) in which Andreas Hünecke discusses the photographs as works of art in their own right while acknowledging that the subject of Feininger as a photographer is still an open field for discovery.   5 Ulrich Luckhardt, Lyonel Feininger (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1989), 41.   6 László Moholy-Nagy, “Production-Reproduction,” (De Stijl, 1922). Reprinted in Christopher Phillips, ed., Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989), 79–82.   7 László Moholy-Nagy, Malerei, Photographie, Film (Munich: Albert Langen Verlag, 1925).   8 T. Lux Feininger, “Lyonel Feininger’s Photography,” unpublished ms, 1995, 1, Lyonel Fein­ inger Archive, Harvard Art Museum/Busch-Reisinger Museum; T. Lux Feininger, interview by the author, Cambridge, MA, 24 May 2000.   9 Lyonel Feininger, letter to Alfred Barr, 30 June 1928, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers, 3a.A.[8]. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 10 T. Lux Feininger, interview by the author, Cambridge, MA, 10 March 2003. Feininger wrote about his sons’ various photographic activities and successes in several letters. See, for example: Lyonel Feininger, letter to Alfred Barr, 30 June 1928, Barr Papers, 3a.A.[8]. MoMA Archives, New York, and Lyonel Feininger, letter to Julia Feininger, 29 September 1927, Feininger Papers, bMSGer 146.1 (2088), Houghton Library. 11 Lyonel Feininger, letter to Julia Feininger, 29 June 1928, Feininger Papers, bMSGer 146.1 (2112), Houghton Library. 12 T. Lux Feininger, interview by the author, Cambridge, MA, 10 March 2003. 13 Lyonel Feininger, letter to Julia Feininger, 31 October 1928. Feininger Papers, bMSGer 146.1 (2147), Houghton Library. 14 “… I can keep on working for 8 to 9 hours now, painting during the day, in the evening by artificial light I am either drawing or printing or doing some other thing to further me …,” 4 March 1925. Leona E. Prasse, Lyonel Feininger. A Definitive Catalogue of his Graphic Work: Etchings, Lithographs, Woodcuts (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1972), 32. 15 Moholy-Nagy, Malerei, Photographie, Film, 53, 121. 16 See Lyonel Feininger, Untitled (Houses and Streetlamp), 15 January 1906, charcoal on paper, Busch-Reisinger Museum, BR63.5425. 17 Feininger eventually was able to overcome this challenge after a great deal of experiment­ ation with various “anti-halatic” negatives, which allowed him to record the streetlamps

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while controlling the enchanting coronas they created. T. Lux Feininger, “Lyonel Feininger’s Photography,” 1, Feininger Archive, Busch-Reisinger Museum. 18 See, for example, Friedrich’s painting Two Men Contemplating the Moon, c. 1830. Reproduced in Sabine Rewald, Caspar David Friedrich: Moonwatchers (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001), 35. 19 Carla Schulz-Hoffmann, “Kunst ohne Eigenschaften? Lyonel Feininger und die Romantik,” in Lyonel Feininger von Gelmeroda nach Manhattan: Retrospektive der Gemälde, ed. Roland März (Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 1998), 321. 20 See Stephanie Rosenthal, “Grossstadtnächte grell geschminkt,” in Die Nacht, ed. Stephanie Rosenthal et al. (Munich: Haus der Kunst, 1998), 135–152. 21 Roger Cardinal, “Night and Dreams,” in The Romantic Spirit in German Art 1790–1990, ed. Keith Hartley (London: Hayward Gallery, South Bank Centre, 1994), 191. 22 Rewald, Caspar David Friedrich: Moonwatchers, 11. 23 Anne Tucker, Brassaï: The Eye of Paris (Houston: The Museum of Fine Arts, 1999), 28. Brassaï’s night photographs achieved widespread fame in 1932 when they were published in his book Paris de Nuit. 24 In 1928 Josef Albers also took up photography and made use of the darkroom with which the Moholys had equipped the house. Albers sought advice from Lux Feininger on how to operate his new 35 mm Leica camera and made some portrait photographs of Lyonel Feininger on the roof of their two-family masters’ house. Whether Lyonel shared his own photographic activities with his new neighbor, however, is unknown. Karen Haas, “More than Meets the Eye: Josef Albers and Photography,” in Josef Albers in Black and White, ed. Karen Haas (Boston: Boston University Art Gallery), 11. 25 László Moholy-Nagy, “Fotografie ist Lichtgestaltung” in Bauhaus 2 (1928): 6. 26 Although Feininger was a self-taught photographer, it is possible that Andreas, the expert technician in the family, occasionally may have advised his father on certain darkroom techniques, including negative printing. T. Lux Feininger, interview by the author, 10 March 2003. 27 For a positive print of this night view see Lyonel Feininger, Burgkühnauer Allee 4 around 10 p.m., 1928, gelatin silver print, Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin, 6326/2. 28 Prasse, Lyonel Feininger. A Definitive Catalogue of his Graphic Work, 31. 29 Lyonel Feininger, letter to Julia Feininger, 22 March 1929, Feininger Papers, bMSGer 146.1 (2153), Houghton Library. 30 The path of the moon as it traveled across the sky (visible in Feininger’s negatives but cropped out of his prints) reveals an exposure time of several minutes. See Lyonel Feininger, Untitled (Night View of the Bauhaus Building, Dessau), 22 March 1929, glass-plate negative, and Untitled (Night View of the Bauhaus Building, Dessau), 22 March 1929, gelatin silver print, Busch-Reisinger Museum, BRLF.28.11, BR60.36.2. 31 These photographs are now part of the Gropius collections at the Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin. Although Feininger may have given the photographs to Gropius simply out of friendship, he may also have known that Gropius was in the process of gathering images for his book, possibly through his son Lux whose photographs also appear in the volume. 32 Walter Gropius, Bauhausbauten Dessau (Munich: Albert Langen Verlag, 1930), 40–3. 33 See Gropius, Bauhausbauten Dessau, 58–59. For a discussion of the period’s fascination with illuminated architecture see Dietrich Neumann, “Lichtarchitektur and the Avant-Garde,” in Architecture of the Night: The Illuminated Building, ed. Dietrich Neumann (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2002), 36–51. 34 One of the only professionally-trained photographers at the school, Lucia Moholy was liked and admired by both Lyonel and Lux Feininger. T. Lux Feininger, interview by the author, 10 March 2003.

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35 Reproduced in Hans Hess, Lyonel Feininger (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1961), cat. no. 314. 36 Andreas Hüneke, catalogue entry for Beleuchtete Häuser-Zeile I, 1929, in Lyonel Feininger von Gelmeroda nach Manhattan, 162. 37 Lyonel Feininger, letter to Julia Feininger, 31 October 1928, Feininger Papers, bMSGer 146.1 (2147), Houghton Library. 38 Lyonel Feininger, letter to Julia Feininger, 21 May 1929, Feininger Papers, bMSGer 146.1 (2164), Houghton Library. 39 Lyonel Feininger, letter to Julia Feininger, 13 May 1929, Feininger Papers, bMSGer 146.1 (2161), Houghton Library. 40 Feininger wrote on the box containing his glass-plate negatives for these photographs: “Dessau: From My Studio Window.” A typewritten label on the same box reads: “schattenaufnahmen II” (shadow photographs), box for BRLF.30.1-14, Feininger Archive, BuschReisinger Museum. 41 Lyonel Feininger, letter to Julia Feininger, 4 August 1926, Feininger Papers, bMSGer 146.1 (2051), Houghton Library. 42 In a 1927–8 photograph by Andreas Feininger the painting is visible on the west side of the room. Drawing inspiration from this earlier work would have been in keeping with Fein­ inger’s practice of occasionally basing paintings on sketches made years earlier. 43 Lyonel Feininger, letter to Alfred Barr, 16 May 1929, Barr Papers, 3a.A.[8]. MoMA Archives, NY. 44 Lux Feininger’s photographs are mentioned in the following letters: Jere Abbott, letter to Lyonel Feininger, 20 December 1927; Alfred Barr, letter to Julia Feininger, 18 December 1927; and Alfred Barr, letter to Lyonel Feininger, 22 April 1928, 12 May 1928, and 11 June 1928, Feininger Papers, bMSGer 146.1 (2), (15), (18), (19), (20), Houghton Library. 45 The photographs Feininger sent to Barr on 16 May 1929, are in the Archives (Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers) and Photography Department at MoMA. The photographs he gave to Abbott are in the Smith College Museum of Art. 46 Lyonel Feininger, letter to Julia Feininger, 27 October 1928, Feininger Papers, bMSGer 146.1 (2145), Houghton Library. 47 Lyonel Feininger, letter to Julia Feininger, 31 October 1928, Feininger Papers, bMSGer 146.1 (2147), Houghton Library. 48 T. Lux Feininger, letter to the author, 11 February 2008; T. Lux Feininger, interviews by the author, Cambridge, MA, 2 February 2006 and 13 June 2007. 49 What Feininger did do, however, was preserve the work, saving almost 500 vintage photographs and around 18,000 negatives and slides. After both his parents died, Lux Fein­ inger gave these collections to Harvard University’s Houghton Library and Busch-Reisinger Museum (see note 4).

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Chapter 7

Excavating Surface On the Repair and Revision of László Moholy-Nagy’s Z VII (1926) Joyce Tsai

The paintings of László Moholy-Nagy have hardly ever attracted the kind of attention his other works have garnered. He secured his reputation as an artist less on the strength of his paintings and more on the theoretical ingenuity of his various experimental projects. He ordered enamel panels from a sign factory and exhibited them as EM1, EM2, and EM3 at a show of his paintings at the Galerie der Sturm in 1924.1 Derived from the German word for enamel, Emaille, the title emulated the language of industrial production, mimicking its seemingly anonymous and systematic logic. The critic Adolf Behne argues in an article from 1924 that these works, in their radically reduced aesthetic vocabulary, suggest a future when art would no longer remain the domain of the privileged but would become accessible to all. Anyone, Behne muses, might one day be able to place a telephone call to order paintings as durable as street signs, factory direct.2 MoholyNagy integrated this imaginative scenario in his retrospective account of the works’ origin twenty years after the fact, an account which inaugurated their more common name, the Telephone Pictures.3 At the Bauhaus, where Moholy-Nagy taught from 1923 to 1928, he flaunted his enthusiasm for photography and was seen by his fellow masters as an enemy of painting.4 He declared on several occasions, most notably in Painting, Photography, Film (1925), that in the face of new technologically sophisticated media, and of photography especially, painting cannot help but become an anachronism.5 In these years, he would claim that not only was painting doomed to obsolescence but art, narrowly understood as an autonomous realm of 142

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creative activity, must too be abandoned.6 Moholy-Nagy would stop painting altogether in 1928 in order to focus on developing new technologies that would enable artists to work with the possibilities of light. Given the trajectory of his artistic career of the 1920s, it is clear why his contemporaries and more recent scholars have viewed MoholyNagy as an artist for whom painting was nothing more than a dusty historical relic, to be replaced with new media commensurate with the demands of the modern industrial world. This narrative of Moholy-Nagy’s artistic career has been shaped by the perception that his artistic project moved from a preoccupation with painting in pigment to painting in pure light, following a progressive arc of technologically-mediated dematerialization.7 Over the course of the 1920s, it would seem that Moholy-Nagy grew ever more impatient with the intractable limitations of easel painting—its messy materiality, its static nature, its problematic surface prone to damage and to the vicissitudes of the hand. Looking at an oil painting such as Z VII (1926), a work which hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, this teleology appears to ring true (Figure 7.1). The surface of the painting has a provisional, slapdash feel to it. An imprecisely spaced pencil grid has been inscribed on the surface of a gray plane. Along points of intersection, uneven dabs of blue paint have been applied (Figure 7.1a). The expanse of haphazardly applied blue dots cannot help but foreground the imprecision of the hand and underscore the tedious temporality of this manual work. Unlike enamel, its ­uneven surface, pockmarked by years of abrasions and losses, speaks to the material fragility of painting. Patches of mismatched pigment betray several campaigns of repair and restoration, some of which are documented in the provenance (Figure 7.1b).8 Even if we try to imagine away these smaller blemishes, there is one area of damage we cannot overlook. A section of the circle is distended, swollen like a scar marking an old wound (Figure 7.1c). A photograph of the back of the canvas shows that the fabric itself had been rent and a white paste had been applied to it, perhaps to seal or to stabilize the rip.9 And that bulge in the circle, struggling to conceal the tear in the canvas, highlights how unwieldy thick, gooey paint is, how it impedes the production of immaterial effects. Z VII seems to testify, point for point, the reasons why Moholy-Nagy would eventually abandon painting in 1928. After all, why paint, when factories could theoretically produce pictures impervious to damage by executing them on cheap, durable, industrial supports? Why paint, when the camera captures the world with such breathtaking facility and speed? Why paint, when light could be made to dance on walls with the right technology? However, Moholy-Nagy returned to painting in 1930, after two

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7.1d Detail: center dark red square. These drying cracks result from the application of multiple layers of paint without each drying thoroughly.

7.1b Detail: lower right edge of canvas, revealing provenancedocumented repairs. 144

7.1c Detail: gray circle with patched tear

7.1a Detail: inside of lower parallelogram with dots overlaid on a penciled grid. Traces of bloodred visible as the faint outline of black here along the edges of the plane.

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7.1 László Moholy-Nagy, Z VII, 1926, oil on canvas, 95.3 × 76.2 cm (37½ × 30 in)

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enormously productive years curating photography shows, designing stage sets, and promoting emerging media through his publications and editorial contributions. He began to paint once more after he achieved his long-standing dream to produce a kinetic light display machine. This is a fact that disrupts the familiar narrative of Moholy-Nagy as the consummate artist-turned-engineer, rejecting the brush in favor of the machine; abandoning painting in favor of photography. Moholy-Nagy’s concomitant investment in painting and in new technological media has baffled generations of critics and scholars. It has been seen as an inconsistency in his thought—or, worse, as a retreat from the radical positions he took in the 1920s.10 Even in the early 1930s, Moholy-Nagy understood and anticipated the perceived discrepancy between his stated project of the 1920s and his artistic practice of the 1930s. Writing in October 1934 to his second wife, Sibyl, after seeing an exhibition of his work in Utrecht, he laments, there are so few people who really can grasp [my paintings] in their reality and because they don’t know anything about the effort put into their making and nothing about the overarching problems [gesamtproblematik] with which these paintings engage … a gallerist in utrecht told me that because of my photo­grams, the newspaper there sent a photography expert to the exhibition who didn’t have the slightest idea as to how to begin dealing with the paintings.11 The reception of his Utrecht show underscored the extent to which the reputation Moholy-Nagy cultivated over the course of the 1920s overshadowed any reception of his paintings. He realized that his paintings appeared to his public to be incommensurate with his aesthetic project altogether. Z VII has largely eluded critical attention. It was in a private collection until 2007 and had been shown only in a handful of small exhibitions over the past few decades, probably in no small part because of its problematic condition.12 However, as this study will show, this particular painting, precisely because of its damage, undergoes a number of transformations and comes to assume an extremely important place in MoholyNagy’s thinking about the interrelatedness of different media. In 1934, in the same month he expressed his frustration with the reception of his paintings in Utrecht, he began work on a retrospective monograph, a spec­ ial issue of the journal Telehor, which offered an overview of his artistic career. Incorporating a selection of his theoretical writings and a range of illustrations of his painting, photography, film, and sculpture, MoholyNagy saw the publication as an opportunity to describe the relationships among these different practices, to offer an overview of what he called

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his gesamtproblematik. Serving as the cover image for this publication is a color reproduction of Z VII in its repaired state but shown horizontally, rotated 90 degrees clockwise from its original vertical orientation (Figure 7.2). It will emerge that sedimented on the surface of Z VII are the traces of Moholy-Nagy’s struggle to clarify the place of painting in his artistic project. Z VII is a curious hybrid, at once representative of his work from the 1920s and wholly anomalous. Judging from its title and composition, it is absolutely a work of the 1920s. The composition Z VII is similar to a picture such as A XX (1924), which is structured by the presence of a dominant circle underpinning a complex of suspended planes (Figure 7.3).13 However, the use of color and the achieved surface on Z VII is completely foreign to Moholy-Nagy’s paintings of the 1920s. In paintings of the period, his compositions provide the scaffolding for his exploration of effects of translucency, transparency, and luminosity. The colors, often within a restricted chromatic range, are all deployed to produce the illusion of an architectonic structure hovering in an infinite space or to render in paint the

7.2 László MoholyNagy, ZVII, 1926, as published in Telehor 1:1–2 (1936): cover 147

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effect of overlapping shafts of light. Z VII feels comparatively obstinate in its refusal to achieve the effects so prevalent in his paintings of that time (Figure 7.1). Unlike the smooth, delicate surfaces of his works of the 1920s, which sought to suppress the traces of the hand—of obvious brushwork— Z VII is a painting with several rapid shifts in facture, moving jarringly, for instance, from the heavy impasto of the gray disc to the thinly rendered expanse of brilliant red constituting the plane jutting below the circle, running vertically down the center of the picture. The vertical strip of uninterrupted, viscid white cuts partially into the right side of that red plane and conjoins it to a pane of pink. The opacity of that white strip repudiates what should read structurally as a convincing area of translucent overlap. That impervious white disrupts the coherence of the central structure. Here, the planes start feeling like discrete shapes, ratcheted together to constitute a compact, almost sculptural figure. There is evidence to suggest that the differences between Z VII and Moholy-Nagy’s paintings from the 1920s emerged as a result of repair. Z VII, as noted above, suffered a trauma to the canvas. A tear, several

7.3 László MoholyNagy, A XX, 1924, captioned as A2, 1926 in Telehor 1:1–2 (1936): 53 148

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centimeters long, was roughly patched. The swell in the circle marks the area where the application of thick viscous paint attempts to conceal the rip—paint distributed across the circle with broad, unbroken strokes applied with a stiff-bristled brush (Figure 7.1c). If this were simply a matter of patching up a tear, we would expect to see a more localized instance of stitching and not this kind of vigorous, if not obsessive, repainting pursued in the whole of that sector. The dramatic nature of the intervention suggests that Moholy-Nagy repaired this bit of damage with his own hand. This is an interpretation borne out by the fact that the paint and technique used to fix this bit of damage is quite different from those deployed in the areas repaired in documented, posthumous campaigns of restoration. According to curatorial files that detail the provenance, Z VII’s dimensions were expanded by about a half a centimeter to fit a frame bought for it by the collector in 1991. The paint used to fill in the newly exposed edges of the expanded picture is discernible, for the color has shifted over the last few years and no longer matches the painting itself. Under ultraviolet light, the difference between the original paints and those used in restoration is even more evident (Figure 7.4).14 The restoration paints fluoresce a dirty yellow, which appears in the black-and-white illustration in this volume as

7.4 László MoholyNagy, Z VII, 1926, pre-treatment photograph (under UV light) 149

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a haze along the perimeter of the canvas, intruding too in isolated cloudy patches in the lower right quadrant, and at the halo emitting from the lower outer circumference of the gray circle. By contrast, the tear with its surrounding areas within the circle fluoresces a streaky lilac, its striations integrated, even if unevenly, into the structure of the brushwork spread across the gray sector. Unlike other areas of subsequent conservation treatment where repairs and restoration are identifiable as discrete patches, this entire section of the circle was treated with a continuous, highly impastoed coat of paint. There is ample evidence that Moholy-Nagy cleaned and restored many of his own works throughout his life, especially in his years in exile during the 1930s in the Netherlands, London, and Chicago.15 However, in this instance, Moholy-Nagy’s intervention cannot be characterized as an act aimed at conserving the original painting. The gray circle was not restored but repainted; it appears that other portions of the canvas were too. The opacity of the thick, slick, cold gray paint constituting the ground for the network of hastily applied blue dots seeks to deny the existence of another color underneath it. However, abrasion has excavated the blood red that the layer of gray was supposed to suppress, a red that also peeks out along the outer borders of that plane. In the reproduction in this volume, that red reads like the barest traces of a black outline at the edges of the dotted plane (Figure 7.1a). The relief-like black, the hard, glossy, beige planes at the painting’s corners, and the central dark red square all share in an insistent opacity. That central red square puckers from the application of impatient layers of paint atop one another without allowing each to dry thoroughly (Figure 7.1d). The impulse to apply coat after coat of opaque paint to the canvas appears to have been motivated by the repair of the picture, coming about as if to balance the thickly plastered surface burying that long lesion in the circle. No exact date can be given for the changes made to Z VII. However, the repaired painting, given a new patchwork coat of colors, gains a special significance by 1936. Z VII graces the cover of Telehor, a journal publication that also served as one of the few retrospective monographs published during Moholy-Nagy’s lifetime (Figure 7.2). The project came out of an invitation extended by the Czech architect František Kalivoda, who asked Moholy-Nagy to organize a show of his art in Brno, in then Czechoslovakia, and to submit a selection of reproductions of his work and writings.16 Moholy-Nagy was in the process of writing his introductory essay, an open letter, for the publication in the same month he wrote his wife about his alarming encounter in Utrecht with the puzzled photography expert who could not grasp his paintings.17

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Kalivoda envisioned Telehor as a forum to explore new international developments in visual art. The internationalism of its ambition is evident from the fact that all of the texts—Sigfried Giedion’s introduction, Moholy-Nagy’s writings, and Kalivoda’s postscript—were all translated from their German original and published in their entirety in the same volume in French, English, and Czech. As Kalivoda underscores in his postscript, Telehor was not intended to be a monographic series. Rather, he hoped to produce thematically-oriented issues that would address crucial problems facing contemporary artists. He maintains that the singular focus on Moholy-Nagy’s work is justified by the fact that his oeuvre comprises several different media and practices all engaged with the problem of light, which Kalivoda calls the “decisive artistic problem of the next few decades, if not centuries.”18 For Kalivoda, the importance of light cannot be overstated, for it is the condition of possibility for any vision. The introduction of electric light led to commercial uses in the metropolis, demonstrating the efficacy of this new technology. Kalivoda argues that Moholy-Nagy’s work offers a glimpse into how light technologies might one day be developed to help cultivate a politically progressive vision.19 The one work by Moholy-Nagy that most obviously addresses the aims stated by Kalivoda is his Light Prop for an Electrical Stage (Lichtrequisit einer elektrischen Bühne, �������������������������������������� 1930), which was unveiled at the Werkbund Exhibition in Paris in 1930 (Figure 7.5).20 The Light Prop was shown in that context as a prototype for further industrial development. It represented the culmination of a dream for Moholy-Nagy, the fulfillment of his desire to break free of the limitations of easel painting. With the invention of this machine, the generation of light, color and spatial effects need no longer be restricted to the illusions produced within a single painting. Moholy-Nagy could manipulate pure luminous color through the complex interaction of the light generated by electric bulbs and reflected dynamically off the machine’s rotating polished surfaces. The machine was destined for the stage, a space far more expansive and inclusive than the picture gallery. Rather than a discrete picture for the single viewer who might pause and contemplate it, Moholy-Nagy’s Light Prop promised to reach a broader audience, perhaps even a mass audience ready to respond to the new effects it could generate by immersing them in a new environment. Moholy-Nagy’s preoccupation with this project is rooted in his long-standing belief that the task of the artist under modernity is not to produce individual autonomous works of art but to transform human vision. At stake in transforming vision is the conceit that a social and political revolution cannot come by simply supplying the masses with the correct political message. Instead, what is necessary is the fundamental reconfiguration of

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how an individual perceives the world, which would analogously transform how he comports himself towards it.21 To reconfigure perception, the artist must mobilize all that science and industry have to offer, and use technology as a catalyst in this process. Kalivoda’s postscript echoes these commitments in his description of the urgency of Moholy-Nagy’s artistic project. Curiously, where Kalivoda’s postscript emphasizes the future potential of Moholy-Nagy’s projects, Moholy-Nagy’s introductory text for the volume, an open letter addressing the editor’s questions written in

7.5 László MoholyNagy, Das Lichtrequisit, 1922–1930, as published in Telehor 1:1–2 (1936): 81 152

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1934, orients itself to the past. This is perhaps not altogether strange, as part of what the publication aims to do is to offer an overview of MoholyNagy’s work. However, the text Moholy-Nagy pens is strangely defensive in its tone. It opens, dear kalivoda, you are surprised that i am again arranging a growing number of exhibitions of both my earlier and more recent work. it is true that for a number of years i had ceased to exhibit, or even to paint. i felt that it was senseless to employ means that i could only regard as out of date and insufficient for the new requirements of art at a time when new technical media were still waiting to be explored.22 Later in the same text, he writes, you are acquainted with my light requisits and my “lightplay black-white-grey.” It took a great deal of work to assemble all this material, and yet it was only a very modest beginning, an almost negligible step forward. nor was i able fully to carry out my experiments even within this limited sphere. you have every right to ask, why i gave in, why i am painting and exhibiting pictures, after once having recognized what were the real tasks confronting the “painter” of today.23 The tone of his letter throughout is striking. We should bear in mind that this publication was Moholy-Nagy’s first retrospective monograph, and Kalivoda, the editor, touted him as one of the most important avant-garde artists of his generation.24 One would expect, under these circumstances, something more celebratory, or at least a more neutrally descriptive account of his career than a text that underscores the failure to achieve his own stated aims. Moholy-Nagy’s letter opens with the admission that his abandonment of painting and pursuit of projects such as the Light Prop at the end of the 1920s amounted to little more than “a very modest beginning, an almost negligible step forward.” He describes the possibilities and potential of “orchestrated symphonies of light,” “light frescoes,” and the illumination of the night sky with monumental “architecture[s] of light.”25 With regard to these projects, which he would never realize, he writes, it is an irrefutable fact that the material dependence of the artist on capital, industry and working equipment presents an

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insurmountable obstacle today to the successful creation of a true architecture of light. … while possession of a few brushes and tubes of color enables the painter in his studio to be a sovereign creator, the designer of light displays is only too often the slave of technical and other material factors, a mere pawn in the hands of chance patrons.26 Moholy-Nagy offers a sober description of the limitations that technologically-mediated art poses by virtue of its technical and capital demands. These lines were written in the midst of a global economic crisis, at a moment when Moholy-Nagy’s practical hopes of finding the resources to advance his ambitious projects had already been dashed. The Light Prop was built by a licensed mechanic, designed by an architect, and funded by the German industrial conglomerate Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG). It offered a model for bringing art into a collaborative relationship with technology and industry. However, the actual prototype produced was never a fully functional machine. It was extremely fragile and unstable. Its creaky gears got stuck, parts came dislodged, and its primitive motor failed upon multiple occasions.27 Nonetheless, Moholy-Nagy hoped that his project to bring into being a workable light machine for the stage would find investors, but no one came forward to fund additional research or development. Plans to showcase the Light Prop at a “Contemporary Room” (Raum der Gegenwart), which Moholy-Nagy conceived as a pendant to El Lissitzky’s “Abstract Cabinet” in Hannover, fell through for lack of funds.28 Discernible in Moholy-Nagy’s open letter is his reluctant acknowledgment that the transformation of human vision by way of technology has inherent limits. Such a transformation called for capital and expertise he could never amass on his own. He understood that to pursue such means would demand compromises he was unwilling to make. It would force him to become nothing more than “a mere pawn in the hands of chance patrons.”29 At stake in his return to painting is a desire to carve out a space to explore the possibilities of creating “new vision” without obliging him to accumulate resources his more technologically ambitious projects required. In a sense, he saw that painting could become technological media’s surrogate because it need not be chained to means necessary to execute the kinds of projects he dreamed of pursuing in the 1920s. Despite the fact the Light Prop was never further developed, Moholy-Nagy remained preoccupied with this work for the rest of his life, transporting the unwieldy machine to his various stations of exile.30 It is also reproduced in Telehor several times as photographs, sketches, and

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film stills.31 This preoccupation with the Light Prop is also evident in the kinds of effects he sought to achieve in his paintings of the 1930s. During the early years of that decade, Moholy-Nagy wrote with much pleasure about his new paintings to his colleagues and friends, including the likes of Franz Roh, art historian and theorist of photography. In March 1934, Moholy-Nagy writes, i’ve been painting a few very nice paintings on highly polished sheets of silberit [a type of aluminum]. an interesting effect: the colored planes float in an abstract space that is constituted only through reflections and mirroring.32 In the 1930s, Moholy-Nagy explored painting both on canvas and on new synthetic and metallic supports he bought with the little money he had or salvaged from his freelance commercial exhibition design projects. He moved away entirely from the architectonic compositions of the 1920s, opting instead for free-floating shapes against fathomless grounds with barely visible lines, sometimes incised on those supports, to tether those figures to one another. One example of this kind of painting can be seen in his Construction AL 6 (1933–1934), from exactly the moment Moholy-Nagy writes to Roh (Figure 7.6).33 It is also one of the eight paintings reproduced in color along with Z VII in Telehor. Here, Moholy-Nagy worked on an aluminum plate with five identically sized cut-out circular holes. This plate is secured with brackets, which hold it in front of a painted wooden plank. The holes in the painting provide areas where real shadows are cast, where light qualities shift with the changes in the surrounding. And although the painting cannot move, Moholy-Nagy activated the polished metal surface through the application of patiently engraved lines and circles in the metal. This carefully and deliberately scratched surface invites the viewer to move in order to catch the light, glinting off at different angles from the painting. There are no obvious affinities between Z VII and AL 6. One is executed on canvas, the other on aluminum, and they do not share much by way of their composition. But the two paintings are linked by their preoccupation with the Light Prop. Seen in relation to the machine, Z VII’s anomalies begin to make sense (Figures 7.1, 7.5). The blue dots spread across the parallelogram bear a likeness to the perforations on a metal plate caught against a dark shadowed ground, akin to the variously perfor­ ated panels that comprise the body of the Light Prop or the kinds of metal sheets he affixed to his paintings of the 1930s. And the circle, which was so obsessively repainted with layers of thick, gray paint, starts to feel like a textured metal disc. It is rendered as if in movement, partially enshrouded in shadow and partially caught behind translucent planes. The planes

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coalesce, not into an architectonic structure, but into a near-hallucinogenic vision of what a levitating light machine of the future might look like, freed of sticky gears and unreliable engines. What this painting makes present is not what the Light Prop is, but what it might become. Kalivoda writes in his postscript for Telehor that the journal seeks to introduce Moholy-Nagy’s work because it shows future potential of “light as an artistic medium” through the exploration of new “technical possibilities.”34 As much as Kalivoda understands painting to be a part of Moholy-Nagy’s project, he sees it as merely provisional. He writes, in our opinion the painters of today have an important educational responsibility: for painting proper is a training both for the artist and for the public. yet it can be no more than a transitional phase, leading to new and higher forms of expression.35 It is then all the more striking that what graces the cover of Telehor is not a picture of the Light Prop, arguably Moholy-Nagy’s most famous

7.6 László MoholyNagy, AL6, 1932, as published in Telehor 1:1–2 (1936): 68 156

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contribution to the exploration of light technology, but a painting worked in a medium which Kalivoda describes as “transitional” (Figure 7.2). Although this painting bears affinities to the Light Prop, publishing the reproduction horizontally disrupts its direct association with Moholy-Nagy’s light machine. Turned on its side, the planes expand laterally, the sculptural quality so palpable in its vertical orientation disperses. If we examine a photograph of the painting’s verso, it turns out that the vertical orientation was perhaps rejected. The instructions given on the reverse to hang the painting vertically are given as “OBEN” and “HAUT,” which correspond linguistically to the German and French contexts where Moholy-Nagy showed his works until the mid-1930s. The arrow pointing in that direction was crossed out with double Xs. The arrows for the horizontal hanging are accompanied with the English word “TOP.”36 It uses the language of Moholy-Nagy’s exile in London and of his adopted home of Chicago, where he died in 1946 just a month after becoming an American citizen. Moholy-Nagy decided upon this orientation certainly by 1936, when Z VII was shown at the London Gallery, hung horizontally as on the cover of Telehor.37 This reorientation is significant, for it captures Moholy-Nagy’s growing reservations about the actual potential of the Light Prop by the mid-1930s, reservations he expressed in his own introductory text to Tele­hor. The Light Prop was supposed to integrate industry, technology, and art together for the progressive transformation of vision, but it also became an emblem for the impossibility of that project. For Moholy-Nagy, it represented something of an impasse, “nothing more than a very modest beginning, an almost negligible step forward.”38 The rotation of the canvas might be seen, then, as an attempt to conceal that painting’s relationship to the problematic legacy of the Light Prop. However, in another sense, Moholy-Nagy might have discovered another way to express the fusion of art and technology in the service of “new vision.” To publish the painting on the cover of Telehor horizontally and in full color, he marshals yet another technology to redeem his vision. In the remaining pages, it will emerge that color photography comes to serve as a means to recuperate Moholy-Nagy’s projects of the past.39 The year Telehor is published, Moholy-Nagy writes in a letter to his friend and fellow painter Paul Citroën: i’ve incidentally recently been on a very good painting streak. i’ve been painting for a few months now with real courage and excitement. mainly i’ve been working out paintings on rhodoid, a kind of celluloid … it’s been great fun … i think one more step and i’ve figured out a new way to put color film on a new path.40

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The stakes of being on a good painting streak have to do with MoholyNagy’s desire to work out the possibilities of new materials. But in the same paragraph, while still talking about painting, Moholy-Nagy ends by expressing his hope that he is close to finding a “new path” for color film, that is, color photography. This is a medium that Moholy-Nagy was deeply invested in already in the mid-1930s, having experimented beginning in 1934 with the Dufaycolor process and later with Vivex while in London.41 Z VII, in its horizontal orientation, reproduced in full color on the cover of Telehor, is not merely an illustration. In a sense, the particular limitations of color reproduction have come to save the painting, to smooth out the obvious areas of damage and to reconfigure the odd spatial relationships within the picture. The thick opaque whites, in part because the print is tinged with yellow throughout, take on an airier quality on the cover. That warm tone in the reproduction helps shift the spatial relations within the picture, opening them up. The yellow plane, jutting out towards the lower right, which once registered like an orphaned extension, reads like a luminous plane of pure, golden light emitting forth from the complex. By rotating the painting and by exploiting a burgeoning technology and embracing its limitations, Moholy-Nagy found a way to mobilize the new medium of color reproduction and color photography to articulate a vision that could not have existed otherwise. It is through this process of experimentation that Moholy-Nagy begins to paint towards color photography. There is something overdetermined about Z VII’s place on the cover of Telehor, a volume which seeks to provide a summary of an artistic project. Because of Z VII’s repair, its repainting, and its transfiguration through color photography, it offers the accrued history of Moholy-Nagy’s hopes and disappointments. Sedimented on the surface of this painting are the traces of a struggle to render visible the possibilities and limitations of his gesamtproblematik. The Light Prop would never be put into production but still continued to serve Moholy-Nagy as a constant touchstone for his subsequent work. The gash in Z VII led to repairs that transformed it not only into a painting of the 1930s, but also a painting that guides MoholyNagy’s forays into color photography. And the limitations of color reproductive technologies cast Z VII in yet another light, lending it a kind of luminous dynamism unavailable to the painting’s patchwork surface.42

Acknowledgments This project began in 2005 when Jeffrey Weiss and Leah Dickerman encouraged me to work on Z VII at the National Gallery of Art. I am indebted to Jay Krueger, whose patient, constant guidance in reading material condition helped to shape my interpretation throughout. I had the opportunity to present this material at the Zimmerli Museum, College of William and Mary,

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and Safra Colloquy (CASVA) thanks to the invitations of Oliver A. I. Botar and Andres Zervigon, Charles Palermo, and Nancy Troy respectively. This essay has benefited from the thoughtful suggestions and comments of my advisors Michael Fried and Kathryn Tuma, as well as Annie Bourneuf, Gülru Çakmak, Marc Gotlieb, Ashley E. Jones, Kate Markoski, Bibiana Obler, Lynette Roth, and Matthew Witkovsky.

Notes   1 The enamel paintings, EM1, EM2, and EM3, are listed in the catalog of the Sturm exhibition from 1924. Galerie der Sturm, Moholy-Nagy, Hugo Scheiber, Gewebe aus Alt-Peru, SturmGesamtschau (Berlin: Der Sturm, 1924). Exhibition installation photograph of the Sturm exhib­ition can be found in Krisztina Passuth, Moholy-Nagy (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), plate 236.   2 Adolf Behne, “Snob und Anti-Snob,” Die Weltbühne 20 (1924): 235–6. Behne’s suggestion that Moholy-Nagy’s reduced aesthetic vocabulary lends itself particularly well to the production of art by industrial means, perhaps even mediated by telephonic transmission, provokes a number of ironic remarks. The editors at Das Kunstblatt ridiculed the seeming enthusiasm with which Moholy-Nagy, Behne, and the Bauhaus, which at that moment was located in Weimar, embraced the unity of art and technology. The editors portray them as such vitriolic enemies of any work of art produced by hand that they would dismiss even the lyric of Homer and Goethe in favor of poetry composed on the typewriter. “Bemerkungen,” Das Kunstblatt 7, no. 3 (1924): 96. The fantasy of artistic production by telephonic correspondence is parodized in Hans Arp and El Lissitzky’s The Isms of Art, where they write, “Now the production of works of art is judiciously so facilitated and simplified that nobody can do better than order his works by telephone from his bed, by a common painter.” El Lissitzky and Hans Arp, Die Kunstismen; Les Ismes de l’Art; The Isms of Art (Munich and Leipzig: Eugen Rentsch Verlag, 1925), ix–x.   3 László Moholy-Nagy, “Abstract of an Artist,” in The New Vision, 1928 and Abstract of an Artist, trans. Daphne Hoffmann, 4th rev. edn (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1947), 79. “Abstract of an Artist” was written in 1944 in English. This notion that Moholy-Nagy made the enamels by phone has had a powerful hold on the imagination. Despite the fact that during his lifetime these works were only referred to by their title EM1, EM2, EM3 as Enamel Paintings or as Enamel Pictures, they are now more commonly known as Telephone Pictures.   4 Oskar Schlemmer to Otto Meyer, December 1925, in Oskar Schlemmer, Diaries and Correspondences, ed. Tut Schlemmer, trans. Krishna Winston (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1972), 183–4. Conversation with László Moholy-Nagy as recounted by Ise Gropius, Diary, 6 November 1925, 93, Bauhaus Archiv, Berlin.   5 László Moholy-Nagy, Malerei, Photographie, Film (Munich: Albert Langen, 1925), 5, 37.   6 Ibid., 13.   7 Moholy-Nagy invokes this development in a number of his publications, beginning already in the 1925 edition of Malerei, Photographie, Film, where he discusses the potential that new technologies offer in shifting the exploration of color effects to the manipulation of pure color itself. Further underscoring the sense of a progressive development towards the manipulation of pure light as a medium is the title of the first section of the book: “Von der Pigmentmalerei bis zum reflektorischen geworfenen Lichtspiel.” Malerei, Photographie, Film, 6–7. However, despite how polemical his claims might appear, he never explicitly argues in his writings that painting understood generally (Malerei as opposed to Tafelbild) would be rendered wholly obsolete. This is an aspect of his thinking that is often suppressed in the

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reception of Moholy-Nagy’s work. One striking example of this is in Christopher Phillips’s indispensable anthology of key avant-garde sources in the history of photography. Introducing a lively debate on the relationship between painting and photography involving Erno˝ [Ernst] Kállai in the pages of the journal i.10, for which Moholy-Nagy served as photography and film editor, Phillips writes, “[Moholy-Nagy] accuses Kallai of a veiled attempt to rescue the craft of painting, which Moholy regards as obsolete in a machine age. Moholy insists that facture remains an important part of the photographic image, too—no longer in the form of ‘coarse-grained pigment,’ but as an increasingly sophisticated manipulation of light and shade, a true ‘facture of light.’” Christopher Phillips, ed., Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989), 94. Moholy-Nagy’s claims about painting in the text Phillips examines are far more nuanced in the German original. There, Moholy-Nagy critiques Kállai for wanting to preserve “representational painting” (darstellerischen Malerei). The text is not, as Phillips suggests, an attack on the practice of painting as such. Moholy-Nagy, “Diskussion über Ernst Kallai’s Artikel ‘Malerei und Fotografie,’ ” i.10 1, no. 6 (1927): 233–4. The translation of Moholy-Nagy’s text published in Phillips’s anthology also excises an entire paragraph on painting without providing any indication of this in the text. “Response by László MoholyNagy,” trans. Harvey L. Mendelsohn, in Photography in the Modern Era, 102.   8 László Moholy-Nagy, Z VII (1926), gift of Richard Zeisler, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. The relevant documents pertaining to condition and treatment are as follows: Rose Fried Gallery, invoice, 29 April 1960; Julius Lowy Frame and Restoring Company, Inc., invoice, 19 April 1990; object file for László Moholy-Nagy, Z VII (1926), Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (hereafter “object file for Z VII”).   9 Photograph of the reverse of Z VII, object file for Z VII. 10 Two authors who have addressed the seeming incommensurability of Moholy-Nagy’s commitment to painting and photography are Andreas Haus and Eleanor M. Hight. Hight describes Moholy-Nagy’s return to painting as follows: “Curiously, one of the many irreconcilable inconsistencies in Moholy’s work involves his own identity as an artist. From the time he left Berlin he seems to have preferred painting over photography. Even though his writings on painting were few, we can sense an underlying desire on his part to be seen first and foremost as a serious painter … [E]ven his descriptions of photography and film as ‘painting with light’ demonstrate his inability to reconcile his theory, in which film media dominate, with his desire to be known as a painter.” Eleanor M. Hight, Picturing Modernism: Moholy-Nagy and Photography in Weimar Germany (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 212–13. Writing in 1978, at a moment when there was a resurgence of interest in Moholy-Nagy’s photography, Andreas Haus offers an account that seeks to acknowledge the fact that the artist considered himself a painter. Nonetheless, he notes “Moholy the painter was never considered as particularly important in the historical development of painting. In exhibitions and museums his works rarely radiate the brilliance and intensity of a Lissitzky, Mondrian or Malevich.” Andreas Haus, Moholy Nagy: Photographs and Photograms, trans. Frederic Samson (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 8. This perception resonates with the reception of Moholy-Nagy’s work seen in exhibition reviews from his own contemporaries as well as those written in recent decades. See Willi Wolfradt, “Berliner Austellungen,” Der Cicerone, 16 no. 4 (1924): 191–2; “Wertheim Gallery,” The Times, 2 January 1937: section 2, 8; Jerrold Lanes, “Exhibition at Guggenheim Museum,” Artforum 8 (1970): 81; Roberta Smith, “On the Paths of Two Giants, Voyagers in Modernism,” New York Times, 3 November 2006: section E.2, 30. 11 László Moholy-Nagy to Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, 9 October 1934, reel 951, page 148, Archives of American Art, Washington, DC. Orthography Moholy-Nagy’s, translations by author unless otherwise noted. Here is the quote in full: “meine bilder – die sah ich jetzt in utrecht – sind noch gar nicht austellungsreif. sie können nur unter der behutsamsten privatpflege

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existieren und nur etwas von ihren werten abgeben. eine ganze ausstellung ist zu viel. es gibt noch kaum leute, die sie in ihrer wirklichkeit fassen können und weil man nicht von der mühe des entstehens und nichts von der gesamtproblematik dieser bilder überhaupt weiss, erscheinen sie dem austellungsbetrachter wahrscheinlich eintönig, einander zu ähnlich. und ich wünschte, dass der zuschauer selbst mit jedem auch bei mir und für mich gewachsenen bild weiter wachse, heute ist er weit noch [?]. trotzdem will ich die nächste zeit nicht verstreichen lassen, ich stelle aus, wo man mir gelegenheit dazu bietet. ich muss es tun, weil die leute überhaupt nicht wissen, dass ich maler bin. so erhalte mir den kunsthändler in utrecht, dass auf grund meiner fotogramms von der dortigen zeitung ein referent für fotografie zur ausstellung geschickt würde, der mit den bildern überhaupt nichts anzufangen wüsste.” 12 Z VII was included at an exhibition at Mount Holyoke College in 1971; an exhibition in 1979 at the Annely Juda Fine Art Gallery in London; and an exhibition of works from the permanent collection in 1985 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. See Joyce C. Tsai, unpublished report, 29 June 2005, object file for Z VII. 13 László Moholy-Nagy, A XX (1924), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. 14 Pre-treatment photograph of Z VII under UV light (August 2007), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. 15 Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to Lucia Moholy, 15 November 1947. Bauhaus Archiv, Berlin. 16 Moholy-Nagy alerts Franz Roh in April 1934 to a Czech invitation to produce a special issue featuring his work. Moholy-Nagy to Franz Roh, 23 April 1934. Special Collections, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. 17 His wife begins work editing his open letter to Kalivoda in October 1934. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy to László Moholy-Nagy, 17 October 1934, reel 951, pp. 155–6, Archives of American Art, Washington, DC. 18 Fr. Kalivoda, “Postscript,” trans. F. D. Klingender, Telehor 1, no. 1–2 (1936): 45. 19 Ibid., 46. 20 To explain the purpose and the possible application of his Light Prop, Moholy published an illustrated essay in the journal of the Werkbund. László Moholy-Nagy, “Lichtrequisit einer elektrischen Bühne,” Die Form: Zeitschrift für gestaltende Arbeit 5, no. 11/12 (1930): 297–9. 21 Moholy’s long-standing commitment to such a project is evident in his early writings, expressed most explicitly in the following: László Moholy-Nagy, “Az új tartalom és az új forma problémájáról,” Akasztott Ember no. 3–4 (1922): 3, translation from Passuth, MoholyNagy, 286–8. 22 L. Moholy-Nagy, “Dear Kalivoda,” trans. F. D. Klingender, Telehor 1 no. 1–2 (1936): 30. 23 Ibid. 24 Kalivoda, “Postscript,” 46. 25 Moholy-Nagy, “Dear Kalivoda,” 30. 26 Ibid., 31. 27 The original Light Prop is in the collection of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, which has had a number of persistent problems with the work’s condition. For an account of its inherent design flaws, see memo from Arthur Beal to Miss Mongan, cc: Prof. Kuhn, Harry Berg, Larry Doherty, 20 May 1969, object file for László Moholy-Nagy. Light Prop for an Electric Stage (Light-Space Modulator), Busch-Reisinger Museum, Cambridge, MA. 28 See correspondences on the “Raum der Gegenwart” in the Alexander Dorner Papers, Sprengel Museum, Hannover. 29 Moholy-Nagy, “Dear Kalivoda,” 31. 30 Of the Light Prop, Moholy’s second wife writes, “I would come to consider the light-display machine the problem child of my household because it refused to pass custom authorities in the normal way. When it finally came to rest in Chicago it had been declared a mixing

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machine, a fountain, a display rack for various metal alloys and a robot, and it had caused me more trouble than a dozen children.” Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Experiment in Totality, 1st edn (New York: Harper, 1950), 67. 31 The Light Prop was reproduced in Telehor 1 no. 1–2 (1936): 80–3. 32 László Moholy-Nagy to Franz Roh, 23 March 1934. Franz Roh Papers, Getty Special Collections, Getty Research Center, Los Angeles. 33 László Moholy-Nagy, Construction AL6 (1933–1934), Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (IVAM), Generalitat Valenciana, Valencia. 34 Kalivoda, “Postscript,” 46. 35 Ibid. 36 Photograph of the reverse of Z VII, object file for Z VII. Thanks to Miles Chappell and Harry Cooper who encouraged me to attend to the peculiarities of the inscriptions on the reverse of this painting. 37 Exhibition photograph of Z VII at the London Gallery in 1936 in Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Experiments in Totality, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 135. 38 Moholy-Nagy, “Dear Kalivoda,” 31. 39 Thanks to Graham Bader for helping me articulate the significance of the rotation of the picture. 40 László Moholy-Nagy to Paul Citroën, 16 June 1936, Bauhaus Archiv, Berlin. Here is the complete quote in the original, orthography Moholy-Nagy’s:“ich bin übrigens in einer sehr güten malsträhne. ich male seit einigen monaten richtig mit mut und begeisterung. hauptsächlich [?] bilder auf rhodoid (eine art zelluloid) und ich vertoniere sie um schatten und farbeneffekte zu bekommen. es macht einen ungeheuren spass, und das [?] entwickelt zu einem netten früher unbekannten ausdruck. ich würde dir mal alles gerne erklaeren, ich glaube 1 schritt weiter und ich habe den farben film auf neuen wegen.” 41 Jeannine Fiedler, “Moholy-Nagy’s Color Camera Works, a Pioneer of Color Photography,” in Color in Transparency: Photographic Experiments in Color, 1934–1946, ed. Jeannine Fiedler and Hattula Moholy-Nagy (Göttingen: Steidl, 2006), 20. 42 Much of the argument of this essay has relied on an interpretation of color in this painting and attends to how its color reproduction fundamentally transforms its internal dynamics. The illustrations for this article are published in black-and-white, which poses unavoidable problems for the interpretation put forward. However, it also illustrates the profound ways in which reproductive technologies irrevocably alter how we perceive a composition. Publishing the color images of this painting—as painting and as 1936 color reproduction—in blackand-white exaggerates the depth of the composition because the resulting images translate subtle shifts in tonality and hue into light–dark relationships. In an imperfectly analogous manner, the limitations of color reproduction transform the perception of the painting’s composition because of the specific ways in which the colors are rendered on the cover of Telehor. This study has attempted to show that it is in his willingness to explore this gap or, rather, the interstices among various media that Moholy-Nagy makes his most profound contributions.

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Chapter 8

Picturing Sculpture Object, Image and Archive Paul Paret

One of the noticeable tics in Bauhaus scholarship has been the obsessive categorization of the school’s institutional history according to changes in its leadership, teaching staff, and program. There are competing accounts of the three stages, or the five stages, or sometimes the eight stages of Bauhaus development, each with detailed argumentation and supporting evidence.1 The cue for this art historical fetish for organizing, writing and rewriting the Bauhaus might be traced to the school itself, which from the outset trumpeted its own organizational and pedagogical structure, and then almost immediately proceeded to alter it in a continuous series of programmatic shifts and key personnel changes. A provocative model for thinking about the progression of the Bauhaus, its workshops and the individual objects produced can be found, surprisingly, at the historical end of modernism in the serial practices of conceptual art, such as Sol LeWitt’s 1974 Variations on Incomplete Open Cubes (Figure 8.1). A work in which “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art,” Incomplete Open Cubes elaborates the possible variations of a single object, an incomplete cube.2 The parameters LeWitt set for the project included the requirement that each variant have at least one strut on each axis (height, length, width), so that the simplest variants have three parts and then become increasingly complex as additional struts are added up to the final, single, eleven-part variation. Another parameter called on the variations to be non-identical, which meant LeWitt could not simply rotate a given incomplete cube so that it appears different and then designate it as a new variant. Determining which cubes were truly 163

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non-identical turned out to be particularly tricky. Oscillating between the logical simplicity of its premise and the obsessive, even irrational, complexity of its realization, Variations on Incomplete Open Cubes is a project that locates meaning not only in the elaborate process of unfolding the ultimate number of nonidentical variations of an incomplete open cube (the answer turns out to be 122), but also, unexpectedly, in the visually dazzling possibilities of their representation: as schematic drawings, miniature models, large-scale objects, photographs, an artist’s book, in isolation, in subgroups, collectively and so on.3 LeWitt’s combination of logical analysis and obsessive reworking provides an illuminating model for considering the Bauhaus and its histories. Could we, as part of an absurdist modernist game, discern and map out all the non-identical variations of Bauhaus directors, workshops and faculty like the three required axial struts of Incomplete Open Cubes? Like LeWitt’s basic cube, the Bauhaus is something seemingly familiar and well understood, which when questioned and interrogated may unravel and multiply into an unknown number of new or little-considered possibilities.

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8.1 Sol LeWitt, Incomplete Open Cubes, 1974, painted wood structure, gelatin silver prints, and drawings on paper, 12 × 120 × 216 in

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If nothing else, LeWitt’s project points to the complexities that can be generated by a simple object. This essay examines such a single, seemingly straightforward object from the history of the Bauhaus: an anonymous photograph of the stone sculpture workshop first published in the catalogue of the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar (Figure 8.2).4 Familiar to scholars and students of the Bauhaus, yet little examined, this photograph does not present a palimpsest of accrued narratives over time, or twists and turns of historical reception. Rather, this photograph has been consistently understood as an illustration of the stone sculpture workshop and document of the objects

8.2 Bauhaus stone sculpture workshop, Weimar, 1923

pictured in it. Beginning with the catalogue of the landmark Bauhaus exhib­ ition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1938, the photograph of the stone sculpture workshop has been reproduced as stock image with little or no comment in dozens, if not hundreds, of Bauhaus books and catalogues as a visual supplement and archival witness testifying to the workshop’s existence.5 To the extent that this photograph has been interpreted at all, it has been for its documentary information about the specific sculptures depicted, most of which no longer survive.6 What follows here instead is

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an exploration of the 1923 workshop photograph for its discursive as well as documentary operations. Strikingly attuned to the discourses of modernism, this seemingly marginal photograph reframes the program and problems of Bauhaus sculpture and suggests new interpretations of some of the individual objects it presents. Reconsidered as a modernist object with a complex and deliberate visual logic, this archival image generates multiple meanings and narratives, not just of the Bauhaus, its objects and histories, but of modernist visuality, media specificity and the vexing status of sculpture in modernity.

The 1923 Workshop Photograph and the Problem of Sculpture The photograph of the stone sculpture workshop has its origins in the book produced for the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar. Designed by László Moholy-Nagy, who had come to the Bauhaus earlier that year, Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar 1919–1923 includes brief sections for each of the workshops, which begin with a photograph of the workshop space itself, followed by images of individual objects by students and apprentices.7 As is the case with the other workshop images included in the catalogue, the photographer of the stone sculpture workshop remains unknown. Yet its selection for inclusion—likely the decision of Moholy-Nagy as the book’s designer and Schlemmer as the head of the workshop—makes it more than an arbitrary snapshot. Presented as an informal cross section of the stone sculpture workshop and its activities, the photograph’s array of figurative and abstract objects in plaster and stone cleverly stages the workshop’s internal debates and the troubled status of sculpture at the Bauhaus.8 Beginning with the two objects that frame the image—Kurt Schwerdtfeger’s Architectural Sculpture on the left and Oskar Schlemmer’s Abstract Figure (Free Sculpture G) on the right—the photograph maps the competing tendencies within the workshop between abstraction and figuration, as well as between architectural and free-standing sculpture. These sculptures mark a basic difference between the teaching of Johannes Itten, who headed the stone sculpture workshop from 1920 to 1922 and emphasized contrasts of form and texture, and Schlemmer’s lifelong commitment to the human figure.9 Moreover, these two framing sculptures delineate intersecting figurative and abstract axes across the image. The corner of Schwerdtfeger’s Architectural Sculpture points diagonally toward the abstract objects clustered in the back right of the image, while the shoulder of Schlemmer’s sculpture draws our eye across the room toward his 166

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tall figurative relief in the back left. Near the center of the room, marking the intersection of these diagonals, Otto Werner’s four-sided (and identically titled) Architectural Sculpture presents itself alternately as figurative and abstract, an attempted synthesis of these competing visual modes. Through its title Werner’s sculpture also declares the founding ambition for the Bauhaus to reunify the arts and crafts under architecture. Sculpture was not to exist independently as autonomous art, something Walter Gropius had disparaged in the Bauhaus manifesto as “salon art” that had lost its “architectonic spirit.”10 Rather, like other Bauhaus workshops, the stone sculpture workshop had been established with the idea that it would contribute to larger architectural projects. The hoped-for commissions, however, did not materialize. As Schlemmer reported during a faculty meeting in December 1922, the sculpture workshops were held back by a “lack of applied commissions”; Gropius also complained about the stone and wood sculpture workshops, noting in October 1923 that “up to now little has been achieved there.”11 The largest commission for the stone sculpture workshop was the 1922 Monument to the March Dead, a memorial for Weimar residents killed during the 1920 Kapp Putsch, designed by Gropius and carried out by the master craftsman Josef Hartwig and students in the stone sculpture workshop.12 Much of the workshop’s activity, however, merely supported other areas of the Bauhaus, such as producing plaster models for the ceramics and theater workshops—including the large oblong object behind the table in the back room of the workshop photograph, part of a stage prop for Lothar Schreyer’s 1923 Moon Play—as well as plaster architectural models for Gropius’ private commissions.13 The two works in the photograph titled Architectural Sculpture by Schwerdtfeger and Werner reflect the frustrated ambition of architectural collaboration at the early Bauhaus. Not related to any commission, both sculptures were made for the journeyman’s exam required of each Bauhaus student following a three-year apprenticeship in one of the workshops. The act of naming alone, however, secures neither an “architectural” function nor meaning for these sculptures, which remain independent modernist objects, demonstration pieces intended for no particular site or architectural project. In spite of their titles and the rhetoric of the Bauhaus program, these objects are disconnected from any rooted function and exemplify the homeless condition of autonomous modern sculpture, the “salon art” that Gropius had hoped the Bauhaus would overcome.14 If these objects cannot easily live up to the claims and aspirations of their titles, the workshop space itself might be reimagined as their aesthetic fulfillment. It becomes one of the tasks of the photograph to forge the disparate objects of the stone sculpture workshop into a more

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coherent program of Bauhaus modernism. It does so not by privileging the individual objects depicted, but paradoxically by obscuring and effacing them, undermining their autonomy and reframing them within a fantasy of architectural totality. Almost all of the sculptures in the photograph are partly obstructed by other objects or cropped by the edges of the image. This fragmented view of the objects conveys a somewhat clichéd sense of a busy, crowded, workshop space. The center of the image is left largely open and the sculptures distributed to the sides. With the objects partially eclipsed and pushed to the periphery, the various sculptural facets and planes do not remain distinct in the photograph, but rather merge and blend with the walls and windows of the architectural space they fill. The tight sequencing of overlapping sculptures and reliefs, coming in from both the left and right edges of the image, defines and articulates the space of the workshop to such an extent that the sculptures seem to constitute the architecture rather than merely inhabiting it. Even those few objects that are not obscured, most notably Werner’s Architectural Sculpture in the center right of the image, have an adjacency to other objects that works against their status as freestanding autonomous objects. In this way, the workshop photograph provides a counter-­ narrative to the autonomous modernism embodied in so many of the actual sculptures. Rather than privileging individual objects, the photograph fragments the sculptures within a dense network of overlapping forms and facets, and recasts them in an approximation of the collaborative architectural totality that the workshop desired, but had yet to realize.

Architectural Reliefs and the 1923 Exhibition When the workshop photograph was taken, in the spring or early summer of 1923, Schlemmer was intensely engaged in questions of architectural sculpture. Although Gropius had for some time been reorienting the Bauhaus toward the design of marketable objects and the imperatives of industrial production—a program he encapsulated during the 1923 exhibition with the pronouncement “art and technology: a new unity”—­ Schlemmer continued to embrace, more completely and for longer than any of his Bauhaus colleagues, the ideal of synthesizing painting, sculpture and architecture. The 1923 exhibition provided a major opportunity for Schlemmer to demonstrate the possibilities of architectural reliefs and give purpose to the sculpture workshops. The previous fall he had remarked with a cautious optimism that “the trouble [for the stone and wood sculpture 168

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workshops] is that big commissions are lacking. Perhaps the exhibition will offer them—but only perhaps!”15 Given the task of redesigning the entrances and hallways of the Bauhaus buildings for the exhibition, Schlemmer wrote of the need “to raise painting and sculpture to the functions that they had in the great ages: part of architecture as space and wall-creation.”16 Echoing Schlemmer, Gropius clarified the intentions of the reliefs for the vestibule of the Art School building by explaining that “the wall panels will be sculpturally organized [plastisch gestaltet] and specifically so that they do not represent some kind of Renaissance-like inserted panels, but rather take on a functional significance for the entire space.”17 The results of these plans were Schlemmer’s elaborate series of figurative reliefs and murals in the stairwell and hallways of the workshop building, now known as the Van de Velde building, and Joost Schmidt’s abstract geometric relief panels in the vestibule of the main Bauhaus building, the Art School building. Schlemmer’s and Schmidt’s reliefs were met with decidedly mixed reviews. Rejected as applied decoration by such important critics as Adolf Behne, an early supporter of the Bauhaus, who, like Gropius, came to advocate a more rigorously functionalist design, these works failed to engender continued interest in architectural sculpture at the Bauhaus.18 Schlemmer too, despite the enormous energy he had put into his reliefs and murals, referred privately to the “relative disappointment” of this work.19 Indeed, the reliefs by Schlemmer and Schmidt were the last attempt by the sculpture workshop at architectural reliefs, which would have no place in the new Bauhaus building in Dessau. Evidence of these projects is visible in the workshop photograph, which continues to be a useful source of archival information, particularly because both sets of works were later destroyed.20 Schlemmer’s tall figurative relief in the back left of the photograph is the mold for one of his reliefs in the workshop building. The small relief just below it and to the right is likely a study for Schmidt’s reliefs in the vestibule of the Art School building. More than a record of these lost objects, however, the workshop photograph also speaks to the aesthetic and programmatic ambitions of Schlemmer’s and Schmidt’s architectural reliefs. Defining the space of the workshop through the dense patterning of overlapping sculptural forms and facets, the photograph in fact comes closer to Schlemmer’s rhetoric of sculpture being “part of architecture and wall creation” than do his reliefs. Similarly, the photograph’s creation of an architectural space transformed by sculpture echoes Gropius’ hope that Schmidt’s reliefs result in “not some kind of Renaissance-like inserted panels” (which, although abstract, is precisely what they were) “but rather take

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on a functional significance for the entire space.” If the reliefs themselves were a disappointment, it is again the workshop photograph that succeeds in representing the programmatic ambitions of architectural sculpture at the 1923 exhibition. So far this essay has addressed the 1923 workshop photograph largely in terms of the relationship of sculpture to architecture and the changing program of Bauhaus modernism. Yet, in addition to these struggles over the function of modernist sculpture, there are other crucial ways in which to understand this photograph. For one thing, the image’s radical cropping can suggest significant reinterpretations of the individual objects it depicts. Moreover, the photograph’s obstruction of sight lines and overlapping of objects call attention to the physical, three-dimensional character of sculpture and the aesthetic and conceptual stakes of its photographic mediation. It is to these questions that we will now turn.

Oskar Schlemmer’s Abstract Figure The photograph of the stone sculpture workshop can be considered almost as a group portrait, with the sculptures and objects acting as the mechanomorphic analogues of the absent masters and students. Presiding over this group is Schlemmer’s Abstract Figure (Figure 8.3).21 Often interpreted in terms of antique statuary and Schlemmer’s ideas on three-dimensional sculpture, Abstract Figure’s precise geometries and mechanical rigidity have made it nearly emblematic of rationalist modernism in the 1920s, a classicizing ideal of machine-age beauty.22 Yet the workshop photograph, certainly among the first commentaries on the sculpture, disrupts any sense of classical equipoise by cropping and slicing Schlemmer’s figure on three sides, and thereby suggests a very different way of thinking about this object. In part because of its enlarged foreground position, Abstract Figure is most radically and violently affected by the photograph’s cropping and fragmenting. Not only does the workshop photograph split Schlemmer’s figure down the middle, in the top right corner it also sections out a quadrant from the nested geometry of the figure’s head and helmet. The violation of the sculpture—sliced and bisected by the camera—calls attention to an aspect of the sculpture that has been overlooked: namely that Abstract Figure may be less a classically balanced figure of equipoise than a wounded body with prosthetic replacements, and a defensive armor protecting it from future damage. As suggested by the photograph, Abstract Figure reveals its almost schizophrenic pose in its awkward combination of severe machined and soft biomorphic forms. One shoulder extends powerfully from the 170

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figure in a broad sweeping curve, while the other is abruptly cut off. Round, bulbous forms contrast with sharply edged, planar surfaces, and two metal poles serve as prosthetic limbs to connect the body to its oversized base, itself a combination of abrupt angles and sweeping curves. This combination presents a confusion of subject positions that mix signs of man with machine, authority with vulnerability, and solidity and wholeness with a damaged and surgically invaded body. In this sense Abstract Figure is emblematic of many of the contradictions of Bauhaus modernism. Both protected and devoured by the more rationalized machine aesthetic that would mark the Bauhaus in the coming years, Schlemmer’s sculpture enacts what Hal Foster has called “the double logic of the technological prosthesis that governed the machinic imaginary of high modernism: the machine as a castrative trauma and as a phallic shield against such trauma.”23 If Schlemmer’s figure is an icon of machine-age beauty, then it is one that has as much in common with depictions of mangled World War I veterans (such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Self-Portrait as a Soldier or George Grosz’s Republican Automatons) as it does with the utopian geometries of international constructivism.24 The radical cropping of the workshop photograph dislodges Schlemmer’s figure from its classical precedents and reframes it within a different modernist discourse. But it is not only the cropping that is relevant here. The workshop photograph further reinforces and elaborates the idea of Schlemmer’s Abstract Figure as damaged and wounded by pairing it with the rough-hewn verso of Kurt Schwerdtfeger’s marble Torso, which emerges just behind Schlemmer’s figure. The dark, jagged materiality of Schwerdtfeger’s figure resonates not only as a textural and tonal contrast with Schlemmer’s smooth white surfaces, but also now as guts and innards, turning Schwerdtfeger’s Torso into a grotesquely flayed doppelgänger of Schlemmer’s cleanly machined forms.

The Space of Modernism Like the photograph’s cropping of objects and obstruction of sight lines, this doubling, the figuring of recto and verso between Schlemmer’s Abstract Figure and Schwerdtfeger’s Torso, calls attention to the three-dimensional character of sculpture as a physical object and the potential problems of representing it from a single viewpoint. Beyond the workshop photograph, Schlemmer’s Abstract Figure appears a second time in the 1923 exhibition catalogue’s section on “independent paintings and sculptures,” where it is pictured both in wide profile from the side and in a narrow view looking 171

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straight up the severed arm.25 A slightly later photograph of Abstract Figure, one that Moholy-Nagy included in his 1929 book Von Material zu Architektur (translated in 1932 as The New Vision) incorporates these two views, plus a third more distant profile from the back (Figure 8.3). Rather than the nightmarish doppelgänger evoked by the raw verso of Schwerdtfeger’s Torso, these views of Abstract Figure are presented as a spatially choreographed montage that, echoing the tradition of the Three Graces, constructs a rationalized, composite knowledge of the complete figure. These two- and three-part views of Schlemmer’s sculpture highlight the object’s three-dimensionality and its changing profiles. Addressing this issue in a brief manuscript from January 1924, Schlemmer states: The essence of sculpture must of course be illustrated by means of three-dimensional sculpture, the purest form. … It cannot be grasped in any given moment; rather it reveals itself in a temporal succession of vantage points and views. Since a piece of sculpture does not yield a total impression from one angle, the spectator is obliged to move, and only by walking around and adding up his impressions does he eventually grasp the sculpture. Thus any piece of plastic art which does not offer the viewer a series of surprises as he walks around it, but merely repeats one segment … has no validity as sculpture.26

8.3 Three views of Oskar Schlemmer, Abstract Figure (Free Sculpture G), 1923. From László MoholyNagy, The New Vision (New York: Brewer, Warren and Putnam, 1932) 172

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Schlemmer’s Abstract Figure is generally regarded as exemplifying these ideals based on its changing profiles and asymmetry, as well as the simple fact that it was completed only a half-year earlier.27 Yet it is hard to say that these separate views offer any real “series of surprises.” Each view of Abstract Figure, in fact, logically implies the other and a single view provides near-total knowledge of the overall form. (It takes the abrupt cropping of the workshop photograph to rupture this coherence.) Schlemmer’s text, hardly radical, is among the many responses by early-twentieth-century artists and critics to the widely influential “concept of relief” advanced by the sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand at the turn of the century.28 In his treatise The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts, first published in 1893, Hildebrand argued that sculpture, although three-dimensional, achieves its artistic value through the visual impression of form rather than through the physical or tactile status of the object itself. “Only when [a three-dimensional figure] works as a plane, although still cubic,” he insisted, “does it acquire artistic form, that is, only then does it mean something to the visual imagination.”29 While Schlemmer’s text advocates sculpture that produces a “series of surprises” as the viewer is “obliged to move” around the object, his Abstract Figure works differently. To a great extent it is consistent with Hildebrand’s dictum about successful sculpture, regardless of the number of different vantage points: There will always be one view that presents and unites the whole plastic nature of the figure as a coherent surface impression, analogous to painting or relief. It signifies the actual visual notion that underlies the sculptural representation and to which the other views are subordinate or seen as a necessary consequence of the main view.30 Within the photograph of the Bauhaus stone sculpture workshop, it is not Schlemmer’s figure but rather Werner’s Architectural Sculpture, with its four distinct carved sides, none of which logically or visually imply the other, which actually counters Hildebrand’s “concept of relief.” An extended discussion of Hildebrand is outside the scope of this essay, but it is worth noting that The Problem of Form belongs to the elaborate art historical discourse opposing classicism and the Baroque, and pictorial versus spatial conceptions of art.31 For Hildebrand the “concept of relief” was a way of establishing and ensuring a clear separation of the ordered aesthetic space of art from the real space of objects and things. At stake in such a distinction was not just the understanding of antiquity and the history of art, but a profound fear and distrust of the material and

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spectacular forms of contemporary popular culture, including photography as well as such phenomena as waxworks and panoramas.32 The separation of the aesthetic space of art from the real space of things is a core issue for modernist sculpture theory, and central to the complex relationship of sculpture and photography in the 1920s.33 It is noteworthy that unlike the communal space of the workshop photograph, the composite photograph of Abstract Figure in three views isolates the sculpture within a completely abstracted black space that removes the figure from any material surroundings and suspends it within an idealized space of modernist autonomy. This exemplifies one of the many ways that photography, through simple acts of lighting and cropping, could eliminate the external context and provide an abstracted visual field to explore forms and volumes freed from tectonic forces of mass, material and, by implication, architecture. An interest in dematerializing the concrete physicality of sculpture and attempting to overcome its non-transcendent materiality is present in a great deal of modernist sculpture in the 1920s and the photography that engages it ambitiously. The central chapter of MoholyNagy’s The New Vision, “Volume (sculpture),” for instance, describes the development of sculpture in terms of the “the path from material-volume to virtual volume and from tactual grasp to visual, relative grasp.”34 (Such ideas are not unrelated to Hildebrand’s relief theory.) In the Bauhaus sculpture workshop by the late 1920s, now under the direction of Schmidt, photography would come to play a central role in the workshop’s perceptual and kinetic experiments with form and volume. The photographic results of these experiments were used to represent the workshop in Bauhaus exhibitions such as the 1929–1930 Bauhaus Wanderschau. An installation photograph of the exhibition shows objects from other workshops displayed on walls and in vitrines, while a long panel labelled “sculpture department” (plastische Abteilung) presents a series of photographic experiments with the creation and perception of volume (Figure 8.4). Not illustrations or stand-ins for an absent object, these photographs are the sculptural objects. The closely allied workings of sculpture and photography also certainly involve the reproducibility of their processes. In the 1923 workshop photograph the reproductive processes of casting and mold-making are evident in Schlemmer’s tall relief in the back left, which is the mold for one of the reliefs he would create in the workshop building. The workshop photograph itself is known almost exclusively as a rephotographed image taken from its initial publication in the 1923 exhibition catalogue.35 Indeed it is in large part due to this logic of the copy that photography and sculpture

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8.4 Installation photograph (detail) from the BauhausWanderschau in the Kunstgewerbemuseum, Zurich, 1930

have such a densely intertwined and still largely unwritten history within modernist art.36 A final point about the 1923 workshop photograph is its plunging perspectival composition, which casts the sculptures to the sides and punctures straight through the two rooms of the workshop into the outdoor space beyond. This pictorial structure can be compared with a very different image from the sculpture workshop published in the journal Bauhaus in the fall of 1928 (Figure 8.5). Identified as having been made in the sculpture workshop (renamed die plastische Werkstatt in 1925), this is not a studio view, but rather a mock-urban landscape filled with illuminated signs, mechanical devices, advertising kiosks and window displays. These objects bear very little relation to the conventional materials, genres, and modes depicted in the 1923 photograph. In place of the conventional materials of plaster and stone are now photography and photomontage; the genres of statuary and relief have been replaced by illuminated advertisements and kinetic devices; and instead of the interior space of the 1923 workshop, this image addresses, as the caption states, the urban spectacle of “the square, the street, the shop-window as advertising theater.” 175

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The two images mark very different moments of the Bauhaus in terms of the conception of modernity and the practice of sculpture. Yet, as radically different as the two images may be, they share a strikingly similar pictorial structure: a tightly framed perspectival construction that organizes the seemingly casually arranged objects into the same rational, geometric space of Bauhaus modernism. This is true to such a degree that the two images could be overlaid almost seamlessly onto one another. The individual sculptures, objects and advertisements become interchangeable elements that fill identical compositional roles regardless of which picture they inhabit. While the materials, practices and ambitions of the Bauhaus sculpture program have changed dramatically in the five years between the two images, their pictorial order or scopic regime has remained largely unchanged. The comparison finally may remind us how carefully staged the 1923 workshop photograph is and that the many programmatic changes at the Bauhaus involved continuity as often as they did transformation. All of these different readings of the 1923 photograph, and presumably others as well, derive from playing the photograph (its inform­ation, rhetoric, medium) against the larger idea of the Bauhaus and modernism (their histories, practices and legacies). This image, perhaps like many others, has been lingering on the periphery, continually reproduced in 176

8.5 Heinz Loew and Franz Ehrlich, Studies for Electric Advertising (the square, the street, the shop-window as advertising theater), 1928. From Bauhaus 2, no. 4 (1928): 7

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the Bauhaus literature with little thought given to its operations, logic or meaning. That seems also the case with the sculpture workshop in general, which existed throughout the history of the Bauhaus but never had a stable or even coherent position within the school’s program and pedagogy. The sculpture workshops remain just about the only area of the Bauhaus not to have been the subject of an extensive exhibition or historical reconstruction. This essay ultimately asks whether the anonymous photograph, a piece of Bauhaus ephemera, may be both marginalia and an autonomous object, a modernist machine with its own immanent potential to generate histories and meanings. Like LeWitt’s Incomplete Open Cubes, in which the fundamental questioning of a simple object unfolds into a dizzying series of forms and variations, the often seen but largely overlooked 1923 workshop photograph can produce an array of interpretive possibilities. Perhaps this exercise is not so far from what Rosalind Krauss once referred to as the “idiotic simplicity and … extravagant cunning” of modernist visual logic.37 If so, this would be the same idiotic simplicity and cunning that can leave us blinded in the sea of LeWitt’s Incomplete Open Cubes, where the simplest of objects can overwhelm us with a surplus of visuality.

Acknowledgments Sections of this text appear in German translation in Anja Baumhoff and Magdalena Droste, eds, Mythos Bauhaus (Berlin: Reimer Verlag, 2009). For their comments and suggestions, I thank Alina Payne, Jeffrey Saletnik and Robin Schuldenfrei. For assistance with images, special thanks are due to Magdalena Droste, Sabine Hartmann and Amelia Walchli. I am grateful for the financial support of the University Research Committee at the University of Utah.

Notes   1 An example of the most basic division of Bauhaus history into three phases (founding; consolidation; disintegration) can be found in Rainer K. Wick, Teaching at the Bauhaus (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2000). Wulf Herzogenrath elaborates five stages in his “Fünf Bauhaus-Phasen,” in Mehr als Malerei: Vom Bauhaus zur Video-Skulptur (Regensburg: Lindinger + Schmid, 1994), 13–40. Hans Wingler breaks the Bauhaus into eight phases in his foundational work, Hans Maria Wingler, The Bauhaus: Weimar Dessau Berlin Chicago, ed. Joseph Stein, trans. Wolfgang Jabs and Basil Gilbert (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976).   2 Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” 1967, in Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective, ed. Gary Garrels (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 369.   3 LeWitt first exhibited the work in the form of 8-inch-tall modules in painted wood displayed on a platform backed by paired photographs and drawings of each variant. The work was also produced as an artist’s book with isometric drawings and in 40-inch aluminum variations, as well as, several years later, a complete set of 25⁄8-inch models. For a nuanced and

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detailed consideration of this project, see Nicholas Baume, “The Music of Forgetting,” in Sol LeWitt: Incomplete Open Cubes, ed. Nicholas Baume (Hartford, CT: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art; Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2001), 20–31. On the obsessive and absurdist aspects of LeWitt’s work, see Rosalind E. Krauss, “LeWitt in Progress,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1985), 245–58.   4 Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar 1919–1923 (Weimar and München: Bauhaus Verlag, 1923; München: Kraus Reprint, 1980), 91. On the anonymity of the photograph, see the remarks on the photographs in the so-called Bauhaus-Alben in Weimar, where a vintage print of this image survives. Klaus-Jürgen Winkler, ed., Bauhaus-Alben 1 (Weimar: Verlag der BauhausUniversität Weimar, 2006), 8–9.   5 Herbert Bayer, Walter Gropius and Ise Gropius, Bauhaus 1919–1928 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1938), 187.   6 Although not all of the objects can be firmly attributed, the works from left to right are: Kurt Schwerdtfeger’s Architectural Relief; Standing Figure by Oskar Schlemmer, the head of the workshop from 1922 to 1925; and a smaller abstract relief probably by Joost Schmidt. To the right of the opening to the back room is Schlemmer’s relief Half Figure with Accentuated Forms, above which sits a small unidentified geometric sculpture; Otto Werner’s Architectural Sculpture stands near the center of the room, next to which on the floor sits an unidentified abstract relief in glass and plaster possibly by Farkas Molnár, and behind that the pyramidal tower intended as a gravestone by Hanns Hoffmann-Lederer; the verso of a marble Torso by Kurt Schwerdtfeger; and, in the right foreground, Schlemmer’s plaster Abstract Figure (Free Sculpture G). The small works on the table in the back room remain unidentified. Behind the table, the standing rounded object is part of a stage prop from Lothar Schreyer’s Moon Play produced at the Bauhaus in 1923. The most accurate cataloging of the image is in Klaus-Jürgen Winkler, ed., Bauhaus-Alben 3 (Weimar: Verlag der Bauhaus-Universität, 2008), 206.   7 For the stone sculpture workshop, the individual objects included sculptures by Otto Werner and Kurt Schwerdtfeger that are also partially visible in the main workshop photograph and will be discussed below. Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar 1919–1923, 92–5.   8 From 1919 to 1924 there were separate workshops for stone sculpture and woodcarving, led first by Johannes Itten and Georg Muche, respectively, followed by Schlemmer, then from 1925 to 1932 a single experimental workshop for sculpture (plastische Werkstatt) led by Joost Schmidt.   9 Itten includes Schwerdtfeger’s sculpture in Design and Form, rev. edn (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1975), 63, 85. 10 Walter Gropius, “Manifesto and Program of the Staatlche Bauhaus in Weimar,” 1919, in Wingler, Bauhaus, 31. 11 Volker Wahl, ed., Die Meisterratsprotokolle des Staatlichen Bauhauses Weimar 1919–1925 (Weimar: Verlag Hermann Böhlhaus Nachfolger, 2001), 281, 318. Translations by the author unless otherwise noted. 12 Klaus-Jürgen Winkler and Herman van Bergeijk, Das Märzgefallenen-Denkmal in Weimar (Weimar: Verlag der Bauhaus-Universität, 2004). For the wood sculpture workshop, the exception was the house designed by Gropius and Adolf Meyer for the timber magnate Adolf Sommerfeld in Berlin, an all-wood structure for which the student Joost Schmidt, who would later lead a much transformed sculpture workshop in Dessau, made a series of decorative carvings. 13 Winkler, Bauhaus-Alben 3, 202–3. 14 On the idea of the homelessness of modern sculpture, see especially Rosalind E. Krauss “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” in Krauss, Originality of the Avant-Garde, 277–90.

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15 Oskar Schlemmer, to the Council of Masters, 22 November 1922, in Wingler, Bauhaus, 60. 16 Oskar Schlemmer, proposal to the State Ministry of Education, 11 November 1922. Quoted in Wulf Herzogenrath, Oskar Schlemmer: Die Wandgestaltung der neuen Architektur (München: Prestel Verlag, 1973), 35. Translations by the author unless otherwise noted. 17 Gropius to Henry van de Velde, 21 June 1923, Mappe 38, Bauhaus Bestand, Thüringisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Weimar. 18 Adolf Behne, “Das Bauhaus in Weimar,” Die Weltbühne 19, no. 38 (1923): 289–92. 19 Oskar Schlemmer, to Otto Meyer-Amden, 21 October 1923, in The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer, ed. Tut Schlemmer, trans. Krishna Winston (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press; Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990), 146. 20 Both Schlemmer’s and Schmidt’s works were later destroyed. See Herzogenrath, Oskar Schlemmer, 59, and Paul Paret, “Rodin at the Bauhaus,” Cantor Arts Center Journal 3 (2002– 2003): 197–204. 21 Originally called Freiplastik G, the name Abstract Figure has since become standard. See Karin von Maur, Oskar Schlemmer, vol. 2, Oeuvrekatalog der Gemälde, Aquarelle, Pastelle und Plastiken (München: Prestel, 1979), 384. 22 See Klaus Weber, “Die Skulptur am Bauhaus: Holz- und Steinbildhauerei, Plastische Werkstatt,” in Experiment Bauhaus. das Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin zu Gast im Bauhaus Dessau, ed. Magdalena Droste and Jeannine Fiedler (Berlin: Kupfergraben Verlagsgesellschaft, 1988), 340; and Karin von Maur, Oskar Schlemmer, vol. 1, Monographien (München: Prestel, 1979), 142ff. 23 Hal Foster, Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2004), 114. 24 During World War I Schlemmer saw active service first in France in 1914 before suffering a foot injury, and then Russia in 1915. In a diary entry on 20 March 1915, he writes: “What does the mighty chaos of war hold in store for me? A bullet through the chest. … Will I be crippled? Will I lose my right hand, my right arm, my sight?” Tut Schlemmer, Letters and Diaries, 21. 25 Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar 1919–1923, 199. The two images were published again on the cover of the journal Bauhaus 3, no. 4 (1929) on the occasion of Schlemmer’s departure from the school. 26 Tut Schlemmer, Letters and Diaries, 148. Karin von Maur has helpfully corrected the mis­ identification of this text as diary entry; it is a separate manuscript. Karin von Maur, “The Art of Oskar Schlemmer,” in Arnold Lehman and Brenda Richardson, Oskar Schlemmer (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 1986), 121, n. 40. 27 See for instance, Karin von Maur, “Art of Oskar Schlemmer,” 107. 28 Perhaps the most significant response to Hildebrand was Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik (Leipzig: Verlag der Weißen Bücher, 1915; München: Kurt Wolf, 1920). 29 Adolf von Hildebrand, The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts, in Empathy, Form and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, ed. and trans. Harry Francis Malgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 258. Among the most widely read works on sculpture in the period, The Problem of Form was revised and reprinted numerous times in the first decades of the century. See Henning Bock, “Einführung: Die Entstehung des ‘Problem der Form’,” in Adolf von Hildebrand, Gesammelte Schriften zur Kunst (Köln: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1969), 17–40. See also David Getsy, “Encountering the Male Nude at the Origins of Modern Sculpture. Rodin, Leighton, Hildebrand, and the Negotiation of Physicality and Temporality,” in The Enduring Instant: Time and the Spectator in the Visual Arts, ed. Antoinette Roesler-Friedenthal and Johannes Nathan (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2003), 297–313. 30 Hildebrand, Gesammelte Schriften, 258. 31 On these issues in relation to architecture, archaeology and the writing of art history,

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particularly in relation to architecture, see Alina Payne “Portable Ruins: The Pergamon Altar, Heinrich Wölfflin, and German art history at the fin de siècle,” Res 53/54 (Spring/Autumn 2008): 168–89. 32 Hildebrand, Gesammelte Schriften, 236; 242. 33 See, for instance, Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000). 34 László Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision: from Material to Architecture, trans. Daphne M. Hoffmann (New York: Brewer, Warren & Putnam, 1932), 134. 35 A vintage gelatin silver print used in the production of the 1923 catalogue survives in the archives of the Bauhaus University in Weimar, yet almost every reproduction of the image has been rephotographed from the 1923 catalogue. 36 See Geraldine A. Johnson, ed., Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension (New York and Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 37 Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1993), 27.

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Part 3 Object Identity

Chapter 9

Designing Men New Visions of Masculinity in the Photomontages of Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, and László Moholy-Nagy Elizabeth Otto

Photomontages produced as a part of the extraordinary culture of giftgiving at the Bauhaus tell us much about the atmosphere of creative play that thrived there and how Bauhäusler represented themselves and commemorated one another.1 These remarkable works have been overlooked for years as mere ephemera and are largely missing from conventional accounts of the school. Born out of later nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury advertising, composite portraiture, and other forms of juxtaposed imagery, photomontage became a new, nontraditional practice that was embraced by a number of avant-garde groups in the interwar period. Montage allowed artists to create representations out of found images and to reorder the “blizzard of photographs” produced by the interwar illustrated press that Siegfried Kracauer described as threatening to overwhelm his contemporaries.2 Photomontage also embraced the dynamic views of modernist photography that László Moholy-Nagy would term the “New Vision”; it was part of a broader attempt to see the world anew through use of the latest visual and photographic technologies including X-ray, film, and photography.3 In the face of the early twentieth-century avant-garde’s experiments in abstraction, and in light of an increasingly sleek-yet-practical design aesthetic at the Bauhaus, photomontage was embraced by many Bauhäusler as a way of exploring the human figure and gendered imagery. This essay examines a number of works given by or exchanged 183

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among some of the most creative practitioners of photomontage at the Bauhaus: László Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer. It also investigates a work only recently attributed to Marcel Breuer, who was not previously known to have worked in montage. In focusing on photomontaged gifts, the essay analyzes the way that these often playful images helped to construct new, post-World War I forms of masculinity and situate the terms of gender as shifting and in play. Michel Foucault offers a relevant critique of the concept of sexual identity as unified and singular in The History of Sexuality. He finds that, following a gradual separation of sexuality from religion and the resulting medicalization of sex and concurrent “exigency of normality,” in the later nineteenth century “the notion of ‘sex’ made it possible to group together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, and pleasures, and it enabled one to make use of this fictitious unity as a causal principle, an omnipresent meaning, a secret to be discovered everywhere: sex was thus able to function as a unique signifier and as a universal signified.”4 Foucault refers to this strict system as “that austere monarchy of sex” and suggests that, as an alternative, we think of a more open structure of “bodies and pleasures.”5 The Bauhaus photomontages discussed in this essay present bodies that offer up contradictory constructions of maleness. At times, they suggest the radical power of pleasure for reshaping human experience in the post-World War I world. Often these are hybrid figures that evoke a new unity of the technologically proficient artist-constructor with a dupe or chump (Trottel), or they bring together varied forms of manliness that range from mockingly heroic to awkwardly undermined. Still other photomontages envision experiments with identities where gender and sexuality are presented as playfully fluid. In situating the terms of manhood as negotiated, these Bauhaus photomontages offered an alternative to the regimented and standardized male body of the still-recent war. In these works—as in aspects of the Bauhaus experiment in general—there was a freedom to explore and contest ways of being a man that, as this essay will show, provided a powerful alternative to military masculinity. These gift montages are traces of an exchange of ideas on manhood, and their investigation allows for a theorization of the role that these private objects played in the context of the Bauhaus program for remaking the world. By focusing on the multiple and varied representations of masculinities which were created in Bauhaus photomontage, this essay engages fragmented and troubled male figures which have been overlooked in studies of the Bauhaus in favor of narratives of the optimistic possibilities of modern design. Photomontage earned a special place at the Bauhaus, not only due to the integral part it played in the school’s social life but also because

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of its connotations as a new way of creating figurative representations. The word “Montage” originated in the context of machinery and industry, and only slowly came to refer to a form of art making after World War I.6 In calling this new type of image a montage, artists were asserting that these objects were not works of art but rather functioning machines with use value. Embedded in the process of montage is also a claim by the maker to be a “Monteur”—machinist or laborer—rather than an artist. The term Monteur had already been picked up by members of Berlin Dada by 1920 at the latest.7 In bringing visuality together with the technical and mechanical, photomontage was a quintessential form for the post-1923 Bauhaus. And this transformative practice allowed for the contemplation and manipulation of the human figure in order to experiment with represented gender roles. The past two decades have seen a turn in art historical scholarship to engage the subject of early twentieth-century masculinities in such modernist movements as Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism.8 But the Bauhaus’s attempt to remake art and life has rarely been explored in relation to constructions of masculinity. The school first opened on 1 April 1919, less than five months after the conclusion of the catastrophic world war, and many of its male teachers and students were veterans who arrived at the Bauhaus “direct from active service, hoping for the chance to make a fresh start and give meaning to their lives,” according to Magdelena Droste.9 Indeed, all of the male Bauhäusler under discussion in this essay served in the war, with the exception of Breuer, who, born in 1902, was too young but who grew up in an atmosphere of war and was influenced by it.10 Many of the former soldiers at the school had few possessions and almost no clothing during those early years, and they often dressed in simple, collarless button-down shirts that were in fact soldiers’ uniforms dyed and altered by their female fellow-students.11 These and other aspects of the men’s military experiences carried over to the Bauhaus. Yet at the same time they worked together and shared their lives with the school’s women, a strong contrast to their experiences of war. Female students held leading roles in the creative, intellectual, and social life of the school, and a few of them even held leadership positions within it.12 The Bauhaus was both a site of new freedoms and experimentation in gender identity and a place where many conventional ideas about men’s and women’s abilities and roles as students and artists held sway.13 Because the constitution of the Weimar Republic guaranteed women’s equality including the freedom to study, the school’s admission policy could not discriminate based on an applicant’s gender. Walter Gropius stated publicly that there should be no difference between the “beautiful”

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and “strong” sexes. However in 1920 the administration quietly changed its policy to restrict the number of women to one-third of incoming classes from that point on.14 Further, the vast majority of female students were streamed into the weaving or, during the initial years, ceramics and bookbinding workshops, which were deemed appropriate places for women. Still, despite inequalities and limits placed on women’s integration by the administration, the students and Masters took liberties to experiment with new ways of living and being. It was in somewhat private or only semi-public contexts such as the exchanging of gift photomontages that a creative and less traditional approach to gender was explored.15 Behind the scenes of Bauhaus publications, pedagogical tracts, or public statements, male Bauhäusler often mocked themselves and each other in a way that suggested masculine authority and traditional manhood were structures that they viewed with suspicion. In his now classic study of proto-fascist, post-World War I masculinities, Male Fantasies, first published in the 1970s in Germany, Klaus Theweleit argues that there is a particular imperative to examining representations of manliness in Germany of the interwar period. Theweleit finds that, for the men who became members of right-wing, Freikorps paramilitary groups—and for all such men with weak ego structures, most importantly National Socialists—a maintenance of the body’s wholeness and its boundaries was psychologically essential. In Theweleit’s argument, “the soldier male’s most intense fear is his fear of decomposition.”16 By maintaining these boundaries, such men were able to hold on to the identities as soldiers and fighters that they had developed in the recently lost war, and they could stave off what Theweleit refers to as “the mass,” a term which covers a broad range of concepts, including filth, animal nature, the enemy, and, above all, women, all of which the soldier male must avoid at all cost in order to maintain himself.17 Theweleit asserts that certain concepts, including culture, race, nation, and wholeness, and such organizations as the military form the fascist male’s defense against the mass and render him the perfect machine. The new man is a man whose physique has been machinized [sic], his psyche eliminated—or in part displaced into his body armor, his “predatory” suppleness. We are presented with a robot that can tell the time, find the North, stand his ground over a red-hot machine-gun, or cut wire without a sound. In the moment of action, he is as devoid of fear as of any other emotion. His knowledge of being able to do what he does is his only consciousness of self.

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This, I believe, is the ideal man of the conservative utopia: a man with machinelike periphery, whose interior has lost its meaning.18 In the realm of representation, Theweleit sees this ideology at work in sculptures by National Socialist artist Joseph Thorak in which he represents heroic male nudes clad in nothing but their own impenetrable musculature.19 In an undated French postcard that Theweleit illustrates in Male Fantasies, even the soft, chubby bodies of newborn baby boys can take on this armor.20 A recruitment poster from approximately 1919 for the Freiwillige Landesschützenkorps, one of the many armed paramilitary Freikorps groups that were active in Germany after the war, shows a disembodied, helmeted soldier’s head which pops out against the background of a red and white flag (Figure 9.1).21 His eyes opened wide in alarm, this soldier’s chiseled features are skull-like as he shouts—screams almost—for prospective comrades to come forward and fight back those who would disturb German labor, presumably Communists threatening a strike. Rather than suggesting vulnerability in this armored face, the large opening of

9.1 Albert Birkle, Halt: Volunteers Forward (Halt: Freiwillige vor), c. 1919, poster, 94.7 × 70.3 cm 187

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his mouth seems protected by the force of his cry and is echoed by the victory wreaths in the upper corners of the poster. While this militarized imagery would have appealed to former soldiers, the last line of text also reached out to the next generation, those who had been too young to fight; “also those with no service record will be accepted.” After the humiliating defeat of World War I, such myth-making representations of an aggressive, invincible, and militarized German male body appealed to many; these images would, according to Theweleit, help form the essential core of Nazi imagery and ideology.22 During the 14 years of the school’s existence, many at the Bauhaus were also still coming to terms with the devastating experiences of the war. Photomontaged representations of Bauhaus masculinity presented a particularly persistent and multi-faceted critique of militarized manhood. As members of the Bauhaus were involved in utopian attempts to try to redesign everyday objects and thus to expand the experience of modernity into all aspects of daily life, these artists were simultaneously troubling masculinity and reinventing themselves as Monteurs, artist-constructors, and New Men. Thus cultural critique at the Bauhaus was not limited to issues of form and design or the unity of art and craft; this critique also explored new ways of being in this postwar world, and a key element of this exploration was a reexamination of set tropes of manhood. At the school, it was through playful and thought-provoking photomontages that contradictions in gender roles were put on display. These works often seem to revel in their mocking of conventional masculinity and even of the manly self. Moholy-Nagy had turned to photomontage only after having initially dismissed it. In a 1920 letter to a Hungarian colleague he wrote of having seen an exhibition at Der Sturm and complained “a man called Kurt Schwitters is exhibiting pictures made from newspaper articles, luggage labels, hair, and hoops. What’s the point? Are these painterly problems?”23 Yet it was while sharing a studio with Schwitters during the financial crisis of the winter of 1922–1923 that he produced his first known Dadaistic, fragmentary montage.24 At the Bauhaus Moholy-Nagy would fully develop his own montage techniques. Arriving at the school in April 1923 at the age of only 27, Moholy-Nagy was the school’s youngest Master ever, and he was a key figure in the institution’s shift from its Expressionist roots to an aesthetic approach based in Constructivism.25 Photomontage seems to have provided a method of creating figurative images from scavenged and found photographs that particularly appealed to him at a time when painting had become a medium for experimenting with abstraction. MoholyNagy’s photomontages often reveal a surprising emotional engagement

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with, and probing of, a troubled masculinity, strong contrasts to the formal visual experiments for which he is better known. Radically different from the Dadaists’ fragmentary and often somewhat messy montage work, Moholy-Nagy’s photomontages tended to rely on a strong sense of linearity and a use of negative space that marks them as in keeping with Constructivism, an approach which was extremely influential upon a number of Bauhaus artists. Using a technique later made famous by John Heartfield, Moholy-Nagy often considered his montages maquettes for what he called photo-sculptures (Fotoplastiken)—infinitely reproducible photographs of the original montages. At least three of Moholy-Nagy’s photomontages make use of a 1926 portrait photograph by his then wife Lucia Moholy in which MoholyNagy appears as an artist-constructor (Figure 9.2).26 Such figures fascinated many in the circles of International Constructivism, and their rise is one of the defining aspects of the avant-garde’s attempts to rethink the role of the artist in society. Linked to the idea of the Monteur, for the artist-constructor

9.2 Lucia Moholy, Portrait of László Moholy-Nagy (Portrait László Moholy-Nagy), 1926, gelatin silver print, 23 × 15.9 cm 189

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the productive nature of the artist’s work was seen as akin to that of the laborer, the engineer, or the scientist; in fact many were willing to dismiss the notion of “artist” all together.27 In the original image, Moholy-Nagy appears in a machinist’s suit (Monteuranzug), which would certainly have been practical but was also a statement of identity that marked him specifically as a Monteur. He is thus marked as a laborer, but his white collar and tie peeking through show him as more designer than mechanic. In Lucia Moholy’s photograph, Moholy-Nagy stands outside with his back against a plain white rectangle—clearly a door—that does not quite extend down to his feet. His facial expression is set and the power of his vision is emphasized through his wire-rimmed glasses. In contrast to earlier images of the romantic artist, Moholy-Nagy here appears tough and capable, his body armored in his practical coveralls. A photograph of one of the photomontages Moholy-Nagy created based on this portrait, The Chump (Der Trottel), was given as a gift to the Hannover-based artist, photographer, and journalist Kate T. Steinitz, whom he had likely met through Schwitters (Figure 9.3). This photo-sculpture by Moholy-Nagy, like many of the drawings, photographs, montages, and other artists’ gifts to Steinitz, was pasted into her “guestbook,” a kind of scrapbook she kept from 1921 to 1961 of the artists’ milieus in which

9.3 László MoholyNagy, The Chump (Der Trottel), 1925/26, photoplastik (rephotographed photomontage, gelatin silver print), 22.9 × 17.8 cm 190

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she lived.28 Thus Moholy-Nagy’s image was on display for numerous other members of the international avant-garde who visited Steinitz and viewed her guestbook over the years. In The Chump Moholy-Nagy retools the photograph of him as steely constructor to reveal himself as embodying absence and lack. The photograph has been reversed and printed in negative three times; in each of these Moholy-Nagy has carefully cut away everything but the black rectangle (originally the white door) against which he stands. What remains are three empty silhouettes surrounded by dark rectangles. In the left and center figures, Moholy-Nagy’s form appears armless, hunched, and rather stumpy. These silhouettes teeter off to the left on unsteady bases of black pigeon-toed feet which appear to have come from a positive print of the same portrait. Both silhouettes seem to look intently to the right at their fellow, a third figure who attempts to break out of his mummifying frame. Muscular limbs sprout awkwardly from the lean body of an athlete placed behind this third rectangle. Spread out across the composition’s large, blank field, these three self-portraits progress from a closed and self-protective posture to one that has opened up and, as we read the image from left to right, appears to run forward. But this chump is still empty-headed. And rather than allowing him to become something new, his Constructivist frame makes his arms and legs appear gangly and out of place. Having based this montage on a photograph of himself as a modernist artist-­constructor, Moholy-Nagy images both a transcendence of this trope and his own status as a misfit. Try as he might to escape his frame, he is still an ungainly Trottel, a chump who appears unable to grow in the Constructivist rectangle which encases him. In placing this vision of himself in Steinitz’s guestbook in the mid-1920s, Moholy-Nagy makes a visual joke on the supposed rigidity of modernist design, one that would have been understood by the avantgarde viewership of the guestbook. It was becoming a truism among critics of the Bauhaus that the school was seeking to make humanity subservient to a tyranny of rectilinear design.29 On a more personal level, this photo-sculpture is a gift in which Moholy-Nagy seems to contradict his own public persona as the serious and multi-talented Bauhaus professor he had become by the mid-1920s. While this montage is based on a photograph of him as an artist-constructor, a type of creator for whom anything was possible, The Chump turns this representation into empty shell and shows him as inept and bound by his own image. This montage thus also undermines and contradicts any possibility of the photograph of Moholy-Nagy as an artist-constructor becoming a heroic or hard-bodied male along the lines of Theweleit’s militarized men.

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Two of Moholy-Nagy’s fellow-Bauhäusler, Breuer and Bayer, also made photomontaged gifts that have strong specific references to Bauhaus masculinities. Most powerfully, these images relate to the Bauhaus patriarch, Walter Gropius, the school’s founder and its director for nine years, for these were birthday gifts for him. As very young men, both Breuer and Bayer had presented their portfolios to Gropius for admission to the Weimar Bauhaus. He accepted them into the school and later made them Masters of the furniture workshop and the printing and advertising workshop respectively. Breuer and Bayer, too, were good friends who influenced each other’s work. The connections among these men fostered a deep knowledge of each other through mentorship, friendship, and rivalry; it was in this context of trust that new images of the masculine self and other could be most substantively developed and explored.30 While Gropius was known to be the recipient of a portrait of a girl with a magnolia in 1924—on the occasion of his forty-first birthday— the work’s creator and subject were long unidentified (Figure 9.4). In the center of the montage a soft, sepia-toned photograph of a well-dressed New Woman appears in double, the sitter’s modernity softened by her wistful facial expression and the flower in her hands. Rotated a quarter

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9.4 Marcel Breuer (?), Portrait of Marcel Breuer as girl with a magnolia. On the occasion of [Walter Gropius’s] birthday, May 18, 1924 (Portrait Marcel Breuer als Mädchen mit Magnolie. Zum Geburtstag am 18. Mai 1924), 1924, photomontage, 24.8 × 32.2 cm

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turn, the right image is cut off just below the woman’s shoulders but appears to flow into the photograph on the left in a draped line across the wall which suggests her body and gives her an ethereal double presence. The interlocked positioning of these two prints of the same photograph suggests the composition and form of a playing card laid out in the middle of a large white space; it makes the sitter into a queen. And it is clearly in her voice that the work’s work’s carefully hand-written lavender text should be read: “My dear Walter, keep our sweet secret. Eternally and truly yours.” Klaus Weber has identified this as a portrait of Breuer that is such a radical departure from other images of him and from the furniture and architectural designs for which he is known that it long went unrecognized, and indeed this identification is still disputed.31 Having arrived at the Weimar Bauhaus in 1920 at the age of 18, by 1924, when he sat for this portrait, Breuer had befriended Gropius and was completing his time as a student; the following year he would take up his position as the head of the furniture workshop at the Dessau Bauhaus.32 Despite the romanticism of this illustrated love declaration for Gropius, the central figure’s slightly prim mouth, masculine hands, and bad wig undermine the image’s softness and give him away as a man in drag. Once this “queen” has been revealed as playing at being a woman, the photograph’s doubling seems to take on a new sense. Whereas a singular photographic image most often appears as a window into reality, a photograph’s repetition highlights its constructed nature. Thus the repeating and rotating of Breuer’s likeness draws attention to this image’s play on binary constructions of gender. The montage’s inscription also yields a further double vision; it appears to plead for secrecy in a love affair between Breuer and Gropius, yet, for the in-theknow viewers at Gropius’s 1924 birthday party, the declaration was made in jest. It creates a fictitious alter ego for Breuer, this romantic lady and modernist queen of hearts, that was intended to be funny. Breuer was, of course, not the first Marcel to invent, have photographed, and modify images of his own feminine alter ego. In 1920 Marcel Duchamp created Rrose Sélavy, and shortly thereafter he was photographed as Rrose by Man Ray.33 Like Breuer’s gift, pictures of Rrose were mostly exchanged between friends and sometimes signed with personal expressions of deep affection; “lovingly Rrose Sélavy. alias Marcel ­Duchamp” is the inscription on one such photograph. Duchamp was fascinated with gender binaries and much of his work explored them.34 While these photographs of Duchamp were only seen by a small audience, in 1921 Man Ray mounted one of them onto a perfume bottle, photographed it and published it on the cover of the small-circulation avant-garde journal

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New York Dada.35 It is impossible to know if Breuer saw this image, but members of the Bauhaus were well connected to other international artists’ groups, and Breuer may have known of Duchamp’s audaciously kitschy self-portrait. What is most significant in this comparison is how images of these men in drag created alternate, feminine selves that, in both cases, were examples of a romanticized femininity which was decidedly different from the work for which the artists were well known—bold avant-gardism on the part of Duchamp and sleek modernist design for Breuer. In her study of Duchamp and gender, Amelia Jones explores the question of what it means for a male artist to “represent himself and nominate himself as a woman.”36 Jones asserts that Duchamp makes himself into a generative mother and patriarch of postmodernism and that, through the images of Rrose Sélavy, he also becomes a sexualized object of the viewer’s desiring gaze. Like Duchamp, Breuer shows himself in an alternate guise to his normal persona and offers himself as the object of male heterosexual desire. But even more than in the generalized flirtation of Rrose’s signature phrase “Vous pour moi?” Breuer’s image is based on a particular relationship, the “sweet secret” that he shares with Gropius. While all evidence suggests that this assertion of a romantic relationship was made only in fun, the twinning in Breuer’s portrait also extends to a double vision of his sexual identity. He appears both as a smitten woman and as a man in drag who is professing his love for another man. In Male Fantasies, Theweleit discusses the regulated play of crossdressing in the military; “many soldier texts employ the vehicle of a fictitious transsexuality, in which men become women, to represent the playful, apparently transgressive, but ultimately strictly regulated nature of flirtations with the homosexual.”37 Breuer’s image in part fits into this scenario. One could surmise that the later Breuer—known for his minimalist design and Brutalist architecture—would likely have dismissed this image as a youthful prank, a playful moment of Bauhaus frivolity. However, in the context of interwar German culture, in which the nineteenth-­ century anti-homosexuality law known as §175 had remained current in the Weimar constitution and thus continued to foster the persecution of gay men, such a gift brought with it another layer of implied meaning which created both risk and trust between the giver and recipient. Because of this law, the blackmailing of men who were even suspected of being gay was rampant throughout the early twentieth century. Already by the early years of that century, sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld had estimated that at least 2,000 homosexuals were the victims of blackmail annually, and things did not improve in the period after World War I. Hirschfeld subsequently

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cowrote, coproduced, and appeared in the 1919 film Different from the Others (Anders als die Andern), which starred Conrad Veidt in a story of love between two men made tragic by the anti-gay statute and an opportunistic blackmailer.38 This film helped to broaden sympathy for and popularize the cause of gay rights during the interwar period. Breuer’s gift was not merely a performance in drag, but a documentation and contextualization of that performance in lasting form. In appearing in this photomontage, Breuer was giving Gropius not only his affection but also his trust, for this lovingly composed portrait also plays at being a document with which Gropius could have blackmailed Breuer, since it evidenced the latter’s supposed homosexuality. But of course the text implicates Gropius as well. If it was indeed Breuer who gave this image to Gropius, he has both manufactured and surrendered evidence against Gropius; if the work was made by someone else, the circle of imagined love and blackmail becomes wider. Because gifts were usually given to Gropius in the context of a Bauhaus-wide birthday party, others most likely would have seen this gift, making them keepers of these men’s supposed secret as well. In this way the montage also gestured to the larger community at the Bauhaus and its status as a circle of outsiders. Gropius did in fact keep his and Breuer’s secret and the documentation of it, for this montage stayed in his collection all his life with no notations to reveal the giver’s identity. In contrast to the Portrait of Marcel Breuer as Girl with a Magnolia, a well-documented and more public love affair is part of the context of a double-sided, accordion-folded series of ten square, montaged panels by graphic designer Herbert Bayer (Figures 9.5 and 9.6). This gift to Gropius as he became a half-century old is entitled 50 Years of Walter Gropius and How I Would Like to See Him Still. On the Occasion of His Birthday, May 18, 1933 in typed text that appears on the front cover. It was made after both men had left the Bauhaus, but at a time when the institution still continued to be a defining influence in their work and lives. The affair that informed this work was not one that transpired between the two men. Rather, in 1932 Bayer and Ise Gropius, who had been Gropius’s wife since 1923, began an ongoing relationship that threatened the very foundations of the Gropius marriage.39 The two men had had a strong mentor–student relationship since the 21-year-old Bayer first arrived at the Weimar Bauhaus in traditional Austrian peasant Tracht for an interview with Gropius in 1921, having hiked there from Darmstadt in central Germany, since he had no money to take the train.40 Over time, they had become good friends, and in 1925 Bayer officially became a colleague when Gropius named him Master of the new printing and advertising workshop. Even with the strain that

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this affair placed on the relationship between Bayer and Gropius in the early 1930s, they maintained a productive friendship and continued to work together periodically on design projects.41 In this epic series of photomontages, tensions between Bayer and his mentor come clearly—if also playfully—to the surface in nine representations that include images of Gropius as philanderer, cuckolded lover, sensualist, and dirty old man. Yet Bayer also shows Gropius as virile and full of life, and he depicts him as a new form of heroic architect, a sort of artistconstructor muscle man. The first and last portions of this work situate it in the context of the love affair.42 The work’s cover shows the headless torso of a photographed nude female body with the number “50” strung merrily between her breasts. Each nipple is demurely covered by a bow, a twinning that gestures to the gift’s giver and recipient, Ise Gropius’s two suitors. The final image in the series is a skillfully executed montage which includes picture frames, classical sculpture, and careful airbrushing—elements which often appeared in some of his best-known works in montage, such as his covers for Die neue Linie or the 1931–1932 series of Dream Montages which includes one of Bayer’s best-known works, The Lonely Metropolitan.43 In this last frame of the montage for Gropius, a female nude appears again, this time seen from behind. Her body is cut off at the knees and the ribs in clean breaks that reveal her as made of stone, thus evoking both classical sculpture and timeless femininity. A small and laughing photograph of Bayer hangs from this montage by a trompe l’œil string with a handwritten message: “and, nevertheless, best wishes, Herbert Bayer.”44 Thus, in its imagery and text, the narrative of the entire montage series is framed in the context of Bayer’s affair with Gropius’s wife. It 196

9.5 Herbert Bayer, 50 years of Walter Gropius and how I would like to see him still. On the occasion of his birthday, May 18, 1933 (50 Jahre Walter Gropius und wie ich ihn noch erleben möchte. Zum Geburtstag am 18. Mai 1933), 1933, numbers 2 and 3 of ten cardboard panels (five doublesided) bound together with linen, photomontage, chromolithographic prints, gouache, watercolor, and paper with typewritten text, 29.5 × 59 cm

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9.6 Herbert Bayer, 50 years of Walter Gropius and how I would like to see him still. On the occasion of his birthday, May 18, 1933, 1933, number 4 of multipaneled photomontage, 29.5 × 29.5 cm

seems to call repeated attention to her body as an object that, like this gift, passed between the two men. In the work’s only two-page spread, the montage which the viewer first encounters after the cover, mass-produced putti draw back a purple velvet curtain to reveal Gropius, shirtless, reclining, and seemingly asleep, his hands resting on his chest (Figure 9.5). Luscious fruit and delectable photographic female nudes from the realm of soft-core porno­ graphy surround him. As is the case in the two images which frame the gift, Bayer’s approach to the female nude initially appears very conventional; female bodies are shown to signify beauty and heterosexual male desire. Yet the ironic tone of the work suggests that these women are both sexually objectified and presented as examples of a genre. In this case, images of women engaged in playful bondage form yet another rococo element among the glassware and dishes that overflow with fruity bounty and epitomize everything that Bauhaus artists had rejected. Another typed text at the montage’s top left praises Gropius as a lust object and an unvanquished if sleeping patriarch: “fifty springtides the unconquered one dozes; potency gushes from pores in heat [brünstig].” In one of the most dramatic portions of the gift montage, another stand-in for Gropius is seen from behind; he is a muscular nude bodybuilder as Hercules posing with arms outstretched and standing on the skin of his Nemean lion (Figure 9.6). With nothing but paper, an architect’s drawing triangle, and a pencil of epic proportions dangling near his rounded

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buttocks, this heroic architect is ready to conquer the built landscape that sprawls out before him. Like the photograph upon which Moholy-Nagy’s The Chump is based, this is a representation of the artist-constructor. Rather than a blend of smock-clad technician and modernist artist, Gropius here is made into a classical nude and a muscular, hard-bodied constructor who bears resemblance to the armored nudes analyzed by Theweleit. Yet the humor of this image—its oversized and phallic pencil which also suggests Gropius’s body as penetrable, for example—undermines any suggestion of the fascist male body. In complete contrast to the clean lines of Gropius’s now-famous designs, the buildings in the valley below appear massive and medieval. Like the image of Gropius in the rococo boudoir, this photomontage emphasizes its own unreality through kitsch. According to the text at the bottom of the image, more important than the landscape Gropius has conquered with his monumental buildings, this architect wins the woman he loves through his physical attractiveness and his craft; “the architect, formed athletically, opens his heart up to a woman geometrically.” Given the ongoing affair that Bayer was having with Gropius’s wife, this montage’s text seems to be a message of reassurance to Gropius that Ise Gropius will remain with him despite her dalliance with Bayer. In the broader context of modernist masculinities, this image of Gropius presents a glorified superhuman artist-constructor while at the same time revealing his physical and emotional vulnerabilities. Bayer bestowed the gift of 50 Years of Walter Gropius and How I Would Like to See Him Still at a significant moment, the spring of 1933, right after the National Socialists’ assumption of power in Germany. Thus this commemoration occurred at the end of an era. The following year Gropius would leave Germany for England, but Bayer remained until 1938. His continued presence in Germany for five years of Nazi rule and most particularly his creation of Nazi propaganda is an aspect of his oeuvre with which historians are still coming to terms.45 In what has become one of his most notorious examples, the prospectus for the Germany Exhibition (Deutschland Ausstellung) which was held during the Berlin Olympics of 1936, Bayer would again turn to the format he used in Gropius’s 50th-­ birthday gift, a square book in which his photomontages were laid out on single- and double-page spreads (Figure 9.7). In fact, the image reproduced in this essay is taken from Gropius’s personal copy of the Germany Exhib­ ition catalogue that was signed by Bayer and given to him as a gift, a likely indication of Bayer’s pride in this work. While the 1936 work uses the same square format as Bayer’s earlier gift to Gropius, the Germany Exhibition shows a kitschy and mythologized vision of Germany and a much less

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9.7 Herbert Bayer, Double-page spread from the Germany Exhibition (Deutschland Ausstellung) catalogue, 1936, halftone print of photomontage in brown, black and blue, 16 pages, unpaginated (each page: 21 × 20.8 cm)

ambiguous image of manhood. In the most significant of these, superimposed over a seemingly endless crowd punctuated by Nazi flags, the heads of three German male types appear: the worker, the farmer, and the soldier. Unlike the teasing couplets which framed Gropius’s birthday gift, the text for the Germany Exhibition, printed in four languages, is unambiguous: “[T]he Fuehrer speaks and millions listen to him. The working people, the peasantry and the regained right of self-defense are the supports of National-Socialist Germany.” Bayer’s turn away from the open-ended and multiple possibilities of Weimar masculinity is here complete. In contrast to the playful spirit and ambiguous admiration that characterized his gift montage to Gropius, the Germany Exhibition spread shows manhood as a set of fixed types differentiated only in the manner in which they serve their Fuehrer, the man they all unquestioningly obey.46 In the period before Germany’s turn to fascism and the concurrent demise of the Bauhaus, men at the school created a series of fraught self-portraits, declarations of love, and representations of rivalry and respect which they gave as gifts to each other and to members of Germany’s broader avant-garde context. These images were part of a troubling of masculinity that was of great imperative in the interwar period. In place of the military troops of various nations to which so many of the men at the Bauhaus had belonged, the school offered a space in which to renegotiate the status of the male artist and manhood itself. Indeed, at times these works seem to gesture towards Foucault’s “bodies and pleasures” and away from constructions of normalcy and “that austere monarchy of sex” in which anatomies, experiences, and identities are falsely unified. The

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photomontages discussed here thus participate in an even broader process of complicating notions of gender, a process in which many artists are still engaged today. While design and formal experimentation were essential to the Bauhaus project, it was in the engagement of Bauhäusler with the human figure that a critique of manhood was most cogently explored. Some of these works—Moholy-Nagy’s The Chump or Bayer’s gift to Gropius—seem to trouble masculinity by imaging the self as inadequate or by showing the aging male body. But in these and in Breuer’s self-portrait, fragile masculinities were also connected to the more utopian and playful ideals of the Bauhaus. Frederic J. Schwartz has recently pointed out that “the utopias of the Bauhaus were numerous and varied.”47 Play—in the classroom, in the studio, and after hours—was an essential part of these utopias and of the school’s attempts to remake life and to recast manhood as something other than the unified, hard-bodied, military masculinity that Theweleit has identified as emerging from World War I and as subsequently feeding into the rise of fascist masculinity and National Socialist culture. In contrast to the armored and impenetrable fascist body, the Bauhaus montages discussed here all exhibit a spirit of experimentation that rejected the construction of manhood as uniform, a construction of which these former soldiers and children of the war would have had personal knowledge. These works allow us to broaden our understanding of the Bauhaus’s project and the nature of its societal critique, and they help us to see how an exploration of changing experiences of gender— masculinity as much as femininity—was integrated into one of the most influential institutions of modernism.

Acknowledgments Thanks to James Van Dyke, Kathleen Chapman, Sabine Hartmann, Michael Mackenzie, Jeffrey Saletnik, Robin Schuldenfrei, Despina Stratigakos, Klaus Weber, and Tobias Westermann for conversations and suggestions that helped shape this essay. Unless otherwise mentioned, translations are my own.

Notes   1 Life at the Bauhaus and the objects produced as a part of its culture of gifts, invitations, and often nonsensical announcements remain little investigated to this point, with certain significant exceptions. See Juliet Koss, “Bauhaus Theater of the Human Dolls,” Art Bulletin 85, no. 4 (2003): 725–45; Klaus Weber, ed., Happy Birthday: Bauhaus-Geschenke (Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv with Ott + Stein, 2004); and Mercedes Valdivieso, ed., La Bauhaus de Festa (Barcelona: Obra Social Fundació “la Caixa,” 2004).

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  2 Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography” (1927), in The Mass Ornament, ed. and trans. Thomas Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 58.   3 László Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur (Munich: A. Langen, 1929; Berlin: Florian Kupferberg, 1968); later translated and, with some alterations, published as Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision: Fundamentals of Bauhaus Design, Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture (1930; Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2005). Many of these ideas were already in evidence in Moholy-Nagy’s Painting Photography Film (1925), trans. Janet Seligman (London: Lund Humphries, 1969). Christopher Phillips explores the New Photography in “Resurrecting Vision: the New Photography in Europe between the Wars,” in Maria Morris Hambourg and Christopher Phillips, The New Vision: Photography between the World Wars (New York: Harry Abrams and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989), 65–108.   4 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 117, 154.   5 Ibid., 157, 159.   6 Hanno Möbius traces the word Montage to mid-eighteenth-century French, where it spec­ ifically meant to assemble a complex mechanism, device, or object and to make it function. See Möbius, Montage und Collage: Literatur, bildende Künste, Film, Fotografie, Musik, Theater bis 1933 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2000), 16.   7 For example, John Heartfield’s nickname among the Berlin Dadaists at that time was “Monteur-Dada.” See Richard Hülsenbeck’s text in Montage: John Heartfield, Vom Club Dada zur Arbeiter-Illustrierten Zeitung, ed. Eckhard Siepmann (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1977, 1992), 24.   8 Among some of the relevant studies here are Brigid Doherty, “ ‘See: We Are All Neurasthenics!’ or, The Trauma of Dada Montage,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 1 (1997): 82–127; Hal Foster, “Fatal Attraction,” in Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 101–22; Amy Lyford, Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction in France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and Christine Poggi, Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).   9 Magdelena Droste, Bauhaus: 1919–1933 (Cologne: Taschen, 1993), 22. Droste states that about 150 students enrolled that first year, and just over half of them were men. Reports conflict on how many of these had been mobilized during the war, but it is safe to say that they were the vast majority. See F. Dietsch, “Die Studierenden am Bauhaus” (Ph.D. diss., Hochschule für Architectur und Bauwesen Weimar, 1990), 52, cited in Mercedes Valdivieso, “Art and Life: A New Unity,” in Valdivieso, La Bauhaus de Festa, 173. 10 Gropius was a World War I officer and received the Iron Cross for his service. It was in the midst of the war that he, an established architect and member of the Werkbund, was first approached with the idea of heading the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar and completed much of the planning for the new form that the school would take under his leadership. See Reginald Isaacs, Gropius: An Illustrated Biography of the Creator of the Bauhaus (Boston, Toronto and London: Bulfinch, 1991), 38–59. Moholy-Nagy enlisted in the Austro-Hungarian army as an artillery officer in 1915, and it was during this time of service that, untrained, he first began to draw. See Krisztina Passuth, Moholy-Nagy, trans. Éva Grusz et al. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 13–14. Bayer served with the Imperial Austrian Army during the last eighteen months of the war. See Arthur A. Cohen, Herbert Bayer: the Complete Work (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 370. 11 Valdivieso, “Art and Life,” 169. 12 Most notable here are Gunta Stölzl, Master of the weaving workshop in Dessau, and Marianne Brandt, who served for a year as Acting Master of the metal workshop when MoholyNagy left the school. 13 For interpretations of Bauhaus gender relations, see Anja Baumhoff, The Gendered World

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of the Bauhaus: The Politics of Power at the Weimar Republic’s Premier Art Institute, 1919– 1932 (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2001); Baumhoff, “What’s in the Shadow of a Bauhaus Block? Gender Issues in Classical Modernity,” in Practicing Modernity: Female Creativity in the Weimar Republic, ed. Christiane Schönfeld (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006), 51–67; and Katerina Rüedi Ray, “Bauhaus Hausfraus: Gender Formation in Design Education,” Journal of Architectural Education 55, no. 2 (2001): 73–80. 14 Baumhoff, Gendered World, 58–9. 15 This essay focuses on images by men, but several Bauhaus women also explored issues of gender through photomontage. See Marianne Brandt’s transformative visions of the New Woman in my Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt (Berlin: Jovis Verlag, 2005). 16 Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies: Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror, vol. 2, trans. Erica Carter and Chris Turner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 40. 17 Ibid., 3–7, 43. For Theweleit, a man who “heaves himself out of the mass” (he is quoting one Captain Berthold) becomes the phallus, or the phallic German (50–2). 18 Ibid., 162. 19 In Joseph Thorak’s Comradery, for example, two such male nudes hold hands fiercely and demonstrate the way in which the homosocial can allude to homoeroticism while still denying it (ibid., 63). 20 In this postcard the French allegorical figure of Marianne flies through the air and distributes nearly identical babies—ready-made for the next war in their French soldiers’ helmets—to households in which their fathers, adult male soldiers, kiss their wives goodbye to head off for the current battle (ibid., 100). 21 Theweleit includes an image of this poster but does not discuss it (ibid., 22). 22 Ibid., 347–9. 23 Moholy-Nagy, letter to writer Iván Hevesy, Berlin, April 1920, collection of the Documentation Center of the Art History Research Group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, reproduced in Passuth, Moholy-Nagy, 388. 24 For more on Moholy-Nagy’s earliest Dada-influenced montage, 25 Pleitegeier of 1922/23, see Irene-Charlotte Lusk, Montagen ins Blaue: László Moholy-Nagy, Fotomontagen und -collagen, 1922–1943 (Gießen: Anabas, 1980), 68–9, and Elizabeth Otto, “A ‘Schooling of the Senses’: Post-Dada Visual Experiments in the Bauhaus Photomontages of László MoholyNagy and Marianne Brandt,” New German Critique 107 (Summer 2009). 25 Moholy-Nagy was offered the post by Gropius after the latter had seen his work in a 1922 Sturm exhibition. See Passuth, Moholy-Nagy, 29–42. 26 In addition to The Chump, which is discussed here, the other two photomontages are both called Jealousy (Eifersucht). See Lusk, Montagen ins Blaue, 100–1. 27 For more on International Constructivism, see Kai-Uwe Hemken and Rainer Stommer, eds, Konstruktivistische Internationale, 1922–1927: Utopien für eine europäische Kultur (Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje; Düsseldorf: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, 1992). Many scholars have traced the figure of the artist-constructor in the interwar period; see Victor Margolin, The Struggle for Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, 1917–1946 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). See also Maria Gough, The Author as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). For a theorization of the New Man, see Matthew Biro, “The New Man as Cyborg: Figures of Technology in Weimar Visual Culture,” New German Critique 62 (Spring/Summer 1994): 71–110. 28 The Guestbook of Kate T. Steinitz, reproduction (Cologne: Galerie Gmurzynska, 1977), unpaginated. See also: William Emboden, “Kate T. Steinitz: Art Into Life Into Art,” in Emboden, ed., Kate T. Steinitz: Art Into Life Into Art (Irvine, CA: Severin Wunderman Museum Publications, 1994), 25–43.

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29 These and many other criticisms were heaped on the Bauhaus. See K. N. [K. Nonn], “The State Garbage Supplies: the Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar,” Deutsche Zeitung (Berlin), no. 178, 24 April 1924, reprinted in Hans Maria Wingler, Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, 1919–1933, ed. Joseph Stein, trans. Wolfgang Jabs and Basil Gilbert (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 76–7. 30 These connections did not end with the Bauhaus period. All three of these men—and Moholy-Nagy as well—left the Bauhaus in 1928, and they continued to maintain their professional and personal relationships, even working together as a quartet in 1930 to design the German section of the exhibition of the Société des Artistes Décorateurs in Paris. See Manfred Ludewig and Magdalena Droste, “Marcel Breuer,” in New Worlds: German and Austrian Art, 1890–1940, trans. Elizabeth Clegg (New Haven, Yale University Press: 2001), 554. 31 The attribution was made by Klaus Weber. See Weber, Happy Birthday, 82. Another expert on Breuer’s work, Isabelle Hyman, has suggested to the author that the handwriting does not look like Breuer’s (email correspondence, 24 April 2009). 32 Andrea Gleiniger, “Marcel Breuer,” in Bauhaus, ed. Jeannine Fiedler (Königswinter: Könemann, 2006), 320–1. 33 Jennifer Blessing, “Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography,” in Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography (New York: Guggenheim, 1997), 18–19. 34 For an especially useful argument to this end, see Blessing, “Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose,” 20. 35 Amelia Jones, Irrational Modernism: A Neurasthenic History of New York Dada (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 296, note 37. 36 Amelia Jones, “The Ambivalence of Rrose Sélavy and the (Male) artist as ‘Only the Mother of the Work’,” in Postmodernism and the En-Gendering of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 146–90. 37 Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 327. 38 For more on Different from the Others see James Steakley, “Cinema and Censorship in the Weimar Republic: The Case of Anders als die Andern,” Film History 11, no. 2 (1999): 186. See also: Matthias Grimm, ed., Die Geschichte des § 175: Strafrecht gegen Homosexuelle (Berlin: Rosa Winkel, 1990). 39 Weber, Happy Birthday, 216. Reginald Isaacs describes the affair and documents it in the letters that Walter and Ise Gropius wrote to each other, but omits Bayer’s name. See Isaacs, Gropius, 166–73. 40 Cohen, Herbert Bayer, 7. In a seeming reversal of this encounter, one of the panels of this montage shows Gropius as a lusty Austrian lad in traditional dress (see Weber, Happy Birthday, 217, for a reproduction). 41 In the midst of the affair, Gropius writes to Ise Gropius of an evening spent with Bayer drinking and talking openly until the next morning. Isaacs, Gropius, 170. 42 Both of these are reproduced in Weber, Happy Birthday, 216–17, along with two others from the series. 43 See Patrick Rössler, Die neue Linie, 1929–1943: Das Bauhaus am Kiosk (Berlin: BauhausArchiv and Kerber, 2007), 44. A selection of The Dream Montages are reproduced in Cohen, Herbert Bayer, 264–8. 44 The image of Bayer is cut out of one in which he originally appeared with Gropius and Xanti Schawinsky, all of them laughing. See Cohen, Herbert Bayer, 377. 45 For example his biographer, Arthur A. Cohen, largely excuses Bayer by emphasizing his lack of interest in politics and the facts that Bayer continued to work loyally for Jewish clients and that his wife and daughter were Jewish (Cohen, Herbert Bayer, 41–2). Other scholars such as Sabine Weissler have probed this work much more deeply. In relation to his design of the “Wonder of Life” catalogue, in which a long and particularly virulent passage

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of text discusses the purity and superiority of the German race and its blood, she asks, “[H]ow clueless or how disengaged could a person like Herbert Bayer be in aestheticizing such slogans?” See Weissler, “Bauhaus-Gestaltung in NS-Propaganda-Ausstellungen,” in Bauhaus-Moderne im National-Sozialismus: Zwischen Anbiederung und Verfolgung, ed. Winfried Nerdinger (Munich: Prestel Verlag and Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin 1993), 60. Jeremy Aynsley traces this apolitical interpretation of Bayer’s National Socialist graphic designs to Alexander Dorner’s 1947 The Way Beyond Art. See Aynsley, Graphic Design in Germany, 1890–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 198–211. 46 For further reproductions from the Germany Exhibition catalogue, see Aynsley, Graphic Design, 204–5. 47 Frederic J. Schwartz, “Utopia for Sale: The Bauhaus and Weimar Germany’s Consumer Culture,” in Bauhaus Culture: From Weimar to the Cold War, ed. Kathleen James-Chakraborty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 115.

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Chapter 10

The Bauhaus Object between Authorship and Anonymity Magdalena Droste

On 17 October 1924 a group of seventeen Bauhaus students wrote a letter of protest to Walter Gropius, claiming that Bauhaus designs should not be published under the label “Bauhaus,” as Gropius and the council of masters (Meisterrat) had decided, but rather under their authors’ names.1 This document has not attracted much attention in studies on the Bauhaus until now, and is very useful to discussions concerning authorship and anonymity at the Bauhaus; it facilitates a reading of Bauhaus objects as oscillating between being part of the identity of the school and an artist’s individual work. It would seem the student protest was in vain, as evident in two important publications. The first was “Die Arbeit der Bauhaus-Werkstätten,” an article written by László Moholy-Nagy about the work of the Bauhaus and published in a special Bauhaus supplement of the Thüringer Allgemeine Zeitung on 19 October 1924. The captions under the numerous illustrations in the article systematically identified objects with no reference to their maker.2 A second example also adhered to Gropius’s publication policy: in the Katalog der Muster, a catalogue of Bauhaus designs printed in-house by the Bauhaus printing workshop in November 1925, all apart from one design by Josef Hartwig were published without identifying the author (Figure 2.2, page 39).3 Even in Moholy-Nagy’s initial version of the Katalog der Muster the objects illustrated are not accompanied by their authors’ names. Instead, they are numbered, which connotes a serial, industrial character, like a sales catalogue. The student protest was part of an ongoing conflict among 205

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more advanced Bauhaus students: one defending the principles of authorship, stressing the position of the artist as an individual creator, and the other supporting Gropius’s desire for anonymity. Gropius was backed by three older students—Josef Albers, Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack and Wilhelm Wagenfeld—each of whom had petitioned the Meisterrat in support of anonymous editions, following the debate Gropius had helped develop at the Werkbund prior to World War I and which he had taken up again as director of the Bauhaus.4 The Werkbund debate centered upon two opposing views regarding the production of design: one stressed the importance of developing type-forms for the marketplace, the other the primary role of the artist. Gropius’s position in the debate would seem to integrate elements of both concerns: he desired type-forms and urged that they be designed by artists.5 Yet Gropius wanted the artist to be modest, open to cooperative work, and lacking individual ego. Furthermore, his vision for design practice included cooperation with—and an orientation towards— the marketplace as well as an idealistic end, which Gropius saw as the creation of artistic forms that could work as symbolic manifestations of their time. The sociologist Georg Simmel has called this “objective culture” (objektive Kultur).6 Gropius would write of this concept in 1924: “[We] must consciously seek to make the personal factor more objective.”7 Albers, Wagenfeld, and Hirschfeld-Mack shared Gropius’s views about authorship and production. Albers, who then was a member of the stained-glass workshop and supervised the so-called “material study” (Werklehre), claimed to be “liberated from the arrogance of individuality.”8 Wagenfeld, who later would become one of the most important German industrial designers, wanted to create prototypes for industrial production, as he exhibited in the design principles of his famous Bauhaus glass lamp.9 Likewise, Hirschfeld-Mack desired the establishment of “new values which, serving the community, would create energy and expansion.”10 Thus, with their stress on objectivity, Gropius and his three collaborators neglected the artist as an individual in favor of “collective values.” They denied some of the most important features of the “modern artist”— individuality, originality and authorship.

Bourdieu’s Habitus and Anonymity at the Bauhaus Authorship should be understood here, on the one hand, as part of what Pierre Bourdieu calls habitus and as it has been applied to modern artists by the German design historian Wolfgang Ruppert.11 On the other hand, it can be cast in terms of what Michel Foucault defines as “functions of an 206

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author.”12 Bourdieu’s habitus describes behavior as specific to social groups in a certain historic situation.13 Habitus describes patterns of acting and thinking. It describes acquired patterns as well as individual behavior and thus comprises both individual and collective practices. To explain interactions between people, Bourdieu introduced “social capital” to describe social relations and obligations—in other words, membership in a group— and the term “symbolic capital,” describing a person’s individual prestige and social power. Authorship, symbolizing individuality, was a central part of the habitus of the modern artist, whether for a so-called fine artist or a designer.14 The fight for individuality was a cause for dispute at the Bauhaus during the time of the student protest and subsequently. Following a discussion of Gropius’s views on authorship and anonymity, I provide three examples in the work and careers of Marcel Breuer, Herbert Bayer, and Marianne Brandt that show how the conflict between their own interests and the school’s interests developed. Ruppert has reconstructed the habitus of the modern artist, showing that since 1890 designers, like fine artists, have developed a means of establishing symbolic representation or capital. Designers became a professional group of their own and, as such, can be understood as developing their own structures of habitus. Gropius recognized efforts to this end but connected these with negative associations, warning his students about the temptation to be a genius or “little Raphael.”15 He opposed individuality insomuch as representatives of the new self-sufficient, professionally independent designer such as Henry van de Velde, Peter Behrens or Bruno Paul had understood it.16 Gropius wanted his Bauhaus students to work as craftsmen and later as technicians and, moreover, to learn to work cooperatively. Thus, in 1921 he demanded that “this unity [of work] cannot be represented by one person but only by the concerted efforts of a number of people in harmony with each other.”17 Gropius’s decision to reject the artist’s right to autonomy and authorship was also motivated by financial concerns in that he desired to establish a commercial company. The initials GmbH (Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung, the equivalent to a limited-liability company) were printed on the cover of the Katalog der Muster so as to strengthen the Bauhaus’s economic power and make it independent of public funding; indeed, the Katalog der Muster was his first endeavor to announce the sale of Bauhaus works in Dessau. In the school’s 1926–1927 estimated budget, Gropius predicted high revenues resulting from the sale of Bauhaus-owned designs, as well as from student fees.18 The school’s statutes also helped Gropius maintain the anonymity of Bauhaus designs. They explicitly stated: “All work produced with Bauhaus materials remains the property of the

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Bauhaus.”19 Gropius’s separation between authorship and anonymity drew upon the legal aspects of copyright as well; students did not hold the rights to their work produced at the Bauhaus, yet the Masters retained rights to their work.20 We could describe copyright as one “function of authorship,” a legal status that several Bauhaus students decided to pursue.21 Those whose names appeared first on the 1924 protest letter were Erich Dieckmann and Marcel Breuer, both of whom had been hired and paid as advanced journeymen, a special status between a student and a Master at the Bauhaus.22 Dieckmann and Breuer argued that they were too old and too gifted to be treated as mere pupils and wanted to be responsible for their creations, as were the Masters. Like student work, a journeyman’s output was subsumed by the Bauhaus. Dieckmann and Breuer thus reacted to a discourse in which the author’s name was overtaken by the subordination of their status to the discourse of a company or a culture, in this case the Bauhaus.23 The ongoing conflict regarding authorship among students was manifested in another contemporary publication; the Bauhaus issue of the journal Junge Menschen published in November 1924, for which the students had been their own editors. Under the illustrations and articles they printed the author’s initials, and a list of their full names at the end. Thus, the students chose a compromise that reflected contrasting opinions about authorship at the Bauhaus. Although they reached an agreement in this instance, the question of artistic individuality—and the means through which one achieved it—remained significant among students. Indeed, the ambition of two of the most gifted, Breuer and Herbert Bayer, moved beyond compromise. Their biographies are examples of a strong will to authorship. Both will be considered here in terms of habitus: Breuer’s wish to develop as an individual artist rather than an anonymous Bauhaus designer and Bayer’s need to develop a new means for representing himself as a graphic designer. In contrast to these men, the biography of Marianne Brandt, one of the few women to hold a leadership position at the Bauhaus, reveals how the lack of social structures and activities available for a female designer—despite a will to authorship—led to professional isolation.

Marcel Breuer’s Battle for Autonomy Marcel Breuer’s struggle for authorship can be interpreted as part of an endeavor to assimilate the habitus of a new type of artist for whom no specific title existed, but who was ideally a person who had mastered both fine art and design, and who saw his aim as addressing problems of housing, interior design, and architecture through modern means. Bourdieu 208

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describes habitus as a “system of organic and mental dispositions and unconscious patterns of thinking, perceiving and acting.”24 He describes the social space in which habitus can unfold as a “field.”25 Thus, in this case we could describe the Bauhaus as the field in which social exchange took place and, following Bourdieu’s thesis, the field in which social exchange as symbolic capital or economic capital (which includes copyright) occurred.26 Breuer endeavored to become Gropius’s equal in order to achieve the desired habitus, and we can interpret his early career as being in symbolic and real conflict with Gropius, who was Breuer’s greatest rival. From 1922 to 1925 Gropius was Master of Form of the carpentry workshop, in which his most gifted student was Breuer. Breuer, who aspired to become an architect, designed a house in 1923 based on Gropius’s ideas and in 1924 he took part in a competition, sponsored by the important architecture journal Bauwelt, for the design of affordable apartments.27 His contribution to the contest was a seven-storey duplex apartment building, a design considered more radical than any previous instance of architectural design at the Bauhaus. For Breuer, who had no academic education as an architect, it was also an accomplishment to be selected as a participant in the building exhibition, Bauaustellung Stuttgart 1924, where photographs, models, and designs by Gropius, Adolf Meyer, Georg Muche and Farkas Molnár were shown. He also displayed his furniture at the Werkbund exhib­ ition, Die Form, which also took place in Stuttgart in the summer of 1924 and then went on to tour four other German cities.28 Furthermore, in October 1923 Breuer, Molnár and Muche had founded an informal architectural department at the Bauhaus which can be interpreted as a challenge to Gropius, although the Meisterrat acknowledged it.29 In February 1924 Breuer gave up his position as a paid journeyman at the Bauhaus so as to have time for his own artistic work, thus stressing how important it was for him to develop his artistic abilities.30 He spent several months in Paris, where he worked in an architect’s office and met Le Corbusier and Fernand Léger, and the gallery owner Léonce Rosenberg, who published two of his furniture designs in the Bulletin de l’Effort Moderne. His efforts in Germany and France indicate Breuer’s intent and indeed his success in becoming known as the type of modern artist meant to be cultivated at the Bauhaus and, at the same time, one reputable in his own right. We can read these events as contradictory. Gropius and the Bauhaus played a significant role in inventing this new type of artist, yet some, like Breuer, felt that they could not be as self-effacing as Gropius would have liked.31 Thus, they had to work at once with and against the Bauhaus. Breuer proceeded step by step to broaden the scope of his individual competence: he began by designing chairs, then he turned to interior design

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and architecture, and founded his own architecture department, always claiming to be finding modern solutions to the problems of living. In April 1925 Breuer became Junior Master of the carpentry workshop in Dessau. Subsequently, he continually fought to link his designs with his name and to develop an artistic personality. His appointment as Junior Master confirmed that Breuer had attained an exceptional degree of technical and design competence, but it also meant that he was an ideal “Bauhaus artist,” having assimilated the “unity of art and techno­ logy” that Gropius desired. Breuer was unscrupulous in his will to assert himself as an artistic personality in the field of architecture and design and did not allow his own interests to be subsumed by those of the Bauhaus. We could describe his courage to wage battles for symbolic power and authorship as part of the functioning of habitus. He had to win these battles in order to find a place among the new generation artists, who covered multiple fields, cast aside tradition, worked in new materials like metal and glass, and aspired to bridge fine and applied art so as to solve the problems of daily life. As early as 1926 and 1927 two conflicts arose between Breuer and the Bauhaus in Dessau: one with respect to the Bambos houses and another with respect to tubular steel furniture. In the former, questions of symbolic order are brought to the fore, whereas in the latter, authorship and notions of “real” power and income come into play. Breuer likely led those who urged that the Junior Masters be given housing equal to that of the older Masters, who lived in a kind of colony of Gropius’s design consisting of three double houses with studios (for Klee and Kandinsky, Muche and Schlemmer, Moholy-Nagy and Feininger) and a single house for the director. In summer 1927 Breuer designed six modest row houses for the Junior Masters.32 The design earned the name Bambos, following the first letters of its planned inhabitants: Breuer, Albers, Meyer, Bayer, Ottens, and Schmidt.33 Although Gropius eventually agreed to provide funds to build the Bambos houses, they were never constructed.34 We can view the housing affair in terms of symbolic representation. Living in a modern house would have demonstrated a higher social status for the Junior Masters, one equal to the older Masters. It would also have reflected the younger group’s own artistic principles; the minimal design was an alternative to Gropius’s houses, which had the character of modern villas. Gropius’s approval of the Bambos design and his willingness to fund its construction represented both a symbolic and a real acceptance of Breuer as nearly his equal. Breuer’s desire for autonomy is further exemplified by the conflict that arose concerning the rights to the tubular steel furniture he had developed at the Bauhaus between 1925 and 1926. Gropius intended to

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arrange license agreements for the manufacture of the furniture and use the income generated thereby for the school. Opposed to this plan, Breuer argued that his designs were comparable to the paintings of the older Masters and that they were his private possession.35 In September 1926 Breuer secured design protection (Gebrauchsmusterschutz) in Germany and a patent in France for these inventions, and in the same year he founded a company to produce his furniture with the Hungarian industrialist Kálmán Lengyel. These actions not only secured Breuer’s claim to authorship but also reflected aspects of the new artist’s habitus: orientation towards the market, productive work, and the integration of art into everyday life. So as to retain Breuer at the Bauhaus, Gropius consented to these activities. But ultimately Breuer decided to leave the school, breaking his contract in January 1928, when it become obvious that Hannes Meyer was to be appointed as the new Bauhaus director. The conflict about the tubular steel furniture can be read as an extension of the 1924 student protest, but in this instance Breuer won the legal rights and thus authorship. Immediately upon leaving the Bauhaus, Breuer published his first catalogue, in which he presented ten pieces of tubular steel furniture, all as furniture “types” and proudly advertised as “Made at the Bauhaus 1925–1927.” By doing so he succeeded in combining individual authorship and the prestige of the Bauhaus, which was becoming more widely known. Indeed, Breuer strove to communicate his authority to the public. In articles published at the Bauhaus and soon after, Breuer addressed daily life, fine art, and the avant-garde, in keeping with the requirements of a modern designer. He published in specialist handicraft journals like Fachblatt für Holzarbeiter.36 In the Bauhaus edition of Junge Menschen, Breuer published the essay “Form-Funktion,” which dealt with a central theoretical problem of the Bauhaus in Weimar and demonstrated that the young Hungarian, even in his first German-language text, did not hesitate to address fundamental questions, such as the relationship between form and function.37 And in 1928 he wrote about his tubular steel furniture for two avantgarde publications.38 Following Bourdieu, writing a text can be interpreted as gaining symbolic capital in a social field. Here we can differentiate two fields in which Breuer inscribed himself: traditional handicraft and fine art. His ambition to assert authority in these fields corresponded to his desired habitus—the new generation of artist-designers had to be fluent in both. Additionally, symbolic forms such as clothing, behavior, and the self-fashioning of one’s image can demonstrate one’s participation in a common habitus. Breuer engaged the symbolic order as a means to assert authorship, and in some photographs of the period we can study his individual appropriation of the common habitus. Breuer composed a photograph of 211

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10.1 Marcel Breuer, 1925/26, photographer unknown

himself sitting in his most radical piece of furniture: B5 (Figure 10.1). Appropriately, his face is as emotionless and as cool as the steel furniture. In another photograph he assumes the pose and gesture typical of an architect; with his hands before his eyes, Breuer seems to control an absent rectangle. Although not necessarily displayed publicly, these photographs demonstrate a will to authorship and show how a desired habitus had become part of Breuer’s personal behavior. This is also evident in the choice of clothing and posture assumed by Breuer and the other Junior Masters in the well-known group portrait taken on the roof of the Bauhaus building. Breuer wears a bow tie (like Gropius, Klee and Kandinsky); he and Bayer are one step behind Gropius, but no one is nearer to the director, who stands in the center of the photograph; and their gaze is open, serious, and as self-confident as that of the older Masters.

Herbert Bayer and the Individuality of Advertising In many respects Breuer seems to have made an alliance with Herbert Bayer, who designed the cover of Breuer’s first catalogue and his personal letterhead. Bayer worked in a field in which competition within the Bauhaus was considerable: Moholy-Nagy, Albers, Joost Schmidt, and Alfred Arndt had all designed “new typographies” with considerable success. Bayer’s strategies to develop as an artistic personality and to assert himself in the relatively small field of “new typography” were similar to those of Breuer. In April 1925 Bayer was appointed Junior Master in the printing workshop. During the next three years he changed the direction of the workshop from an emphasis on printing to advertising. In the school’s 1927 prospectus the workshop is listed as “advertising” (Reklame), replacing 212

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its earlier name “printing and advertising”, and thus Bayer had given it a distinct status that directly linked his work at the Bauhaus to commercial endeavors. In doing so, he was perhaps the first Bauhaus designer to open his workshop to commissions, thus granting him a kind of symbolic leadership at the school and underlining his autonomy from his Bauhaus colleagues, such as Moholy-Nagy. Like Breuer, Bayer had begun to assert authorship during his Weimar years. In 1925 (like Moholy-Nagy and the graphic designer Max Burchartz) he began to print his name upon his designs by adding a small mark (Druckvermerk) along the edge of the page. Thus, even the Bauhaus letterhead functioned as advertising for the young designer. Another strategy was to conceive of inventive and highly original design initiatives in the field of advertising. In 1924 he developed six innovative pavilions which utilized new, multimedia strategies of advertising. Pavilion Regina, for example, advertised toothpaste with smoke, images, texts and sound. One of his most innovative inventions was Universal, a typeface which combined lowercase and uppercase letters in one alphabet. Of course, signature and innovation are traditional means to maintain an artistic hold on the market. But it is remarkable how Bayer used these strategies to maintain authorship in the new professional field of advertising. Bayer also invented visual strategies through which to articul­ ate his individuality and to combine his Bauhaus identity with his desired habitus. In a photograph taken in 1926, he reinvented the tradition of selfportraiture in which an artist shows himself at work (Figure 10.2). But he

10.2 Herbert Bayer, 1926, photograph by Irene Bayer-Hecht 213

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did not present himself with easel, brush and palette; rather, he sat at his worktable, at once serious and relaxed, wearing a tie, but with his shirtsleeves rolled up. His tools are pen and ruler. On the desk lay the Dessau prospectus, a work in which he had innovatively combined text and photographs, itself a new achievement at the time. Portrait poses such as those assumed by Klee or Kandinsky, who in photographs positioned themselves in their studios surrounded by their artworks, had not been appropriate for Bayer, a graphic designer and nascent adman of the interwar period; no visual prototypes existed to show a graphic designer’s portrait in the guise of an advertiser. Although this photograph was not published, it is remarkable as an iconographic performance and demonstrates, as did Breuer, how a desired habitus became part of private behavior. In 1928 Bayer designed a set of innovative business cards, some of which indicated his association with the Bauhaus and some of which dissociated him from the school (Figure 10.3). We also can interpret these cards as part of Bayer’s move to achieve a desired habitus. Bayer presented himself to his prospective clients as having the qualities of being young, modern, dynamic, as well as trained at the increasingly well-known Bauhaus. His serious facial expression and his downcast eyes also speak to the discipline necessary to meet clients’ desires, as he announced in the accompanying text, which Bayer printed over his face, thus showing a high identification with his “mission statement.”39 The final sentence on the business card reads: “My technical knowledge and experience ensure an efficient mode of operation.” Of the three boxes in the upper portion of the card, one announced “conceptual and technical advertising design” (werbeentwurf und ausführung). The center and right boxes are formal counterparts: one reads “bauhaus dessau” and the other “herbert bayer.” Yet as the boxes

10.3 Herbert Bayer, 1928, printed visiting card 214

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indicate, “Bayer” and “Bauhaus” were connected and separated at the same time and, in some of the cards, “bauhaus dessau” was crossed out, thus showing that Bayer had not been released from, but had intentionally left the school. As Breuer had, Bayer pursued the publication and exhibition of his work. In October 1925 Jan Tschichold, one of the leading modern graphic designers of the period, introduced Bayer as among the pioneers of “new typography” in a special issue of the printers’ journal Typographische Mitteilungen.40 In 1926 Bayer published his first essay in the special Bauhaus issue of the printers’ journal Offset, which had been organized by MoholyNagy and included several advertisements designed by Bayer for his Bauhaus workshop.41 He also took part in exhibitions of “new typography” and modern advertising: one of them was in Mannheim, called Graphische Werbekunst Internationale Reklame, which later traveled to Zwickau; the other was Internationale Buchkunst-Ausstellung, which took place in Leipzig in 1928. Finally, Bayer not only designed Breuer’s first catalogue and letterhead; in 1928 he also published three versions of Breuer’s design for the Bambos houses in the first and only issue of the journal Bauhaus which Bayer edited.42 Bayer designed the visually complex and compelling cover which curiously enough he did not sign, thus showing, perhaps, that the will to authorship was only one aspect of a more complex habitus. Breuer and Bayer challenged their teachers and won battles to assert individual authorship at the Bauhaus by investing energy, creativity, and discipline over and above that of the older Masters, while also working to convince the art world of their presence within a new generation of artists. Marianne Brandt would not find such success at the Bauhaus, nor would she during her subsequent career.

Marianne Brandt’s Anonymous Authorship When Breuer and Bayer began their careers as Junior Masters in April 1925, Marianne Brandt had just finished her second semester in the metal workshop. Brandt’s Bauhaus narrative has often been told in a positive light. Indeed, many of her works were of the highest quality and are among the most widely recognizable Bauhaus objects today. In the Katalog der Muster six of the designs were by Brandt and some of her designs were produced by industry. In July 1928, for instance, the Bauhaus entered a contract with Schwintzer & Gräff, Berlin, which mainly produced designs developed for the Dessau school building, many of them by Brandt.43 Additionally, she was responsible for collaborations between the metal workshop and private companies. 215

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Although Brandt’s affiliation with the Bauhaus mostly has been cast as a success, if one follows Bourdieu, this reading does not hold.44 Whereas Breuer and Bayer had used publications to promote themselves, in 1928 Brandt was publicly attacked by avant-garde sculptor Naum Gabo in a five-column article in the journal Bauhaus, in which he accused the metal workshop of not doing functional work, but of working in a “Stil” or in a stylish way. Brandt answered Gabo’s attack with a very short article, claiming that her work was based on scientific research. Gabo was allowed to respond and maintained that a mere light bulb fulfilled the same purpose as the lamp around it; designing lamps whose form followed light bulbs was superfluous in his opinion.45 Given the documents of the time, it seems that Hannes Meyer himself had approved Gabo’s attack. Later, in a letter to Meyer dated 25 April 1929, Brandt announced that she was going to break her contract with the Bauhaus, most probably to motivate Meyer to intervene in workshop policy. She had recently been confronted by her colleagues Hin Bredendieck and Hermann Gautel, who were interested in developing metal furniture and declared Brandt unable to do so, even telling her that they would not mind if she were to leave the workshop.46 Brandt was not supported by Meyer; in fact, he rearranged the workshops so as to accommodate the desires of Bredendieck and Gautel immediately after she left the Bauhaus when her contract expired. If, in keeping with Bourdieu, one understands the Bauhaus as a field and thus as a social space of conflict where people devise strategies meant to attain real or symbolic power, then Brandt’s efforts to this end had been in vain. She had lost the struggle for power by giving up direction of the metal workshop, after having also lost symbolic authority when attacked publicly by Gabo. We should also consider Brandt’s approach to her career after leaving the Bauhaus. In contrast to Breuer and Bayer, she neither published in journals nor did she assert a professional identity after leaving the Bauhaus. She did not, for instance, have her own letterhead. Her work for the Ruppel factory in the small town of Gotha from the end of 1929 through 1932 was anonymous. And her job there was to redesign their existing line of metal products such as boxes for stamps, clocks, and napkin-holders. As an artist she was almost invisible. Meanwhile, Breuer continued to develop his career as an architect and marketed his furniture as “Breuer-Stahlrohrmöbel” (although this endeavor was to fail economically soon thereafter). Bayer became head of the Studio Dorland, an advertising agency where he led a small group of graphic designers who developed new Druckvermerke for signing their work. At the other end of the spectrum, Brandt complained about her inability “to sell herself.”47 Like Breuer

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10.4 (left) Marianne Brandt, Metallic party, selfportrait, 1929 10.5 (right) Marianne Brandt, selfportrait, no date

and Bayer, Brandt held legal authorship of her Bauhaus work, excluding the lamps.48 In 1932, she asked the Bauhaus to return the negative metal mold press used to make her bowls, and proposed that some of her metal designs be produced by Swiss Wohnbedarf AG.49 But her attempts for economic success failed just as the Bauhaus itself struggled to maintain its existence and economic conditions worsened.50 Also significant is the fact that Brandt was a woman. We know that the written (and mostly unwritten) patterns of gender roles were important at the Bauhaus, as they were in the Weimar Republic.51 Many of these features are visible in Brandt’s biography, behavior and art. We have observed symbolic representations of a desired habitus in photographs of Breuer and Bayer. Both images were produced during their passage from the Bauhaus to independent professional life and both indicate a kind of appropriation or invention of a desired habitus. In the case of Brandt, we do not know of any photographs in which she showed herself with her pro­ ducts or at work and thus demonstrates authorship or a desired habitus.52 The only photograph in which she was shown with metal objects is her selfportrait for the Metallische Fest (Figure 10.4). She composed it with a subtle eroticism: closed eyes, open lips, head back.53 There is continuity to Brandt’s body-habitus which is evident in her early photography (Figure 10.5). Brandt had practiced photography 217

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since 1917 and had often used it as a medium for self-expression.54 All of her photographs are carefully composed. In them, she loved to play with her hands and arrange flowers, perhaps to show personal emotions indirectly. In most she looks open, but somehow helpless. Perhaps this indicates an uncertain identity, an identity which plays with different female roles? This is an identity which can be realized only when performing priv­ ately before a camera, where she is more audacious than in her “normal life.” In her photographs, she prefers an over-emphasized female habitus, pointing directly or indirectly at herself, calling for attention. Bourdieu writes that at the level of consciousness we do not master the whole meaning of our behavior and, consequently, our behavior makes more sense than we know.55 Brandt’s behavior tells us that she was unable to imagine or invent a professional habitus in the way Breuer and Bayer had done, even as a photographic subject. Not even at the symbolic level did she find a model which unified her professional abilities and her gender. Ruppert stresses that in order to develop a habitus a social field must exist. It was difficult for Brandt to develop a professional female habitus as a designer even in the relatively liberal environment of the Bauhaus. The development of a female habitus was more promising in the weaving workshop because weaving traditionally was a field deemed appropriate for women. But the metal workshop was a male territory: a battleground among men. Although Brandt surprised her male colleagues by mastering all technical aspects of the workshop and producing the largest number of objects, she lost the fight for real power and symbolic recognition at the Bauhaus. Developing a professional female habitus was even more challenging in the world beyond the school, where there were almost no arenas for a female metalworker to assert authorship. For Brandt, her time at the Bauhaus was the highpoint of an ultimately nonexistent career. Although the Bauhaus was a “gendered world,” it had, nevertheless, and considering the era, offered Brandt more opportunities than she would have later in life.56 It seems clear that, in her case, questions of authorship and gender cannot be separated, even within the realm of the Bauhaus. Brandt stopped working for the Ruppel factory in 1932.57 From 1933 to 1945 she lived in her parents’ home in Chemnitz, which became part of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1948. One of her students described the six years she taught at art schools in Dresden and Berlin between 1949 and 1954 as “being almost without any resonance.”58 In 1954, at the age of 61, she retired. In 1967, she was not even informed when the Italian company Alessi reproduced one of Brandt’s ashtrays.59 In any case, political conditions would not have allowed her to agree to a

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10.6 Left: Andrea del Verrocchio, Bust of a young woman with flowers, 1480 Right: Marianne Brandt, Montage, Andrea del Verrocchia Portrait of an unknown well-known 1480–1960, 1960

private contract with a capitalist company, although technically she owned the rights to the design.60 It would be ten years later before the Bauhaus was politically accepted in the GDR and the Bauhaus building in Dessau reopened after having been closed for 50 years. Brandt received an invitation to the opening ceremony but was too ill and too old to attend. A year later, in 1977, she gave many of her belongings to the Galerie am Sachsen­ platz in Leipzig, which in turn sold them. She moved to a retirement home in Kirchberg where, in 1983, she died in a room with four beds.61 The rebirth of the Bauhaus in the GDR came too late to foster a corresponding renaissance for Brandt’s career. Although she was concerned with authorship throughout her life, Brandt’s discourse only became one of authorship when it was published after her death.62 In either 1960 or 1962, years before the Bauhaus renaissance in the GDR and as she was approaching her seventieth birthday, Brandt created a montage in which she glued her head onto a reproduction of a female bust by Andrea del Verrocchio (Figure 10.6). She captioned it: “Andrea del Verrocchia Portrait of an unknown well-known” and added the 219

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dates “1480–1960.”63 By adding these dates, Brandt constructed a continuity from Verrocchio’s time to her present. She may have thought Verrocchio had been a woman because Andrea is a female name in German. Regardless of whether she changed “o” to “a” intentionally or if this was a Freudian slip, we find many of the features that Brandt used in her selfportraits in the bust (flowers, similar hand gestures, and a frontal view), to which she added her own head, showing personal emotion. The bust functions on different levels, oscillating between hope and resignation; there is a permanent shifting between image and text, between Brandt and the unknown young woman. Is Brandt the unknown or does she refer to the unidentified Renaissance girl? Are both known and unknown? Through her caption, Brandt makes herself part of the unknown woman, perhaps indic­ ating that she regretted being unknown, even reflecting upon her wellknown Bauhaus objects. At issue in this collage is Brandt’s impossibility of asserting authorship.64 She did not claim authorship of the collage; she did not sign, publish or exhibit it. Brandt, whose Bauhaus biography had been neglected, used the work to ask why she never had success despite her creative abilities. She was, in fact, only able to question authorship, but not to act on it. Brandt’s inability to assert authorship ultimately led her to a position of resignation. In 1975 Hans M. Wingler, the Director of the Bauhaus Archive, corresponded with Brandt and sent her catalogues of two exhib­itions devoted to Breuer and Bayer. With these exhibitions Breuer and Bayer had been able to connect their Bauhaus history with their successful American careers. For both men a circle closed which had begun at the Bauhaus and with their early battles for authorship. Brandt thanked Wingler for the catalogues, writing: I can inform you that I recently received the Bayer and Breuer catalogues, of which I was especially interested in Breuer’s. An astonishingly productive and great master. Certainly I always feel somewhat “small and ugly” [before him], also with regard to earlier achievements. Now, unfortunately, everything is past, and I am just vegetating. Others are still riding high despite their old age; unfortunately I don’t have this luck.65 Striking here is Brandt’s negative self-esteem as “small and ugly,” which she even projects upon her past. In viewing herself as being a small, ugly woman, she is unable to appreciate her own work. This final self-interpret­ ation reveals a pattern demonstrated throughout her life.66 Brandt began her Bauhaus education by destroying her former work. This may be interpreted as a radical new beginning, but from the

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perspective of her final years, this was a symbolic act of self-destruction or self-effacement. She did not claim authorship of the collages and photo­ graphs she produced during her time at the Bauhaus. She almost never published or exhibited them. And she was unable to assert authorship of her design products. She never acquired a professional habitus as a designer like her male colleagues, and she was unable to reconcile her female habitus with the professional habitus of her male counterparts. At the end of her life, Brandt was on the way to becoming forgotten as an artist and author. There is a strong continuity in her personal thinking and its symbolic expression which we could describe as the inability to create a unity between gender and professional practice. This fundamental lack, the reasons for which are multifold, disabled Brandt from claiming authorship. This did not prevent her Bauhaus objects, however, from becoming part of the “objective culture” Gropius had desired, and part of the Bauhaus as a collective work of design history.

Postscript: Repetitions In the end, Breuer, whose abilities Brandt admired so much, never lost the instinct to secure his name as an artist in his own right. In the 1960s Breuer reinvented the authorship—both legally and discursively—of his tubular steel chairs, which by that time had become rather little known.67 In 1962 Breuer organized a reissue of his designs with the Italian furniture producer Gavina. It was then that the B5 got the name Wassily and the B32 was baptized Cesca. When Knoll bought Gavina in 1968 these designs found international success and were soon after considered “modern classics.”68 It was part of Knoll’s sales strategy to market them as artworks by modern architects and designers. To know this furniture was to be educated about design. In 1977 Der Spiegel, the most influential German weekly magazine, ran an article instructing readers on how to differentiate between a cheap copy and an original. And still today, upon seeing one of these chairs people ask “Is this a Breuer chair?” and not “Is this a Bauhaus chair?” The marketplace rewarded Breuer and Bayer. So too did Gropius, with whom both collaborated: Gropius shared an architectural firm with Breuer for many years and Bayer designed the catalogue for his 1968 Bauhaus exhibition “50 Years Bauhaus,” which traveled throughout the world. But both Breuer and Bayer, as has been shown by Gabriele Diana Grawe, were not interested in being associated with the Bauhaus: “I first did not want to work on the Bauhaus exhibition but then realized I had to,” Bayer wrote, almost with resignation.69 While Breuer and Bayer saw the Bauhaus as part of the past and wanted to move their own careers forward, modest and poor Marianne 221

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Brandt had no career and would be forgotten, if not for a new generation of historians interested in questioning old stories of success.

Acknowledgments My thanks to Pedro C. Fernandez for discussing this text with me and for his assistance with English translation. Further thanks to Hélène Lipstadt; Anja Baumhoff, Loughborough University; and to the editors, Jeffrey Saletnik and Robin Schuldenfrei.

Notes   1 Karl-Heinz Hüter, Das Bauhaus in Weimar (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1982), 232–3.   2 László Moholy-Nagy and Georg Muche, “Die Arbeit des Staatlichen Bauhauses,” special supplement (Sonderbeilage), Thüringer Allgemeine Zeitung, October 19, 1924.   3 See Anne Bobzin and Klaus Weber, Das Bauhaus-Schachspiel von Josef Hartwig (Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv, 2006). His name was also printed on earlier advertisements for his chess sets. Curiously, there is no other Bauhaus object for which so many advertisements were made, all of which include Hartwig’s name. On 10 February 1924 the Bauhaus negotiated a contract with Hartwig for the production of the chess set. See Johannes Glemnitz, “The Wood-carving Workshop and the Toys of the Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar,” in Bauhaus-Alben 1, ed. KlausJürgen Winkler (Weimar: Verlag der Bauhaus-Universität, 2006), 225–7, note 25. In the negotiations about the contract Hartwig wrote: “the production is usually done by me” (Glemnitz, 227). The reason why the sheet depicting his chess set was printed three months later (February 1926) than the others (November 1925) is not clear. In 1925 Hartwig left the school for a better job in Frankfurt and therefore it may have taken some time to get his permission to advertise the chess set. The school had the right to advertise other products.   4 On Gropius’s partly controversial positions regarding the role of the artist in the prewar Werkbund see Frederic J. Schwartz, Der Werkbund: Ware und Zeichen 1900–1914 (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1999), 274–5.   5 Magdalena Droste, “Visionen und Konflikte: Bauhaus-Design und Kunsthandwerk,” in Positionen des Gestaltens seit 1850, ed. Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte und Bayrischer Kunstgewerbe-Verein (München: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2002), 190–201; especially 192.   6 Georg Simmel, “Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben,” in Individualismus der modernen Zeit und andere soziologische Abhandlungen, ed. Otthein Rammstedt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), 319–33, especially 331.   7 Walter Gropius, “Breviary for Bauhaus Members” (draft, 1924), in Hans Maria Wingler, The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, ed. Joseph Stein, trans. Wolfgang Jabs and Basil Gilbert (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 76.   8 Josef Albers, “Historisch oder jetzig,” special issue (Sonderheft) “Bauhaus Weimar,” Junge Menschen 8 (November 1924): 171.   9 Wilhelm Wagenfeld, “Zu den Arbeiten der Metallwerkstatt,” ibid., 187. 10 Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, “Die Reflektorischen Farbenspiele,” ibid., 188–9. 11 Wolfgang Ruppert, Der moderne Künstler: Zur Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte der kreativen Individualität in der kulturellen Moderne im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 225. 12 Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?”, in Art in Theory 1900–1990, ed. Charles Harrison and

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Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 923–8. Thanks to Pedro C. Fernandez for making the English text available to me. 13 Joseph Jurt, Bourdieu: Grundwissen Philosophie (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 2008), 58–101. I follow Jurt’s definitions of Bourdieu’s central terms habitus, field, and capital. 14 Ruppert, “Die Konstruktion des Künstlerhabitus,” in Der moderne Künstler, 225–474. 15 Walter Gropius, “The Viability of the Bauhaus Idea” (1922), in Wingler, Bauhaus, 51–2, especially 51. 16 Walter Gropius, “The Necessity of Commissioned Work for the Bauhaus” (1921), in Wingler, Bauhaus, 51. 17 Ibid. 18 “Budget estimate for the Bauhaus for 1926–27,” in Wingler, Bauhaus, 111. 19 “The Statutes of the Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar,” ibid., 44–8. 20 Nevertheless, Gropius’s policy in this case was not consistent. All of the objects’ makers are specified in Walter Gropius, Neue Arbeiten der Bauhauswerkstätten (1925; reprint, Mainz: Florian Kupferberg Verlag, 1981). 21 See Foucault, “What Is an Author?”, 923–8. 22 “Summary of the students in the cabinetmaking workshop,” in Winkler, Bauhaus-Alben 1, 74. 23 See Foucault, “What Is an Author?”, 924. 24 My translation, following Ruppert, Der moderne Künstler, 27. See also Jurt, Bourdieu, 58–70. 25 Jurt, Bourdieu, 100. 26 Ibid., 70–8. 27 See Joachim Driller, Marcel Breuer: Die Wohnhäuser 1923–1973 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1998). 28 Angelika Emmrich, “Marcel Breuer: Tischlerlehrling und Geselle des Weimarer Bauhauses 1920–1925,” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Hochschule für Architektur und Bauwesen, series A (Weimar, 1989): 79–84, especially 82. 29 Driller, Marcel Breuer, 10. 30 Volker Wahl, ed., Die Meisterratsprotokolle des Staatlichen Bauhauses Weimar 1919 bis 1925 (Weimar: Verlag Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 2001), 326. 31 This did not prevent further collaboration between Breuer and Gropius. Breuer, for example, provided some furniture for the interiors of the two Gropius houses in the Stuttgart Werkbund Weissenhofsiedlung exhibition in 1927. 32 Driller, Marcel Breuer, 42. See Lutz Schöbe, “Bambos – Die Jungmeisterhäuser von Marcel Breuer,” in Marcel Breuer: Design und Architektur, ed. Alexander von Vegesack and Matthias Remmele (Weil am Rhein: Vitra Design Museum, 2003), 176–87. 33 The first publication of this drawing was in Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, ed., Gunta Stölzl: Meisterin am Bauhaus Dessau (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 1997), 41. 34 Driller, Marcel Breuer, 42. 35 Otakar Mácˇel, “Marcel Breuer, ‘Erfinder der Stahlrohrmöbel’,” in Vegesack and Remmele, Marcel Breuer, 52–115, especially 69. He also could have used the example of Hartwig’s chess set. To maintain his rights, Breuer established some limitations to his contract with the Bauhaus that ran from April to October of 1927. 36 Marcel Breuer, “Die Möbelabteilung des Staatlichen Bauhauses in Weimar,” Fachblatt für Holzarbeiter 20 (1925): 17–19. 37 Marcel Breuer, “Form Funktion,” special issue (Sonderheft) “Bauhaus Weimar,” Junge Menschen 8 (November 1924): 191. 38 Marcel Breuer, “Das ökonomisch-künstlerische Prinzip des modernen Möbels,” Die Pyramide 14, no. 8 (1928/29): 260–2. See also Marcel Breuer, “Metallmöbel,” in Deutscher Werkbund, Innenräume, Räume und Inneneinrichtungsgegenstände aus der Werkbun-

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dausstellung “Die Wohnung,” Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart, ed. Werner Gräff (Stuttgart: Wedekind, 1928). 39 “The essential point of an assignment must always be explored and recognized. Then the external appearance of an ‘advertising object’ will be the logical medium for the purpose that the advertising object is to fulfill. Work according to this concept guarantees persuas­iveness and quality. I apply all means of representation from typography, photography, painting and drawing as appropriate in trademarks, business documents, advertisements, brochures, posters, packaging, advertising structures and other advertising objects. My technical knowledge and experience ensure an efficient method of working.” Thanks to M. Belcher for the English translation. 40 See the “Elementare Typographie” special issue (Sonderheft) of Typographische Mitteil­ ungen (October 1925) with illustrations by Bayer on pages 210–13. 41 Herbert Bayer, “Versuch einer neuen Schrift,” Offset-Buch- und Werbekunst 7 (1926): 398–400. 42 See Bauhaus 2, no. 1 (1928). For the Bambos houses, see pages 12–13. 43 Justus A. Binroth et al., Bauhausleuchten? Kandemlicht! Die Zusammenarbeit des Bauhauses mit der Leipziger Firma Kandem (Stuttgart: Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2002), 44. 44 On Brandt’s success, see for example Elisabeth Wynhoff, ed., Marianne Brandt: Fotografien am Bauhaus (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2003), and Elizabeth Otto, ed., Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt (Berlin: Jovis Verlag, 2005). 45 Naum Gabo, “Gestaltung?,” Bauhaus 2, no. 4 (1928): 2–6. The responses of Marianne Brandt, “Bauhausstil,” and Naum Gabo, “Antwort an Frau Brandt,” are found in Bauhaus 3, no. 1 (1929): 21. 46 Letter from Marianne Brandt to Hannes Meyer dated 25 April 1929, in Binroth et al., Bauhaus­ leuchten?, 169–70. An article by Gustav Hassenpflug, “möbel aus holz oder metall oder?” introduced the idea of metal furniture. It can be interpreted as another move to change the workshop’s direction from developing lamps to furniture. See Bauhaus 2, no. 4 (1928): 14. 47 Hans Brockhage and Reinhold Lindner, Marianne Brandt “Hab ich je an Kunst gedacht” (Chemnitz: Chemnitzer Verlag, 2001), 115. 48 There is no comprehensive academic research on the complex questions of copyright concerning the Bauhaus and its members. 49 The Bauhaus did not give her the negative mold press. See Peter Hahn, ed., Bauhaus Berlin (Weingarten: Kunstverlag Weingarten, 1985), 55. See also Friederike Mehlau-Wiebking, Arthur Rüegg, and Ruggero Tropeano, Schweizer Typenmöbel 1925–1935: Sigfried Giedion und die Wohnbedarf AG (Zürich: gta-Verlag, 1989), 225; and Binroth et al., Bauhausleuchten?, 192. 50 Another reason may be that design was changing towards a more streamlined, less constructive direction than those of Brandt herself. 51 Anja Baumhoff, The Gendered World of the Bauhaus: The Politics of Power at the Weimar Republic’s Premier Art Institute 1919–1932 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001). 52 See Wynhoff, Marianne Brandt, in which several of Brandt’s photos are published. 53 We find similar features in other works by Brandt. In the two collages she made of the members of the metal workshop (1928) she puts herself at the feet of Moholy-Nagy, in a position Elizabeth Otto has compared to a reclining Venus. See Elizabeth Otto, “Medium und Körper in Marianne Brandt’s Fotomontage me,” in Wynhoff, Marianne Brandt, 32–40, especially 39. 54 Letter from Eckhard Neumann to Marianne Brandt, 14 December 1967, Collection of Bernd Freese. 55 Jurt, Bourdieu, 41. 56 See Baumhoff, Gendered World. 57 Brandt’s father wrote her in a letter dated 23 November 1932: “Your letter informs me that

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you are planning to take down your tents in Gotha” (Du stehst nach Inhalt Deines Briefes davor, Deine Zelte in Gotha abzubrechen), Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. It seems that she gave up a job that she did not like, and hoped to find a new or better one. 58 Brockhage and Lindner, Marianne Brandt, 196. 59 Otto, Tempo, Tempo!, 150. This object is not mentioned in Bruno Pedretti, ed., Posthumous Works Designed While Living: Metallwerkstatt Bauhaus 20’s/90’s (Milan: Electa, 1995). In the correspondence quoted by Otto, a producer’s name is not mentioned. 60 Weise writes that the GDR did not allow one of her ashtrays to be reproduced by the West German company WMF. See Anne-Kathrin Weise, “Pariser Impressionen – Marianne Brandt und Frankreich,” in Das Bauhaus und Frankreich, ed. Isabelle Ewig, Thomas W. Gaethgens, and Matthias Noell (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002), 231–41, note 15. 61 Brockhage and Lindner, Marianne Brandt, 199. 62 See Foucault, “What Is an Author?”, 923–8. 63 First publication in Brockhage and Linder, Marianne Brandt, 142. Brockhage and Linder give the date 1960; Otto states 1962. 64 We can only suppose that gender plays an unspoken role here, since at that time questions of gender were ignored in East and West Germany. 65 Letter from Marianne Brandt to Hans M. Wingler, dated 7 June 1975, Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. “Ich kann Ihnen heute mitteilen, daß die zwei Kataloge Breuer u. Bayer kürzlich bei mir eingetroffen sind, wobei der von Breuer mein besonderes Interesse hat. Ein erstaunlich produktiver und großer Könner. Allerdings komme ich mir dann immer besonders “klein und häßlich” vor, auch in Hinblick auf frühere Leistungen. Jetzt ist ja leider Alles vorbei. u. es wird nur noch vegitiert [sic]. Andere sind noch ganz oben auf trotz hohen Alters, leider habe ich dies Glück nicht.” Thanks to M. Belcher for the English translation. 66 See Pierre Bourdieu, Die männliche Herrschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005). 67 Donatella Cacciola, “Etablierte Moderne. Die Möbel von Marcel Breuer in der Produktion von Gavina und Knoll International,” in Vegesack and Remmele, Marcel Breuer, 150–65. 68 Gerda Breuer, Die Erfindung des Modernen Klassikers. Avantgarde und ewige Aktualität (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2001). 69 Letter, Herbert Bayer to Ise Gropius, 2 October 1972, Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. Quoted in Gabriele Diana Grawe, Call for action. Mitglieder des Bauhauses in Nordamerika (Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, 2002), 38, 43.

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Chapter 11

The Identity of Design as Intellectual Property T’ai Smith

Diagrams, Labels, Inventions Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s 1927 design for a cantilevered chair is well known. Less known is the patent text that demarcates its principal ideas; or the page of patent diagrams (Figure 11.1) that show two variations on this article of furniture. For the first drawing, labeled “Fig. 1,” an elegant, continuous line follows from the chair’s backrest to the triple U-shapes that form the base. “Fig. 2” is almost the same but has the addition of curved armrests. The diagrams also include letters that, corresponding with the text of the attached US patent 1,791,453, link to detailed, technical descriptions of each part. (“On the drawing, a f a Fig. 1 denotes the U-shaped base or foot of the chair which consists of the sill portions a a and their transverse connection f.”)1 This sheet is dated twice, once with the date of patenting (“Feb. 3, 1931”), and once with the date of filing (“Aug. 4, 1928”). The identity of its inventor is marked through the graphical imprint of a name: “Ludwig Mies”; but the page also shows the stamped signature of a patent attorney, specified for his part in bringing the patent document into being. So between the drawings, signatures, and dates, we bear witness to a drawing as an administrative and legal entity—in fact a copy of another drawing made for a patent originally sought, achieved, and published in Germany.2 These diagrams support the textual outline of an idea for a chair—an object whose identity has been validated in the final count by a patent office. Another graphic, a label marking samples of textile products for sale (Figure 11.2), presents what we might call the signature of a

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11.1 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Chair. US Patent 1,791,453, filed 4 August 1928, and issued 3 February 1931

designer, “o.b.” (for the initials of former Bauhaus weaver Otti Berger), and the corporate manufacturer, “Schriever.” Within the trademark’s center, two horses mirror one another, and in the elliptical frame three words identify, at once, the medium’s material properties (horsehair), its process of manufacture (doubleweave), and its legal status (subject to a “D-R” [German] patent). Below that, text specifies the size of the fabric (“130 cm”), the sample’s number (“37”), and the color (in this case, “752 schwarz”). Thus, within this label, the medium’s identity, its properties, converge with the signifiers for the designer’s and the company’s intellectual property. These two artifacts are of interest insofar as they provide a window onto the field of Bauhaus design that begins to consolidate in the 1930s. There are ways that the patented “ideas” (the chair and the fabric) 227

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11.2 Otti Berger, Schriever Rosshaar fabric sample label, c. 1934

to which they point persist with the concepts promulgated by the school, but they also refer to objects whose identities have been framed by the terms of intellectual property. Developed by two Bauhaus personae (its last director and a former student), each item, as indicated by its patent text, seeks to provide functional improvements for a much-used item in the modern world: Mies offers a more “comfortable,” more “economical” chair; Berger offers tear- and water-resistant upholstery for seating in modern public spaces or trains and automobiles.3 And each item, in a sense, attempts to draw on the inherent traits of each object in the abstract— “chair” or “upholstery fabric”—in order to provide a better, “improved” version of that item’s essential identity. As evidenced in these diagrams, label, and corresponding patent texts, we increasingly find not just designed objects, or even prototypes for them, but patent documents on ways to “improve” them. Indeed, the model of Bauhaus design that crystallized during and just after Mies’s tenure as the school’s director from 1930 to 1933 was rather different from the one established in the 1920s.4 After a decade of treatises by Walter Gropius and other Bauhaus members on the specific formal concerns of each workshop and its medium, or on the value of merging technology and art in the modern world, design in the hands of late- and post-Bauhaus practitioners would ultimately become a function of protracted legal battles, patent texts, and letters mediated by attorneys and patent offices. Thus if the

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theoretical vocabulary concerning specific workshops and their respective materials (metal, fiber, clay) or crafts (metalwork furniture, weaving, pottery) in the 1920s context did remain in the 1930s to some degree, it was no longer simply a pedagogical matter. The modernist-functionalist ethos of the Bauhaus also persists, but those goals are now framed as patented, engineered ideas. Consequently, if we are speaking of the identity of the design— its properties or identity as property—we need also to speak of the identity of the designer, a legal individual or name. By the late 1920s and early 1930s, Bauhaus designers came to be identified as more than just the creators of prototypes for mass-produced products. As the agent who pursued legal protection for his or her intellectual property, the designer became a name within a patent registration—a text framed by legal jargon and scripted pragmatically by both a designer and his or her attorney. In this context, Gropius, Mies, Marcel Breuer, Walter Peterhans, and Otti Berger all became “inventors,” or rather patent-seekers. Through case studies of Mies and Berger, this essay will investigate, on the one hand, the contiguity between the Bauhaus language of functionality and the semantics of subsequent patents—that is, how the language that was initiated in the Bauhaus education came to occupy a different frame. Here I ask to what degree “intellectual property” (something owned by a given legal party) might relate to the notion of specific media “properties.” On the other hand, this text will consider how the identity of design as patented intellectual property, insofar as it manifests the anxieties of a political environment (first in Nazi Germany and then in the postwar United States), might raise issues about the national identity of its inventor. In other words, if Berger’s fabric and Mies’s chair are remarkable as utility “inventions,” equally noteworthy about them is the history onto which they unfold and what that history might say about the political concerns of that moment.

The Medium’s Properties: Patented Techniques Looking through the lens of legal parameters in his book on the German Werkbund, Frederic Schwartz asks after the relationship between design issues and the terms of copyright and trademarks. The law, Schwartz reveals, became incredibly important to design in 1907, the year the Werkbund opened and the year design copyright protection (Musterschutz) was first granted in Germany. Beginning with the recognition that early design theory was at pains to define itself according to the traditional 229

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parameters of a discrete object or material, Schwartz turns to contemporaneous debates surrounding copyright law. Looking, for instance, at Peter Behrens’s designs for teapots, labels, or the AEG trademark, Schwartz discusses the debates that spread through the Werkbund over the identity of design and the related concept of authorship. Whether or not the designer could be understood as an “individual” or simply the maker of anonymous industrial “types” was a problem that divided the Werkbund community into two factions. Although the “individualists” seemed retrograde toward pre-industrial craft, in fact, Schwartz argues, they were only more prescient about the importance of branding and the value of applying the artistic copyright to design. In this context, Schwartz comments, “medium could no longer serve as a reliable guide for defining the work of art.” Instead, “[f]or copyright, the decisive characteristic of the intellectual product [Geisteswerk] is the individuality of the creator,” or the author who has attained legal protection for the design of his or her wares.5 But “medium”—at least as it had meaning at the Bauhaus— was hardly an obsolete artifact of the academic arts; indeed a discourse concerning the properties of specific crafts, pervasive at the school in the 1920s, paved the way for a further entrenchment of design into intellectual property. While Schwartz points out that the early-twentieth-century Werkbund context had dispensed with such a traditional notion that distinguished painting, say, from sculpture, in fact the medium of design would, by the 1930s, expand to include a set of parameters beyond the formal object (the type) and materials proper. Design’s identity would increasingly become a set of innovative operations or changes, for instance, to the engineering of a chair or the mechanics of weaving, rather than the look of a discrete object. Thus, if a changed model of the design’s identity is at stake, so too was the language that defined the medium’s parameters. Breuer, it seems, started the movement of seeking and acquiring patents for a string of his furniture designs, beginning in 1926 with his furniture of metal tubing and in 1928 for a collapsible chair, both of which were structures of remarkable strength and “spring” due to the innovative use of nickel-plated tubular steel. Quickly several associates of the Bauhaus followed suit, seeking patents for their designs. Gropius patented his Theaterbau design in 1929, and between 1927 and 1952 Mies patented several designs concerning chairs and furniture, one concerning wallpaper (with Lilly Reich), and another concerning an optical printing device (with Walter Peterhans).6 Mies, who first registered and sought a patent for his cantilever design for a chair in 1927 in Germany,

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would go on to patent this same design in five other countries. In order to acquire protection amidst a field of contentious court battles, but also to assure his economic livelihood, Mies registered his “ideas” with various patent offices in Austria, Belgium, England, Switzerland, and the United States.7 By 1932, the year in which Berger applied for her first patent, and the year in which Mies moved the school to Berlin, the identity of Bauhaus design had thus established its identity according to new objectives. Design was less a question of formal “types” and style, unique and recognizable patterns. Following functionalist prerogatives, Bauhaus design had departed from its original concern with shape, color, or texture—forms that would otherwise provide a designed product with an individual character and provide the user with an overall impression of formal or aesthetic originality, as with a design that had Musterschutz. Instead, Bauhaus design of the 1930s had increasingly become intertwined with the terms of invention, a new method of engineering certain processes and results, as pertaining to patents.8

Mies’s Vocabulary Insisting later in life that he had had “nothing to do with the Bauhaus,” Mies notoriously dismissed his identity as the third Bauhaus director.9 And yet what is clear from the program for architectural education that he developed for the Armour Institute of Technology (later the Illinois Institute of Technology) is that his pedagogical approach borrowed heavily from the Bauhaus’s curricular protocol. So while he had said of the Bauhaus workshop structure upon entering the school in 1930: “I don’t want any old mess, I don’t want workshop and school, I want school,” his IIT program in many respects re-performed the relationship between theory and practice that the Bauhaus curriculum initially established.10 His outline for an architectural education provided a foundational experience in “visual training”—in a course codesigned and taught by Peterhans—as well as specific materials, “wood, stone, brick, steel, concrete.”11 The program also emphasized the “possibilities and limitations” of structure, the “architectural problems” of space or proportion, and the “expression value of materials,” thereby integrating and systematizing Mies’s modernist understanding of architecture.12 For all the literature on such an important modern architect, there is less written on Mies’s theoretical understanding of architecture as a medium than one might expect.13 This is likely because, as Werner Blaser notes regarding his teaching techniques at IIT, 231

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Theory and practice were side by side. For a score of years Mies worked at IIT, not so much as a lecturer but rather as a master who spelled out the problems at the drawing board … He wrote very little by way of theory since he was more concerned with stating the problem in precise terms than with theoretical speculations. For him, it was all a question of the practical problems, of working things out in detail … Mies once said to me: “If I have to draw a straight line, I draw it as straight as I can. If I hammer in a nail, I don’t hit my fingers.”14 Nevertheless, Mies’s ideas—however practically formulated within the context of his buildings and drawings—did make their way into writing. His friend and fellow architect, Ludwig Hilberseimer, who taught architecture at the Bauhaus and then followed the director to Chicago, not only transcribed his precepts into classroom lectures (on the topics of architecture and city planning), but also articulated those ideas in textual, theoretical form. In his book-homage to Mies, titled simply Mies van der Rohe, Hilberseimer wrote of the master architect’s “vocabulary” or “architectural language” as formulated in the domain not of words but of materials, space, and structure: “Mies van der Rohe’s greatest achievement,” according to Hilberseimer, is the creation of steel architecture and the consequent establishment of the vocabulary for a new architectural language. He developed steel architecture out of the very nature of steel … He has arrived at structural clarity, the requisite of steel architecture, and found a harmony between the material means and his spiritual aims.15 In Hilberseimer’s words we find some of Mies’s principles on space and materials, broken down into modernist edicts—concepts that suggested metaphysical ideals and sought to transcend history or politics. For a section on materials in Hilberseimer’s book, he writes of Mies’s architecture as the physical expression of theoretical principles: “Each material and each structure has its own characteristics and architectural possibilities, which, if truly understood and mastered, its inherent order perceived, becomes a means for the embodiment of an architectural conception.”16 So, for instance, “Mies considers brick as a disciplining medium of order,” and “an all-glass, steel framed structure,” like his Adam Building (Berlin, 1928) epitomizes the “lightness,”

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or “weightlessness” of these modern materials. With glass “there is no longer the contrast and play between light and shade, so characteristic of stone architecture, but something new—the play of reflection.” And a building of reinforced concrete using the cantilever principle produces a building whose “floors seem to be planes floating in air.” In true Bauhaus fashion (indeed we could be listening to the words of preliminary-course masters Johannes Itten or Josef Albers), each material used within the larger medium of architecture embodies its specific and true “nature.”17 Hilberseimer locates in Mies’s buildings themselves a physical formul­ ation (an “embodiment”) of the true essence of each material—brick, glass, reinforced concrete—and as such the metaphysical “language” of architecture as a medium.18 For the patent labeled 1,791,453, Mies’s modernist “vocabulary” persists, this time transcribed not from architecture into pedagogical precepts or sketches on a drawing board but into patent texts and diagrams. The precise modernist language helps to identify the various parts of a chair—one whose structure is pinned down by scripted letters “(a b c e d e c b a f)” and whose function is outlined in a series of paragraphs that differentiate its principles from other, similar patents in the field.19 But perhaps most interesting, when it comes to Mies’s patents, the language of functionality becomes increasingly modernist and Platonic, not less so. Thus in his first American patent, titled simply “Chair,” he seems to have identified the true nature of this item of furniture. Determining that all instantiations of chairs have, until his perfectly engineered seat and frame, failed to provide the sitter with a comfortable carriage, the first sentence of this patent reads: “The usual construction of chairs with four legs renders the seats comparatively rigid which entails an inconvenient carriage of the upper portion of the body of a person using these chairs.”20 According to the patent, the chair requires advanced engineering, an invention, to achieve a more elastic and thereby comfortable version of itself, its truer identity. Thus, in Mies’s “present invention … the foot, the seat supports and the back … formed of bent tubes, the lower halves of which, or, more precisely, the portions between the foot proper and the seat supporting ledges are bent about semicircularly.” With this design advantage, and “with the aid of a templet [sic], so that the manufacture is by far simpler than it formerly was,” the chair structure is at once “economical,” sleek and elastic, supports the back, and also prevents injury to the body or a garment, as “there are no contacting screw heads” or places to “clamp fingers and hands.” Another patent which he achieved in Germany in 1929 and then

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applied for in the United Kingdom with the title “Improvements in and relating to Chairs and the like,” outlines specific chair and settee designs— such as the one later titled by Knoll as the “Barcelona Chair”—but also provides possibilities for arranging and springing seats in such a way that “a large number of different possible … constructions” are possible.21 The patent specifies, in other words, not so much a single chair design, but multiple methods for improving seated furniture. Similarly, a patent he filed in Germany with the serial number 242,480 in 1935, and in the USA with number 2,283,755 in 1938 (Figure 11.3), presents less a new design for an “article of furniture” (as the American title might suggest), using a specific set of materials in a certain form, than a new method for engineering a “resilient support”: One object of my invention is to provide a resilient support for chairs or the like, which may be formed of a continuous member and permits the use of a material, such as wood, synthetic resin or sheet material. … Another object of my invention is to provide a support which has a gradually increasing resiliency from the ground engaging portion towards the seat engaging portion, whereby the portions of the support which are subjected to the highest stresses, have the necessary resistance against the bending stresses acting thereon.22 Mies’s “objects,” as described here, are less designed entities with discrete boundaries than a set of objectives or technical goals. What we witness is an expanded functionalist language, suited to a legalistic domain.

Berger’s Vocabulary Questions concerning the various arts’ properties—form, material, or color—were taken up in the Bauhaus curriculum first in the preliminary course and then in the form and color theory courses. As the notion of “properties” entered the Bauhaus weaving workshop, the weavers would argue that what was specific about their medium involved its “objective” qualities—the texture of the woven surface or the grid pattern specific to the structure of the weave. Writing about the early experiments of the workshop, weaving master Gunta Stölzl noted their “quest for law and order.” The weavers set out to discover a set of “basic elements” involving, primarily, the idea that weaving is at once a surface and a structure, that a “woven fabric constitutes an esthetic entity, a composition of form, color, and material as a whole.”23 234

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11.3 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Articles of Furniture. US Patent 2,283,755, filed 26 November 1938, and issued 19 May 1942

But after 1926 an additional reflection on a fabric’s function was increasingly important to the weavers’ theories of their medium. The weavers asked after the ability of a curtain or upholstery fabric to meet the functional, and “hygienic” demands of the modern environment—its trains and railway stations, its airplanes and automobiles. Having rejected the definition of weaving as a “picture made of wool,” the weavers theorized that their medium’s specific properties concerned various processes of production, or a potential set of functions.24 The weaving medium was no longer limited to its formal properties. 235

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Berger came to the Bauhaus as a student in 1927 and was quickly inspired by the Bauhaus’s practical vocabulary and the weaving workshop’s interest in developing innovative fabric structures rather than patterns or printed forms.25 After some time spent teaching weaving technique in the interior design workshop headed by Lilly Reich, she left the Bauhaus in 1932 to establish her own textile design studio, “otti berger atelier für textilien.” She worked to gain contracts with a number of textile manufacturers and the Swiss interior design firm Wohnbedarf AG. But in order to fully “own” her design work, the creation of her studio was not enough. Between 1932 and 1937, she applied to patent three of her weaving inventions and registered three others as utility models (Gebrauchsmuster).26 As though borrowing directly from the functionalist language that circulated at the Bauhaus, Berger’s 1934 patent text titled “MöbelstoffDoppelgewebe” (double-woven furniture fabric) discusses how the material used as the warp and called “synthetic horsehair” yields a remarkably strong upholstered surface that is both water- and tear-resistant. Berger’s “design” here does not bear a distinct formal pattern, and indeed the samples appear rather unremarkable. One could not easily differentiate these from other, similar-looking fabrics using a twill weave, let alone recognize by sight the unique properties that establish their identity as intellectual property. The expanded notion of the medium, evident in these samples, would have to be fortified by the language of the patent text. Through the Patentschrift signed by textile designer Otti Berger, the “law and order” of her medium’s theoretical vocabulary took on a legalistic shape. The history of Berger’s initial attempts to acquire a patent sheds further light on the issue. Berger ran into trouble during the application process, perhaps in part because the specific properties that constituted it as a technical innovation were not apparent to the untrained eye, the nonweaver. Berger’s patent application, registered on 16 June 1932 and originally titled “Möbelstoff,” was quickly rejected in the initial round of correspondence with the German patent office.27 They responded by saying that her invention was illegitimate on the grounds that similar patents had already been filed—one for a weave using rayon (Kunstseide), which, though different from Berger’s synthetic horsehair, also took advantage of recent advances in synthetic materials. The patent office gave her three months to alter its wording.28 It was less a matter of the actual object in question than the semantic matter of its framing. And so she reworded her application and gave it a revised title: “Möbelstoff-Doppelgewebe,” stressing now the invention of a particular kind of double-weave, in which the warp and weft threads of the upper part of the cloth were composed of synthetic horsehair while the lower of another kind of thread, such as

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cotton. Berger insisted that the advantage of her invention, and what differentiated it from others of its kind, was its “strength and durability,” as well as the fact that the material in question, unlike natural and even other synthetic fibers, was a “continuous filament.” Moreover, she added that her process of double-weaving, or the particular method of the fabric’s construction—in addition to the material itself—was what gave the fabric its strength as well as its “pliability” and relative “suppleness.”29 On 22 February 1934, Berger was finally awarded a patent with the number 594,075. In the 1930s Berger’s work entered a field of patented identities in which legal texts functioned to define, or rather redefine, her object. In various patent applications her medium is formulated in a vocabulary that both takes on the Bauhaus’s positivist and functionalist language of specific media and also extends its parameters. Thus, property (as in ownership) and the medium’s properties collapse within the terms of Berger’s patent descriptions. And her patents function to provide a formal theory of her (invented) medium’s expanded domain.30

Economic Identities/National Identities A number of letters in the archive of the Busch-Reisinger Museum not only tell the tale of how approximately one thousand of Berger’s textile samples came to Harvard University’s collection but also express a set of anxieties associated with proprietorship in general. In 1951, in the wake of World War II, Ise Gropius, acting on behalf of her husband’s “wishes,” contacted Charles Kuhn, then curator of the museum, writing that my husband is particularly keen to see [Berger’s] theoretical and teaching methods go to the Museum because Miss Berger showed them [to] him once in England and he found them of particular interest. In fact, hardly anybody in the Bauhaus understood so completely and carried out so successfully the working methods that my husband tried to develop during the nine years when he ran the Bauhaus.31 In her attempt to facilitate a large-scale acquisition of Berger’s textile samples, Ise Gropius insisted on the weaver’s recognition as a highly successful designer whose work epitomized the school’s objectives. Underlying the bequest, however, was also an attempt to protect Ber­ger’s work from intellectual property infringement.32 In an earlier exchange between Ise Gropius and Hanna Lindemann (the Bauhaus’s former secret­ ary), the two expressed concern that Berger’s textile inventions, at that 237

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time in storage in London, could be stolen by certain manufacturers while in transit to the USA. In one letter, for example, Lindemann offered to contact a friend for advice on transporting the samples through customs, but expressed insecurity lest he “be interested in the designs and perhaps enrich himself by picking up some of Otti’s ideas or patterns for his manufacture.” Indeed, Lindemann would later write that she was “afraid it may fall into wrong hands and somebody else, for example, Anni Albers, [might] have a profit of Otti’s work!”33 The fact that these anxieties permeated the postwar context is no surprise. While the Harvard museum apparently functioned as a safe haven from market pillaging in the 1940s and 1950s, it was no doubt the ghosts of 1930s Germany that overshadowed this (and other similar) acquisition(s). Berger applied for a German patent in 1932, and, though she achieved it in 1934, the protracted process, involving perhaps a hundred or so letters between her and her patent attorney or between her attorney and the patent office, was tangled in the vexed conditions of the German political and economic environment under Nazi rule. These issues, raised in the wake of the closing of the Bauhaus in 1933, would extend into the postwar years in America—as Mies, for instance, continued to patent and repatent his innovations for chair designs. Within the political climate of a late- and post-Bauhaus context, a fervor in registering patents was marked by anxieties not only over the identity of the design (the property) but also over the identity of the designer (the proprietor). In the mid-1930s, the flood of patent applications by former Bauhaus students and teachers emerged in part out of the circumstances that surrounded the school’s closing in 1932 in Dessau and in 1933 in Berlin. After the communist-inspired directorship of Hannes Meyer, and in spite of competing rightist and leftist student factions, Mies worked hard to neutralize the school and its design ethos. But as German politics moved to the right, the designer’s identities were increasingly defined by a discourse of nationhood and identification papers.34 The new “identity” of design in the 1930s was thus marked by an international arena of intellectual property law on the one hand and a newly defined (or consolidated) sense of the maker’s national identity on the other. The double bind of the 1930s would carry forth into the postwar years—when Mies sought more patents after his move to America, and Berger’s textiles were acquired by Harvard. Mies’s first attempts to acquire patents happen to coincide with three events: first, his collaboration with Lilly Reich on the Barcelona Pavilion and its furniture; second, the legal battle with Mart Stam over the design of the cantilevered chair; and third, the economic downturn of 1930.

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It was the latter that forced Mies, whose architectural practice was lacking sufficient commissions, to accept the position of the Bauhaus directorship; but it also helped instigate a new financial means. Philip Johnson noted, for instance, how “until he left Germany, Mies derived a large part of his income from a patent on the cantilever principle.”35 Of course the very act of patenting his work was, on the one hand, an attempt to secure his economic situation, and on the other, politically pragmatic. According to Elaine Hochman’s account of Mies, the architect was something of a two-sided coin, a living contradiction whose “architectural style [was] born of the simple frugalities of the factory,” and yet also “was synonymous with ‘luxe’—marbles, onyx, stainless steel, and impeccable (and costly) craftsmanship.”36 Coming from humble craftsman roots (from a line of stonemasons), Mies had bourgeois aspirations that tended to shape his economic pragmatism, his attempted political neutrality in the face of Nazi rule, and his goal for pure, modernist freedom. While Mies was appointed by Gropius in order to depoliticize the Bauhaus after Meyer’s tenure had thrown it into a communist tailspin, Mies nevertheless found himself dragged into the politics of Nazi Germany. As Hochman argues, his decision to fight for the Bauhaus was in his eyes a crusade for the universal acceptance of modernism by the Nazi political establishment, but his livelihood also depended on it.37 Although Hochman does not discuss his patents, it is perhaps telling that he sought economic refuge in them—as a means, perhaps, of maintaining some form of political neutrality within the conflicted political arena of this moment. The very question of his politics would arise again in the legal correspondence surrounding his patents in the aftermath of World War II. Between 1946 and 1948, Mies and his co-patent applicant, Anton Lorenz, hired their patent attorney, Henry Feist, to work on “releasing” Belgian patent 353,213 for the cantilever chair design. Here, the legal and cultural implications of Mies’s identity—whether or not he was a Nazi sympathizer—was integral to the identity of his patent and whether or not it could be granted as his intellectual property. According to a letter from Feist to Lorenz, the Belgian Office of Inventions required proof in the form of documents that Mies was and had always been “an enemy of the Nazi Government”—proof, for instance, that his money, titles, or any other possessions had been confiscated by the Nazis.38 The lawyer responded to the Belgians’ request with a letter noting that not only had Mies become an American citizen, but also that he had lost his German citizenship three months prior to acquiring his new national identity in 1944. Moreover, his employment as the Bauhaus director was “terminated for the reason of ‘political irreliability,’” and this status also prevented him from working “in

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Germany in his profession as an artist and architect.” Most strikingly, the letter notes that the “U.S. Alien Property Custodian did not confiscate the U.S. patents granted to Mies van der Rohe,” but that a “confiscation would have taken place, if Mies van der Rohe would have acted against the interest of the U.S. or allied countries, such as Belgium.”39 In other words, when it was economically advantageous for Mies to be not neutral but partisan, he asserted a very different version of his modernist identity. The economic realities of intellectual property, he eventually realized, were very much linked with his political and national self.40 With Berger, we find a similar transnational identity, but with very different, far more calamitous consequences. Although Berger attempted to patent two more textiles in Germany, she failed to receive these during the Nazi era.41 It seems that between 1933 and June 1936, when the latter patent was cancelled, the German office had grown increasingly strict about the parameters for patent applications concerning textiles. And yet this is not the entire story. For precisely at the moment that Berger was experiencing increased difficulty over her applications, she was also receiving notices from another government office about her status as a foreign national and a Jew. In 1934, she was asked to provide proof that a male in her family (a father or brother, of which she had none) had served in the German military.42 In 1936, her visa status as a designer (Musterbildnerin) was revoked and she was ultimately forced to leave Berlin for London a year later.43 Also in the early 1930s, Berger published several articles and many images of her designs in the two industry magazines, the Zurichbased International Textiles and Berlin’s Der Konfektionär. One article, translated literally as “Increase of sales through the refining of taste,” written in 1932, merges an analysis of the practical and economic concerns of textiles with the recognition of financial restraints.44 The economic pragmatism of the patent texts enter her theories to such a degree that they, too, begin to sound like a lawyer spelling out the terms of a plaintiff’s case. Berger’s voice resonates with the appeal of a legal advocate for her work and textile design in general. The case she presents in these magazines is less aimed at designating the boundaries of her intellectual property than it is a case for her identity as a brand name.45 And this was partly something of a response to the forces at work in the German political field. Like Mies, Berger struggled to gain patents in the difficult political environment of 1930s Europe, but for Berger we might say that her applications were part of a need to secure an identity in a country (governed by Nazis) that would increasingly work to void it. Berger and Mies faced a complex of questions in this period,

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for as their experience shows, design’s “identity” as intellectual property would, in the post-Bauhaus context, become twofold, even threefold. In patent texts, journal articles, and letters, legal jargon would intermingle with the otherwise “pure” investigation of the textile medium’s domain. But also found here are the entwined questions of the medium and subjectivity, intellectual property and identity. For Berger, the patent text may have seemed in the 1930s the best way to circumscribe both the identity of a given design’s properties and her own identity, that of an owner. As she attempted to escape the reach of the Nazis in her home country of Yugoslavia, by 1941 her national identity would increasingly lose its palpable shape—becoming a product of various failed visa applications to both England and the United States.46

Coda: Trademarked Authors In the 1960s, some time after his patent expired, the identity of one of Mies’s chairs as a work of intellectual property would change. Originally conceived as a piece of furniture that would “diminish” the amount of “necessary muscular effort” required to sit down “and rise again,” the item now manufactured by Knoll took on a new identity.47 With the “idea” for the chair—in which “the framework and seat surface [were] sprung independently”—no longer protected from infringement, the once-patented item morphed into yet another legal form. It was now a trademark based on a name (“Ludwig Mies van der Rohe” or the phrase “Barcelona Chair”) and the item’s recognizable form. The formal shape of this chair currently stands as an icon of modern design, definitively connected to the Mies brand name. If the transformation of modernist functionalist ideals into legal identities and brands should seem at all counterintuitive, I turn to Otakar Mácˇel’s description of a paradox concerning Breuer. For here it is found that shifting identities were perhaps part and parcel of the Bauhaus approach. With the interior of his Piscator apartment, notes Mácˇel, Breuer discovered a formal language that would be virtually prototypical for his work in coming years. His strivings for a matterof-fact aesthetic sobriety, thanks to which “the new space … would represent no self portrait of the architect” (as he had formulated it in Das Neue Frankfurt), placed him in a paradoxical situation: it was, in fact, precisely through their formal reductiveness and economy that his interiors betrayed their author’s identity.48 In other words, it was the modernist aspiration toward universality and 241

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even anonymity (as theorized by Sigfried Giedion, for example, and seen in the work of Breuer but also Mies) that would produce designs, like that of the Barcelona Chair, which would become recognizable, trademarked names and forms.49

Notes   1 Ludwig Mies, Chair, US Patent 1,791,453, filed 4 August 1928, and issued 3 February 1931.   2 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Stuhl, German Patent 467,242, received 23 August 1927.   3 Mies, US Patent 1,791,453; and Otti Berger, Möbelstoff-Doppelgewebe, [patent] filed 16 June 1932, issued 22 February 1934.   4 For a summary of the 1920s Bauhaus goals and curriculum, see Walter Gropius, “The Theory and Organization of the Bauhaus,” in Bauhaus 1919–1928, ed. Herbert Bayer, Walter Gropius, and Ise Gropius (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1938), 20–9. This text was originally published as Idee und Aufbau des Staatlichen Bauhauses Weimar (Munich: Bauhausverlag, 1923).   5 Frederic J. Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture before the First World War (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996), 156. Here Schwartz is citing Albert Osterrieth, a contemporary of the prewar Werkbund and an “expert on intellectual property law” (153).   6 To find many of these patents, see Esp@cenet website, search by inventors’ names in “worldwide patents,” http://gb.espacenet.com/search97cgi/s97_cgi.exe?Action=FormGen &Template=gb/en/advanced.hts (accessed 1 January 2009).   7 As discussed by Otakar Mácˇel, Mies and Breuer confronted a number of legal disputes with Dutch designer Mart Stam over the innovation of the cantilever chair design. See Mácˇel, “Avant-Garde Design and the Law: Litigation over the Cantilever Chair,” Journal of Design History 3, no. 2/3 (1990): 125–43.   8 To further clarify in general terms, one can have a design registration or design patent for the unique, formal look of an object, such as the shape or ornamental details of an iMac, whereas one would patent its internal hardware and software, subject to that form of protection being available in the particular jurisdiction; similarly, Marianne Brandt’s ashtray from 1926 could have received Musterschutz as a registered design, whereas Mies would seek a utility patent for various mechanical or engineered improvements to chairs. For a useful discussion of shifting patent laws and definitions specific to Germany from the Wilhelmine era through National Socialism, see Kees Gispen, Poems of Steel: National Socialism and the Politics of Inventing from Weimar to Bonn (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002). See also note 26 below.   9 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, cited in Martin Kieran, “From the Bauhaus to Housebuilding – Architecture and the Teaching of Architecture at the Bauhaus,” in Bauhaus, ed. Jeannine Fied­ler and Peter Feierabend (���������������������������������������������������������� Cologne: Könemann Verlagsgesellschaft, 2000)�������������� , 567. According to Kieran, Mies said this in 1968 “when asked about contributing to a Bauhaus exhibition.” According to Elaine Hochman, Mies “persistently downplayed his association with the Bauhaus,” and the request for a Bauhaus exhibition came in 1964, to which he replied: “I owe the Bauhaus nothing.” Elaine S. Hochman, Architects of Fortune: Mies van der Rohe and the Third Reich (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), 82. 10 Kieran, “From the Bauhaus to Housebuilding,” 567. 11 Werner Blaser, After Mies: Mies van der Rohe – Teaching and Principles (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1977), 11, 26. 12 Ibid., 10.

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13 See Fritz Neumeyer’s The Artless Word: Mies van der Rohe on the Building Art, trans. Mark Jarzombek (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994) for some discussion of this issue. 14 Blaser, After Mies, 10. 15 Ludwig Hilberseimer, Mies van der Rohe (Chicago: Paul Theobald and Company, 1956), 49. 16 Hilberseimer, Mies van der Rohe, 22; emphasis mine. Subsequent quotations in this paragraph without notes are from Hilberseimer, Mies van der Rohe, 22–3, 28. 17 See Marcel Franciscono, “Johannes Itten, The Bauhaus Preliminary Course, and the Bases of Design,” in Walter Gropius and the Creation of the Bauhaus in Weimar: The Ideals and Artistic Theories of the Founding Years (Urbana, IL, and London: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 173–237. 18 Hilberseimer’s argument ignores the fact that Mies famously applied elements such as steel I-beams not for strength but for effect and, one could argue, quite “falsely.” 19 Mies, US Patent 1,791,453. 20 Ibid. 21 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Improvements in and relating to Chairs and the like, UK patent 374,413, filed 5 December 1930, complete not accepted. 22 Ludwig Mies, Articles of Furniture, US Patent 2,283,755, filed 26 November 1938, and issued 19 May 1942. 23 Gunta Stölzl, “Weaving at the Bauhaus” (1926), repr. in Hans Maria Wingler, The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, ed. Joseph Stein, trans. Wolfgang Jabs and Basil Gilbert (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 116. 24 For a discussion of these developments, see Stölzl, “Weaving at the Bauhaus”; Gunta Stölzl, “Utility Textiles of the Bauhaus Weaving Workshop” (1931), repr. in Wingler, Bauhaus, 174; and Helene Nonné-Schmidt, “Woman’s Place at the Bauhaus” (1926), ibid., 116–17. 25 The concern with developing new structures and using modern materials in innovative ways differentiates Bauhaus weavings from, for example, the Soviet-Productionist textiles of Lubova Popova, which were mainly patterns printed on basic fabrics. 26 A Gebrauchsmuster—translated alternatively as “utility model,” “petty patent,” and “innovation patent”—does not currently exist in the USA. In Germany, it is differentiated from a patent in that it is granted for a shorter period. Berger’s “Möbelstoffdoppelgewebe”—later marketed by the Schriever company as “Rosshaar Doppel Gewebe”—received Gebrauchsmuster status and then later patent status in Germany. When she applied for patent status after two years of having a Gebrauchsmuster, that object was held under increased scrutiny by the German patent office. Another of her designs, “Gewebe (Lamé-plume)” was accepted only as a Gebrauchsmuster in Germany, but was eventually patented in the United Kingdom as “Improvements in or relating to Textile Fabrics made of Ramie Fibers” in 1938. The third, “Gewebe für Möbel und Wandbekleidung,” was also never given full patent status, but accepted as a Gebrauchsmuster. The letters and documents regarding this material are in folders 21–23 of the Otti Berger files, Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin (hereafter cited as Berger, B-A files). 27 I discuss this case further in my dissertation, “Weaving Work at the Bauhaus: The Gender and Engendering of a Medium” (Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, NY, 2006). 28 Reichspatentamt to Hans Heimann, 23 July 1932, folder 22, Berger, B-A files. 29 Otti Berger, Möbelstoff-Doppelgewebe. 30 Rosalind Krauss’s discussion of “the medium” as “invented” with respect to the work of Marcel Broodthaers informs my discussion here. See her “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999). 31 Ise Gropius to Charles Kuhn, 3 October 1951, Otti Berger manuscripts, Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (hereafter Berger, B-R MSS). 32 Berger’s textiles were in the hands of Hanna Lindemann, but were owned by the architect

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Ludwig Hilberseimer, who, according to Lindemann, “was the boy-friend of Otti with the intention of marrying her. Otti had transferred to him her rights of patents before she left England or even at an earlier date.” Hanna Lindemann to Ise Gropius, 7 October 1951, Berger, B-R MSS. 33 Hanna Lindemann to Ise Gropius, 7 October 1951, Berger, B-R MSS. 34 For a detailed account of the politics that surrounded the Bauhaus in its final years under Mies’s directorship and also under Nazi persecution, see Hochman, Architects of Fortune. 35 Philip Johnson, Mies van der Rohe (New York; Museum of Modern Art, 1978), 49. 36 Hochman, Architects of Fortune, 13. 37 Ibid., 94, 100. 38 Henry K. Feist to Anton Lorenz, 26 February 1948, container 46, Papers of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (hereafter cited as Mies Papers). 39 Henry K. Feist to Office des Inventions, 21 July 1947, container 46, Mies Papers. 40 The scope of this situation even extended to his name. In an affidavit for his application for a new US patent in 1948, item 3 states “that on December 14, 1944 I became a citizen of the United States and that the order of the District Court … for the Northern District of Illinois … provided that my name was changed … as part of my naturalization from Ludwig Mies to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, said name Ludwig Mies van der Rohe now being my legal name,” container 46, Mies Papers. 41 See note 26. 42 Präsident der Reichskammer der bildenden Künste to Otti Berger, 21 September 1934, folder 19, Berger, B-A. 43 Präsident der Reichskammer der bildenden Künste to Otti Berger, 23 May 1936, folder 19, Berger, B-A file. 44 Otti Berger, “Umsatzsteigerung durch Geschmacksveredelung,” Der Konfektionär 95 (30 November 1932): 5. 45 I consider Berger’s self-branding as an “inventor” in further detail in “Anonymous Textiles, Patented Domains: The Invention (and Death) of an Author,” Art Journal 67, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 54–73. 46 See Walter Gropius papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, container 446. Included is correspondence Gropius had with the British Consulate in Berlin (1937) and with the US Consulate in Belgrade (1941) concerning Berger’s visa applications. 47 Mies, UK patent 374,413. 48 Otakar Mácˇel, “Marcel Breuer – ‘Inventor of Bent Tubular Steel Furniture,’ in Marcel Breuer: Design and Architecture, ed. Alexander von Vegesack and Matthias Remmele (Weil am Rhein, Germany: Vitra Design Museum, 2003), 75. 49 Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975).

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Bauhaus Endgame Ambiguity, Anxiety, and Discomfort Alina Payne

There is no doubt that the Bauhaus occupies a liminal space on the threshold between two worlds. As a subject of scholarly research as well as a slice of lived experience, for many it straddles the world of objective and ostensibly rational thought and that other, subjective and driven by feeling. This dual existence hints at its intellectual appeal, but also at the emotional ambivalence or baggage that surrounds it. The essays in this volume engage both, ranging as they do from the conception of the Bauhaus to its reception and survival. Collectively they uncover the tensions beneath the apparently unified exterior, the anxiety beneath the assurance of leadership. Running a school (Figure 12.1) and with it a revolutionary curriculum involves a great deal of confidence—confidence in method, in choices, in

12.1 Hannes Meyer, Title page of the prospectus “Young People, Come to the Bauhaus,” 1928, photograph by Andreas Feininger 247

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people. And indeed, beyond a hint to military recruitment, the reference to Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam on the Sistine Ceiling on Bauhaus brochures is certainly not coincidental. But the inevitable reverse of this coin is doubt, conflict and fear. That the relationships within the Bauhaus were fractious is well documented, of course. But what can be sensed in these essays is an even more subtle problematic that did not get aired, that was not verbalized and argued over, that remained embedded and silent and for that reason may have been more subversive. As in the case of all portrait photo­graphs—to use a metaphor compatible with the Bauhaus aesthetic—the posed, frontal view and airbrushed positive of Gropius and his school looks distinctly different from the spontaneous, sideways angleshot taken in a raking light that reveals unsuspected and unwanted wrinkles and shadows, scars, warts and all. But both belong to the subject and reveal its identity. Like all interesting contributions the essays in this volume then raise questions more than provide answers. This is as it should be. The Bauhaus project embraced modernity with a vengeance, and in so doing also embraced its conflicts and ambiguities, its innovations and its failures. And modernity—whether as a successful or a failed and/or conflicted project—is much on the agenda today.1 Looking askew, therefore, is the overarching if unexpressed theme that unites these essays. Under this umbrella they engage a series of issues that cluster around three major problems: the problem of authorship, that is, of the artist; the problem of the artistic media inside the project of modernity, that is, of the artwork; and finally the problem of reception as the Bauhaus “brand name” bounced off the hard walls of shifting doctrines and political environments in the twentieth century.

Authorship: From Identity to Proprietorship It should come as no surprise that authorship was a fundamental issue for a collective of artists working for/with an eye to industry. Of course this was not a new problem, as authorship had been claimed in many ways in the visual arts and the crafts since time immemorial. Painters signed their paintings and sculptors their works; engravers and draughtsmen signed their prints; craftsmen embedded their initials or their portraits into collective works such as fresco cycles and cathedrals. Indeed, the awareness of competition was always such that Sebastiano Serlio, for example, took out a copyright on his designs of the columnar orders in 1528 in Venice in advance of the publication of his book in 1537.2 Artisans also signed their pieces. Silver-makers 248

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devised their signs as did porcelain-makers and carpet-weavers. Chippendale, Hepple­white, Sheraton published books of patterns—as did Robert Adam of his objects and patterns shortly thereafter. To be sure, then as now pride, self-promotion, and market protection were at stake, but not the defin­ition of the work itself, I would argue. What T’ai Smith’s and Magdalena Droste’s essays reveal is that in the Bauhaus environment defining the relationship between technique and process and between process and form, indeed, separating them the better to define them, was ultimately driven not by theoreticians or critics, or even by the artists themselves, but by the legal profession.3 It is the legal profession (in the shape of state bureaucracies that designated intellectual property) that forced a systematic deconstruction of the concept of artistic originality and exerted pressure on this term and mutatis mutandis on the Bauhaus identity itself. As Gropius conceived the school and its output, individual authorship was denied and was meant to give way to the collective “brand name.” Yet, when Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe sought to claim authorship for their industrially produced objects, and when Marianne Brandt and Otti Berger failed to do so, they revealed an anxiety with respect to their identity as artists and with respect to proprietorship in the face of machine production. Although they used the entire gamut of possible vehicles—photographs, publications, advertising, self-portraiture— to make their claims, to be visible as artists, it was ultimately the patent vocabulary that mattered. In a world in which the definitions of authorship of objects were still caught between the inherited definitions of the artistas-genius and that of the craftsman, finding the right descriptors posed a real problem. Yes, Berger’s national identity (as a Jew and as a Yugoslav­ ian) and her gender complicated the process, but even more difficult, it seems, was the imperative to describe what exactly she wanted to patent: a material (the water- and tear-resistant double weave), a process, an idea, a form? Fabrication or appearance? It all needed to be taken apart, and the uncertainty revolved around identifying exactly wherein lay the original feature(s) that could be appropriated and industrially cloned. Of course, distinguishing between form and its physical manifestation, between idea and materiality, has been a recurring issue in Western philosophy and aesthetics since Plato across Kant to Heidegger. Yet here, oddly enough, the Bauhaus mass-production project radicalizes it and brings it to a head in the Patent Bureau office. Beyond the patents office, authorship-anxiety played itself out in the Bauhaus in other ways as well. The machine-shop floor was a male domain, and the art that engaged that industrial reality naturally carried with it the kind of machismo that Moholy-Nagy’s portrait in a factory-worker

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overall radiates. Yet, as Elizabeth Otto suggests, this masculinity—to which memories of a past war and flashes of one to come also contributed—was also a site of significant ambiguity and tension. What Breuer signals with his self-portrait in drag that he gifted to Gropius is a troubled masculinity at the core of the Bauhaus—real gender and artistic gender seem to be at odds with each other, as they were for Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy. Artistic genius as male genius is taken for granted in these pranks, but self-representation is nevertheless fraught. The overlay of intellectual factory worker on the artist’s identity shores up the masculinity and austerity that the objects themselves underlined, but beneath it all there is a double seeking to get out—feminine, playful, frivolous, breaking with the weighty seriousness of the didactic mission, a kind of suppressed surrealist yin to the positivistic Bauhaus yang. Even more problematic is the troubled identity/authorship of maker-versus-machine that Robin Schuldenfrei uncovers. As she points out, there was a serious tension between Bauhaus rhetoric and industrial fact—many of the objects were luxury items and became part of uppermiddle-class chic, while real mass production and mass access, like mass appeal, remained unrealized goals. The key issue here is appearance—the appearance of “anonymity,” of mass production, the “look” of machine tooling that the objects proclaimed, although frequently made by hand and in expensive materials. Neither mass taste nor mass production was there as yet to receive the Bauhaus aesthetic. It is true that the competing Deutsche Werkstätte at Hellerau was a success story under its founder Karl Schmidt, Herrmann Muthesius’s long-time friend and inspiration, but its product line, albeit participating in the pared-down modernist aesthetic, made more compromises with the average middle-class lifestyle of sittingroom and dining-room sets or ensembles (Garnitur) and avoided overly radical looks (and this may also be why it morphed into a genuine furniture industrial enterprise that survived in one form or another until 1989).4 Authorship is at issue here too, but in a different way—the issue is not the signature or the patent, which, ironically, would have upset the massproduction aura, as Gropius knew all too well, but of who is perceived to be the author. Craftsman-made but “attributed” to industry/machine, these objects played a game of hide-and-seek with the maker. The authorship problem, that is, the problem of the artist visà-vis the public—whether as gendered individual, as maker/fabricator, or as owner of (mechanical) reproduction rights—uncovers the uncertain domain that the artist had entered once s/he stepped into that so-coveted world of industry. Two worlds had collided and the Bauhaus artists were caught between them still. In 1929 Loos’s obituary article for his trusted

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furniture-maker of thirty years, Josef Veillich, opened with the words: “Old Veillich is dead. He was buried yesterday” (Der alte Veillich ist gestorben. Gestern wurde er begraben).5 If we think of these words in the context of the anxiety building up around artistic identity and proprietorship, we understand that what was “buried” was more than Veillich, as Loos knew all too well, but that whole world in which who designs, who carves, who turns the wood and chooses it, who makes the prototype and who manufactures it, was still ambiguous, hybrid and messy. Were Loos’s chairs (Figure 12.2) by Loos, by Veillich, or by Thonet? By all three? By the later 1920s the lines were beginning to be drawn more precisely. Typisierung (standardization) and Mechanisierung (mechanization) raised the problem of artistic independence as we know from the Van de Velde/Muthesius confrontation of 1914, but it also raised the Bauhütte problem, that emblem of the Bauhaus and of community-based artistic work.6 Was the Bauhütte—the medieval workshop so powerfully implied by the cathedral of its 1919 proclamation— a viable model in the world of technology and mass production? Or an idealistic one, contaminated with history despite the turn away from the past? Was Scheffler’s continuous Geist der Gothik (spirit of Gothic) that stretched from the Middle Ages to the present possible? Or was the cathedral built on a fault and therefore destined to crack as Lionel Feininger, in Karen ­Koehler’s telling, may have intuited? Might one read anxiety lurking behind that Gothic crystal that announced the Bauhütte of tomorrow?

12.2 Adolf Loos, Chair for Cafe Capua, 1913 251

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The Relationship between the Arts The relationship between the arts had been a problem of old, much discussed and debated, at the very least since the days of the paragone— the “comparison” but also feud between painting and sculpture in mid-­sixteenth-century Italy. Academies had brought them together over time—often also accompanied by architecture—but the cohabitation had never really been without a measure of tension.7 And the Bauhaus did not depart from this model. Despite later perceptions of the Bauhaus as a beacon for architecture—a view supported by the fact that both Gropius and Mies headed schools of architecture in the United States, as well as by Sigfried Giedion’s and Nikolaus Pevsner’s hagiographies—Kunstge­werbe (decorative arts) were its original mandate and focus. To be sure, the vision of social intervention through art meant that all arts were brought together under the aegis of the Bauhaus, but nevertheless Kunstgewerbe remained for a long time the real heart of the project for the simple reason that it alone was suited for industrial mass production. Architecture might look industrial or employ industrial materials, and painting and sculpture might refer to industry, but they were not its products and never could be. However, once artistic interest shifts towards the other media—to metal and pottery, textiles and woodworking, paper and costumes, printing and photography—and they become the paradigms of the arts’ alliance with industrial production and consumption, the perfect distillation of modernity, the traditional media go into crisis. What position does painting occupy in this context? What about sculpture? Reformulated in terms of first principles and intended as foundation courses for the workshops at the Bauhaus, they entered a liminal existence. To be sure, the “traditional” media had been challenged by Cubists, Dadaists, Constructivists, and so on, but here the attack was from medium to medium and the environment competitive. Indeed, Greenberg’s resistance to the Bauhaus project as retold by Jeffrey Saletnik may have been biased, but may also have been profoundly insightful. Deconstructing painting and sculpture, rethinking relations and seeking transformations meant a denial of the material—of painting by the painters, of sculpture by the sculptors. Neither was at the core of the Bauhaus work, and it inevitably precipitated a condition of crisis. It is this liminality of painting and sculpture and the submerged discomfort associated with them that can be sensed in the cases that Laura Muir, Annie Bourneuf, Joyce Tsai, and Paul Paret present. Thus the random photograph of the sculpture workshop that Paret examines hints at the tragic condition of sculpture. The empty, haunted workshop—without

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tools, without people, without stone blocks, marble chips or dust, with no clay or any other sign of labor—is a site of loss, emptied of meaning: the bustle of the twentieth century is not here but has moved in the neighboring studios. It is perhaps ironic that this farewell to sculpture should occur in a photograph. Theirs was a vexed relationship long before Moholy-Nagy showed up at the Bauhaus. Indeed, in his famous essays of the 1890s, Heinrich Wölfflin argued for the planar experience (flächenhafte Auffassung) of sculpture, as seen through the photograph in fact.8 In this judgment he drew on Adolf von Hildebrand, his great friend and influence, who privileged the relief and the two-dimensional effects of plastic form.9 Indeed, both Wölfflin and Hildebrand hinted that the flat surface could absorb the third dimension, and unwittingly prepared its demise or at any event its loss of relevance. Gropius and his colleagues may not have read Wölfflin’s articles, but they probably read Hildebrand (whose book had numerous reprints) and in any event they were probably educated in the German tradition of exalting sculpture and being suspicious of it at the same time. Wölfflin’s emphasis on the “corporeality” of architecture in the 1880s (in his “Prologomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur” and in Renaissance und Barock) was criticized harshly by August Schmarsow, who famously proposed space as the fundamental characteristic of architecture.10 But what was noteworthy in Schmarsow’s critique was that he attributed this focus on the body, on the physical mass of architecture more generally to the German fascination with sculpture (by which he meant ancient sculpture in particular).11 Here lay already in a nutshell the beginning of the unease with sculpture that, thirty years and many debates later, also comes through in the Bauhaus photograph of the sculpture workshop. One could take this even further, and ask: could sculpture as an art have been defended within the Bauhaus? Had not the object, now claiming the attention of the artist—the toy, the lamp, the teapot, the chair—taken over as sculpture and moved it to another workshop, gutting the traditional sculpture studio of value, of any reason for being, leaving it to be devoured in the maw of photography? In his introduction to the Werkbund catalogue of the 1924 exhibition Form ohne Ornament, Wolfgang Pfleiderer approaches the objects of daily use precisely as miniature sculptures.12 In his view the artists who turn to “technical forms” find them to be “the most powerful and liveliest aesthetic symbols of the times,” and it is precisely because these near-abstract forms are “forms without ornament” that they can be interchangeable with sculpture. Once the applied ornament on cups and teapots, vases and furniture was removed they could enter the domain of (abstract) sculpture. The idea that sculpture

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12.3 Left: Illustration from J. M. Richards, “Towards a Rational Aesthetic,” Architectural Review 78 (July–December 1935) Right: Illustration from Christian Barman, Review of Herbert Read, Art in Industry, Architectural Review 77 (January–June 1935)

resided in all objects—no matter how small or large—was not lost on the reception. In his article in the Architectural Review of 1935 (Figure 12.3, left) it is precisely this slippage across scales from typewriters to cooling towers that J. M. Richards (editor of the journal) underlines.13 And in the same journal, reviewing Herbert Read’s Art in Industry (1934), Christian Barman presents objects (large and small) as equivalents to abstract sculpture: seaplanes and die-makers’ squares (Figure 12.3, right) “although very different things, they are beautiful for the same reasons”.14 Despite the fact that sculpture has deserted the studio, it has conquered the world. Muir’s essay on Feininger and Bourneuf’s on Klee hint at another unease: the equally vexed relationship between painting and photography, and therefore of painting inside the Bauhaus project. For the painter Fein­ inger, night photography is a private and secret endeavor: quiet, almost surreptitious and stealthy, shy yet curious, he haunts the site like a nocturnal animal. The dynamic-action paradigm is so often invoked in the Bauhaus literature—the publicity, media-thirsty side of the official image, its public sphere, its transparent studios—that one is almost unprepared for Feininger’s approach. His model is not that of the glare of lights, of the modern metropolis, of Mendelsohn’s celebrations of electricity. Instead, he seems to be exploring its disquieting “other”—its ghostlike appearance at night, in fog, at the intersection point between ice and the steam spewed out of a locomotive. Muir’s Feininger thus complicates the reading of the 254

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Bauhaus—offering another crack in the Bauhütte. One senses that here, in the face of photography, art as painting is in retreat, seeking a refuge. Feininger’s efforts are not public, and he keeps his photography work at a distance from his painting. Is this his way to subvert the steady erosion of its domain by the camera? And is perhaps this “other” image of the Bauhaus, the silent and dark one that opposes the complete visibility of the daytime transparency, more true? Many of Feininger’s images seem to be about darkness, approximating as they do the feeling of a walk through a cemetery at night. Is there some intuition here that the bull-like charge ahead into modernity may ultimately also be dangerous? Is there an intuition here of the darkness to come? Bourneuf’s essay reveals another anxiety. Her reading of Klee’s Quadratbilder of 1923 suggests almost a case of Victor Hugo’s “ceci tuera cela”—except that, in this case, reading itself is threatened (and the Gothic cathedral, albeit transparent, is still looming in the background). Where, in the new typography and advertising world of the Bauhaus, reading becomes more like viewing images, Klee proposes images more like reading. The essay poses the question: is Klee’s ambivalent response to the direction images were taking at the Bauhaus his way to subvert MoholyNagy, to reinvest painting with meaning? And are his images-as-text about taking refuge, just as Feininger’s private photographs were a refuge for the painter but not a replacement for his art? Eventually Moholy-Nagy himself returns to painting, as Tsai’s essay documents, but this may be the Moholy-Nagy of wiser years, who has learned to accept compromise and to find value in it: painting may cause him to be apologetic, but, free from seeking financial and technological support to create his light pictures, he is also freer to invent. Freedom comes at a price—the price of turning back to traditional media—but it also brings opportunities. Yet, despite the opening, painting for him is still an in-between medium—a passage towards color photography, a case of seeing through—of tele-visio, of telehor, of fern-sehen. And the rip in the painting, roughly mended, may also suggest a lack of care, an ambivalent and troubled response to a generous yet oldfashioned medium.

Unbehagen: Packaging the Bauhaus, Early and Late Historical distance has its antiseptic side and cleanses the past of its human residue. When Adorno reflects upon the discomfort (Unbehagen) of life in the Bauhaus flats in Frederic J. Schwartz’s telling, it is perhaps not as philosopher but as dweller that we should hear him. The triumphalist 255

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readings of Giedion, Hitchcock and Pevsner, and those who followed, belied the Unbehagen. As we know, the Bauhaus came under severe criticism, starting in the later 1970s, and though this led to a loosening of the tight grip the “doctrine” had on architects and schools of architecture, it also fuelled a reaction that went too far to the right—to a suburban sprawl version of “Stockbroker’s Tudor,” to quote Osbert Lancaster, one of the early editors of the Architectural Review, who poked gentle fun at both modernist and reactionary excesses.15 But reactions, like excesses, point to fissures in any construct, and this one did so too. It certainly revealed a pent-up resentment against the near-totalitarian modernist aesthetic associated (rightly or wrongly) with the Bauhaus, but it also hinted at a contradiction built into the Bauhaus aesthetic itself. In order to appreciate “cleaning house”—the bare, denuded and spare interiors (Figure 12.4) of the early Bauhaus experiments which led to the Existenzminimum projects—one needed to experience its opposite. The cry for simplicity and ease of mobility for the metropolitan nomad came out of a very specific reaction to the past—a reaction against the Victorian clutter, the enveloping, slightly frenzied art nouveau total interiors, against the heavy furniture ensembles that weighed down everyday life. Decades later the imperative to reduce seemed less urgent. “Cleaning house,” de-cluttering, is only cathartic if there is something to clean in the first place. If unease and anxiety connect the readings of the Bauhaus collected here, the essays by Schwartz and Koehler are not hard to place.

12.4 Hannes Meyer, Co-op Zimmer, 1926 256

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Where in the earlier essays anxiety and discomfort were sometimes buried and sometimes hinted at by the artists and needed to be excavated by the authors, here no such coyness is at work. Politically there is and was a lot of overt discomfort and anxiety about the Bauhaus from the beginning. Chameleon-like, its architectural language was associated with any number of dramatically divergent political ideas: with bolshevism and Soviet politics (as “degenerate art”), with imperialism by some and democracy by others, with the Marshall Plan, with the GDR as well as with capitalism as Bauhaus modernism became the image of corporate America. Its program and its rhetoric could evidently respond to any number of agendas, though of course a lot had to do with the war—its remembrance and its forgetting, its victors and its losers. And in this realm, anxiety bubbles in all directions. Schwartz looks at debates surrounding the Bauhaus and accus­ ations brought against it by, among others, Adorno and Bloch, who speak of “hopelessness” (Trostlosigkeit) and termite existence in the context of German reconstruction (Wiederaufbau). Schwartz points out that in the postwar period it was impossible to attack the Bauhaus: even if there was a critical reception, there was no critical discourse within which to embed it—no forum, no vocabulary and hence no discussion possible as there had been before World War I. But he goes farther and, analyzing several attempts at discourse-making, he charts the road from an anthropological turn (with a phenomenological cast) in the 1950s to repoliticization in the 1960s and then a depoliticization of the Bauhaus in the early 1970s in the context of the “economic miracle” (Wirtschaftswunder), all of which make the Bauhaus ultimately anachronistic since in his words “it could no longer speak to the present.” Koehler’s perspective on the Bauhaus is from the other side of the Atlantic, as the United States turns to Gropius and the Bauhaus to anchor its own politics of reconstruction. The Bauhaus becomes an actual tool, a political instrument—such as to promote the Marshall Plan and legitimize the American presence overseas in the later 1940s and 1950s.16 This use of the Bauhaus to signal political and/or economic indebtedness recalls the very lively scholarship on gift-giving that draws on Marcel Mauss and has found a home in early modern studies.17 There is a complex web of gift-giving at work here too where the Bauhaus is the commodity being given: by the Germans to the Americans in the first place, in the 1930s; then by the Americans back to the Germans along with other gifts—of money, of military support and stability—together with demands of loyalty. In this back and forth, the original creators are left stranded, peons in the chess game of history. Seen from the sidelines, this appropriation and re-gifting by the Americans cause unease in the communist

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bloc as it views the Bauhaus tradition. For Soviet Russia (and the GDR) the Bauhaus is at first an imperialist tool—and causes discomfort—only to be recuperated into the language of its contemporary architecture on the grounds of construction technology rather than style (prefabrication appealing to a planning-oriented economy) with the approval of Khrushchev and the revisionism that ensued. In this case the anxiety is not so much within the Bauhaus itself as in its reception and deployment. Yet Koehler’s essay reveals a poignant final moment here that returns the Bauhaus to its begetters. Like the Bauhaus, Gropius grows old. Starting off as a radical, he then becomes an exile, packaged as the paradigm of the German seeking a haven in America by the United States Information Bureau, to become finally an elder statesman, the American envoy whose mission is to rebuild Germany. Not surprisingly there is a sense of fatigue in Gropius’s 1957 paper “Apollo in the Democracy” that he delivers in Hamburg, this time as an American to the Germans: the early political ardor is gone, and he muses philosophically on the role of the architect in a society whose definition of democracy is perpetually shifting. Is this experience and wisdom at the close of a long career? Perhaps, but it is also a weariness bordering on disenchantment that speaks of personal collisions with democratic societies as they navigated the high seas of the twentieth century. For a believer in the social function of everyday art this appears to have been a perplexing journey.

Endgame: Bauhaus Genealogy and Kunstgewerbe If the essays collected here reveal the tensions, stresses, and anxieties that attended the Bauhaus through its complicated life cycle, no one looks to its past. And yet, perhaps one way to understand the tensions that lay embedded at the heart of the Bauhaus, and at the same time made it the complex project it was, is to look back to its origins, to its genealogy beyond the Werkbund and Wilhelmine Germany (where studies tend to stop), into the culture of the nineteenth century.18 Neither the great fairs of the nineteenth century nor the Jugendstil or art nouveau discourses were without consequences—the Bauhaus did not spring fully formed from the head of Gropius, and for all the erasing of Van de Velde, there must have been something of him and his Kunstgewerbeschule left there, despite the war, despite the absence.19 If nothing else, the building, the shell, the memory of the place, its shadows spoke of continuity. The whole Kunstgewerbe movement from the second half of the nineteenth century and leading up to the Werkbund were immured there. And the picture of that movement 258

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was more complicated and more varied than its histories acknowledge, and had more participants too—such as anthropology and ethnography, archaeology and art history alongside the usual suspects (aesthetics, and politics, psychology and technology). The theoretization of the object lies in the nineteenth century, not the twentieth, and the Bauhaus is the endgame of a long history that starts in earnest in 1851. Kunstgewerbe, Gewerbe, Kleingerät, Kleinkunst, technische Künste, Kunsthandwerk, Kunstindustrie, Hausindustrie, Allgemeinge­werbe, Hausgewerbe all the way to bewegliche Kunst—like the presumed 100 names for snow that the Inuit vocabulary is credited with, these terms that have no comparable English equivalents signal interest, theoretical attention, a rich and highly articulated domain of subtle vocabulary shifts that surround the object.20 Such a developed family of terms in German reveals an intensity and concentration that goes beyond a reaction to the new global economies, to industrial production and mass consumption. Indeed, the Kunstgewerbe lay at the heart of the culture debates in the nineteenth century, which ranged from the education of craftsmen to that of the public, from the appropriation of primitive or ethnically diverse cultures within increasingly fragile empires to the assimilation of technological advances. Alone among the founding historians/critics of the modern movement, Pevsner drew attention to the decorative arts debates and their fallout.21 But neither Pevsner nor the literature that followed in his wake recognized sufficiently the enduring impact of Gottfried Semper, who cast a huge and benevolent shadow over the whole century and far beyond—on architecture education, the museum movement, the absorption of industrial work within the arts, and the rethinking of the meanings of culture.22 Indeed, Semper was the first to set out clearly and forcefully as well as systematically the significance of the object in society and tie it back to the monumental arts, specifically architecture. In his Der Stil (1860–1863) he covered terrain he had trodden before, but collected it under one title and gave it a physical form and prominence that his lectures and articles did not have. As a treatise it reached many and remained one of the last of a great tradition of architectural writings, a reference point for several generations that followed.23 His principal point was that monumental art develops from the crafts, and that without a healthy base a society cannot aspire to produce (any) art of high quality. Looking around at the offerings of the world’s nations displayed at the 1851 Great Exhibition he was discouraged. His program to remedy this situation was simple: educate the masses through museums, lectures and exhibitions; educate the craftsmen through schools, museum collections and competitions, and hope that between them a healthy grassroots art of objects of daily use

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would evolve that in time would also generate a healthy architecture. Of course, this is only a rough outline of Semper’s complex engagement with the object of daily use, but it is sufficient to indicate the reach of his program. Through his agency and that of others who held similar views, the pendulum of attention swung towards the arts and crafts and their industrial production, and led to the movement that carries their name. But what did it mean that architecture, and indeed the whole notion of modern living, came out of a rethinking of the objects of daily use? Presented as the DNA of culture and invested with great significance, the objects of daily use were seen to lie at the intersection between several human-based sciences in the nineteenth century: archaeology, anthrop­ ology, ethnology, art history. Collectively these disciplines formulated the concept of culture. In this concept, objects and ornament played a critical role, the essential role. Increasingly seen as unselfconscious, almost instinctual testimonies of artistic will, they became the obvious route to evaluate cultures (Figure 12.5).24 And it was once again Gottfried Semper who offered an opening for the architecture literature into the discourse that these disciplines generated with his own forays into their literatures. Unlike the British, who subsequently turned to the social-political implications of the Industrial Revolution or the economists who focused on the consequences of the first real global economy, Semper steered the discussion into more theoretical, philosophical and aesthetics-driven waters in keeping with the traditional inclination to approach such questions in the German-speaking countries. As result, architecture could communicate with the other disciplines that had also focused on definitions of culture. Ornament and objects of everyday use was what connected them—the archaeologist’s find with the ethnographer’s collection, the art historian’s

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12.5 Left: August von Eye, Atlas der Culturgeschichte (Leipzig: F. U. Brockhaus, 1875) Right: Alfred Haddon, Evolution in Art (London: Walter Scott Publishing Company, 1902)

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museum objects with the anthropologist’s tattoos of primitive cultures— and the intensity of publications in this domain testifies to its importance at this juncture, from the writings of anthropologists Franz Boas to those of Alfred Haddon, from the archaeologist Alexander Conze to Alois Riegl.25 This exaltation of Sachkultur (“culture of objects”) seeped into architecture culture through professors at the many polytechnics (Technische Hoch­ schulen), through the professional journals, as well as direct access by way of public lectures and published books. Bridge personalities were important—figures such as Cornelius Gurlitt and Richard Streiter who are not nowadays remembered in these contexts but who were significant conduits and offered interesting readings that alerted architects to recent work in various fields.26 The journals where they published were another obvious dissemination site and allowed ideas to spread beyond the classroom. But across these debates and publications, what remained a constant and was traceable back to Semper was the social importance of teaching—the exhib­ition, the school, and the crafts as a didactic, even cathartic, process of recovering the truth of art. And this describes the Bauhaus. What came with this inheritance? Principally the imperative to teach, the didactic mission, and the focus on objects as the essence of culture. The original Weimar Bauhaus under Van de Velde, like the Werkbund before it, belonged to this world, and albeit the war emptied it and denied him reentry, the foundations remained, no matter how strident the differences were made to appear later. But Semper had not written about the other arts, nor had he really addressed architecture as such except as an ultimate recipient of an evolution of forms. Applying the Kunstgewerbe findings to the monumental arts remained in the air and, like others, the Bauhaus founders tried to find their way. Given this background, it is no surprise that painting and sculpture should have slipped into the crevasses, or that architecture did not become a subject of study until quite late in Bauhaus history. Nor should it be surprising that education became such a powerful driving instrument and colored the Bauhaus output. What was made had to have been taught—yet not all art is discursive. Le Corbusier, for example, did not teach; he wrote but did not devise a pedagogical method of conveying ideas to others so that they too could develop their own. Yes, one could conceive of the Bauhaus as a laboratory of research, but it had a systematic basis, albeit one that was constantly in flux. Teaching at the Bauhaus, I would argue, meant that certain kinds of art-making were possible and not others, that deconstructing the artistic process also meant pre-thinking its outcome. And it is precisely this collision between the imperative to teach and intervene at the creative heart of society, from the top down, with the ideal of allowing the creative juices to rise to the fore, from the bottom up,

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that caused much of the tensions and unease at the Bauhaus. Its own DNA was set a good century before Gropius founded it again in Weimar, and it was not possible to escape it. Semper’s theories of art and of culture contained the dichotomy between slow evolution and rapid intervention at its very root, and it was left to the Bauhaus to play out the inherent tensions. Perhaps Saletnik comes closest to observing the consequences of this problem when he identifies a wall of incomprehension between the American Greenberg and the German Albers: Abstract Expressionism and Bauhaus didacticism are not chips from the same block and never could be. The top-down intervention a.k.a. social mission of the Bauhaus that contradicts its claim to be a seismograph of modernity and mass culture surfaces also in the Bauhaus approach to the design of objects of everyday use. Breuer’s tubular steel chair, like Mies’s, raises the question: who sits in them? Is the steel chair the response to habit and use or does it invite and create its own user? In the end the two chairs raise the question of habit formation: who leads? The subject or the object? This is a critical question for the Bauhaus project, and once again hints at the ambiguity at its center. Indeed, there was a tradition of evaluating modern forms and materials that goes back to the turn of the twentieth century and which proposes precisely that: the gradual and deliberate intervention at the level of habit formation that changes the public’s repugnance for industrial materials and objects into aesthetic pleasure.27 And it is these points of contact that a more inclusive reading of the Bauhaus’s past, not only its present and future, would illuminate. For example, for Richard Streiter, critic and teacher in Munich at the Technische Hochschule and student of Theodor Lipps, seeing and holding objects produced by industry (Figure 12.6) causes habit and familiarity,

12.6 Lucia Moholy, Typewriter on desk in Walter Gropius’s house at the Bauhaus, Dessau, 1926, gelatin silver print, printed c. 1950, 14.9 × 11.4 cm 262

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and it is these two conditions that lie at the root of the Zeitgeist as its particular feeling for form (Formgefühl).28 For him the body, shut out of the new materials of architecture, which are cold and abstract, can only assert itself through the touching (tasten) and feeling (fühlen) of small objects, that is, not through (poetic or symbolic) representation or even allusion to recognizable body parts or bodily states, but through physical familiarity with forms held by the hand or surrounding the body.29 Ultimately for him the origins and manifestation of a new Formgefühl are to be found in the decorative arts; it is “prepared” in the small scale. His own proposal is to develop a “machine style” which he describes as consistent with what the machine produces best and looks like: smooth, precise, simple, crisp, and of an exceptional consistency.30 In the end he makes the radical suggestion that repeated handling of objects yields aesthetic appreciation of modern architecture—that objects communicate by way of the unselfconscious haptic experience of the viewer, and function didactically. Tracing such lines back into the Bauhaus past would throw a different light on accepted truisms and modify the normative conception that is still lingering with us.

Farewell to the Crystal And so, to come back to the beginning, I return to the Proclamation of the Bauhaus and Koehler’s suggestion that the cathedral was fragmented. I had never thought of it like that, I must confess. To me it seemed a crystalline object, a reference to the Bauhütte, to the City Crown, to the transparent cathedral all in one. And yet the more I looked at it and tried to defer my prejudices I came away with the idea that it could indeed be read that way too—a call to battle, to gather the troops, but also perhaps a hint of doubt, of worry. Was the German Gothic cathedral that firm and solid, or did it stand on shaky nationalist ground despite its internationalist aspirations? Was it that transparent, or did it have cracks that only time would reveal? I wondered about the term Krystall—with its references to Bruno Taut’s utopian Crystal City Crown but also to the Kristallnacht that lay in the future but was beginning to loom on the horizon. As a term of currency in Germany at the time, it had positive as well as negative associations. The purity and transparency of the crystal is one side, but the crystal is also hard, cold, and sharp-edged; it can inflict pain as well as pleasure. Maybe the crystal that cracked and shattered was intuited here. The Bauhaus was a conflicted place and it left a conflicted legacy—and reconstructing that anxious center is what the scholarship gathered here is all about.

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Notes This essay developed from my response to the papers presented in the conference “Bauhaus Palimpsest: the Object of Discourse” which took place at the Harvard Art Museum, Harvard University in March 2008, and draws from my forthcoming book, Objects, Ornament and Culture: Modern Architecture and the Rise of a Theory of Objects (Yale University Press).   1 See, for example, Timothy J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).   2 Deborah Howard, “Sebastiano Serlio’s Venetian Copyrights,” The Burlington Magazine 115, no. 844 (1973): 512–16.   3 For full references to the essays (and original papers) referred to here and thereafter, please consult the contents list of the present volume.   4 The Deutsche Werkstätte changed its name to “Volkseigener Betrieb Deutsche Werkstätten Hellerau” on 1 January 1951; this lasted in a somewhat coherent form until 1970, when 26 branches of the “Möbelkombinat Deutsche Werkstätten Hellerau” were closed, but it continued in some form until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989; the whole enterprise was privatized at that point into some 30 independent companies. Klaus-Peter Arnold, Vom Sofakissen zum Städtebau: die Geschichte der deutschen Werkstätten und der Gartenstadt Hellerau (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1993), 117. On Typenmöbel see also W. Owen Harrod, “Bruno Paul’s Typenmöbel, the German Werkbund and Pragmatic Modernism, 1908–1918,” Studies in the Decorative Arts IX, no. 2 (Spring–Summer 2002): 33–57.   5 Adolf Loos, “Josef Veillich,” in Adolf Loos, Trotzdem, 1900–1930 (Innsbruck: Brenner Verlag, 1931), 248–55.   6 The German terms Typisierung and Mechanisierung are notoriously difficult to translate. “Standardization” in the sense of a repetition of standard types is a workable approximation of the former, while “mechanization,” though somewhat ungainly, was made famous by Sigfried Giedion in his Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948) and therefore retains period authenticity.   7 Alina Payne, “Architectural History and the History of Art: A Suspended Dialogue,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 59/60 (September–December 1999): 292–9.   8 Heinrich Wölfflin, “Wie man Skulpturen aufnehmen soll,” Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst 7 (1896): 224–48 and Zeitschrift für Bildende Kunst 8 (1897): 294–7.   9 “erst wenn die plastische Figur als ein Flaches wirkt, obschon sie kubisch ist, hat sie künstlerische Form...” Heinrich Wölfflin, “Ein Künstler über Kunst,” Allgemeine Zeitung (Munich) 11 July 1893, in Kleine Schriften, ed. Joseph Gantner (1886; Basel: Schwabe, 1946), 88. Wölfflin reviews Adolf von Hildebrand, Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst (Strassburg: Heitz, 1893). 10 Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1888). Wölfflin, “Prologomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur” in Kleine Schriften, 13–47. August Schmarsow, Zur Frage nach dem Malerischen (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1896), and Schmarsow, Barock und Rokoko oder Über das Malerische in der Architektur (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1897). 11 Alina Payne, “Architecture, Ornament and Pictorialism: Notes on the History of an Idea from Wölfflin to Le Corbusier,” in Architecture and Painting, ed. Karen Koehler (London: Ashgate, 2001), 54–72; Alina Payne, “The Pergamon Altar, Heinrich Wölfflin and German Art History at the fin de siècle,” RES: Journal of Aesthetics and Anthropology 53/4 (Spring–Autumn 2008): 168–89. 12 Wolfgang Pfleiderer, “Introduction,” in Die Form ohne Ornament: Werkbundausstellung 1924 (Berlin and Leipzig: Deutsches Verlags-Anstalt Stuttgart, 1924), 3–22. 13 See J. M. Richards, “Towards a Rational Aesthetic,” Architectural Review 78 (July–December 1935), 211–18.

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14 Christian Barman, Review of Herbert Read, Art in Industry, Architectural Review 77 (January–­June 1935), 3–8. 15 Osbert Lancaster, Pillar to Post, English Architecture without Tears (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1939). The book was republished together with Homes, Sweet Homes (London: Murray, 1940) as Here, of All Places (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958). 16 For another perspective on the Bauhaus and the Marshall Plan, see Greg Castillo, “The Bauhaus in Cold War Germany,” in Bauhaus Culture: From Weimar to the Cold War, ed. Kathleen James-Chakraborty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 171–94. 17 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: Norton, 1990). First published as Essai sur le don in 1950. 18 See, for example, John Maciuika, Before the Bauhaus (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 19 Kathleen James-Chakraborty, “Henry van de Velde and Walter Gropius. Between Avoidance and Imitation,” in James-Chakraborty, Bauhaus Culture, 26–42. 20 As noted, these terms cannot be translated to precise English equivalents, but their general meanings are as follows: Kunstgewerbe (arts and crafts, applied arts), Gewerbe (trade, industry, craft), Kleingerät (small household appliances), Kleinkunst (minor arts), technische Künste (technical arts), Kunsthandwerk (artistic handicrafts), Kunstindustrie (art industry), Hausindustrie (cottage industries), Allgemeingewerbe (general trades), Hausgewerbe (house trades), and bewegliche Kunst (mobile, portable arts). On the linguistic intensity associated with concepts of great importance (or not) in a culture, see especially Bruno Snell, Die Entdeckung des Geistes. Studien zur Entstehung des europäischen Denkens bei den Griechen (Hamburg: Claaszen & Goverts, 1946). 21 On the relative positions of Pevsner, Giedion and Hitchcock on this issue see Alina Payne, “Architecture and Objects: The Power of Pevsner,” Harvard Design Magazine (Spring 2002): 66–70. For a treatment of the period which develops Pevsner’s position, see especially Stefan Muthesius, Das englische Vorbild (Munich: Prestel, 1974). 22 The literature on Semper is vast. Most recently his oeuvre has been revisited, though the focus remains primarily his place within nineteenth-century architecture culture. See the splendid volume by Winfried Nerdinger and Werner Oechslin, eds, Gottfried Semper 1803– 1897: Architektur und Wissenschaft (Zurich: GTA, and Berlin: Prestel, 2004); Harry Mallgrave, Gottfried Semper: Architect of the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); and Gottfried Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, trans. and ed. H. Mallgrave (Los Angeles: Getty Research Center, 2004). 23 Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten oder Praktische Aesthetik, 2 vols. (1860–1863; Munich: Fr. Bruckmann Verlag, 1878); Semper, Kleine Schriften (Zurich: Meyer and Zeller, 1856; 2nd edn, Berlin and Stuttgart: W. Spemann, 1884) which also carried his legacy forward. Two other essays became cult reading: Gottfried Semper, “Science, Industry and Art,” in The Four Elements of Architecture, ed. W. Herrmann (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and Semper, “Ideales Museum für Metalltechnik” (1852) dedicated by Semper in 1867 to Rudolf von Eitelberger, the first director of the Vienna Museum für Kunst und Industrie. Although well known, it was first published in Julius Leisching, “Gottfried Semper und die Museen,” Mitteilungen des Mährischen Gewerbe­museums (1903). As an example of his reception in Britain, see Lawrence Harvey’s presentation of his work to the RIBA: “As Semper was convinced, that the beginnings of art are to be found in the humble crafts which supply the necessaries of every-day life, and that even now they have the greatest influence in forming our taste, he was one of the first to maintain the importance of founding museums of art work.” Lawrence Harvey, “Semper’s Theory of Evolution in Architectural Ornament”, Transactions of the RIBA, n.s., v. 1, 1884–1885, p. 32.

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24 Riegl’s definition of Kunstwollen first adumbrated in his Stilfragen is the mature formulation of this trend. See Alois Riegl, Stilfragen. Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (Berlin: G. Siemens, 1893). 25 For example, see Franz Boas, “The Decorative Art of the Indians of the North Pacific Coast,” Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History IX (1897): 123–76; Alfred C. Haddon, The Decorative Art of British New Guinea: A Study in Papuan Ethnography (Dublin: The Academy House, 1894); Haddon, Evolution in Art: As Illustrated by the Life-Histories of Design (London: Walter Scott Publishing Co., 1902); Alexander Conze, Melische Thongefässe (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1862); Alois Riegl, Spätrömische Kunstindustrie (Wien, K. K. Hofund Staatsdruckerei, 1901). 26 Cornelius Gurlitt’s published output was vast. Among his works most relevant to this discussion, beyond his well-known work on the Baroque, see Cornelius Gurlitt, ed., Im Bürgerhause: Plaudereien über Kunst, Kunstgewerbe und Wohnungs-Ausstattung (Dresden: Gilbers, 1888), and Gurlitt, Die deutsche Kunst des XIX. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Georg Bondi, 1899); Richard Streiter, Ausgewählte Schriften zur Ästhetik und Kunstgeschichte, ed. Franz von Reber (Munich: Delphin, 1913). 27 See, for example, the architect Heuser, who proposes his “articulation style” (Gelenkstil) in iron as a response to new materials in Austria’s preeminent journal of architecture: “Mit der Zeit aber wird das Zweckerfüllende Minimum von Material Wohlgefallen erwecken, der Klageruf der Styllosigkeit wird aufhören, wenn erst durch allmälige Auslese gereifte Motive im Gedächtniss der Menschen leben und berreits ist in Geräthen und Maschienen ein Formenreiz entstanden, welchen du Bois-Raymond als ‘mechanische Schönheit’ bezeichnet (see Allgemeine Bauzeitung 1890: 149).” G. Heuser, “Das Werden von Stylformen,” Allgemeine Bauzeitung 1894: 63, and Heuser, “Zur Entstehung des Gefachstyles, insbesondere der Gelenklager,” Allgemeine Bauzeitung 1892: 19. 28 “Haben sich durch das beständige Sehen und Benutzen jener Erzeugnisse [der modernen Technik] unsere Augen und unsere Tastgefühl mehr und mehr an die struktiv-technische Sachlichkeit gewohnt und unser tektonisches Formgefühl dementsprechend beeinflusst, so ist zudem noch unser Körpergefühl durch die ausserordentliche Steigerung der Verkehrsmittel für eine grössere Bewegungsfähigkeit sehr empfänglich und demnach für allen hemmenden und beschwereden Ballast sehr empfindlich geworden.” Emphasis added. Streiter, Ausgewählte Schriften, 81–2. 29 Ibid., 119. Streiter’s characteristics of the new materials are: “fleischlose Dünnheit; steife Trockenheit; statische Berechnung; äussere Gleichartigkeit der Glieder; verwirrende Menge sich durchkreuzender fast körperloser Linien.” Ibid., 110. 30 Ibid., 28.

266

Illustration credits ARS = Artists Rights Society, New York Cover, 0.1 and 12.6  Harvard Art Museum, Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Walter Gropius, BR50.140. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College. © 2009 ARS/VG BildKunst, Bonn 0.2 Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin, Gift of Walter Gropius. © 2009 ARS/VG BildKunst, Bonn 1.1 Harvard Art Museum, Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Julia Feininger, BR56.235. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College. © 2009 ARS/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 1.2 Harvard Art Museum, Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Julia Feininger, BR49.198. Photo: Allan Macintyre © President and Fellows of Harvard College. © 2009 ARS/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 1.3 Collection Merrill C. Berman. Photo by Jim Frank. Permission to reprint from Merrill C. Berman 1.4 Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York 1.5 United States Department of War Information, Washington, DC 2.1 Harvard Art Museum, Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Walter Gropius, BR50.120. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College. © 2009 ARS/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2.2 Harvard Art Museum, Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of the artist, BR48.78.3. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College. © 2009 ARS/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2.3 © Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig 2.4 Above: Harvard Art Museum, Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Walter Gropius, BR50.181. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College. Below: Werkbundarchiv-Museum der Dinge, Berlin 2.5 Harvard Art Museum, Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of the artist, BR48.78.3. Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College. © 2009 ARS/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2.6 Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. © VG Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2008 2.7 Harvard Art Museum, Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Ise 267

Illustration credits

3.1 3.2 3.4 3.6 3.7 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4

4.5 4.6 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 6.1

6.2 6.3

6.4

6.5

6.6

268

Gropius, BRGA.21.55 (above) and BRGA.21.122 (below). Photo: Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College. © 2009 ARS/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn Photograph: Institut für Sozialforschung, Frankfurt Courtesy The Merrill C. Berman Collection Photograph Christian Staub. Courtesy Ulmer Museum/HfG-Archiv Photographs Herbert W. Kapitzki. Courtesy Ulmer Museum/ HfG-­Archiv © Michael Scheler, Hamburg, Germany Photograph courtesy The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. © 2009 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/ARS Photograph © Tate, London 2009. © 2009 Barnett Newman Foundation/ARS Photograph courtesy The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. © 2009 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/ARS University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Gift of Hans Hofmann. Photo: Benjamin Blackwell. © 2009 The Renate, Hans and Maria Hofmann Trust/ARS Photograph by Genevieve Naylor Photograph courtesy The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. © 2009 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/ARS Courtesy Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2009 ARS Courtesy Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2009 ARS Courtesy Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2009 ARS Courtesy Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2009 ARS Courtesy Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2009 ARS Courtesy Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. © 2009 ARS Gift of T. Lux Feininger, bMSGer 146.4 (291). By permission of Houghton Library, Harvard University. © 2009 ARS/VG BildKunst, Bonn Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. © 2009 ARS/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn Gift of T. Lux Feininger, bMSGer 146.4 (302). By permission of Houghton Library, Harvard University. © 2009 ARS/VG BildKunst, Bonn Harvard Art Museum/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of T. Lux Feininger, BR71.21.23. Photo: Allan Macintyre © President and Fellows of Harvard College. © 2009 ARS/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn Gift of T. Lux Feininger, bMSGer 146.4 (323). By permission of Houghton Library, Harvard University. © 2009 ARS/VG BildKunst, Bonn Harvard Art Museum/Busch-Reisinger Museum, Bequest of

Illustration credits

7.1

7.2

7.3

7.4

7.5

7.6

8.1

8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5

William S. Lieberman, 2007.17. Photo: Katya Kallsen © President and Fellows of Harvard College. © 2009 ARS/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn Gift of Richard S. Zeisler. Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. © 2009 Hattula MoholyNagy/ARS/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn Gift of David K. E. Bruce Fund. Image courtesy of National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, DC. © 2009 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/ARS/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn Gift of David K. E. Bruce Fund. [Note: The painting is currently in the collection of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris under the title A XX (1924)] Image courtesy of National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, DC. © 2009 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/ARS/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. © 2009 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/ARS/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn Gift of David K. E. Bruce Fund. Image courtesy of National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, DC. © 2009 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/ARS/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn Gift of David K. E. Bruce Fund. Image courtesy of National Gallery of Art Library, Washington, DC. © 2009 Hattula Moholy-Nagy/ARS/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Accessions Committee Fund: gift of Emily L. Carroll and Thomas Weisel, Jean and James E. Douglas, Jr., Susan and Robert Green, Evelyn Haas, Mimi and Peter Haas, Eve and Harvey Masonek, Elaine McKeon, the Modern Art Council, Phyllis and Stuart G. Moldaw, Christine and Michael Murray and Brooks Walker, Jr. and Phyllis Wattis. © The LeWitt Estate/ARS Photographer unknown. Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Archiv der Moderne Photographer unknown. © 2009 Estate of Oskar Schlemmer, Munich Photo: Zürcher Hochschüle der Künste, Medien- und Informationszentrum MIZ-Archiv Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin Published by Kunstanstalt Carl Sabo, Berlin. © 2009 ARS/VG BildKunst, Bonn Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. © 2009 ARS/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn Collection of Hattula Moholy-Nagy. © 2009 ARS/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. © 2009 ARS/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

269

Illustration credits

  9.6   9.7 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6

Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. © 2009 ARS/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn © 2009 ARS/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. © Dr Dirk Scheper, Berlin Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin © 2009 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. © 2009 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. © 2009 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn Left: © Museo Nazionale del Bargello. Right: Sammlung Brockhage, Photo: Wolfgang Schmidt. © 2009 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

11.1 11.2 11.3 12.1 12.2

© 2009 ARS/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin © 2009 ARS/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin Eva Ottlinger, Adolf Loos: Wohnungskonzepte und Möbelentwürfe (Salzburg and Vienna: Residenz, 1994) Hannes Meyer, Co-op Zimmer, 1926 Deutsches Architektur­ museum, Frankfurt am Main

12.4

270

Index §175 (law on homosexuality, Weimar Republic) 194

29–30; sculpture 167, 253; style 69–71; vision 18–19; Wölfflin, Heinrich 253; writings 259

Abbot, Jere 136

Armour Institute of Technology 231

Abstract Figure (Free Sculpture G) 170–1;

Arnheim, Rudolf 50

three views 172f8.3

art: authority 42; Bauhaus objects 38, 55;

Adam Building (Berlin) 232–3

concepts 15; criticism 90, 91; limitations

Adorno, Theodor: Aesthetic Theory 15–16;

154; quality 259; science 30; status 52;

authenticity 72, 75; Bauhaus flats 255;

technology 37–8

Functionalism Today 61–3, 64–5, 78;

Art and Technology: A New Unity 20

Negative Dialectics 79–80; poetry 32

Art Nouveau 256

advertising 175, 183, 212–13

Art of Being at Home, The 77

Aesthetic Theory 15–16

aura 38, 42–3, 52, 53, 54

aesthetics 51, 169–70, 256

Ausstellung Europäisches Kunstgewerbe 50

affluence 39

authority 42, 53, 54, 216

Albers, Josef: anonymity 206; Bauhaus

authorship: attitudes 2; Bauhaus objects 250;

modernism 86; Bauhaus success 54;

Bayer, Herbert 213; Brandt, Marianne

Black Mountain College 84, 93f4.5; color

220; conflicts 7; gender 218; habitus 206;

instruction 91–2, 96, 97f4.6; Greenberg,

identity 248–51; students protesting 205–6

Clement 262; Homage to the Square, Black Setting 89f4.3; interaction of color 86–8; material inquiry 83–4; material study (Werklehre) 92; matière 92, 93–4; painting technique 89–90; pedagogy 92,

Bahrdt, Hans Paul: Art of Being at Home, The 77 Banham, Reyner: Hochschule für Gestaltung (Ulm) 75f3.4

94–6; photography 140n24; preliminary

Barcelona Chair 234, 242

instruction 233; Variant/Adobe, Red Front

Barman, Christian 254; Review of Herbert

86f4.1; Werklicher Formunterricht 94; Yale University 84 Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG): Light Prop for an Electrical Stage 154 ambiguity 262

Read, Art in Industry 254f12.3 Barr, Alfred 22, 127, 136 Bartning, Otto 65–6 Bauaustellung Stuttgart 1924 209 Bauhaus: anonymity 205; arts’ properties

America, the Haven 24–8

234; books 106; criticism 256; decorative

anonymity 205, 206–8, 216

arts 252; depoliticized 79; designs 228;

anthropology 74, 76, 257

Dessau 193; development 163; dis-

anti-semitism 22

course 66; German Democratic Republic

Apollo in the Democracy 28–33

219; goal 79; habitus 209; legacy 62–3,

Arbeitsrat für Kunst 17, 20

263; liminal space 247; masculinity

architectural discourse 257, 260

250; mass reproduction 249; material

architecture: appreciation 263; Bauhaus 252;

studies 85; patents 238; photomontages

culture 260; designs 78; discourse 63,

184–5; play 200; preliminary instruction

66; history 74; language 232; night pho-

84, 92, 97–8, 233; Proclamation 263;

tography 128, 134; politics 257; public

reception 258; relationships 248; rhetoric

discourse 67; revolution 79; science 27,

250; sculpture 166; stone sculpture

271

Index

workshop, Weimar 165f8.2; technologi-

mass reproduction 44–5, 53; One-Way

cal reproducibility 54; United States of

Street 106–7; technological reproducibility

America 85; Weimar 192

52, 54, 55n2; Work of Art in the Age of its

Bauhaus 1919–1928, The 22; installation view 23f1.4 Bauhaus Books: Bauhaus Buildings Dessau 47, 134; Painting, Photography, Film 108, 127; Pedagogical Sketchbook 113

Technological Reproducibility, The 38 Bennett, Jay: America, the Haven 24–8 Bense, Max 74 Berger, Otti: authorship 249; died 244n45; German patents 238; identity 240;

Bauhaus buildings 133

Increase of sales through the refining

Bauhaus Debate 66

of taste 240; labels 227; Möbelstoff-

Bauhaus design 231

Doppelgewebe 236–7; national identity

Bauhaus exhibition 79f3.6, 168–9; Bauhaus

249; patents 231, 236–7; Rosshaar fabric

Wanderschau 174

sample label 228f11.2; vocabulary 234–7

Bauhaus GmbH 48–9

Berlin 19, 21

Bauhaus Magazine 130–1, 175, 215, 216

Birkle, Albert: Halt:Volunteers Forward

Bauhaus Manifesto 13, 16–19; Bauhaus 1919–1928, The 23f1.4; preliminary design 18f1.2 Bauhaus masters’ housing (recto): Moholy, Lucia 7f0.2 Bauhaus objects: active engagement 85; art objects 38; authorship 250; Bauhaus

187f9.1 Black Mountain College 84, 94–5; Albers, Josef 93f4.5 Blaser, Werner 231–2 Bloch, Ernst: Art of Being at Home, The 77; Education, Engineering Form, Ornament 61–4, 78; Spirit of Utopia 64

practice 91; context 45, 98; elitism 40;

Bochum Declaration 77

legacy 54; photographs 138; serialized

Bois, Yve-Alain 115–16

production 44; status 52

Bollnow, Otto Friedrich 75

Bauhaus vitrine: Ausstellung Europäisches Kunstgewerbe 40f2.3 Bauhaus Wanderschau: installation photograph 175f8.4 Bauhütte 251

bookbinding 107 books 105–6 Bourdieu, Pierre 7, 206–9, 211, 218 brand name 240, 248 Brandt, Marianne: Acting Master 201n12;

Baumeister, Willi 72

Andrea del Verrocchia Portrait of an

Bauwelt 209

unknown well-known 219f10.6, 220;

Bayer, Herbert: 50 Years of Walter Gropius

authorship 7, 208, 215–21, 249; Bauhaus

and How I Would Like to See Him Still

216, 221–2; desk light 4; died 219; gen-

on the Occasion of His Birthday, May 18,

der 217; Metallic Party 217f10.4; Mon-

1933 195, 196f9.5, 197f9.6; advertising

tage 219f10.6; photomontages 202n15;

212–15, 223n39; affair with Ise Gropius

self-esteem 220; Selfportrait 217f10.5;

195; authorship 7, 208; Bauhaus 221; Die

Tea Infuser with Strainer 39f2.2, 90; Tea

neue Linie 196; emigration 198; exhibi-

service with Water pot 42f2.5; teapot 38

tions 215; Germany Exhibition catalogue

Brandt, Willy: Bochumer Erklärung 78f3.5

199f9.7; Junior Master 212; Katalog der

Breuer, Marcel: as artist 209–10; authorship

Muster 49; Museum of Modern Art, New

7, 208, 221, 249; autonomy 208–12;

York 22; Nazi propaganda 198–9; New

Bauhaus 51; chairs 2; cross-dressing

Typography 108; photomontages 184,

192–4; Form-Funktion 211; Gropius,

192; Tea Infuser with Strainer 39f2.2; Tea

Walter 195, 223n31; habitus 209; Junior

service with Water pot 42f2.5; visiting

Master 210; masculinity 250; patents

card 214f10.3; at work 213f10.2

230; photomontages 184, 192; Portrait of

Beckmann, Hannes 92–3

Marcel Breuer as a Girl with a magnolia

Behne, Adolf 53, 142, 169

192f9.4; sexuality 194; tubular steel

Benjamin, Walter: Bauhaus Manifesto 23;

furniture 212f10.1

272

Index

built environment 66, 77

documentary images 2

Burgkühnauer Allee 129

doppelgänger 171

Busch-Reisinger Museum 6–7, 237

Droste, Magdalena 185 Duchamp, Marcel 193, 250

capitalism 77 Cathedral 13, 17

Duffy, Edmund: Unconquered People, The 27f1.5

Cathedral of Socialism 19–21

Duve, Thierry de 91, 99n8

Centrifugal Memorial Page 116–18

dwelling 73

Chinese characters 110 Chinese poems 110, 122n26

education 259–60, 261

Citroën, Paul 157–8

Ehrlich, Franz: Studies for Electric Advertising

civil society 29

176f8.5

color instruction 96–7

elitism 38–9

colors 147–8

Erste Bauhaus Austellung in Weimar: Schlem-

communication 2, 3 Communism 32 Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne

mer, Oskar 21f1.3 European resistance: Unconquered People, The 27–8

(CIAM) 68; Wohnung für das Existenz-

exhibitions 22, 215

minimum 69f3.2

Existenzminimum 69–70, 256

Congress for Cultural Freedom 32

expense 43

Conrads, Ulrich: Bochumer Erklärung 78f3.5;

Eye, August von: Atlas der Culturgeschichte

Damaged Life 77

260f12.5

Consemüller, Erich 134 conservation: Z VII 149–50

fabrics 227–8, 234, 235

Construction AL6: Light Prop for an Electrical

Feininger, Andreas 127; Young People Come

Stage 155–6

to the Bauhaus 247f12.1

Constructivism 188, 189; Chump, The 191

Feininger, Julia 127–8, 134, 137, 138

copyright 208, 229–30

Feininger, Laurence 127

Coughlin, Father Charles 22

Feininger, Lyonel: architectural vision 18–19; Avenue of Trees 135, 137f6.6; Bauhaus

Dada 185

133f6.4; Bauhaus Buildings Dessau 134;

Darmstadt Colloquia 65, 71; Image of Man in

Bauhaus Manifesto preliminary design

out Time, The 72; Man and Space 72

18f1.2, 263f12.7; Bauhaus Proclamation

decorative arts 252, 263

cover 14f1.1; Cathedral 17, 251; Lighted

Degenerate Art 22

Windows I 134; “Moholy’s Studio Win-

democracy 28–9, 32

dow” around 10 p.m. 131f6.2; negative

Der Konfektionär 240

prints 130–3; night photography 128–30,

Der Spiegel 221

254–5; photography 5, 126; private pho-

Derrida, Jacques 19

tography 136–7; Untitled (negative image

Dessau: Bauhaus 21; Bauhaus buildings 45;

of a Master’s house, Burgkühnauer

Brandt, Marianne 215; Breuer, Marcel

Allee, Dessau) 132f6.3; Untitled

193; Feininger, Lyonel 126; Junior Master

(Night View of Trees and Streetlamp,

210; sale of Bauhaus works 207; Type-

Burgkühnauer Allee, Dessau) 129f6.1;

writer on desk 1f0.1, 262f12.6

Untitled (Trees and Shadows, Burg-

Deutsche Werkstätte (Hellerau) 250 Deutscher Werkbund conference 1965 61

kühnauer Allee, Dessau) 136f6.5; visitors to Bauhaus 45–6; woodcut 132–3

Die Form 209

Feininger, T. Lux 127, 136, 137–8, 140n24

Dieckmann, Erich 208

Feist, Henry 239–40

director’s house 45

female students 185, 186

discourse 3, 63, 66–7, 77

Foster, Hal 171

273

Index

Foucault, Michel 119n5, 199, 206–7; History of Sexuality, The 184

252; art and technology 37–8, 168, 210; authorship 205, 249; Bauhaus 248, 262;

Frankfurt Institute for Social Research 80f3.7

Bauhaus Buildings Dessau 47, 134, 138;

Frankfurter Zeitung 52

Bauhaus in United States of America

Freikorps 186

84; Bauhaus Manifesto 16–17; Bauhaus

Freiwillige Landesschützenkorps 187–8

Produktion 56n6; Bauhaus staff 20;

Freud, Sigmund 19

Breuer, Marcel 195, 221; cooperative

Friedrich, Caspar David 129–30

working 207–8; democracy 32; designs

functional form 63, 64–5

228; Dessau 1; as diplomat 30; director’s

functionalism 65, 67–8, 70

house 45; emigrated 22; emigration 198;

Futurism 185

equality 185–6; Harvard University 28; as hero 3–4; Hildebrand, Adolf von 253;

Gabo, Naum 216

leaves Bauhaus 134; luxury objects 42;

Galerie der Sturm: EM1, EM2, EM3 (Tel-

masculinity 192; masters’ houses 46f2.7;

ephone Pictures) 142

modernism 67; Moholy-Nagy, László

Gehlen, Arnold 74

107; Monument to the March Dead 167;

gender: authorship 218; binary construction

Nazism 29; patents 230; photographs

193; Brandt, Marianne 217; contradic-

6–7; photography 125; production 53;

tions 188; explored 186; identity 185,

protesting students 79f3.6; re-education

200, 249; photomontages 184

30–1; resigned 21; revisionism 13; sculp-

German-American Bund 22

ture 167; sculpture relief 169; status of

German Werkbund: Warenbuch silver jugs

Bauhaus objects 52; Typewriter on desk

41f2.4 Germany 15, 17–18, 30–1, 63, 85, 233–4 Germany Exhibition 198–9

1f0.1, 262f12.6; United States of America 257; workshops 49; writings 23–4 Gurlitt, Cornelius 261

Giedion, Sigfried 252 Giefer, Alois 61, 62f3.1

Haas, Walter 48

gifts: Bauhaus 199, 257–8; Bauhaus parties

Habermas, Jürgen 79

195; Chump, The 190; homosexuality 194; photomontages 184, 186, 192 Glaesemer, Jürgen 113, 123n35 Grassi-Museum, Leipzig: Ausstellung Europäisches Kunstgewerbe 40f2.3

habitus: authorship 207, 208, 210; Bayer, Herbert 214; body-habitus 217; Brandt, Marianne 221; female students 218; market orientation 211; symbolism 211 Haddon, Alfred: Evolution in Art 260f12.5

Grawe, Gabriela Diana 221

Halle 135–6

Greenberg, Clement: abstract purism 90–1;

Hamburg 28

Albers, Josef 86, 262; art criticism 84; Bauhaus 252; discourse 97–8; disliked

March Dead 167; postcard 44f2.6

Josef Albers 88; formalist values 85;

Hays, K. Michael 53–4

Hofmann, Hans 100n19; Klee, Paul 105

Heidegger, Martin 72–3, 74–5; Hochschule für

grids 108–9, 111, 113 Gropius, Ise: affair with Bayer 195, 198;

Gestaltung (Ulm) 75f3.4 Heilmann, Hans 110

Dessau 1; Kuhn, Charles 237; role at

hieroglyphs 109, 110

Bauhaus 5; typewriter 4–5; visitors to

Hilbersmeier, Ludwig: Mies van der Rohe 232

Bauhaus 45

Hildebrand, Adolf von 253; Problem of Form

Gropius, Walter: 50 Years of Walter Gropius

in the Fine Arts 173

and How I Would Like to See Him Still

Hirschfeld-Mack, Ludwig 206

on the Occasion of His Birthday, May

Hirschfield, Magnus: Different From the Oth-

18, 1933 197–8; America, the Haven

274

Hartwig, Josef 2, 222n3; Monument to the

ers 194–5

24–8; anonymity 206, 223n20; Apollo in

historical legacy 4

the Democracy 28–33, 258; architecture

history 3, 74

Index

Hochman, Elaine 20, 239

Knau, Josef: Kugelförmige Kannen 41f2.4

Hochschule für Gestaltung (Ulm) 74

Knoll 221, 234, 241

Hofmann, Hans 84, 88, 89–90; Goliath 89f4.4

Koeppen, Wolfgang: Hothouse, The 61, 67

Holocaust 29

Koerner, Joseph Leo 105, 123n32

Homage to the Square, Black Setting 88

Körting & Mathieson 50

Hothouse, The 61, 67

Kracauer, Siegfried 183; typewriter 4

House Un-American Activities Committee 22

Krauss, Rosalind 91

human vision 154

Kuhn, Charles 237 Kunstgewerbe 42, 52, 258–63; Ausstellung

identity 218, 237–41, 249

Europäisches Kunstgewerbe 50

Illinois Institute of Technology 231 industry 248

Lancaster, Osbert 256

innovation patent 243n26

Lange, Emil 48

intellectual property: Bauhaus objects 228;

Lauterbach, Heinrich 74

designs 230; identity 240; law 238; legal

Le Corbusier 261

profession 249; medium 229; patents 227

legacy 54, 263

International Textiles 240

legal profession 249

Itten, Johannes 92, 107, 166, 233

Leistikow, Hans: Wohnung für das Existenz-

Jaspers, Karl 31

Lengyel, Kálmán 211

Johnson, Philip 239

LeWitt, Sol: Variations on Incomplete Open

minimum 69f3.2

Jones, Amelia 194

Cubes 163, 164f8.1

Judt, Tony 32

light 130, 143, 151, 156

Jugendstil 258

light display machine 146

Junge Menschen 208, 211

Light Prop for an Electrical Stage 154, 155–6

Junior Masters 210, 212

Lihotzky, Grete 51–2 Lindemann, Hanna 237–8, 244n32

Kalivoda, Frantisek 150–1; Telehor 156

Lipps, Theodor 262

Kandinsky, Nina 2

Loew, Heinz: Studies for Electric Advertising

Kandinsky, Wassily 2, 84 Kapp Putsch: Monument to the March Dead 167

176f8.5 London Gallery: ZVII 157 Loos, Adolf 63, 250–1; Chair for Cafe Capua

Katalog der Muster 49, 56n4, 205, 207, 215

251f12.2

Katalog der Muster, Bauhaus GmbH 1925:

Lorenz, Anton 239

Tea Infuser with Strainer 39f2.2; Tea

luxury objects 42, 55

service with Water pot 42f2.5 Kentgens-Craig, Margaret 28, 99n10

Mácˇel, Otakar 241–2

Kittler, Friedrich 5

Mäckler, Hermann 61, 66; Frankfurt Institute

Klee, Paul: Bauhaus context 106; bookbinding 107; Centrifugal Memorial Page 113,

for Social Research 62f3.1 male students 185

114f5.4; color-writing 110–11; Display

manifesto 3

Window for Ladies’ Underwear 117f5.6;

Mann, Thomas 31

freundlicher Blick 109f5.1; Hoch und

masculinity: Bauhaus 199, 200, 250; mili-

stralend steht der Mond 111f5.2; Once emerged from the grey of night... 111,

tarized 188; photomontages 184, 192; Theweleit, Klaus 186–7

112f5.3; paintings 105; paintings as

mass production 38, 52, 252

pages 106; Pedagogical Estate (Special

mass reproduction 4, 43, 51, 53, 250

Order) 115f5.5; Pedagogical Sketchbook

masters’ houses 45, 130; Dessau 46f2.7

113–15; pedagogical writings 113; square

material study (Werklehre) 92, 94

pictures 5, 108–13, 118, 255

matière 92, 93–4

275

Index

Mauss, Marcel 257

painting 5, 255; Painting, Photography,

Meadow, Leon 26

Film 108, 118, 127, 142; photography 125,

Meinecke, Friedrich 31

138; Photography is Creation with Light

Meyer, Hannes: Bauhaus 3; Brandt, Marianne

130; photomontages 184, 188–9; picture-

216; Co-op Zimmer 256f12.4; Coop Zim-

writing 109; preliminary instruction 92;

mer 40; director Bauhaus 13, 134, 211;

Production-Reproduction 53; readability

industrial orders 51; needs 37–8; Young

111–12; restoration of works 150; Staat­

People Come to the Bauhaus 247f12.1

liches Bauhaus Weimar 1919–1923 166;

Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig: architecture 252; Articles of Furniture US Patent 235f11.3; authorship 249; Barcelona Chair 241;

Telehor 146–7; use of color 147–8; Z VII 143, 145f7.1, 147f7.2; Z VII pre-treatment photograph 149f7.4

Bauhaus 231–4, 242n9; Chair US Patent

Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl 146, 161n30

1,791,453 227f11.1; director Bauhaus 13;

Molzahn, Johannes 108, 121n20

patents 226, 231–2, 233, 238; political

Monteurs 189–90

neutrality 239; United States of America

Monument to the March Dead 167

244n40

Museum of Modern Art, New York 22–4, 165;

Mitscherlich, Alexander: Our Inhospitable Cities 77

Bauhaus 1919–1928, The 23f1.4 Muthesius, Hermann 250

Möbelstoff-Doppelgewebe 236–7 modernism: Abstract Figure (Free Sculpture

National Socialism 72

G) 171; Bauhaus 67, 171, 248, 257; Bau-

National Socialists 16, 21, 186, 199, 200

haus objects 37; German reconstruction

Nazi Germany 229, 238, 239, 240

61–2; Greenberg, Clement 85; industry

Nazism 29

38; language 233; luxury objects 55;

negative prints 127, 130–3

Sachlichkeit 38; sculpture 176; stone

negatives 6–7

sculpture workshop 168

Neues Bauen 69

Moholy, Lucia: Bauhaus Buildings Dessau 134;

new media 143

collection of negatives 6–7, 9n10; Dessau

New Typography 107–8, 120n10, 123n31, 212

126; Katalog der Muster 49; Kugelförmige

New York Dada 193–4

Kannen 41f2.4; masters’ houses 46f2.7;

Newman, Barnett 84, 86–8; Adam 87f4.2

photograph 4; photography 2, 140n34;

night photography 128–9, 130, 254–5

Portrait of László Moholy-Nagy 189f9.2;

Novembergruppe 17

Stands with Tea Infusers 37f2.1; Typewriter on desk 1f0.1, 3, 262f12.6

objects: Bauhaus 2–3, 37; identity 6; patents

Moholy-Nagy, László: A 2 148f7.3 (see also

228; photography 2; status 2, 4, 8;

A XX); AL6 156f7.6; A XX 147; Chump,

theorization 259

The 190f9.3, 191, 198; color photography

Occupation of Germany 29

157–8; Construction AL6 155; designs

Offset 215

50; Die Arbeit der Bauhaus-Werkstätten

ornament 63

205; EM1, EM2, EM3 (Telephone Pic-

Ortega y Gasset, José: Myth of Man behind

tures) 142; gender 249–50; Katalog der Muster 49; light display machine 146;

Technology, The 74 Otto, Elizabeth 250

Light Prop for an Electrical Stage 151; Light Prop for an Electrical Stage photograph 152f7.5; luxury objects 44; masters’ houses 46f2.7; as Monteur 189–90;

276

painting: light 143; liminality 252; new vision 154; photography 137, 254; sculpture 252, 261

negative prints 127; New Typography

palimpsest 2

107–8, 110; new vision 154, 183; New

parties 195

Vision, The 172f8.3, 174; night photogra-

patents: Berger, Otti 236; language 233; mass

phy 128–9; open letter to Kalivoda 153–4;

reproduction 249; Mies van der Rohe,

Index

Ludwig 226; proprietorship 249; tech-

Sartre, John Paul 33

niques 229–31; tubular steel furniture 211

Schapiro, Meyer 85

Paul Stotz AG 50

Scharoun, Hans 73

pedagogy 4, 231

Schawinsky, Xanti 203n43

Pevsner, Nikolaus 252; decorative arts 259

Scheler, Max 80f3.7

Pfleiderer, Wolfgang: Form ohne Ornament 253

Schlemmer, Carl 20

photography: Bauhaus 2, 125; Bauhaus build-

Schlemmer, Oskar: Abstract Figure (Free

ings 133; Brandt, Marianne 217–18; color

Sculpture G) 166, 170–1, 172f8.3, 173,

157–8; cropping 170; Feininger, Lyonel

174; architectural sculpture 168–9;

134–5; Feininger, T. Lux 136; light 130;

Cathedral of Socialism 20; Erste Bau-

modernism 171–7; Moholy-Nagy, László

haus Austellung in Weimar 21f1.3; stone

127; New Typography 110; painting 137,

sculpture workshop 167; stone sculpture

254; sculpture 174; stone sculpture work-

workshop, Weimar 166; three-dimen-

shop 167–8; Typewriter 6

sional sculpture 172–3

photomontages 183, 184, 188, 196, 200

Schmarsow, August 253

Picasso, Pablo 105

Schmidt, Joost 169, 174; postcard 44f2.6

picture-writing 106–8, 109

Schmidt, Karl 250

Plessner, Helmuth 74

Schreyer, Lothar 107, 167

politics 67, 71, 76–7, 239–40, 257

Schriever 227; Rosshaar fabric sample label

Portmann, Alfred: biology 74

228f11.2

Preliminary Course 92–3, 127

Schuster, Franz: Style of our Time, The 71

preliminary instruction 234

Schwartz, Frederic J. 200; copyright 229–30

printed matter 106

Schwarz, Rudolf: Make things, Artist, don’t

printing workshop 212–13 production 2, 47–51, 52–5 Programm des Staatlichen Bauhauses in Weimar 16 propaganda 28, 32 proprietorship 249 public image 4

talk 66 Schwerdtfeger, Kurt: Architectural Sculpture 166; Torso 171 Schwintzer & Gräff 50, 215 Schwippert, Hans 70f3.3, 71, 73, 75–6; Werk und Zeit 79 Schwitters, Kurt 118, 188 science 27, 29–30

radio 27 raw materials 41–2 re-education 30–1

sculpture: Bauhaus 166, 167, 253–4; liminality 252; modernism 171–7; painting 252, 261; photography 174; three-dimensional 171–2

Read, Herbert: Art in Industry 254

sculpture relief 169–70

readability: Centrifugal Memorial Page 116

sculpture workshop 5

Reich, Lilly 236

Sedlmayr, Hans 72

reproduction 53

Semper, Gottfried 261, 262; Der Stil 259–60

revisionism 13

serialized production 45

revolution 17–18

sexuality 197

Richards, J.M: Architectural Review 254;

Simmel, Georg 206

Towards a Rational Aesthetic 254f12.3 Rittweger, Otto 43; Stands with Tea Infusers 37f2.1

Social Democratic Party (SPD) 77 social goals 4 Spirit of Utopia 64

Roh, Franz 155

square pictures 108–13

Rosenberg, Harold 85, 99n9

Stam, Mart 238, 242n7

Ruppert, Wolfgang 206–7, 218

standardization 47, 251 status 38, 52, 55

Sachkultur 261

Steinitz, Kate T. 190–1

Sachlichkeit 38, 56n3, 64

Sternberger, Dolf 73

277

Index

Stölzl, Gunta 201n12, 234

Veidt, Conrad: Different From the Others 195

stone sculpture workshop 165f8.2, 174, 252–3

Veillich, Josef 250–1

Streiter, Richard 261, 263

Verrocchio, Andrea del: Bust of a young

students protesting 205–6; Bauhaus exhibi-

woman with flowers 219f10.6

tion 79f3.6; Frankfurt Institute for Social

viewing 113–16

Research 80f3.7

visiting card: Bayer, Herbert 214f10.3

Surrealism 185 symbolism 13, 220–1

Wagenfeld, Wilhelm 75, 206; Kugelförmige

Taut, Bruno 263

weaving 234, 243n25

Tea corner: director’s house 46f2.7

Weber, Alfred 65–6

technological reproducibility 53, 54

Weber, Klaus: Portrait of Marcel Breuer as a

Kannen 41f2.4

technology 37–8, 154 Telehor: A 2 148f7.3; Construction AL6 155; international journal 151; Light Prop for

Girl with a magnolia 193 Weimar 19, 38, 126, 192, 261; stone sculpture workshop 165f8.2

an Electrical Stage 154; Moholy-Nagy,

Weimar period 16

László 146–7; Z VII 150, 158

Weimar Republic 185

textiles 237–8

Wenne, Anna 116–18

Theweleit, Klaus 188; Male Fantasies 186–7,

Werk und Zeit 78

194

Werkbund: anonymity 206; authorship 230;

Thorak, Joseph 187

Bauhaus 258; conferences 71; Darm-

Thüringer Allgemeine Zeitung 205

stadt Colloquia 65; Die Form 209; Light

trade shows 50

Prop for an Electrical Stage 151; Man

transference 5, 6

and Space 72; Werk und Zeit 78; Woh-

Triska, Eva-Maria 113 Tschichold, Jan 215 tubular steel furniture 210–11; Marcel Breuer 212f10.1 Tümel, Wolfgang: Stands with Tea Infusers 37f2.1

nung für das Existenzminimum 69f3.2 Werner, Otto: Architectural Sculpture 167, 168, 173 Wiederaufbau 66 Wingler, Hans Maria 220 Wölfflin, Heinrich 253

typefaces 213

wood sculpture workshop 167

Typewriter on desk 1f0.1, 6, 262f12.6

woodcut 13, 132–3; Bauhaus Proclamation

Typographische Mitteilungen 215

cover 14f1.1 workshop production 48

Unconquered People, The: cover illustration 27f1.5

workshops 47–52 writing 3, 106, 107

United Kingdom 234 United States of America 4, 24, 29, 84, 229, 257

Yale University 84; color instruction 97f4.6 Yugoslavia 241

United States Office of War Information 26; Unconquered People, The 27 Universal typeface 213 US Information Agency 32

Zodiac: Apollo in the Democracy 33 Z VII: critical attention 146–8; damage 143; detail: center dark red square cracks 144f7.1d; detail: gray circle with patched

Van de Velde, Henry 261; Kunstgewerbe­ schule 258

tear 144f7.1c; detail: inside lower parallelogram 144f7.1a; detail: lower right

Variant/Adobe, Red Front 86

edge of canvas 144f7.1b; Light Prop for

Variations on Incomplete Open Cubes 163–4;

an Electrical Stage 155–6; orientation

LeWitt, Sol 164f8.1

278

157–8; repair 148–50; Telehor 147f7.2