Exhibition Review: Bauhaus (2012)

Exhibition Review from the August 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

  “To create a new guild of craftsman, without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist” – Walter Gropius

It is apt for an exhibition about the Bauhaus, the Modernist architecture and design school to be taking place at the Barbican (till 12 August), that icon of brutalist architecture.

Architect Walter Gropius, inspired by William Morris, established the Bauhaus in Weimar in Germany in 1919 where he aimed to challenge the hierarchy between fine and applied arts, by creating art for the people, fashioning functional artistic products, and creating an aesthetic to counter bourgeois furbelows. Klee wrote it was “a community to which each one of us gave what he had.” The exhibition features paintings such as Kandinsky’s ‘Small worlds’ and Feininger’s ‘expressionist’ ‘Studio window’ and ‘Cathedral’.

The working class in Berlin went on general strike in the Spartacist uprising of January 1919 and armed struggle ensued. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) government (akin to the Labour Party) brought in Freikorps soldiers to crush the revolutionary uprising, and socialists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were brutally murdered. A year later, when threatened by the right-wing Kapp putsch, the SPD felt no shame in calling on workers to strike to save them. Gropius designed an ‘expressionist’ Monument to the March Fallen in honour of workers killed in the putsch.

The Bauhaus was part of a cultural renaissance that took place in Weimar Germany which included cinema like ‘The Cabinet of Dr Caligari’, the theatre of Brecht, paintings by Grosz, the Frankfurt School of Fromm and Marcuse, Hirschfeld’s struggle for sexual law reform, and Reich’s ‘SexPol’ clinics for the working class.

The Bauhaus exhibition features products from its workshops such as the Wagenfeld table lamp, Brandt tea services, Albers’ tables and Breuer chairs. Gropius drew up designs for the ‘total theatre’ of Brecht-producer Erwin Piscator. The workshops were ultimately making exclusive products for the affluent and not for large-scale manufacture. Gropius had not solved the dilemma that Morris had faced.

In 1928 Marxist architect Hannes Meyer was appointed Bauhaus director and moved away from aesthetics and artistic intuition towards functionality and building theory. He believed buildings should be low-cost and fulfil social needs: “the people’s needs instead of the need for luxury”. Meyer expanded the workshops on a co-operative basis to meet the requirements of industry: his aim, the “harmonious organisation of our society”, and interestingly the Bauhaus made its first profit in 1929. The photography workshop was established; Maholy-Nagy made his trippy film ‘A Light Play’; there was the Warholian Metal Party; and the Bauhaus students moved towards Marxism. Gropius had built workers houses for the Torten-Dessau estate, which Meyer extended by building balcony access apartment houses. Meyer also designed the ADGB Trade Union School in Bernau.

Meyer was sacked in 1930 because of the politics and went to Moscow as an architecture professor. Eventually he ended up in Mexico. In the 1930s he was an active participant in the discourse about suppressing the bourgeois concept in architecture.

The Bauhaus was closed in 1933 by the Nazis who deemed its concept as “degenerate”.

Steve Clayton