Inside Saarinen’s terminal building 1976

This year sees hundredth anniversary exhibitions dedicated to the Bauhaus. Of course, what they are really celebrating is its revised scholarly teaching programme along with the industrial design philosophy of Walter Gropius, who became principal, and his team and successors that included Josef and Annie Albers, Kandinsky, Klee, Itten, Schlemmer, Marcel Breuer, Moholy-Nagy and Mies van der Rohe. The original Bauhaus building pictured here was built between 1904 and 1911 in Weimar for the then Weimar Saxon Grand Ducal Art School which merged with the Weimar Academy of Fine Art and re-opened to make the Bauhaus in1919. Gropius became its ground-breaking head.

Ideas don’t come out of thin air, but as those who try to protect them through copyright actions don’t seem to appreciate, are usually born from what has gone before, reworked or ‘revisioned’ as it would be described in 21st century vernacular or just plain stolen and then evolved. Gropius’s Bauhaus successfully built on a century of thinking about design within the new industries of Europe and, to a much lesser extent, the USA.

It all began here – Ironbridge , Shropshire, England, heartland of the first industrial revolution

The years before, and even to some extent during, the first world war were years of the culmination of revolutionary processes that began with the English industrial revolution, indeed some time before that with an agricultural revolution. The growth in the 19th century of a middle class and improved manufacturing to service their aspiration led to a new wave of innovative retailing (the first department store etc.) and consumer goods production. Many of the creative innovations were developed and continue to be carried forward to influence us today. Well know amongst the many design innovators was the Arts and Crafts movement led by William Morris, but revolutionary thought of Freud, Marx and Lenin, along with the growth of compulsory education, all helped build new social movements. In Germany there was a clear move to build a philosophy of design and production as that nations industry began to overtake the complacent industrial strength of British industry.

In Victorian Britain there was an appreciation of the importance of design education and art colleges were fostered in every town as the centres of thinking ‘outside the box’ that would challenge the manufacturing enterprises of their geographic area to innovate. That these have been virtually extinguished in a Britain that no longer leads in research and innovation is a testament to the dead hand of the old established Universities and academic snobbery.

The original Weimar Art School built between 1904 and 1911, reinvented as the Bauhaus by Gropius in 1919

Whilst the introduction of the multidisciplinary art college was a revolutionary step forward, the truly revolutionary educational thinking was led by Gropius at the Bauhaus and teaching at the lesser known Vhkutemas school in Moscow. The influence of the revolutionary thought leaders like Lissitzky, Tatlin and Mayakovsky was strong and in turn was influenced by the work of Chicago architects like Welsh born Frank Lloyd Wright, leading them to a possibly fatal determination to build an ‘America of the Arts’ in Russia. Nor was this innovation isolated as there were educational exchanges between Vhkutemas and the Bauhaus, This process accelerated when the Marxist power sought conformity and artists left ahead of Stalinist terror. Nor was this thinking insulated as evidenced in the changing philosophies in the art world, where Picasso and Braque, Futurists, Vorticists, Surrealists, Dadaists and ultimate anti-art artists like Duchamp challenged the concepts of humanism and the primacy of religion. As H. R. Rookmaaker says in his book ‘Modern Art and the Death of a Culture’. Picasso:
                     ” had realised their quest for the universal…had lost the personal, the human, the real”
                             “accepted there are no Universals. The general, the absolute is non-existent.”
                                    “Picasso had dared to break through the sound-barrier of reality”

Kornhaus Restaurant, Dessau. Fabrics inside from Annie Albers workshop

The questioning of reality, springing from the work not just of visual artists but also a growing use of photography to reveal the previously unrecognised, was advanced across the field of human research such as in the photographic investigations of motion by Edward Muybridge. Revolution broke away from reality in literature too, shown in the writings of Lewis Carroll, which may have played a part in turn in inspiring the fantastical pseudo-science of Pataphysics espoused by Alfred Jarry following the breaking with any reality shown in the stories of Alice or the Jabberwock
                   “Far and few, far and few,
                    Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
                    Their heads are green, and their hands are blue
                    And they went to sea in a sieve.”