Bauhaus emerged from the ruins of a shell shocked and traumatised Europe. Blinking into the sunlight of peace after five of the most brutal and destructive years ever forced upon the continent. The seemingly unending nightmare of the First World War had left Britain, France and Germany bled dry, collapsed against each other like drunken fighters with no punches left to throw. The war and subsequent peace treaties had led to the complete break up of what remained of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, as most of Europe was torn into new countries, territories and occupied zones. War followed by pandemic had nearly wiped out a generation of Europeans while the economies of Europe had been stripped bare in the mutilating drive for greater armament production. The only institutions and factories left standing were unsuited and unused to peace.
From such destruction, the desire for change is inevitable. Driven by the belief that something in society must be fundamentally wrong for such acts to occur, people reached out for causes, leaders and philosophies that would burn the past. This desire became an ideological scorched earth tactic that would drive the following tumultuous decades. Russia, having suffered humiliation and starvation, collapsed into murderous civil war and surfaced as the first Communist state. In France the search for cause became a demand for vengeance as successive Governments meticulously crippled the German state, while in the UK the Labour movement gained power for the first time as they replaced the Liberals at the top tier of British politics. Radicalism even extended to global politics as nations attempted to build a new world order with a supranational arbiter authority to decide conflicts between nations. The League of Nations' lofty ideals were too great a mismatch with the chaos of the age to last.
In Germany, the destruction spread to every area of society and government but, more than these physical scars, defeat was a blow to their national identity. Despite being a relatively new nation, unified only in the previous century, repeated military success and the political skill of Bismarck had put them at the centre of world affairs. A naval, military, economic, and occasional colonial power that had shaken the European balance of power to its core, Germany now lay beaten and crippled as French and English scavengers picked the bones at Versailles. In truth, the German spirit had already been broken. The sickening, rotting, maddening anger at the very core of the German heart expressed itself in so many ways in these fateful years. From failed communist revolts, to attempted Nazi putsches, from the illogical belief in Dolchstoß, the stab in the back myth, to the sadistic compulsion to print money even as hyperinflation raged, this anger was everywhere. In every aspect of life, Germans sought to break down the accepted way of things to form something, anything, new. In trying to avoid a repeated destruction they engaged their most destructive tendencies.
From this obsessive desire for the new came the Bauhaus movement. An artistic and creative drive to try new forms, new pedagogies, new ideas and new techniques. The earliest works of Bauhaus are almost methodical in their abstractness, showing a consuming desire to avoid the usual, the pre-existing or the functional. One notable sculpture is an abstract relief design carved into the wood of what used to be a propeller, the machines of the great war turned into the products of new art. Master Itten studied old masters on a geometric level, the paintings stripped down into mathematical formulae or their images viewed through a prism of raw emotional resonance. Everything about the school was rebuilt through this mindset, even their timetables were redesigned to look unlike those of the past.
The geometric abstraction soon merged with the burgeoning constructivist movement and Bauhaus had its motif. Angular designs and bold colours brought with them a new modernism contrasting sharply with the annihilated buildings and muddy quagmire of the Western Front. The naturalism and curves of previous art was to be wiped away, Bauhaus experimented with a linear functionality building back up to the useful and practical from these new ideas and transformed basics. The school collaborated on a project to build a timber house in line with their ideas. Dominated by mesmeric patterns of geometric shapes and filled with functional if abstract furnishings such as the famous rotating bookcase, it was to be a triumph not just of design but of a communal and collective spirit as Masters and Students alike contributed their time and worked as equals to building the structure from scratch.
The desire to create a movement that could change how people thought about the world was now in full flow but the almost deliberately uneconomic minds of the Bauhaus masters were running into conflict with the ever collapsing German state. As hyperinflation ran wild and society broke down even the concept of money seemed to be under threat from the rampant destructive energy of this perfect storm. For a time the masters at Bauhaus helped design banknotes with ever more ludicrous numbers on them. The notes now sit comfortable amongst the more outrageously surrealist works produced by the school. With their funding withdrawn Bauhaus moved to the growing city of Dessau with new backers, responding to threatening economic times by shutting their productive and successful pottery workshop.
Dessau was to be the Bauhaus movement's crowning triumph, with their new funds affording them a prime campus location with the freedom to do as they wished. The result was to be an idealised vision of architectural modernity inspired by the school's founder and director at the time Walter Gropius. Sweeping away Gothic and traditionalists design principles, the Bauhaus Dessau's straight lines, sharp edges and clean design tried to create the functional and modern out of the design practices of their school. Designed with students as well as masters, the building is grippingly modern. This was the working space rebuilt from new foundations, and new ideals and was a towering achievement.
Elsewhere on the campus the master's houses were designed with new standards of living in mind. Simplicity, clean lines, and functionality were key as the Bauhaus sought to bring its design gifts to work on how people ate, slept and entertained. Light, tubular steel chairs, re-positionable lights, and sofas that could be transformed for more or less people were the order of the day. They believed with an almost religious fervour that the geometric designs of the future would sweep away the heavy, solemn furniture of the past.
These were growth years as Germany and the world looked to recover, and the Bauhaus turned their attention to even loftier ideals. Herbert Bayer attempted to create a universal phonetic alphabet and font to unite languages and people. Other masters focused on the idea of a complete art, one uniting all mediums. A theatre owner commissioned work for an automated theatre where the Bauhaus' artistic ideals of the stage could be played out. They already held their own entertainments and bizarre parties where students would have to attend in outfits according to a design theme. The Bauhaus branched out into clothes, and wallpaper, bringing their ideas of design into people lives and homes. The heady days were not to continue and the automated theatre was never to be built.
The aesthetic and functional movements within the school came into conflict with new director Hannes Mayer pushing the school to make a profit on its design radicalism. Some idealistic masters left, including Bayer with his unsuccessful universal font. But worse was to come. Just as the world thought it was beginning to recover it crashed again, first on Wall Street and then everywhere. Extremism was reborn with an even greater fury and the Bauhaus was a target.
In a deliberate attempt to de politicise the school Mies Von De Rohe became director but he was unable to stem the criticism and, following an unsuccessful move to Berlin, the school was forced to close under unrelenting political pressure from the Nazi party. Despite being denounced as “degenerate” and “un-German” art, the movement the Bauhaus created could not be stopped and its influence pushed well into the future. However for Germany a different kind of modernism was coming. The Nazis were also invigorated with the sense of creative destruction but their aims were much more sinister. The new tools and aesthetics of modernity, the autobahn, the Volkswagen, the Panzer and the gas chamber were their signatures as they attempted to break society down and rebuild it from the ground up. Where once the Bauhaus had attempted to use modernity to bring new design into functional use and merge art with life, the Nazis used the same forces of modernity to mass produce murder and push their death cult into the everyday lives of Germany’s citizens and victims.
At the Barbican's exhibition on Bauhaus there is a large section on the design and construction of the Bauhaus Dessau. The limitless hope that pours forth from the note books, publications, and design models which portray the new modern living is in complete ignorance of what was to come. It is enough to break the stoniest heart.
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