An idea made concrete

Was the Bauhaus the most inspired art school of all time or the malignant source of an uglifying industrial culture which has defiled our cities? Two books look at its influence abroad after 1933 when the Nazis put the jackboot in.

The Bauhaus was nothing if not modern — even if ‘modern’ is now a historical style label and the Bauhauslers were as trapped in their historical circumstances as we are in our own. This was noticed and ridiculed by Tom Wolfe in his 1981 squib, From Bauhaus to Our House, a book as bristling with cheerful spite as with clever wordplay.

Although not quite so simple, the Bauhaus was dedicated to the idea that the prospects for all mankind could be determined by engineering and metaphors of engineering. And its genius was Walter Gropius, not a Bolshevik firebrand but an officer-class Prussian so austere that a member of his staff, the painter Paul Klee, called him the Silver Prince.

One reason the Bauhaus became so influential was Gropius’s clever branding: something arising from a total commitment to his project. ‘Bauhaus’ was a new coinage, but evoked the Bauhutte, or guilds, of the Middle Ages which Gropius idealised.  It was certainly easier to export phonically than Gieblichenstein Kunsthochschule, a rival art school in Halle.

Another reason is that Gropius surrounded himself with talent: for example, he hired Kandinsky to teach art in provincial Saxony-Anhalt. Imagine getting Ronaldo to play for the pub team. And with great branding insight, Gropius published the Bauhausbucher, holy writ of modernism, laying down the law on abstract painting, Existenzminimum design and non-representational film as an art form.

Gropius himself left Germany in 1934, but first appeared in England in 1928, lightly disguised as Evelyn Waugh’s Professor Silenus in Decline and Fall.