Jan. 17, 2010
BOOK REVIEW: 'The Bauhaus Group' Supplies Human Dimensions to Six Art, Architecture Modernism Icons
Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
Huntingtonnews.net Book Critic
Nicholas Fox Weber titled his book about six iconic Bauhaus figures "The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism" (Knopf, 544 pages, 16 pages of color illustrations and 87 in-text black and white illustrations, index, notes, $40).
He could have alternatively titled it "Bauhaus Confidential." Weber's book reminded me of the best writing of the late social chronicler Dominick Dunne, who died last year at age 83.
Weber for 33 years has been president of the Albers Foundation and writes movingly about Josef and Anni Albers, friends of his and two of the six artists profiled in a group biography that is probably the best one-volume examination of the Bauhaus. The school, which opened in 1919 in Weimar, Germany and later moved to Dessau and finally to Berlin before it closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazis, influenced art, architecture and design throughout the world arguably more than other single organization.
Founded by architect Walter Gropius as the Staatliches Bauhaus ("State Building House or School" ) the school, surprisingly enough, didn't have an architecture department for its first few years, despite the fact that it included two of the world's greatest architects -- Gropius and Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe -- both of whom are profiled by Weber.
Mies was the final director, and like his fellow architect Gropius, emigrated to the U.S. and helped continue the Chicago School of Architecture in its modernist or "International Style" phase. Gropius's firm TAC (The Architects' Collaborative) was formed in 1945 (dissolved in 1995) and designed many outstanding buildings. Gropius also assisted in the design of one of New York's most recognizable skyscrapers -- the Pan Am (now Metropolitan Life) Building next to Grand Central Terminal.
Gropius wanted to create a seamless institution that integrated all the arts under one artistic roof, and he and the other two artists profiled -- Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky -- along with many other talented masters like Marcel Breuer achieved that goal in spades. The Bauhaus style profoundly influenced modern architecture and also changed forever the parameters of painting and drawing, typography, graphic design, interior design and industrial design.
All of this is covered in great detail by Weber, who also provides intimate details about the Bauhauslers and their love lives, their friendships, their quirks, their feuds, their prejudices --- in other words, all the things that make humans human. We learn much about Alma Schindler Mahler, who was famously satirized by singer/songwriter/mathematician Tom Lehrer in his 1965 song "Alma."
Like her fellow native of Austria-Hungary, Oskar Schindler (no relation) Viennese-born Alma Schindler Mahler had a list -- of A-List artistic figures to have affairs with and, in the case of a select few, to marry. She started out with Gustav Mahler and married Gropius after the great composer died. After she divorced Gropius, she married novelist Franz Werfel and, according to Lehrer's song:
... that is the story of Alma
Who knew how to receive and to give
The body that reached her embalma
Was one that had known how to live
I learned that Swiss artist Paul Klee, to my delight, was a cat lover. Weber relates how Klee was asked by a train conductor for a ticket for the feline, named Fritz, who had accompanied him on his journey. Klee retorted that he didn't know there was such a thing as a cat ticket. Klee was devastated when Fritz died, a feeling this cat admirer reviewer identified with. Klee was also an inventive chef, in a Germany obsessed by food after the starvation of World War I and the hyperinflaction of the Weimar Republic.
Speaking of food, Wassily and Nina Kandinsky had a secret; they had had a son who died at the age of two in Moscow, of complications from starvation. At the Bauhaus he kept their tragedy a secret; years after the Bauhaus closed, Nina Kandinsky was found strangled in her chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland. The murder was never solved.
Not all the invention at the Bauhaus was of the artistic kind: Mies Van der Rohe was born just plain Maria Ludwig Michael Mies in the German city of Aachen. The son of a stone carver, Mies always competed with the more socially prominent Gropius and the addition of the Dutch aristocratic moniker was one way to boost his career in a country that was obsessed with social class.
Mies struggled on in Germany for four years after the closing of the Bauhaus in 1933 and finally left for the U.S. where he became head of the architecture department of what later became the Illinois Institute of Technology. He also designed the campus of the school located south of the Loop, as well as many iconic buildings in Chicago and elsewhere, including New York City's Seagram Building. Germany's loss was Chicago's -- and America's -- great gain.
Much of the narrative involves Josef Albers and his wife Anni, especially the latter who survived her husband by almost two decades. Weber tells us that while Josef Albers came from a working class Catholic family, and Anni Albers from a rich and cosmopolitan Jewish one, her parents found her so difficult that they told Josef they were thrilled she had found him, and that he could always seek refuge with them. Anni and Josef Albers were the only husband-and-wife artistic pair at the Bauhaus (she was a textile artist; he a professor and an artist, in glass, metal, wood, and photography).
Combining gossip, art and architectural criticism and very readable biography, "The Bauhaus Group" is a book that everyone interested in modern art and architecture should read.
Editor's note: Accompanying this review is a contemporary photo of the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany. Gropius designed the structure, which was built in 1925-6.
Publisher's web site: www.aaknopf.com
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BOOK REVIEW: 'The Bauhaus Group' Supplies Human Dimensions to Six Art, Architecture Modernism Icons
Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
Huntingtonnews.net Book Critic
Nicholas Fox Weber titled his book about six iconic Bauhaus figures "The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism" (Knopf, 544 pages, 16 pages of color illustrations and 87 in-text black and white illustrations, index, notes, $40).
He could have alternatively titled it "Bauhaus Confidential." Weber's book reminded me of the best writing of the late social chronicler Dominick Dunne, who died last year at age 83.
Weber for 33 years has been president of the Albers Foundation and writes movingly about Josef and Anni Albers, friends of his and two of the six artists profiled in a group biography that is probably the best one-volume examination of the Bauhaus. The school, which opened in 1919 in Weimar, Germany and later moved to Dessau and finally to Berlin before it closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazis, influenced art, architecture and design throughout the world arguably more than other single organization.
Founded by architect Walter Gropius as the Staatliches Bauhaus ("State Building House or School" ) the school, surprisingly enough, didn't have an architecture department for its first few years, despite the fact that it included two of the world's greatest architects -- Gropius and Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe -- both of whom are profiled by Weber.
Mies was the final director, and like his fellow architect Gropius, emigrated to the U.S. and helped continue the Chicago School of Architecture in its modernist or "International Style" phase. Gropius's firm TAC (The Architects' Collaborative) was formed in 1945 (dissolved in 1995) and designed many outstanding buildings. Gropius also assisted in the design of one of New York's most recognizable skyscrapers -- the Pan Am (now Metropolitan Life) Building next to Grand Central Terminal.
Gropius wanted to create a seamless institution that integrated all the arts under one artistic roof, and he and the other two artists profiled -- Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky -- along with many other talented masters like Marcel Breuer achieved that goal in spades. The Bauhaus style profoundly influenced modern architecture and also changed forever the parameters of painting and drawing, typography, graphic design, interior design and industrial design.
All of this is covered in great detail by Weber, who also provides intimate details about the Bauhauslers and their love lives, their friendships, their quirks, their feuds, their prejudices --- in other words, all the things that make humans human. We learn much about Alma Schindler Mahler, who was famously satirized by singer/songwriter/mathematician Tom Lehrer in his 1965 song "Alma."
Like her fellow native of Austria-Hungary, Oskar Schindler (no relation) Viennese-born Alma Schindler Mahler had a list -- of A-List artistic figures to have affairs with and, in the case of a select few, to marry. She started out with Gustav Mahler and married Gropius after the great composer died. After she divorced Gropius, she married novelist Franz Werfel and, according to Lehrer's song:
Who knew how to receive and to give
The body that reached her embalma
Was one that had known how to live
I learned that Swiss artist Paul Klee, to my delight, was a cat lover. Weber relates how Klee was asked by a train conductor for a ticket for the feline, named Fritz, who had accompanied him on his journey. Klee retorted that he didn't know there was such a thing as a cat ticket. Klee was devastated when Fritz died, a feeling this cat admirer reviewer identified with. Klee was also an inventive chef, in a Germany obsessed by food after the starvation of World War I and the hyperinflaction of the Weimar Republic.
Speaking of food, Wassily and Nina Kandinsky had a secret; they had had a son who died at the age of two in Moscow, of complications from starvation. At the Bauhaus he kept their tragedy a secret; years after the Bauhaus closed, Nina Kandinsky was found strangled in her chalet in Gstaad, Switzerland. The murder was never solved.
Not all the invention at the Bauhaus was of the artistic kind: Mies Van der Rohe was born just plain Maria Ludwig Michael Mies in the German city of Aachen. The son of a stone carver, Mies always competed with the more socially prominent Gropius and the addition of the Dutch aristocratic moniker was one way to boost his career in a country that was obsessed with social class.
Mies struggled on in Germany for four years after the closing of the Bauhaus in 1933 and finally left for the U.S. where he became head of the architecture department of what later became the Illinois Institute of Technology. He also designed the campus of the school located south of the Loop, as well as many iconic buildings in Chicago and elsewhere, including New York City's Seagram Building. Germany's loss was Chicago's -- and America's -- great gain.
Much of the narrative involves Josef Albers and his wife Anni, especially the latter who survived her husband by almost two decades. Weber tells us that while Josef Albers came from a working class Catholic family, and Anni Albers from a rich and cosmopolitan Jewish one, her parents found her so difficult that they told Josef they were thrilled she had found him, and that he could always seek refuge with them. Anni and Josef Albers were the only husband-and-wife artistic pair at the Bauhaus (she was a textile artist; he a professor and an artist, in glass, metal, wood, and photography).
Combining gossip, art and architectural criticism and very readable biography, "The Bauhaus Group" is a book that everyone interested in modern art and architecture should read.
Editor's note: Accompanying this review is a contemporary photo of the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany. Gropius designed the structure, which was built in 1925-6.
Publisher's web site: www.aaknopf.com
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