see also:

The Bauhaus school

6 The Bauhaus and the New Typography
 

Chapter 3 discussed the unstable situation in German society after the disastrous defeat of the German military in the First World War. Reflecting the polarized political situation of that era, the members of Berlin Dada had thrust themselves into the fray, making political works that excoriated the foibles of the Weimar Republic (1919-33) as well as the violent nationalism of the nascent Nazi movement in Germany. The "Weimar Republic" denotes the democratic government based in the small city of Weimar that led Germany between 1919 and 1933. It oversaw an era marked by artistic ferment as well as social instability that was aggravated by periodic economic crises. It was into this volatile climate that Russian Constructivism was first introduced to Europe around 1920. Notably, one the most significant early routes whereby Russian Constructivism was brought to the attention of artists in Germany was through the efforts of the Berlin Dadaists. Several members of the group had joined the German Communist Party, and they hoped that a Communist revolution could rise from the ashes of the war in their own nation.

see also:

Dadaism

Dada and Russian Constructivism

In 1920, at the Berlin Dada exhibition called the "First International Dada Fair," the slogan "Art is Dead! Long Live the Machine Art of Tatlin!" was displayed prominently on the wall of the main gallery. Serving as a sort of unofficial theme for the exhibition, this idealization of Tatlin's Constructivist art had more to do with the Berlin Dadaists' embrace of Utopian Communism than with their employment of Russian Constructivist aesthetic strategies. In a similar vein, in 1920, Raoul Hausmann made a photomontage called Tatlin at Home (fig. 6.1). This work shows a man-machine hybrid, his brain made up of various industrial pans, including an automobile steering column. The figure's left eye is merged with a wheel from a car, suggesting that Tatlin's artistic vision is dispassionate and clinical, the vision of an engi­neer. In the upper right corner, a photograph of a ship's propeller seems to spring from the man's brain, like a thought bubble in a comic book. The photo is not an actual portrait of Tatlin, but a found image that is just as anonymous and impersonal as any of the other photographic elements. Hausmann later stated that he had only a vague notion of the guiding principles of Russian Constructivism in 1920, and had derived the idea of a machine-man representing Tatlin through an almost random process. At this time, the members of Berlin Dada were especially disgusted with the prominence in Germany of Expressionist an, which they believed was hopelessly subjective and romantic in outlook. Dadaists argued, somewhat inaccurately, that Expressionist artists loved to wallow in their own emotional tribulations while ignor­ing the reality of post-war society.

An influx of Russian emigres in the early 1920s, including El Lissitzky, Naum Gabo (1890-1977), and Antoine Pevsner (1884-1962), created a critical mass of artists interested in exploring Constructivist principles. Gabo and Pevsner were broth­ers who had left Russia for Germany in 1922 because their views on Constructivism, which stressed its aesthetic dimension, were not considered sufficiently orthodox by more politically minded Soviet artists. Combined with the high quality of the German printing industry, this influence made Germany the center of Constructivist thought. Theo van Doesburg's Constructivist Congress of 1922 served as an important touchstone for this com­munity of artists. Under the influence of Kurt Schwkters and Theo van Doesburg, Germany remained the focus for artists who sought to explore the connections between the Dada and Constructivist modes of making art. It should be noted that by 1922 the De Stijl movement led by Van Doesburg had been essentially folded into the general concern for geo­metric form in the 1920s that goes under the name "International Constructivism." International Constructivism, often called just "Constructivism," is distinct from the Russian movement of the same name in that it was not always associated with revolutionary Communist ideology. While it may seem difficult to tease out the two related strands of the Constructivist movement—and they often overlap—designs made in Europe including those by Russian artists such as Lissitzky (see fig. 5.38) are classified as International Constructivism.

The Constructivists concept of the artist as engineer had a number of parallels in Dada, whose members also rejected taking on the role of the fine artist because of its association with con­ventional aesthetics. The term "photomontage" in fact originated with Berlin Dada, who thought of themselves as "assemblers" (in German, a montage is an assembly). An interest in the potential of photomontage to serve as a tool of social activism united Dadaists and Russian Constructivists. It was important to Dada artists who wanted to make works that engaged with society to find a strategy that allowed them to represent the modern world in a novel way, without recourse to conventional realistic painting techniques. The Dadaists shared with the Russian Constructivists a sense that abstraction, by definition, could only communicate ideas in a limited fashion, and that it was necessary to reference the real world in order to convey their polemical beliefs.

 

see also:

Raoul Hausmann

6.1 Raoul Haussmann, Tallin at Home, 1920.

see also:

Expressionism

German Expressionism
 

Despite the inroads made by Dada and Constructivist artists early in the 1920s, it is important to remember that Expressionism remained a dominant force in German post-war culture. Before the outbreak of war in 1914, Germany had been perhaps the most important locus for Expressionists such as Oscar Kokoschka. The gallery owner Herwanh Walden had helped to create a thriving scene for artists who portrayed subjective, emotional states of mind. His Berlin gallery Der Sturm and the journal of the same name were essential purveyors of Expressionist aesthetics in cities such as Berlin.

 

Expressionist Film

 

The turmoil after the war naturally led to a situation where artists sought to use a language of feeling, creating a subjective sense of mood and atmosphere through their work. Some of the most stunning Expressionist projects in the post-war era were produced by German filmmakers. The government-subsidized film studio called Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (UFA) oversaw a "golden age" of German cinema during the years of the Weimar Republic. The largest film studio in Europe, UFA became internationally renowned for its Expressionist dramas and spectacular sets and special effects.

    The breakthrough film for UFA was made by the director Robert Wiene (1881-1938) immediately after the First World War ended in 1918. Called The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, this movie recounts the story of a gruesome series of murders in a small German town. Narrated in flashback by a young man who recounts how a hypnotist, the Dr Caligari of the title, and his zombie-like assistant come to his town and wreak havoc on the local citizenry. The Cabinet of Dr Caligari ends with what the film industry calls a "reveal," a dramatic new revelation that completely changes the viewer's interpretation of what has gone on before in the story. In this case, the "reveal" is the fact that the narrator is really an inmate in an insane asylum and the story is nothing more than a demented fantasy based on the doctors and patients where he lives. This story of a madman had particular resonance in post-war European society, where so many young men had returned from the trenches suffering from "shell shock," the term given at that time to sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder.

    The set designers of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari created dramatic Expressionist scenery, complete with distorted, illogical spaces and exaggerated, spiky forms (fig. 6.2) in order to express the tortured psyche of the narrator. Walter Reimann (1887-1936), Walter Rohrig (1897-1945), and Hermann Warm (1889-1976), the Expressionist artists in charge of the design, also devised fantastical lighting techniques that gave the film a forbidding atmosphere of mystery and violence. The highly subjective mood of the story is greatly enhanced by the compelling nature of their achievement.

    Posters advertising the release of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari share the aura of emotional distress that was depicted in the film's story, sets, and lighting. One striking poster was designed by Erich Ludwig Stahl (b. 1887) and Otto Arpke (1886-1943), collectively known as Stahl-Arpke. Their 1920 poster shows an empty room, the "cabinet," or office, of the title, with a lone chair before a desk with one burning candle (fig. 6.3). In traditional art, an empty chair often symbolizes a dead person, which adds to the poster's projection of unease. The chair and desk, as well as the walls and window in the background, are oddly shaped, their distorted forms suggestive of a world gone mad. The candle projects just enough light to make out the misshapen room, while dark shadows coat the edges of the floor and mask the ceiling completely. Stahl-Arpke had one advantage over the film's set designers, whose works were filmed in black and white; the poster artist is able to introduce a fiery palette of reds and oranges that complements the distorted space and eerie lighting. At the top of the poster, an odd assortment of hand-drawn letters, some nearly sans serif while others echo the blackletter tradition, sprawl topsy-turvy across the image in a shape that mimics the floor design.
 

6.2 Robert Wiene, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1919. Film still.

6.3 Erich Ludwig Stahl and Otto Arpke, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1919 Institut Collectie Nederland, Rijswijk, Amsterdam.

Metropolis

In 1927, UFA released its much-anticipated blockbuster science-fiction film Metropolis. Directed by Fritz Lang (1890-1976), Metropolis featured what at the time were the most expensive sets ever built for a film. The dramatic Expressionist scenery was populated by over 30,000 extras, to create one of the most spectacular film sets in cinema history (fig. 6.4). Metropolis relates a convoluted story about the social injustices of a large modern city, where a small elite live high in the skies in beautiful sky­scrapers while the masses of nameless and faceless workers toil underground in hellish industrial plants. This underground world of deep shadows projects a pervasive Expressionist theme of anxiety and alienation. Lang combined the basic theme of injustice with a love story as well as an Oedipal drama that features tension between a father and son.

    In the film's semi-coherent narrative, the administrator of Metropolis concocts a plan to defeat the leader of the rebellious workers by replacing her with a robot. This female robot is fashioned by a diabolical scientist in a frightening laboratory space that combines high-tech machinery with spiky, medieval architecture. In this way, Metropolis combined two themes that are pervasive in German Expressionism after the war; the fear of machines and the fear of women. In contrast to the technological utopianism embraced by artists of De Stijl and the Russian Constructivists, Expressionists offered an alternative view heavily influenced by the destruction wrought by machines during the First World War. For these artists, modern industrial society was a nightmarish place that portended a coming "dystopia," or anti-utopia, in this case a vision of a soulless, corrupt, and alienating future. While Lang shared the Constructivists' fascination with machines, he interpreted their effects on society in an almost diametrically opposed manner. The workers whose repetitive drudgery is a central visual motif of Metropolis perform their tasks in a mechanical way that resonates with the man-machine hybrids of the technological Utopians. Yet, their labor is destroying their individuality, transforming them into soulless automatons. Additionally, many male Expressionists such as Lang made works that project a distinct unease with respect to assertive women. It would seem that the "New Woman" movement in Germany, with its call for greater social and economic justice for women, was perceived by some as a threat to tradi­tional, patriarchal society. The emotionally laden language of Expressionism proved to be a perfect vehicle to convey these anxiety-provoking themes.

A poster by Heinz Schulz-Neudamm (1898-1969) for Metropolis uses an Expressionist idiom to suggest some of the major themes of the film (fig. 6.5). The angular, attenuated shapes of the letters at the top of the poster perfectly mesh with the visionary architecture and powerful beams of light depicted below it. This stylized, Expressionist title lettering sets the emotional tone for the poster, while the more pedestrian factual information at the bottom of the image is drawn with an anonymous bold sans serif. The robot woman that is at the center of Lang's narrative hovers in the foreground, confronting the viewer with a steady gaze. However, the chilling Expressionist vision of the future in a technologically advanced society was contested in Germany by artists committed to the belief that the machine would help Europe build a more just and equitable society.
 

6.4 Fritz Lang, Metropolis. 1927. Film still.

6.5 Heinz Schulz-Neudamm, Metropolis, 1927. Poster.

The Arbeitsrat fur Kunst

The political and artistic activist group named the Arbeitsrat fur Kunst ("Workers' Council for Art") played an important role in articulating the role of artists and designers in rebuilding German society after the First World War. Founded in December 1918 by the Expressionist architect Bruno Taut (1880-1938), the group was designed to serve as a think-tank where artists could help plan the new direction for postwar Germany. The founders of the Arbeitsrat, which included the art critic Julius Meier-Graefe, held strong Utopian beliefs, and many hoped that a new society would be built on Marxist principles of equality and justice. Taut, in composing the group's manifesto, asserted that artists would play a central role in terms of molding public opin­ion through the employment of the visual arts. He wrote, "Art and the people must form a unity. ... From now on the artist alone will be responsible for the visible fabric of the new state." This suggestion that artists were destined to play a leadership role in the political arena had often been theorized by Expressionist avant-garde artists; the dreams of the Arbeitsrat met the same fate as those of their predecessors, as the group never succeeded in making its vision into a reality.

    A woodcut attributed to Max Pechstein (1881-1955) serves as a son of visual manifesto of the Arbeitsrat (fig. 6.6). Designed as the cover for an essay outlining the group's beliefs, the image shows three people holding the tools of an engineer and a construction worker. Together, these figures appear to have crafted the words "Arbeitsrat fur Kunst Berlin," which soar outward from them. The spiky, abstract drawing forming a vision of stars and beams of light in the background is typical of Expressionist art. The subset of Expressionists with Utopian aspirations in particular often envisioned crystal cathedrals as a metaphor of spiritual transformation. Similarly, the oblique reference to non-Western art in the use of the "primitive" mask on the face of the figure to the left represents another key element from the repertoire of Expressionism. The use of the woodcut medium itself harks back to the medieval prints that were an important source of inspiration for German Expressionist artists. One element of the Arbeitsrat's vision for the future, its call for more collaboration in the arts that are to be the product of a close-knit community, was in fact rooted in an idealized vision of the past. Many Expressionists from the early twentieth century asserted that the medieval period had been a golden age of fraternal collaboration, when artists and craftsmen had worked side by side anonymously in pursuit of a common goal.

The membership of the Arbeitsrat was made up of artists and critics from a variety of fields, although architects in some ways dominated the group. When Taut dispiritedly resigned in 1919 because of the failure to achieve any significant political impact, leadership of the group was transferred to Walter Gropius, an architect who had worked before the war in the studio of Peter Behrens. Gropius eschewed direct political action on the part of the Arbeitsrat, instead refocusing the group on a visionary architectural plan he called the Bauprojekt ("building project"). This imaginary building was to serve as a center for the social and cultural regeneration of Germany. Again, the Utopian nature of the plan bears witness to the Expressionist roots of the Arbeitsrat—there was a pervasive belief in the group that Germany could be the site of a dramatic, if unspecified, social and even spiritual transformation. The Arbeitsrat soon folded as the violence and turmoil of the immediate post-war era did much to undermine people's faith in speculative, Utopian projects. However, two important themes devised at the Arbeitsrat would reappear in Gropius's later work: first, that the visual arts could play an instrumental role in the building of a new society; and, second, that architecture must assume a leadership role in the arts because it afforded the opportunity for the greatest aesthetic and social impact. Gropius's view of architecture was, of course, influenced by the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or "total work of art." He believed that the practice of architecture could serve as a centralized locus whereby all of the arts could be fused together into a new whole.

6.6 Max Pechstein, Arbeilsrat fur Kunst Berlin, 1919.
Research Library. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA.

see also:

The Bauhaus school

Weimar Bauhaus

 

In April 1919 in the German town of Weimar, Gropius established an educational institution that brought to fruition some of the ideas that had originated with the nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement as well as those of the Arbeitsrat. In merg­ing Saxony's school of the fine arts, the Kunstschule, with its school of the applied arts, the Kunstgewerbeschule, Gropius was ihle to pursue a curriculum that collapsed the conventional hier­archy between fine and applied arts (see Chapters 1 and 2). The Kunstgewerbeschule was at that time run by the Belgian designer Henry van de Velde, who recommended Gropius for the job »hen he was himself dismissed because of his foreign nationality. Gropius hoped that the new combined schools would complement each other, with the aesthetic theory of the fine arts duJectically interwoven with the empirical knowledge of the practitioners of the applied arts. The majority of the students at the school were men, and Gropius actively sought to exclude women from most media and especially the exalted practice of architecture, generally restricting them to the weaving, pottery,and bookbinding workshops.

In naming his new institution the Staatliches Bauhaus ("National House of Building") Gropius indicated his conviction that the arts and crafts could best be synthesized thorough the example of architecture, the Gesamtkunstwerk, The neologism "Bauhaus" was intended to call to mind the medieval guilds of craftsmen that served as an inspiration for the school at the time of its founding. Before the First World War, Gropius had been a member of the Deutscher Werkbund and had wanted to design new, functional architecture for the modern industrial world. However, the trauma of the war drove him as well as many other members of the Werkbund to hunger for what they felt was a more spiritually authentic medieval past, in which artists had col­laborated for the greater good. Fairly quickly Gropius would revert to his prewar faith in the machine aesthetic and drop this Utopian nostalgia for the Middle Ages, but by that time the faculty at the Bauhaus had already been filled out with a number of spiritually minded Expressionists.
 

Expressionism at the Bauhaus

The Bauhaus was initially under the sway of Expressionist precepts brought to the curriculum by Gropius and two of his first faculty members, Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956) and Johannes Itten (1888-1967). Feininger, a German-American with experi­ence as a cartoonist, was given direction of the printmaking workshop by Gropius. One of his first works as a faculty member at the Bauhaus, the woodcut Cathedral (fig. 6.7), shows the strong influence of Expressionism in his work, as it is reminiscent of Max Pechstein's design for the Arbeitsrat, of which Feininger also was a member. Used as the title page for the Programm des Staatlichen Bauhauses im Weimar, the first publication that outlined the vision for the new school, Feininger's work portrays the insti­tution in starkly Expressionist terms. Here, the Bauhaus is portrayed as something akin to the Arbeitsrat's Bauprojekf, a visionary building shining such as a cathedral on a hill. Combined with the additional religious imagery of the brightly shining stars, this cathedral symbolizes the quasispiritual sense of mission that characterized the Bauhaus in its first years and which was drawn from Expressionist doctrine. The text of the Programm reinforced the theme of Expressionist spirituality that guided the new institution's faculty.

Let us create a new guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between crafts­man and artist! Together let us desire, conceive, and create a new building of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting into one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.
 

Clearly, Feininger's woodcut was intended to put into visual terms this concept of the Bauhaus as a "crystal symbol of a new faith." It is also notable that Gropius in the text touches on both the intended erasure of the arts and crafts hierarchy as well as the "new building," which will unify the arts in an architectural Gesamtkunstwerk. An acquaintance of Oskar Kokoschka, Gustav Klimt, and Herwarth Walden, Johannes Itten already had a long-established career as an Expressionist painter and printmaker when he joined the Bauhaus in 1919. His initial assignment at the school was to oversee the sculpture, metalwork, and glass painting studios, as well as to design and implement an introductory course for all students. This six-month-long foundation course included practical training, such as an introduction to different media and basic design principles, but it emphasized the more diffuse goal of setting free the innate creativity of students. Using unconventional teaching techniques, such as breathing exercises, Itten soon became a favorite of the Bauhaus's student body. Yet, more than in administrator or teacher, he was a presence that resonated throughout the institution. Usually garbed in monk's robes, his head shaved like a Buddhist holy man, he was a literal embodi­ment of the Expressionist view of art as an essentially spiritual activity (fig. 6.9). In the early 1920s, when Itten's student followers took to fasting and self-mutilation at their leader's behest, his colleagues became more and more uncomfortable with him. He resigned from the Bauhaus early in 1923.

In 1921, Itten oversaw the publication of a yearbook featuring Bauhaus works that he called Utopia and subtitled Documents of Reality (fig. 6.8). This idiosyncratic title is indicative of the hazy Bauhaus goal of making Utopian speculation into a social reality. The typography of the lithographed cover, by Oskar Schlemmer (1888-1943), complements Itten's conceptual speculation with its whimsical, intuitive design, which features an assortment of typographic elements drawn from Cubism and Futurism. The dramatic letterforms, an odd mix of outlined letters, expanded bolds, and attenuated sans serifs, are suffused with vibrant colors that appear to be derived from the palette of the Expressionist painter Paul Klee (1879-1940), another faculty member at the Bauhaus. Itten believed that form must always express content, and here his design is fully evocative of the romantic aspirations espoused by much of the faculty and many of its students in the early years.

    At the time of the Bauhaus's founding, the institution was forced to confront the dispute in Germany over the relative merits of blackletter versus roman lettering. As part of their Utopian belief in a universal design style, Bauhaus graphic artists focused on the latter, as they did not want to associate the school with German nationalist sentiment. Under the influence of the avant-garde, artists such as Schlemmer began experimenting with sans serifs from the time of the school's founding in 1919.

    The continuing dominance of Expressionist aesthetics is evident in a lithograph by Lyonel Feininger, director of the print-making workshop that was established in 1921. The lithograph was created as the cover of New European Graphics, a collection of Bauhaus prints published late in 1922 (fig. 6.10). The spiky letter­ing displays a strong calligraphic character, as the elongated legs of the letters seem to drip down on to the row of text beneath them. The form of the letter "M," in particular, resonates with the crystal-like forms of Expressionist graphics. The horizontal rows of text are decidedly uneven, as if they had been scrawled as part of a passionate frenzy of artistic inspiration. It was precisely this type of emotional impact that so disgusted the Dadaists and Constructivists who were beginning to congregate in Germany at this time.

    By 1922, the overarching Bauhaus emphasis on intuition and Expressionism evidenced by the prominent roles of faculty members such as Itten, Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) led to criticism by other members of the progressive avant-garde, especially followers of De Srijl. It is notable that Kandinsky, a Russian emigre, had joined the faculty in 1922, following an attempt to establish himself in post-revolutionary Russia. Unable to reconcile his Expressionist and spiritual beliefs with the nascent Constructivist movement and its reverence for political activism, Kandinsky had returned to Germany, where he found a refuge at the early Bauhaus.
 

6.8 Qskar Schlemmer, Utopia, 1921. Watercolor, silver, gold, bronze over drawing in ink.
Oskar Schlemmer Theater Estate. C. Raman Schlemmer Collection.

6.9 Johannes Itten, Self-Portrait. 1920. Photograph.
Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin.

see also:

The Bauhaus school

Constructivism and the Bauhaus

When the De Stijl leader Theo van Doesburg settled in Weimar late in 1921, he provided young artists with an alternative vision to that espoused by faculty members such as Kandinsky. Van Doesburg had numerous contacts with the Bauhaus professors and students during 1922, when he offered a series of lectures explaining the rational, geometric principles behind De Stijl and Constructivism. He also organized the Constructivist Congress in Weimar in 1922, which was attended by Lissitzky. Van Doesburg found a receptive audience among the Bauhaus student body as well as members of the faculty who were not comfortable with the prevailing Expressionist ethos. Oskar Schlemmer, who had joined the faculty in 1920 and soon became the head of sculpture in stone and wood, wrote about his concerns in March of 1922: "Turning away from Utopia! We must be realistic, and strive for the realization of ideas. Not cathedrals but machines to live in." Two exhibitions held in Weimar during 1922 that featured a preponderance of works by Itten's followers further reinforced the opinion that the Bauhaus was failing in its mandate to advance the development of German art and architecture.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

In 1923, under the influence of De Stijl and Russian Constructivism, the Bauhaus moved toward a curriculum that emphasized functionalism and a machine aesthetic based on reductive geometric abstraction. In the spring of that year, Gropius responded to the increasing pressure on him from van Doesburg and the Constructivists by appointing to the faculty Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), a Hungarian artist who had moved to Berlin in 1921. In Germany, Moholy-Nagy had become acquainted with both van Doesburg and Lissitzky, and he had quickly absorbed their knowledge of Constructivist aesthetics. Moholy-Nagy arrived at the Bauhaus during the same term that Itten resigned, and the young Hungarian quickly assumed control over both the metals workshop and the preliminary course that had been Itten's province. The appointment of Moholy-Nagy allowed Gropius to avoid feeling compelled to hire van Doesburg, whose strong personality and somewhat dogmatic beliefs threat­ened Gropius's own authority. The new direction at the Bauhaus also represented another response to the trauma of the First World War, as the leaders of the school emphasized the rebuilding of society at every turn.

Moholy-Nagy's influence was immediately apparent in the way in which he reorganized the preliminary course that served as the foundation of the Bauhaus curriculum. Assisted by Josef Albers (1888-1976), Moholy-Nagy moved quickly to rationalize the teaching of elementary design principles so that the focus shifted away from idiosyncratic spiritual values and toward the logical analysis of form. Promoting Constructivist principles, Albers and Moholy-Nagy made an understanding of new materials such as Plexiglas and steel one of the centerpieces of the course. The exercises that Moholy-Nagy designed for the three-dimensional section of the preliminary course became legendary for the way in which they enabled students to master the fundamentals of Constructivist technique. Students were taught to use the tools of the engineer, the compass and the straightedged ruler, in place of freehand drawing techniques. It is important to realize how these tools serve to distance the hand of the artist in a literal as well as a conceptual sense from the resulting work —a direct rejection of the Expressionist ethos that privileges both the artist's subjective sensibility and his or her masterly touch of the brush.

The concept of the artist turned engineer also resonates with the widespread adoption in Germany after the war of the principles of scientific management of industrial processes. The American theorist Frederick W. Taylor (1865-1933) had advocated the rationalization of labor in order to advance the effectiveness of mass production. After watching workers on the assembly line and analyzing the specifics of each movement and the time taken to perform each task, Taylor was able to suggest ways in which industrial workers could improve their efficiency. Taylor's principles thematicalty connect with the idea of the man-machine hybrid, enforcing strict rules whereby each worker performed a mechanical, repetitive task as quickly as possible. While critics saw "Taylorism" as another factor that made indus­trial work soulless and alienating, most people in the 1920s embraced Taylor's theories as another positive step down the road to a machine-driven Utopia. Just as workers must become machines, as reflected in a famous photograph (fig. 6.11) by Lewis Hine (1874-1940), so artists would become engineers in the coming industrial Utopia. The romantic view of technology espoused at the Bauhaus viewed Taylorism in this positive sense, and hoped to put its principles into effect in the cause of advancing German industry.
 

6.11 Lewis W Hine, Mechanic at a Steam Pump in an Electric Power House, 1920.
George Eastman House, Rochester, New York. Gift of the Photo League.

see also:

The Bauhaus school

Women at the Bauhaus

When the Baubaus was established in 1919, Germany was in the throes of reconstruction and dramatic social change following its defeat in World War I. The 1919 Weimar Constitution had stipulated an end to gender discrimination in many aspects of German life including education, so women were no longer to be excluded from publicly funded institutions such as the Bauhaus. Director Walter Gropius initially embraced this doctrine, telling a gathering of students in 1919 that women students should expect "absolute equality of status, and therefore absolute equality of responsibility." However, in practice Gropius and other Bauhaus teachers pursued a policy that channeled female students into craft-oriented workshops, mainly those teaching weaving, bookbinding, and pottery.

    The relegation of women students to such workshops only rein­forced the stereotype that certain artistic practices were innately "feminine" while others were uniquely "masculine." Such a traditional approach was somewhat surprising in an institution dedicated to breaking the age- old distinctions between fine arts and crafts.

    The weaving workshop—which became the textile department after the move to Dessau in 1925—played the largest role in women's careers at the Bauhaus, mainly because the bookbinding workshop was closed in 1922 and the professors in the pottery workshop proved resistant to accepting female students. After completing the preliminary course in the weaving workshop, students were taught by George Muche with the technical assistance of Helene Borner, who had previously worked for Henry van de Velde at the Weimar Kunstgewerbeschule. Students of weaving were inspired by the paintings of Paul Klee and Johannes Itten, and they worked towards making textile design a respected form of non-functional artistic expression.

    After 1925, former student Gunta Stolzl (1897-1983) was appointed technical instructor of the textile department, and she assumed the role of artistic director in 1927, a position she held until 1931. Stolzl became the first female artistic leader of a Bauhaus workshop. Embracing the machine aesthetic wholeheartedly, Stolzl introduced new modern materials to the students, including rayon and cellophane. She also established some of the strongest links between a Bauhaus workshop and industry, an original goal of the school that had proved to be little more than a pipe dream in many of the other workshops.

    Despite the entrenched attitudes that prevented women from working in a full range of workshops, a few artists such as Marianne Brandt (1893-1983) managed to overcome these barriers and succeed outside the weaving milieu. In 1923 she matriculated from the metal workshop, which had moved away from the Expressionist, fine-art interests championed by Itten to the Constructivist functionalism of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Brandt was part of a collaborative team that designed one of the Bauhaus's most successful products, the Kandem Lamp that remains ubiquitous to this day. With the departure of Moholy-Nagy in 1928, Brandt became artistic director of the metal workshop and, like Stolzl, proved to be one of the school's most effective negotiators, establishing a number of contracts with local industries. She is also remembered as a pioneering photographer.
 

The 1923 Exhibition

Moholy-Nagy arrived at the Bauhaus at a critical time in the school's history, because the Thuringian state government, which had provided financing since 1919, was demanding that the institution hold an exhibition in the summer of 1923 to justify the past four years of work. The relationship between the Bauhaus and the state government had been a tumultuous one, and it appeared that the exhibition was required in the hope that it would result in the public humiliation of the school. The government demand resulted in the "Bauhaus Austellung 1923," at which Gropius had an opportunity to display the institution's new, post-Expressionist, functionalist identity. Taking the theme "Art and technology, a new unity: technology does not need art, but art does need technology," Gropius used the exhibition as a platform from which he could turn the Bauhaus back to the machine aesthetic and the Deutscher Werkbund goal of providing high-quality designs for the modern world.

During the months leading up to the exhibition, Moholy-Nagy was instrumental in overseeing the design of publicity materials for the exhibition as well as any other Bauhaus graphics. In 1923, he devised a new logo for the Bauhaus Press, consisting of an interlocked square and equilateral triangle tightly circum­scribed by a circle (fig. 6.12). Functioning visually as an arrow in some instances, this composition displays the elementary geometry and dynamic asymmetry that are at the heart of the Constructivist aesthetic. Moholy-Nagy also quickly established an expanded sans serif as the typographic standard at the school. He was adamant that all typography must emphasize clarity over any other element, rejecting the whimsical Expressionism of Feininger and Itten. The issue of clarity is just one example of the overall "functionalist" principles that Moholy-Nagy established as the focus of the curriculum; each and every art form was to be evaluated primarily on its ability to perform its most basic task effectively. There was no room for decorative effects that jeopardized the core principles of a book, or a poster, chair, teapot, or building.

The Bauhaus's promulgation of sans serif typography proved to be one of the successes of the 1923 exhibition, as the Thuringian government hired a Bauhaus student, Herbert Bayer (1900-1985), to design new paper currency (during this period each German state government issued its own currency). The resulting bills were a model of sans serif typography, the letters and numbers set off by rectangular blocks of color to enhance their readability (fig. 6.13). Because of the rampant inflation that was destabilizing the German economy at that time, the bills quickly became worthless, as even their high denominations could not match the astounding rise in prices of that summer and fall. By November 1923, a newspaper in Germany cost 50 billion Marks, and Bayer's 2 and 3 million denominations seemed quaint.

    The dramatic shift in the style of Bauhaus graphics during the spring of 1923 shows how swiftly the students and faculty shifted gears to embrace the Constructivist trend. Of course, professors such as Schlemmer had been longing for just this sort of opportunity. Schlemmer's 1922 design of a man in profile, clearly influenced by the reductive geometric abstraction of De Stijl, became an important motif at the Bauhaus after 1923. Besides serving as the new Bauhaus official seal, replacing an Expressionist design, it was included in a variety of graphics including a lithographed poster (fig. 6.14) by Fritz Schleifer (1903-1977). An advertisement for the 1923 exhibition, Schleifer's poster shows a simplified design in which the profile of the face consists solely of four rectangles, with a red square indi­cating the allimportant eye. Schlemmer's original had featured hairline serifs leading off the geometric shapes at right angles.

    Another Bauhaus student, Joost Schmidt (1893-1948), designed an exhibition poster that is clearly indebted to Russian Constructivism (fig. 6.15). A tight oval shape structures the com­position along a dynamic diagonal axis; all the other elements of the poster respond in some way to this oval form. On the upper end, a circle filled with Schlemmer's man in profile is embedded in a circle that is itself embedded in the curve of the oval. Lettering that spells out "State Bauhaus" wraps itself around the circle forming the contour of the oval, yet the word "Staatliches" breaks away from the dominant shape, its form falling outside the original contour. In the middle of the poster, the word "Ausstellung" ("exhibition") cuts into the side of the oval, bisect­ing it. The simple red and black palette enhances the design, as it creates the same sort of point-counterpoint that governs the bal­ancing of the geometric forms. Schmidt's functionalist design anticipates the dominant style at the Bauhaus after 1923, and he in fact went on to become a member of the faculty, leading the advertising workshop between 1928 and 1930.

    Perhaps the most important graphic design to come out of the 1923 exhibition was the exhibition catalog Staatliches Bauhaus im Weimar, 1919-1923. Moholy-Nagy himself created the layout,