BAUHAUS

REVOLUTIONARY HUMAN PERCEPTION

GRETA GINOTYTE ART2

Famous artists that studied or tought in BAUHAUS

INTRODUCTION
Bauhaus, the German art and design school designed in the mid-1920s by the architect Walter Gropius in the industrial city of Dessau. School, which began with a vision: the idea of creating a New Man from the disaster of World War I. This was to be a creature who, provided with all the senses and trained by the best artists and architects of that time, would be able to invent the present and the future of a modern century. A design house provided a meaningful location for the communal development of ideas about the shape to be given to life and the outside world, and itself stimulates constant reflection regarding its own extension and rebuilding.

THE HOUSE
The act of building a house, of making it into home, was sustained by defining elements of space and time and parallels the process of life itself. Walter Gropius and his colleagues wanted to change the face of their society, to erect a spectacular modern building which would be free of decorative clutter of the imperial era and which would above all point in a new direction. The last Bauhaus director, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, retrospectively expressed the matter with his characteristic precision: Only an idea has the power to spread so widely. There have been other great design schools at that time, but none that matched the 1

Bauhaus. Many of the most influential designers of the 20th century taught or studied there. Gropius and Mies van der Rohe in architecture. Marcel Breuer in furniture. Bayer in graphics. Lszl Moholy-Nagy in film. Oskar Schlemmer in theater design. Anni Albers and Gunta Stlzl in textiles. Marianne Brandt and Wilhelm Wagenfeld in product design. Working alongside them were great artists like Paul Klee, Josef Albers and Wassily Kandinsky. One of the reasons to a great success of Bauhaus could be the Gropius attempt to create not only different products, but the different home space for creation. In the spirit of the German guild tradition, to emphasize the work, i.e. the products to be created, the term Bauhaus referred back to an even earlier period that is the medieval Bauhtten and emphasized not so much the products to be created as the social and spiritual community of the creators. The guiding idea behind the Bauhaus was a thoroughgoing Romantic desires for unity and harmony in autonomous shared work dedicated solely to art and faith.

REVOLUTIONARY CHILD
The Bauhaus was the child of an age that felt itself to be revolutionary. For many Germans who had lived through World War I and the collapse of Empire, Nietzsches re-evaluation of the values had become a reality. Not a few of them took the view that the old middle-class world of industrialism and militarism with its aristocratic elite had destroyed itself, along with its own inner contradictions. Everywhere, the ideas of the Russian October Revolution exciting visions of the renewal of society were spread. The end of the old and the creation of the new now seemed possible, and there were many who felt that they were called to be leaders in the construction of a better future. Since the turn of the century, an aesthetic movement had included philosophy, educational theory and innumerable varieties of Lebensreform movements in support of a better lifestyle. Jugendstil and Art Nouveau laid the basis for all branches of modernism. The historicism of the older generation, the masculine cult of the ego in the founding years of economic growth following Germanys unification in 1871, the moral constraints if respectable society and the rationalism of positivistic philosophy these had been followed in the special field of art, long before World War I, by a generation that took up the causes of pure feeling, authenticity, experience, expression and as a substitute for religion a more universal symbolic way of thinking and feeling. It could be said that the political hopes of renewal after World War I had been preceded by the artistic and aesthetic blueprints of an entire generation. These blueprints had in common the elementary opinion of a union of art and life. In particular, the academic distinction between high art and applied art came increasingly to be regarded as outdated and gave rise to plans entirely in the spirit of Jugendstil, which from the beginning had casted the separation of art and craft to make separately the old academies or to combine them with craft schools. This seemed an obvious thing to do since by then the craft schools that had been established in the 1870s and 2

1880s had rapidly overtaken the traditional academies in terms of modernity and international orientation and even before the turn of the century were quite often provided by really gifted students. The industrial revolution made it clear at the beginning of the nineteenth century that along with the development of an economic principle driven by individual egoism; the hope for a harmonious society was ultimately crushed. The artists responded by retreating into their circles and the bohemian cult. The opinion reaching back to the Romantic era, that the real artist was an outsider on the edge of society remained fixed as a clich well into the twentieth century.

ART AND SOCIETY

The replacement of manual work by modern machine technology, and the consequent end of individual craftsmanship with its roots in society and culture, became symptoms of growing social contradictions. By upgrading the artistic component in craft work, the nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement attempted to preserve an ideal of the original unity of art and life, and to uphold the dignity of individual human labor within the limited sphere of domestic and lifestyle culture. In Germany struggling for markets for its goods, this was soon followed by an alliance between the aesthetic reformers and industry. Good form was adopted as the Werkbunds slogan. Its characteristics were defined as quality and functionalism the functional conception of the item in question was completely classified in its perfection of construction free of sufficient ornament. This identity of form and content led the style of the Werkbund to become an early kind of functionalism. The object, the specific benefit, was to acquire a necessary validity for itself and, with its total functionality, to constitute a seamless unity with all the other shapes and forms of its surroundings from sofa cushion to urban construction. In 1914 there were discussions within the Werkbund over including furniture production in the move away from individual artistic design in favor of machine-produced type furniture, in line with the technological manufacture of goods. In accordance with the criterion of good form, any individual ornamentation of particular items, any creative license of playful extravagance such as was on offer from international Art Nouveau, particularly from French arts and crafts, which occupied a leading position throughout the world and which to some extent were still working with rococo forms, came under suspicion of luxury and bad taste.

NEW PERCEPTION OF LOOKS

Gropius pleaded without doubt for artistic, indeed poetic elaboration of technological forms, and indeed of such a kind that the model would be provided not by the bare bones of structure but by a new formal totality: All inessential details are subordinated to a great, simple representational form which 3

finally, when its definitive shape has been found, must constitute the symbolic expression of the inner meaning of the modern artifact automobile and railroad, steamship and sailing yacht, airship and aircraft have, through form, become symbols of speed. Their lucid appearance can be taken in at a glance and no longer in any way suggests the complexity of the technological organism. In them, technological form and artistic form have become a close organic unity. The quote is taken from early Gropius works and it can be seen that the man was tinged with Futurism and was about revealing an independent individual artistic personality.

FRESH ENERGY
There was a strong contrast between Bauhaus and Nietzsches followers nihilists at that time. The Bauhaus was a one of those progressive movements, hopeful, youthful and utopian, which wished to replace the dominance of the old order (which had been nihilistically destroyed) with fresh energies. Gropius said in his inaugural manifesto of 1919, We must all return to craft work. Historically speaking the beginnings of the Bauhaus appears to hark back to the age of Romantic hopes of national unity. In 1918-1919 the return to handicrafts did indeed appear imminent as never before. The world war and the demand by the victorious powers for reparations had devastated German industry so completely that it was thought that Germanys economy would be reduced to pre-industrial conditions for many decades to come. At first the situation in 1919s made it seem perfectly possible for artists to become a creative force within the people. This aspect linked the aspirations of the early Bauhaus with other avant-garde movements as well, the most extreme positions being taken by the De Stijl movement in Holland and the Russian Constructivists. From 1922 Gropius started to use the phrase that was to become closely linked with the Bauhaus idea: art and technology new unity. The Bauhaus was not an institute for the study of the history and theory of technology: its pronouncements left entirely open the questions of what kind of technology was actually regarded as significant, what fields of application were involved, and what were the attendant consequences for specific design work.

NEW LOOK TO A BODY

Spiritual guardian Gertrud Grunow There is a thought that the doctrine of harmonization was a matter of temporary metaphysical confusion in the early days of the Bauhaus, and therefore highly suspect. Although this assessment proves to be fundamentally incorrect Gertrud Grunows work at the Bauhaus was the starting point for the development of a physical awareness and delight in movement that stand out in numerous photographs, especially 4

from the Dessau period of Bauhaus. They show young people enthusiastically pursuing sporting activities, convincingly refuting the wide-spread image of the sluggish, idle bohemian. Modern life, modern architecture and design seem to enter into a connection with a healthy, physically aware lifestyle. Gymnastics were performed on the roof garden of the Prellerhaus in Dessau. The body was liberated from stuffy gloom of club gymnasiums. Between heaven and earth: man in pure, limpid and harmonious motion. The perfect working of the physical machine had become a symbol of the predictable and natural laws of design and life. This feeling for life was never far from the surface at the Dessau Bauhaus. A healty mind and healthy body was the ideal in the late 1920s. Before long it was to loom over Europe in the form of monstrous idol, blond and blue-eyed, of German heroism, hard as Krupp steel, swift as a greyhound and tough as leather. However at the time the men and women of Bauhaus, despite or because of their obvious mental and physical health, joined the ranks of the outlawed and banished and were stigmatized as being highly unGerman. The aim was not only to train the body but at the same time to impart an experience of it which would be of direct artistic value. About 30 Bauhaus students enrolled for the gymnastic classes. It was said that students in this course will be presented as Bauhaus men and women trained in freedom Gymnastic team consisted of mixed-sex students, what was extremely dubious reputation to Bauhaus, extremely poor and had no chance at all to exist. In these circumstances all the woman students were changed into man officially on a paper so that team could exist. In any event, and despite such initiatives, sport at Bauhaus remained a dream for the time being and student sporting activity was left to the ingenuity of the individual. The main problem was that, like all public institutions, the gymnasium where students had gymnastic lectures was suffering from the acute postwar coal shortage and had to keep closed during the winter months. Gropiuss aim of educating people in a communal way of life as the shared basis for a new art certainly included physical education. The concept of the body in the early Weimar years was based on current postwar metaphysical, religious ideas. this The direct connection between physical and mental harmony as the basis of creative potential was also the theoretical center of the preliminary course in Weimar.

GERTRUD GRUNOW WITCH OF BAUHAUS

Gertrud Grunow provided a draft program for harmonizing the personality by means of sound, color and movement. The starting point of Grunows theories was the discovery of a fundamental relationship between musical notes and body movements or postures. From her observations, Grunow, who was a trained singing teacher, deduced that movement followed, with the fixity of a natural law, the enhanced internal perception of color or sound. The aim was to create a sense of balance by way of the inner experience of sound and color that is to say to bring harmony and order into mans vital powers. Although 5

harmonization theory pursued the same aims as the Bauhaus preliminary course, the intention was that after completing the course the student should be able to select the workshop that suited him or her with the objective of discovering and developing specific talents. Gertrud Grunow transferred the connection between color and music to the qualities of materials and integrated the development of a feeling for materials into the logical sequence of synaesthetic laws. This landed Grunow with an enormous workload because not only were her classes attended by students taking the preliminary course, but harmonization theory also continued to be taught as a subsidiary subject throughout the entire duration of the Bauhaus course. This meant that she was teaching every day from 8 oclock in the morning until the evening hours. In general, Gertrud Grunow operated outside the fixed organizational structure of the Bauhaus. Although she taught at school only for 3 years, her harmonization theory was mentioned in the college statutes. The integration of this unusual subject into the otherwise consistent division of Bauhaus teaching into the two areas of form theory and work theory evidently caused considerable difficulty. After the first presentation of her harmonization theory at Bauhaus, she became person the Weimar public most loved to hate. She received plenty of criticism and was accused of illegal methods of hypnotic shock treatment, so branding her as dangerous criminal. In May 1924 the newspaper Weimarer Zeitung was able to report on the dreadful consequences of harmonization theory: the method of teaching seemed so to affect the pupils nerves that medical help was needed for frequent fainting fits and convulsions. Indeed, in one well-known case the victim of this method ended up fit only for the lunatic asylum (quated from Cornelius Steckner, Zur Asthetik des Bauhauses, Stuttgart, 1985, p. 53). Graphic work created by Johannes Itten named Breath in, breath out with the words The body, an equal in the trinity formed with mind and soul. It must be treated cleanly. Easy breathing was regarded as a prerequisite for the harmonious inteJohannes Itten Breath in, breath out

gration of life, experience, knowledge and creativity. Taking as his starting point the body, as it tenses and relaxes during breathing. Picture reminds of De Stijl movement design because of main geometrical forms 6

used to create the letters and the background and consistence of 3 main colors red, yellow and blue. As De Stijl movement focused on these basics of shapes and colors, picture could be interpreted as focus on the basis of art, leaving all unnecessary details and focusing on work with mind control and body. Birds drawn in a picture symbolize freedom of mind. One of the two birds is flying down as it could be interpreted as the breath taken in when focusing on mind and the other flying up could be interpreted as breath taken out. Clock at the top of the picture could symbolize sun, time flow, eternity because of four the same length arrows, what could be interpreted as disappearance of time. From a first look it could seem that there is chaos in a picture, but after analyzing it, an order and harmony could be found.

WOMEN FREEDOM IN BAUHAUS

The Bauhaus is to this day still regarded as the nucleus of the early 20th century German avant-garde, including relations between the sexes. There are memoirs that give detailed descriptions of life and love in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin. Although art historians have succumbed to the glamour of the period and the aura of famous artists at the college, in most cases they have not looked closely enough, and the myth remained unchallenged for a long time, the picture is now changing and the Bauhaus need no longer be made to serve as an exemplary component of the first German democracy, but may be allowed to show its dark side that women, of whom there were a considerable number, around a third of the Bauhaus membership, were particularly to be found. They all came to the BauErich Consemller, Marcel Breuer accompanied by his harem of Bauhaus woman

haus expecting to be able to take full

advantage there of the new opportunities for women. The democratic constitution of the Weimar Republic guaranteed women the right to study and vote for the first time. During the war, on the home front, they had replaced the men who had been called up in many areas, and had thereby acquired a new self-confidence. Even if demobilization proved a reverse for many, they had still experienced enough to know that the so-called weaker sex could hold its own alongside men. In the process the roles of sexes became very clear, and in cultural life they provided plenty of material for amusement. In the postwar period, women in suits or uniform possessed for both sexes an androgynous charm, admirably personified by Marlene Di7

etrich. War had, in part, modernized society. In this period there were a large number of new occupations for women to choose from. It had now become possible for women to become a doctor, scientist, professor or lawyer, a broad class of lower-level salaried employees had come into being, including secretaries, salesgirls, female telephonists and office workers. Women were at last able to prove that they could combine competence with femininity. Despite all the qualities, gender-specific role models remained relatively stable, the image of the housewife and mother retaining its unquestioned validity. Woman at the Bauhaus also had to prove the ability to combine competence with femininity. In early months, few people were delighted to find such a high proportion of women at the college. The female students at the two previous colleges, the Grand Ducal School of Fine Art and the Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts, had had those institutions almost to themselves during World War I. But now they were confronted with the young men returning from the war. The Bauhaus became live of activities; there were lively discussions about the meaning of life, the laws of art and the universe. After the war, the young men who returned home were highly motivated to make something of their lives, but in some cases they also badly lacked a sense of direction. In the founding director Walter Gropius the students found a willing listener to their questions and problems. At the Bauhaus it was soon realized that the war had been a crucial experience which the two sexes had lived through in very different ways. Gropius wanted to forge a closer unity among the students, in that way many parties were arranged at various occasions. Marianne Brandt Helfen Sie mit!

Marianne Brandt created photocollage Helfen Sie mit! (eng. Join and help!) on which backside was written Die Frauenbewegte (The woman moved). Picture analyses social problems at the time. Photocollage analysis women right problem, in the middle there is a woman dressed as that time usual man, wearing big white hat with a ribbon and glasses also smoking a pipe. This kind of look was revolutionary in that time, showed eccentric side of a woman, raised debates. In a collage could be seen massive world problems, clouds of fumes symbolizing horror of war and cemetery field with black crosses, symbolizing deaths of men soldiers at the war with a sentence asking to come to help could show that women were left alone without men and now they need approval, rights to survive. Photo of woman sculpture what can be seen obviously from breasts with an aureole around the head symbolizes that time has come for new sex to 8

save the world as a new messiah.

INTIMATE LOOK TO BAUHAUS

Bauhaus community was seen fit to adopt a blatantly provocative demeanor even in the most private matters. One need not adduce, for instance, the cases of Bauhaus people of both sexes disporting themselves naked somewhere in the great outdoors, and regarding this as so natural that they were not even surprised when other people somehow chanced upon them. Nor need one join in the accusations relating to those cases where such unusually free behavior of the two sexes together led in due course for the female parties involved to become mothers. The product of an utterly depraved sensibility and, furthermore, as the outcome of the destructive methods as regards teaching and upbringing at the Bauhaus, when such motherhood is also publicly celebrated with all manner of ballyhoo, when, for example a cradle is
Bauhaus students showing open relationships

made in Bauhaus workshops by the young men involved and then taken in a kind of triumphal procession to where the victim lives, as has been known to occur. (Weimarische Zeitung newspaper 1924) Weimarische Zeitungs serious appeal was published to responsible national-minded German parents to save their children from the Bauhaus as a shelter of evil, with the inevitable consequence of unwanted pregnancies. People liked to see Bauhaus as a radiant untroubled community of modern-minded young people leading a quasi-functionalist life under the control of reason and guided by brain. Love life couldnt easily be fitted into such concept. At the same time this image is continually obstructed by a confusion of legends and our own imagination. The members of the Bauhaus had to put up with accusations that they went swimming naked in the local rivers. The reason why people recognized Bauhaus students was that sometimes girls had short hair and the boys - long ones, or no hair at all and that was proven enough. To move about freely, naked, out of doors was extremely offensive to the inhabitants of Weimar. They had it in mind that the new director of the once so venerable art school had come in order to corrupt the young. In their agitation the worthy citizens completely forgot that in their naked gayety the men and 9

women of the Bauhaus were acting in the best classical tradition. It is hardly surprising that the people of Weimar took offense at the goings-on at the Bauhaus, for in the early 1920s their own moral concepts were beginning to waver. The Bauhaus alone provided bearings in the chaos of all the new, incomprehensible, unclassifiable movements in postwar Germany. Immorality or strict morality was the criteria by which any new and different lifestyle was assessed. It was a huge scandal if an unmarried female Bauhaus student gave a birth to a child. Of course, such an event scarcely distinguished the Bauhaus from the rest of society but the baby at the Bauhaus seemed to be a greater disgrace than the illegitimate offspring of an ordinary girl. It was hardly because the Bauhaus students were unbridled in the pursuit of their passions and were irresponsibly working to produce a new messiah. The difference between them and the ordinary girl was that the latter did in fact accept the role of the victim and agreed with the demands of society, that is to say as a rule both by being disgraced and cast out, or by marrying a more or less well-meaning representative of the male sex. In case of a Bauhaus baby, it was hardly possible to speak of a victim. The birth of a genuine Bauhaus child was regarded by the students as a joyous event to be welcomed and celebrated. For them it was no more and no less than the arrival of a new citizen of the earth. In contrast to the usual wailing and acting in such cases, the inmates of the Bauhaus bore the consequences jointly and, it is clear, with pleasure what was the real scandal. Maybe a trace of provocation did creep into the public commitment to this child: defiance and pride at standing so emphatically apart from the moral norms of society and basing their behavior on their own ideas of life. There was no hope of the public to be willing to accept this, a public for whom an unwanted pregnancy was a disgrace, a stigma. People preferred to see what was not there, to project any conceivable fantasy onto the Bauhaus, although nothing different actually happened there than the rest of the world, it just did not happen behind the frosted glass screen of typical middleclass people attitude. There is no information that there was such thing as special kind of love exclusive to the Bauhaus, taking a different form from that common to the human species. The Bauhaus inmates merely cultivated freedom and tolerance in their dealings with one another. In this respect they lived up to the often-invoked ideal of the New Man. Tolerance once was one of the freedoms claimed by young people when they described themselves as members of the Bauhaus.

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REFERENCE
1. Jeannine Fiedler, Peter Feierabend;THE BAUHAUS, 2000; Knemann verlagsgesellschaft mbH; 2. http://www.technologystudent.com/prddes1/bauhaus1.html; 3. Ulrike Muller; BAUHAUS WOMEN, 2009; Flammarion mbH.

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