If Fiona MacCarthy were a less confident writer, she would have started her biography of Walter Gropius with the moment they met, a year before the great man’s death in 1969. MacCarthy was attending the Bauhaus exhibition at the Royal Academy, a landmark event intended to introduce postwar London to the seminal art school Gropius had founded 50 years earlier in Weimar. While British builders and manufacturers had spent the early part of the 20th century churning out Tudorbethan semis and stuffing them with mass-produced clutter, their Bauhaus-trained counterparts – Germans, but also Swiss, Czechs and Hungarians – had been working towards a sleekly modern “international” aesthetic in service of a Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) in which buildings and their contents were conceived as a whole entity. Here was a rational, functional and above all integrated design for living, as attentive to clear northern light as it was to the shape of a door handle.
In person, Gropius turned out to be pleasingly Bauhausian too: spare, neatly finished and, even at 84, exuding a certain shimmer. MacCarthy declared herself duly dazzled. Yet despite this, she chooses to begin her narrative four years earlier when, as the Courrèges-booted design correspondent of the Guardian, she was sent on assignment to Bromley to look at a chair. Not any old chair, but the Isokon Long Chair, a 1930s design classic that had been out of production for years due to wartime restrictions and was now being modestly relaunched in a furniture shop in suburban Kent. It was, MacCarthy says, like no other chair she had ever seen, being “curvaceous, fluid and poetic” and without a hint of chintz. The original advertising leaflet promised that reclining on the Long Chair was like floating on air. Having tried it, MacCarthy felt bound to agree.
But here’s the thing. This chair was not made by Gropius. While his intellect and aesthetic are there in every careful dip and swell, it was his friend and colleague Marcel Breuer who had actually put pencil to paper and made poetry out of Estonian plywood. In fact, over the course of his 50-year career, Gropius didn’t do furniture, and rarely even did buildings. Most of the iconic pieces that we associate with the Bauhaus – the Wagenfeld lamp, Marianne Brandt teapot, Anni Albers weavings – come with someone else’s name attached. Much of the great breakout architecture of that time – the Villa Savoye near Paris, Villa Tugendhat in Brno – was the work of Gropius’s associates Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. Even at the Bauhaus itself, the teaching faculty, which included Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Oskar Schlemmer, was always in danger of out-starring the director.
By introducing us to her subject by way of a chair he didn’t make, yet which could not exist without him (Breuer consulted his colleague and neighbour constantly during its design), MacCarthy neatly dramatises her point that Gropius’s real genius was for coming up with ideas and creating a context in which they could flourish. Without his dispersed brilliance, many celebrated artists and craftspeople would not have been able to make the work that they did. Nor would generations of art students have benefited from the Vorkurs, a probationary period during which they were required to master basic forms, textures and colours before moving on to specialise in a particular art or craft (Gropius was passionately opposed to any hierarchical ordering). This foundation year has remained part of the way art schools operate to this day.
Inevitably the stuffy burghers of Weimar soon decided that there was something strange about their Bauhaus neighbours – it wasn’t just the loud parties and the nude swimming, but the niggling worry that it was all something to do with Bolshevism (the Russian Revolution was a very recent memory). So in 1925 Gropius moved the Bauhaus 100 miles north to Dessau, and set about materialising the codes of the school’s mature style. The earlier emphasis on returning to medieval craft traditions was now integrated into an exploration of industrial process. Gropius designed a home for his school that was made from reinforced concrete, with glass curtain walls and a flat asphalted roof that functioned as a pavement in the sky. In the proper spirit of Gesamtkunstwerk, the interior fittings, furniture and lighting were all produced in his workshops.
So far so uncontroversial. MacCarthy deals deftly with the often-posted charges against Gropius that he was sexist in all the usual ways of the time: at the Bauhaus the girls did weaving, the boys built things and the masters felt entitled to try it on with anyone who caught their eye. It is when we come to the next part of the story that she is obliged to lean in and do some heavy lifting. Suspicions have always circulated that Gropius didn’t stand up to nazism quite as strenuously as posterity would have liked. By the time the police stomped in to close the Bauhaus down on the grounds that it was “one of the most obvious refuges of the Jewish-Marxist conception of ‘art’” (Gropius was neither), he had left the school and was working in private practice in Berlin. In 1933 he entered a competition to design the new Reichsbank. His plans were rejected, yet he continued to hope that Nazis might find something to like in his spare yet monumental work: not every fascist thug hankered after a Ruritanian hunting lodge. Instead of becoming defensive about any of this, MacCarthy points out that Gropius had always been a collaborator in the best sense of the word. His impulse was to reach out rather than retreat – a quality shown most obviously when dealing with the many lovers of his first wife Alma Mahler, widow of the composer. Rather than challenge the likes of Oskar Kokoschka or Franz Werfel to a duel (Gropius had served as a gold-frogged Hussar officer in the war and knew how to shoot), he was prepared to travel halfway across Europe to talk things out. Not only did this serve to neutralise some of Alma’s toxic flap, but it also meant he could add these men, several of whom were influential and wealthy, to his contacts book. The worst you can say about Gropius, MacCarthy suggests, is that he was living at a period in history when being a pragmatist could save your life.
By 1934 it was clear that even this head-down approach wasn’t going to work and Gropius and his second wife Ise escaped to London or, more particularly, to Hampstead, where they settled in the celebrated Lawn Road flats, that gleaming white complex that encompassed the idea of a “machine for living”. By eliminating unnecessary labour – there was a communal canteen and a shoe-cleaning service – free time could be dedicated to the things that mattered: clever talk, love affairs and designing the Isokon Long Chair with Breuer who had moved in next door. But Lawn Road was hardly representative of 1930s British architecture – indeed it struck many as an abomination – and the opportunities for Gropius to build his own work were slim.
In theory, the US, where Gropius and Ise moved three years later, should have been better. Not only had he expanded his English vocab beyond three words, but it was a place that seemed comfortable with its own modernity. All those grain silos and water towers would make any modernist’s heart beat faster. But the big commissions did not materialise. In part this was because Gropius was working at Harvard, a job that provided him with the necessary papers, a title and an income, but not much time to make new work.
The construction most associated with him from this period was his own house which, while exemplary, was hardly on the scale of the projects that “Mies” and “Corb” were squaring up to, including the monumental Seagram building and the headquarters of the United Nations.
In the history of 20th-century design, it is too easy to fall into the old trap of believing that modernists valued ideas and form – and more particularly ideas about form – over living, breathing people with all their warm mess. In this brilliantly recuperative biography MacCarthy provides the same service for Gropius as she did 25 years ago for William Morris. In short, she shows us the man behind the forcefield. Go to Ikea and you’ll see how much we still owe him.
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