The Bauhaus aesthetic always drew sophisticated detractors. In 1981, Tom Wolfe, whose own taste in interiors ran to damask and lacquer, published “From Bauhaus to Our House,” a polemical defense of “coziness & color” and an indictment of the “whiteness & lightness & leanness & cleanness & bareness & spareness” of austere modern design. What bothered Wolfe most was the style’s erasure of affect, pleasure, and chance, subtractions that made a house into something resembling “an insecticide refinery.” It had been this way since the early twenties at the Bauhaus—the school, in the city of Weimar, Germany, where the aesthetic originated. From the start, Wolfe writes, Gropius, “the Epicurus” of the place, had insisted on “a clean and pure future.” Wolfe identified with Alma Gropius, the architect’s first wife. When Alma, a voluptuous and refined woman, visited the Bauhaus from her native Vienna, she was especially repelled by its high-minded diet of “a mush of fresh vegetables.” Years later, she remarked that the Bauhaus was best defined not by clean lines and pure materials but by “garlic on the breath.” [...]
Gropius’s personal awakening was abetted by a global one. “On or about December 1910,” Virginia Woolf famously wrote, “human nature changed.” Individual artists were suddenly granted the freedom to design the arc of their own lives. Collectively, this freedom inspired the consistent period aesthetic that we call modernism. In 1911, Gropius returned to his architectural practice and, with a partner, designed an astonishing building: the Fagus orthopedic shoe-last factory, in Lower Saxony, one of the greatest buildings of early modernism. Its shimmering glass curtain wall, a feature that later became essential to Bauhaus design, brought together everything Gropius loved. It made a factory feel as dignified as a cathedral, expressing the near-holiness of modern work. Like the radically inventive poems and paintings of the era, it synthesized new materials and methods in ways that somehow felt classical, as though art had leapfrogged over the nineteenth century, the sentimental world of Gropius’s childhood. [...]
The rational domestic interiors we associate with the Bauhaus—white walls, a few perfect objects, chairs and tables distilled to their essence—make the very idea of personal conflict seem almost gauche. There is no way to reconcile Gropius’s emotional life in the early twenties with the idealized spaces he created. His marriage to Alma dissolved, and her visits to Weimar were fraught, though Gropius loved to spend time with their daughter. In MacCarthy’s book, the storms of his private life tend to be tallied on one side of the ledger, unconnected to the goings on in his professional world. Later in his life, bantering with Frank Lloyd Wright about the importance of collaboration, Gropius was asked by Wright, ever the solo operator, whether he would enlist a neighbor’s help in making a baby. Gropius, channelling both sides of his nature, answered that he might, if his neighbor was a woman. [...]
The evolution of a single design gives a sense of how the Bauhaus grew. For his Model B3 chair—also called the Wassily chair, in honor of Kandinsky, who expressed admiration for its prototype—Breuer took inspiration from the elegant handlebars of a milkman’s bicycle, made of seamless tubular steel, a new material. He created an industrial-age club chair that, reduced to its metal frame, seemed to levitate in space. You could see through it to other, equally beautiful Bauhaus objects in the background. Like all the furniture Breuer designed for the school, it was also a collaboration: the school’s textile workshop contributed the seats, woven from Eisengarn, a strong cotton thread. And, as with many great Bauhaus designs, it is an example of materialized reasoning. It solves the formal problem of creating a substantial piece of furniture that is both there and not there. It is interesting from every angle, and especially beautiful from the back.
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