Decorative Art in Modern Interiors [antikvár]

'Everywhere today the best minds are fifty years ahead of the official mind' Decorative Art 1929 George Adams 1919+50=1969 The Bauhaus was founded in Weimar in 1919, and lasted for only 14 years. Yet it influenced our environment to a remarkable degree. The exhibition '50 Years Bauhaus", now touring the world, provides an opportunity to assess what influence this unique school of design has exerted on the shape of things. Walter Gropius has written that when he was a boy in Berlin, in the 1880's, his family lived in a city apartment 'with open gas jets, coal-fired stoves in each room, including the bathroom, where warm water was heated for the bath each Saturday; that took two hours. There was no electric tramway, no automobile, of course no aeroplane. Radio, film, gramophone. X-ray, telephone were non-existent.' Between about 1890 and 1900 all these wonderful amenities and amusements turned from dreams to realities, yet when the young architect Gropius founded the Bauhaus, directly after the First World War, his description of his childhood home was still fairly typical of the domestic scene in western Europe. Industrially-produced goods were generally hideous, creditable neither to machine nor to hand. 'Artists' were employed to produce patterns for dies, moulds and blocks, with which to give the machine-made product a hand-made look in 'Renaissance, 'Gothic' or 'Classical Greek' style. The Bauhaus was heralded with a manifesto, an appeal to the artist to learn a craft and to abandon the class distinction between artist and craftsman, so that 'we can create the new building of the future which will unify architecture and sculpture and painting, to rise one day towards heaven from the hands of millions of workers as the crystalline symbol of a coming new faith.' No doubt the romantic language of the manifesto was influenced by the ideas of Ruskin and Morris who called upon the spirit of the Middle Ages to fight the machine-made, badly-designed goods of their own time. But mysticism and the influence of Expressionistic art, then current in Germany, hatl a short-lived effect on the Bauhaus. I was a student there in its early period and felt all the cross-currents which blew so violently through the school. Many discussions centred on the questions: should one make beautiful, unique objects by hand, or try to improve Man's environment by embracing large scale production, with the help of machines? Should one assert one's individual taste for shape and ornament, or explore the shapes and forms which a machine can most easily produce? The particular abomination of the Bauhaus was the 'Art Nouveau' movement, trying selfconsciously to create a new style for Itself, full of squiggly lines and ornamental whims. This was diametrically opposed to the idea of objective and functional design which emerged at the Bauhaus in 1921 and, once accepted, was enthusiastically pursued by its students. Marcel Breuer, then still a student, was dreaming of an invisible 'chair' of compressed air. Others were thinking of electric light without wire, which would not radiate heat and could be turned on to full power or dimmed at the touch of a button. Woven materials would be made from new, unheard-of yarns, and houses would be built with flexible walls, adjustable to individual needs. Utopian ideas maybe, but they led to the development of designs which could be manufactured at the time. Because the results did not depend on stylistic criteria, many of them have survived and have not dated. Abstract art and technology had travelled along more or less parallel roads. It now seemed logical, even imperative, to fuse the two. Therefore it was necessary to establish at the Bauhaus a grammar of design so that all students could acquire a knowledge of the visual elements—form, colour, proportion, rhythm—as well as an intimate knowledge of basic materials—wood, glass, metal, fibres. This was admirably achieved in the preliminarycourses which the Bauhaus pioneered, first under Johannes Itten, a Swiss artist, later under Josef Albers, earlier a student of. the Bauhaus, and under Moholy-Nagy, a Hungarian Constructivist painter and designer. After the foundation course, students entered workshops of their own choice in order to gain a more thorough knowledge of materials and their processes. The craft training was an essential stage in their education if, as designers, they were to be able to influence industry and create prototypes for mass-production. The second industrial revolution was on its way. In spite of lack of money for experimentation, the first products emerged from the Bauhaus workshops and were shown at a big exhibition in Weimar in 1923, designed in part to defend the existence of this unorthodox school against its many enemies. It was a courageous undertaking, since the school had started on a shoe-string only four years earlier, but Gropius, fired with enthusiasm and tireless energy, carried all the students with him. His motto for this exhibition was 'Art and Technology—a new Unity'. The show was a considerable success, internationally acclaimed and visited by 15,000 people. Part of the exhibition was the experimental 'Haus am Horn', designed by the painter Georg Muche in collaboration with Adolf Meyer, the architect. It was an attempt to build a 'minimum family house' economically, with all the essential comforts, central heating etc. The rooms were furnished with products of the various workshops, designed by the students. Also on view was Gropius' office at the school with furniture and textiles made in the workshops by the students. This showed clearly the Bauhaus preoccupation with ordered spatial relationships—walls, window, furniture and lighting, everything subordinated to the creation of harmonious unity in strictly rectangular shapes. Lamps and metal teapots were a little clumsy but became more refined when newer, better machines were introduced into the metal-workshop.