“Personally, I would have wished my successor quieter times, a less stormy atmosphere, calmer emotions and less thirst for sensationalism, in order to complete a task that we who belonged to a previous generation had taken up – i.e., the development of a new style. The College of Applied Art and the Applied Art Seminar in Weimar owe their origins to that idea and they vigorously promoted that goal … The State Bauhaus has been called upon to continue the work that was started. If it has now chosen methods that appear to the public to be too radical, it is because after the war a terrible anarchy of taste and a corruption of the senses through false luxury, spread among the ‘nouveaux riches’,have threatened to call into question again all of the successes achieved by our long efforts … In the deep conviction of these feelings, I have decided as the creator of these two institutions – the College of Applied Art and the Applied Art Seminar – which have been united as the State Bauhaus and now form integral parts of it, to pass on to you this conviction of mine.”[1]
Historians of the Bauhaus have in the meantime certainly recognized its roots in applied art and the academic world and view the institute’s development in this context. However, the important issue of the relationship between innovation and traditions at the Bauhaus continues to be an extremely interesting area of debate. Can we really agree with van de Velde, the author of the above lines, that the Bauhaus was the “continuation of his college of applied art using radical methods”? He is calling attention to a legacy inherited by the Bauhaus about which Gropius preferred to remain silent, and he himself is deliberately ignoring the Weimar College of Fine Arts, which along with the College of Applied Art also formed a significant component of the “heritage” of the Bauhaus.
The fact is that in the spring of 1919, the Bauhaus was located in the college buildings designed by van de Velde, and the new association included several of the master craftsmen from the former College of Applied Art. Fundamental ideas in its programme, such as workshop training and the economic independence it hoped to achieve through production work, had already been pioneered by van de Velde. He had supported ideas for the reform of art colleges and proposed that workshops for tapestry, embroidery and lace manufacture should be affiliated to the academies of painting and sculpture.[2] Van de Velde saw the engineer, rather than the artist, as holding the keys to a New Style. This seems to anticipate Gropius’s views, although for the younger man it was the architect who was the central figure.
However, Gropius’s appointment in Weimar suggested that the College of Applied Arts would be continued, as he was van de Velde’s proposed candidate. The two artists had attracted attention with outstanding contributions to the “Werkbund” exhibition in Cologne in 1914, and they had stood side by side against the defenders of standardization during the “Werkbund”controversy that followed. Despite this, and despite all the apparently obvious historiographic consistency of a development from the College of Applied Art to the Bauhaus, it should not be overlooked that between the closure of the former institute and the founding of the latter a world war had raged that created a fundamental change in conditions and made a seamless continuation of history barely conceivable. The reasons for van de Velde’s removal from Weimar and for the radical nature of the Bauhaus were ultimately political in nature.
In the four years between the closure of the College of Applied Art and the opening of the Bauhaus, the College of Applied Art only consisted of a few privately run workshops. The real organizational structures such as the statutes and curriculum, which the Bauhaus initially took over in 1919, were borrowed from the Academy of Fine Arts of the Grand Duchy of Saxony, which had been able to continue operations at least on a smaller scale during the war years. Almost all of the professors and students of the Academy were taken on by the Bauhaus as masters and apprentices in the spring of 1919, and the new institute was given the quite unwieldy subordinate title: “Former Academy of Fine Arts of the Grand Duchy of Saxony and Former College of Applied Art of the Grand Duchy of Saxony in Amalgamation”.
The process of appointing Gropius took place practically between the fronts in Weimar art college politics, and it required all sorts of diplomatic skills. There had been considerable tensions between van de Velde and the then Director of the Academy of Fine Art, Fritz Mackensen, at the time when the College of Applied Art was still in existence, and it was rumoured that these had even culminated in a challenge to a duel. Although Gropius had been nominated by van de Velde, it was ultimately Mackensen who negotiated with him on behalf of the Grand Duke, while at the same time attempting to have the applied arts subordinated to the directorate of the Academy.
In 1915, discussions were finally broken off at a point at which the candidate had been granted broad independence for his own college, organizationally affiliated to the Academy of Fine Arts. No reopening of the College of Applied Arts was under discussion. Gropius had already clearly stated to Mackensen that he would not continue van de Velde’s teaching method, as he regarded it as above all as formally disciplining and restricting the students to a single style and considered this fundamentally mistaken. In an early version of the Bauhaus’s letterhead, mention of the College of Applied Arts was even omitted in the subtitle – for whatever reasons.
Despite all they had in common and their broad mutual agreement, the generational difference between Gropius and van de Velde was noticeable even around 1914–1915. This became particularly clear through the outcome of the “Werkbund”controversy, which Gropius had hoped would lead to the “Werkbund” leadership becoming much younger, but which ultimately failed partly due to the mediated positions of van de Velde and Osthaus.
The situation in the spring of 1919 was marked by two trends. On the one hand, the re-starting of negotiations with Gropius represented a return to a prewar procedure that had been interrupted, suggesting a resumption of the “good” traditions of the “old times”, although admittedly with fresh portents. On the other hand, the programme of the Bauhaus above all corresponded to the emotionalism of the November Revolution. The way in which the new Director’s efforts in one direction or another were evaluated depended above all on the viewer’s perspective. Both the professorial teaching staff and also the students appeared to be open to innovations, but they had been largely isolated since before the war. It is therefore not surprising that the masters Richard Engelmann and Walter Klemm attempted to have Henry van de Velde appointed to the Bauhaus – although they were probably still assuming that Gropius in any case intended to run the college as a kind of continuation of van de Velde’s Weimar College of Applied Arts, which had been closed in 1915. Gropius’s reaction to his two colleagues’ plan left no doubt about the far-reaching changes the Bauhaus would involve for existing conditions and the extent to which it was to differ from its predecessors. Despite all his personal sympathy for van de Velde, Gropius spoke out very clearly against reappointing and employing him at the Bauhaus.
Both the immediate new appointment of Bauhaus masters such as Johannes Itten, Georg Muche and Paul Klee and also the departure of students and lecturers who were interested in an academic artistic training to go to a separate college in 1921 gave the Bauhaus clear contours as an anti-academic, modern institute and unmistakably distinguished it from its predecessors.
The founding of the Bauhaus was to represent a radical new start. Whereas the aim at the College of Applied Arts had been to achieve a harmonious whole in design, the Bauhaus was dedicated to the harmonious human being. Whereas van de Velde had regarded the students as successors, Gropius saw their goal as lying in the free development of personality.
In a letter to Hans Curjel in 1961, Gropius still vigorously disputed that with the Bauhaus he had taken up the legacy of the Weimar College of Applied Art, and he described this idea as a false interpretation of the Bauhaus concept.
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A theme year is being devoted to Henry van de Velde, the pioneer for the Bauhaus, in 2013.
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[1] Cf. Kathleen James-Chakraborty, "Fragile Allianz: Über die Beziehung zwischen Henry van de Velde und Water Gropius", in Anja Baumhoff and Magdalena Droste, eds., Mythos Bauhaus (Berlin, 2009), p. 37.
[2] Henry van de Velde, letter to the State Parliament of Thuringia, 16 October 1924, cited after Volker Wahl, ed.,Das Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar: Dokumente zur Geschichte des Instituts 1919–1926 (Weimar, 2009), pp. 393–4.
Bibliography
Ackermann, Ute. “Eine Allianz für Weimar? Henry van de Velde und Walter Gropius”, in Hellmut T. Seemann and Thorsten Valk, eds., Prophet des Neuen Stil. Der Architekt und Designer Henry van de Velde. Jahrbuch der Klassik Stiftung Weimar 2013,pp. 301–21.
James-Chakraborty, Kathleen. “Fragile Allianz: Über die Beziehung zwischen Henry van de Velde und Water Gropius,” in Anja Baumhoff and Magdalena Droste, eds.,Mythos Bauhaus (Berlin, 2009), pp. 35–51.