Reading Comprehension

The Bauhaus school, which operated for fourteen years across three German cities before its closure under National Socialist pressure in 1933, has come to stand, in the popular imagination, for the synthesis of art with industry — a programme in which painters and weavers and architects collaborated on objects that could be both well designed and reproducible at scale. The image is not wrong but is, like most images of this kind, polished by repetition. The school's actual programme and its actual products were considerably more various, more contested, and more provisional than the standard story has space to acknowledge.

The version of the school that has come to be remembered most clearly is the version of the Dessau years under Hannes Meyer and Mies van der Rohe, in which functional design for industrial production was the explicit aim. The earlier Weimar years, under Walter Gropius, were considerably more various: expressionist craft, mystical preliminary courses on the spiritual properties of materials, woven and lithographed work whose connection to industrial production was at best aspirational. The school's later association with the language of pure function was a development the founders had not initially planned and would have, in 1919, found surprising.

A second simplification concerns the products themselves. The famous tubular-steel chair, the chrome lamp, the gridded wallpaper — these have come to stand for the school's output as a whole. The actual output included a considerable quantity of weaving, ceramics, photography, theatre, and bookbinding whose place in the standard image is small. To reduce the school to the modernist chair is to take a few mature products from one phase and to treat them as the school's essence; the school, more accurately, was a sequence of pedagogical experiments under changing direction whose products varied accordingly.

None of this diminishes what the Bauhaus accomplished in its short institutional life. It does suggest that the lessons usually drawn from it — about design education, about the union of art and industry, about modernist functionalism — are lessons drawn from a particular phase of a particular school read through a particular postwar reception, often by writers whose own commitments shaped what they emphasised. The school's actual history is more interesting than the lessons; the lessons are interesting too, but their authority is not the authority of the school's history itself. To distinguish the two is the small but useful work of careful historical attention.