Always a Part of the Present

All three of them left Dessau with or shortly after Walter Gropius, and their foreign origins helped them to internationalize the Bauhaus idea in the further course of their lives. Josef Albers, another of the young masters (1888–1976), briefly cooperated with the Gropius network from 1933. As a student, he had already used the formula “Historical or Present?” to describe the rejection of tradition and the past. True to this motto, Gropius and his team always wanted to be part of the present.

The social structure of this network barely changed over three decades: Gropius remained the leader, everyone was on familiar terms and the hierarchies were rather flat. The wives were not or only marginally a part of it. Competitiveness and conflicts between the members were defused and not tolerated by Gropius—even when an affair between Herbert Bayer and his own wife that lasted for years severely endangered his marriage.

The competence in terms of modernity shaped the team even after leaving the school. In the years from 1928, each had his own office, but the team remained personally connected through vacations, trips, visits, parties, letters and love affairs. Beyond these private interests, however, they also came together time and again to collaborate.

To see how the network secured orders for its members, it is particularly instructive to look at their cooperations in major exhibition projects: the exhibition of the Deutscher Werkbund in Paris in 1930, the Building Exhibition in Berlin in 1931, and even in 1934—after the Nazi takeover.

The changes that took place in Germany in 1933 did not mark a direct turning point in the history of this network, since its members had begun to disperse geographically as early as 1930/31: from 1931 on- wards, Breuer traveled (partly with Herbert Bayer) through Southern Europe and Morocco, founded an architectural office in Budapest in 1933 and found work in Switzerland. Moholy-Nagy completed projects in Germany, the Netherlands and England. Herbert Bayer was kept very busy with the artistic management of the Dorland branch in Berlin.

After Gropius’ move to the USA in the summer of 1937, Schawinsky, Moholy-Nagy, Bayer and Breuer caught up with the Gropiuses at a beach in Planting Island, MA. The network’s ties never seemed stronger than in these crises and transition years that were soon to be followed by the Second World War.

In 1938, the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized an (initially controversial) exhibition on the Bauhaus, the impact of which was to be of long-term significance. The catalogue and exhibition contained a section entitled “Spread of the Bauhaus Idea”, in which Albers and Moholy-Nagy were able to present works by students from Blackmountain College and the New Bauhaus in Chicago as a ‘continuation’ of the Bauhaus. Gropius himself had the opportunity for the first time to spread the idea that the Bauhaus’s concept of teaching was timeless. And Herbert Bayer, who was almost single-handedly responsible for realizing the exhibition, thus broke into a new career as a commercial artist in the USA.

The network didn’t take permanent damage until after 1945. Marcel Breuer had already parted ways with Gropius and the architectural firm, which they had run jointly until then, in 1941. Moholy-Nagy died at an unexpectedly early age in 1946. In 1947/48, Gropius had a falling out with Schawinsky. Herbert Bayer, motivated by his own accomplishments, wanted to step out from under his mentor’s shadow. But Gropius’ commitment to “his” Bauhaus never wavered: after the war, the Harvard professor’s authority in urban planning in the young Federal Republic was enormous.

Gropius also began early on with the museification of his rich private archive and made donations to the Busch-Reisinger Museum in Cambridge, MA on the one hand and the newly founded Bauhaus-Archiv in Darmstadt (later Berlin) on the other. One of the late highlights in Gropius’ life was undoubtedly the exhibition that opened exactly 50 years ago to mark the school’s 50th anniversary, which he once again co-curated with Herbert Bayer and for which he designed the catalog and poster.

Starting in Stuttgart, the show went on a world tour until 1971, laying the groundwork for the global recognition with which the Bauhaus looks back on its 100-year history today. Walter Gropius’ strategy of always remaining part of the present evidently panned out in the end.