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30 May, 2019<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\nWalter Gropius\u00a0 had three lives: Germany until 1934, England until 1937, America until his death in 1969. During World War One, wearing a flamboyant Hussar\u2019s uniform that made him a perfect target, he narrowly escaped a rifle ambush and almost lost his life. He later survived the explosion of a mortar grenade, emerged from a plane crash that killed the pilot and was buried alive for three days.<\/p>\n
From April to June 1914 Gropius\u2019s monumental office building and modern machine factory for the Deutscher Werkbund in Cologne appeared in an exhibition that attracted more than three million visitors. Made of iron and glass, supported by pillars and decorated with a stone relief by Gerhard Marcks, it united industry and art. D.H. Lawrence, who visited Heidelberg in June 1914, may have seen photographs of this rather grim and widely-publicised building. He probably used it in Women in Love<\/i> (1920) as the mysterious and hitherto unidentified model for Loerke\u2019s sinister factory frieze in Cologne. Gropius conceived his building as an \u201catonement\u201d for modern mechanised life. Lawrence thought the building epitomised modern warfare and emphasised the stark and soulless aspects of the design.<\/p>\n
Gropius\u2019s greatest achievement was the creation in 1919 of the Bauhaus art school which, MacCarthy writes, \u201cplayed a crucial role in the development of European modernism in the years between the wars\u201d. He recruited an outstanding faculty that included Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Marcel Breuer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Lyonel Feininger and Josef Albers. Gropius\u2019s concept of Gesamtkunstwerk<\/i> inspired practical training in pottery, carpentry, metalwork and weaving\u2014along with nude swimming and free love. The apostle of rationality and clean lines fused art and craft, technology and industry. Robert Oppenheimer, who directed research for the atomic bomb in wartime New Mexico, had the same combination of brilliant mind and inspiring leadership as Gropius.<\/p>\n
The fortunes of the Bauhaus were closely connected to German politics. It was first supported then attacked in Weimar, and attacked again when it moved to Dessau, where it was condemned \u201cas a Jewish-Bolshevistic enclave, artistically crazy and racially impure\u201d. The East German communists attacked and then revived it. The fate of the widely dispersed anti-Nazi Bauhaus exiles ranged from prosperity in America to death in Auschwitz. The Bauhaus\u2019s influence extended from the progressive Dartington School in England to the experimental Black Mountain arts college in North Carolina. The Bauhaus also left its imprint on stores that sold well-designed furnishings: Design Research in America, Habitat in England, Ikea in Sweden.<\/p>\n
The handsome Gropius, a rather stiff Prussian, was decent, urbane, charismatic, even witty and unbuttoned. He felt he should get circumcised to sympathise with persecuted Jewish colleagues, and told one of his lovers: \u201cPut a flower between your lovely thighs when you are hot from thoughts of me and send it to me in a letter . . . I kiss your sanctuaries.\u201d<\/p>\n
The emotional core of Gropius\u2019s biography is his connection with Alma Mahler. As she unchained her libido in the sexual hothouse of Vienna, her high-minded lovers didn\u2019t know whether to sleep with her or kill themselves in a frenzied Liebestod<\/i>. She was a Protestant, Catholic convert, Theosophist, anti-Semite and Nazi sympathiser who had two Jewish husbands and an affair with a Catholic priest. She defied social conventions, eagerly expressed her desires and was keen for polymorphous perversions. She didn\u2019t wear a bra or girdle and, like T.S. Eliot\u2019s Grishkin, her uncorseted bust \u201cgave promise of pneumatic bliss\u201d. <\/p>\n
Alma\u2019s letters, begging for sex, were seductive and erotic. She wrote to Gropius, \u201cThere is not one spot on your body that I would not like to caress with my tongue . . . I want to suck you in from all sides like a polyp . . . pour your sweet stream into me.\u201d She juggled several competing lovers at the same time and fuelled her old flame while arousing her latest conquest. Gropius was miserably married to her for five years. Their beloved daughter, Manon, whom Alma cruelly kept from him, became paralysed by polio and died, aged 18, in 1935. Erich Maria Remarque, who met Alma in wartime Los Angeles, wittily flayed her as \u201ca wild, blonde wench, violent, boozing. Has already put\u00a0 Mahler under the earth. She was with Gropius and [Oskar] Kokoschka, who seem to have escaped from her clutches. [Franz] Werfel won\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
Beginning in 1923 Gropius had a long and mostly happy marriage to Ise Frank, who had an expert knowledge of English and gave vital help with translations and correspondence. In 1930, when she fell in love with his Bauhaus design colleague Herbert Bayer, Gropius vainly pleaded with her \u201cto respect their marriage\u201d. He then adopted a \u201csuper-magnanimous\u201d role and allowed her liaison to continue on numerous skiing holidays.<\/p>\n
Anxious to retain Gropius\u2019s friendship, Bayer half-apologised for his treachery but also sent postcards showing what a great time they were having. Ise callously asked Gropius to buy a pair of sandals for his rival. In 1936, when the affair petered out, Gropius and Ise adopted Ati, the ten-year-old daughter of her late sister. She replaced the recently dead Manon, but, despite Gropius\u2019s tender love, Ati sensed his deep detachment and never really felt she was his daughter.<\/p>\n
Like Thomas Mann, Gropius was a disciplined North German Protestant from a haut-bourgeois family, who went into voluntary exile. MacCarthy states, \u201cHe had broken completely with all he had built up professionally in Germany, his hopes of future work there, his roots, his culture, his huge array of contacts, his whole familiar, absorbing way of life.\u201d Mann publicly criticised the Nazis and lost his houses, possessions, manuscripts and savings. But he knew English, had all his books published in America and England, and had a successful exile.<\/p>\n
Though Gropius also opposed the Nazis, he never actually broke with the regime and managed to get all his valuable possessions (though not his money) out of Germany. Like Mann, he generously helped his fellow exiles when he settled in America.<\/p>\n
In 1937 Gropius became chair of the Graduate School of Architecture at Harvard, where his students included I.M. Pei and Philip Johnson. His English was now much better and he was more self-assured. Always loyal to his old Bauhaus colleagues, even after they had betrayed him, he hired Bayer and Marcel Breuer, who later quarrelled bitterly with him. MacCarthy ambiguously describes Breuer\u2019s close relations with Ise as \u201cpart-brotherly, part amorous\u201d. In 1938, the Museum of Modern Art held a Bauhaus exhibition that defiantly responded to the Nazi Degenerate Art show of 1937. Gropius, who thought he\u2019d secured a lifetime position at Harvard, was shocked when he was brutally forced out in 1952 by the jealous dean who had originally hired him.<\/p>\n
MacCarthy has written a thorough and competent book, but she does not explain that Gropius\u2019s recurrent pattern of bonding with cuckolded husbands and with Bayer gave him perverse sexual pleasure by sharing a woman with another man. Nor does MacCarthy explain why he tolerated Bayer\u2019s affair with his wife and even remained on close terms with him. Gropius believed Ise would remain faithful, needed her practical help and didn\u2019t want a divorce. He was loyal to her and generous to Bayer, and forgave them for behaving as he had done with Alma and other married women in the past. <\/p>\n
MacCarthy defends Gropius against his critics: the narcissistic Alma, the harsh Tom Wolfe and Evelyn Waugh, who portrayed him in Decline and Fall<\/i> (1928). Waugh satirised a vulnerable spot, also perceived by Lawrence, when Professor Silenus exclaims, \u201cThe only perfect building must be the factory, because that is built to house machines, not men.\u201d MacCarthy sees Gropius as\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u201cheroic, a romantic and optimist, a great survivor\u201d, but concedes that his buildings lack the \u201ctranscendent personal qualities of architecture by his contemporaries Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Walter Gropius:\u00a0 <\/b>Visionary Founder of the Bauhaus
\n<\/b>By Fiona MacCarthy
\n<\/i>Faber & Faber, 560pp, \u00a330<\/p>\n<\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/p>\n
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Progress and destruction<\/a><\/p>\nWhat to read next<\/h6>\n
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