Building a Thesis about the Bauhaus

NOTE: This lecture includes several image galleries that won’t appear in this outline. To find them, go to the webpage I’ve created for my lectures,

http://www.humanities.uci.edu/~rmoeller/HCC_Cover/Cover_HCC_Makers.html

moeller is password and login, go to the Bag of Tricks, go to the link to Image Bank and look at the Boys in the Bauhaus, the 1923 Exhibition, the Working-Class Estate, the Harbor and the 405

Dada Poem Challenge Entries

How I do research:

  • I am interested in the Bauhaus
  • I want to develop a thesis for a paper that explores its attempts to create new forms of living spaces for working-class people in Germany in the 1920s.
  • Where do I begin?

Office hours Tuesday, 10:30-12, 452 Murray Krieger Hall. So far, I've received very few emails with questions about my lectures. Does silence mean that everything is crystal clear? enlightening? engaging? fun and entertaining? I am ready for the good, the bad, and the ugly in my office hours and at rgmoelle@uci.edu

Bob's Eight Step Program:

Have a whiter smile! Fresher breath! Tone up those abs! Flatten that stomach! All at the comfort of your own desk! (And today and today only, if you phone right now, you'll also get a free set of steak knives.)

Well, not really, but maybe a way to come up with a thesis for a paper (and no, there no guarantees, no money back, just one way to approach research)

In what follows, I'll outline a research strategy (the one I followed in developing a thesis for this lecture). One size doesn't fit all scholars or topics, but at some place in the process of doing research, I would bet you would do some version of everything I'll describe here.

The premise of the lecture: Using some of my time in HCC to take you through how to do research is important as giving you a ton of information about the historical period we're studying. If I don't demystify the process of historical research, you'll think I was just born knowing a lot of stuff. And if we work through how to do research, it'll be easier for you to do it yourself! So there'll be content, but there'll also be a discussion of how I gathered the content and how I used it to formulate a thesis.

Challenge 2. Due by 8:15 AM Wednesday, February 6, (email me what you've done, or put it in my mailbox in Murray Krieger Hall 200). Make your own political photomontage! Make an image, relevant to the 2008 presidential campaign, by constructing your own montage (after all, John Heartfield didn't have Photoshop), use Photoshop or some other image editing program, or cut and paste and make a collage to create the image.

 

Step One: Finding a thesis in what we're reading (the first step is often locating someone else's interpretation about something that interests us)

  • What does the Britannica, assigned for this course, have to say about the Bauhaus?

CR 40-41 (Red indicates what I think the key words are)
“Amid the political and economic turmoil of the early 1920s, Germany’s cultural and intellectual life was flowering. The so-called Weimar Renaissance brought the fulfillment of the Modernist revolution, which in the late 19th century had begun to transform the European aesthetic sensibility. The Modernist rejection of tradition perfectly suited the need of many Germans for new meanings and values to replace those destroyed by the war. ‘A world has been destroyed; we must seek a radical solution,’ said the young architect Walter Gropius upon his return from the front in late 1918. In 1919 Gropius became the founder and the first director of the Bauhaus school of design in Weimar, the most important institution in Germany for the expression of Modernism’s aesthetic and cultural vision. Bauhaus artists believed that they were creating a new world through their painting, poetry, music, theatre, and architecture.”

Step Two: How does this thesis hold up when we begin to do some research? Do we agree? Will we need to revise the Britannica's thesis? Do we have a different argument we want to make?

NOTE: The captions I provide for images in my lectures do NOT model for you what you're asked to do in the next paper assignment. I can accomplish in my lecture much of what you'll accomplish in what you write. Use all of the 200 words you have to write a caption for each image.

What do we need to know about?

  • Let's get clear on the terms the Britannica uses
  • What is Modernism?
  • Who is Walter Gropius?
  • What is the Bauhaus?
  • And do we want to accept the comparative language of the Britannica (the Bauhaus school of design in Weimar, the most important institution in Germany for the expression of Modernism’s aesthetic and cultural vision)
  • Don't forget the links I've compiled for you in the Research Resource guide

Grove Art Online, Entry for Modernity

"Term applied to the cultural condition in which the seemingly absolute necessity of innovation becomes a primary fact of life, work, and thought...
Constant technological progress... accelerating consumption... incessant change... Modernity is the accumulating impact of these forces of modernization on individuals, societies and environments... It is what happens to both everyday and exceptional experience when large sections of a society are undergoing modernization. It is an unfolding of active processes, of changes in all spheres, away from accepted traditions, customary conventions and current practices towards imaginary, often utopian futures..."
Related to the industrial revolution. Related to revolutionary political movements, secularization, challenges to traditional values. Rejection of inherited hierarchies.
Marxism presents one version of modernity in which the bourgeois state is overthrown, a socialist state is established, and communism brings liberation.
Modernity celebrates mass production, advertising, entertainment, fashion.
See also the entry on: The Modern Movement, and check for bibliography here.

 

Research alert: I got to "Modern Movement" by hitting a hot link in the "Modernity" article. The second article took me to the Werkbund and William Morris, Arts and Crafts Movement, pre-1914 style movements that were "modern." Would they be interesting research topics?

And basic biography: Who is Walter Gropius?

Grove Art Online: Entry for Gropius, Walter (again, get there with ease with the Research Resource page)

>Born, 1883 in Berlin, died 1969 in Boston
>Technical training in industrial design and architecture
> Designs factory buildings in Berlin before 1914
> Officer on the western front in the war
> Joins Work Council for the Arts in 1918 (CR, 54-5, see Manifesto, making Connections)

>Takes over directorship of Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919
>Bauhaus supported by Social Democratic municipal government.
>Bauhaus aligned on the political left and opposed by many for that reason
> Gropius moves Bauhaus to Dessau in 1925, greater focus on architecture, again, support for SPD municipal government
> Designs working-class apartment housing
> Leaves Bauhaus in 1928, continues work as architect
> Visits Soviet Union in 1930-1, but is disillusioned by discrepancy between Soviet dream and socialist reality in the Soviet Union
> Bauhaus labeled as "Cathedral of Marxism" by Nazis, and Gropius emigrates voluntarily in 1934, first to United Kingdom, then to US

Step Three: What have we learned that might lead us to think critically about the thesis in the Britannica? What do we know that the Britannica didn't tell us?

  • Marxism is connected to one vision of modernity; Britannica says he wants a "radical solution" but nowhere hints at Gropius' embrace of Marxism
  • The Britannica tells us that Gropius serves in the army in the First World War, but it doesn't a sense of the profound impact the experience of combat has on him
  • Gropius is involved in one of the revolutionary artistic movements for which we have a document in the Core Course reader
  • In the previous lecture, we saw a close connection between radical politics and cultural production in the 1920s in Germany. Is that an important aspect of the Bauhaus that the Britannica doesn't emphasize? Is flowering the metaphor I'd use to describe what is happening with culture? Burning up? Exploding?
  • The Bauhaus artists were creatomg a new world, but didn't they think it had a radical political content? Were Bauhaus artists another group of makers who believed they were also doers?
  • And what haven't we learned anything about? We saw in Lecture Two that there were some female makers in Weimar? Were they in the Bauhaus? Why doesn't the Britannica comment on this?

Step Four: Hunting and gathering: Doing more research to see if including what the Britannica leaves out makes a difference

This step takes longer. We did the quick and dirty detective work with Grove Art Online. Now we need to dig deeper, and this will take us into books and articles. (Moeller's law: Always err on the side of excess. You can trim more easily that you can fatten, and you can't dare to omit unless you know what you're omitting.)

[Remember: Secondary accounts are interpretations, not the last word. Just because it's in the Britannica doesn't mean that you can't challenge it.]

Some new facts that we get out these other sources (including on-line sources about which we have confidence):

  • What we can learn from these other sources
    • Gropius profoundly not only influenced by war experience, badly wounded and sees many of his contemporaries killed or shattered, psychologically or physically
    • Experience leaves him questioning the meaning of creative work
    • Ends war with an explicitly political vision
    • Gropius is another maker who thinks he has to be a doer

Writing in 1919, he concludes: “Since we now have no culture whatever,… I am convinced that for all its evil concomitant Bolshevism is probably the only way of creating the preconditions for a new culture in the foreseeable future.”
And:
“The intellectual bourgeoisie of the old Reich—indifferent… intellectually lazy, arrogant and miseducated—has proven its inability to serve as the bearer of German culture. With the unshackling of its rigid world… its spirit toppled, [and] it is now in the process of being remolded. New classes of people, not yet fully formed, are pushing their way up from the depths. They are the target of our hopes… It is to them that the artist of the future will turn.”

More evidence in CR: From proclamation to program: The Program of the Staatliches (=state) Bauhaus (Bau=building, Haus=house) in Weimar (CR, 59-62)

"Architects, sculptors, painters, we all must return to the crafts! For art is not a 'profession.' There is no essential difference between the artist and the craftsmen. The artist is an exalted craftsman. In rare moments of inspiration, transcending the consciousness of his will, the grace of heaven may cause his work to blossom into art. But proficiency in a craft is essential to every artist. Therein lies the source of creative imagination. Let us then create a new guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist! Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward the heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith."

  • Did the Britannica say anything about utopian visions, desire, the destruction of arrogant class barriers, the leveling of difference between artist and craftsman? Did it say anything about crafstmen at all? (And does Gropius mean craftsmen as people who share a gender?)
  • [And what would Shakespeare and Alberti think of this?]
  • So how does the Bauhaus seek to accomplish this?
    • Create a working community of artist-craftsmen
    • "priority of creativity; freedom of individuality, but strict study discipline"
    • Instruction in "all practical and scientific areas of creative work"
    • Admission "without regard to age or sex"
    • And relationships solidified by leisure activities
    • A social, intellectual, artistic, emotional home

The Bauhaus Core Course

  • The goal" "the unified work of art--the great structure--in which there is no distinction between monumental and decorative art" (architecture is the art, not the gingerbread decoration around the edges)
  • Gropius is mainly interested in architecture--but he is also interested in everything that goes inside the building
  • Goal of reproducible products/forms/artistic creations
  • Goal of contracts with industry to mass produce goods
  • Goal of improving the life of the working-classes
  •  

 

>But also utopianism

>Lyonel Feininger's sketch for a "Socialist Cathedral" adorns the cover of the published program

 

 

 

 

 

 

From program to practice

The Bauhaus in Weimar

Oskar Schlemmer, Bauhaus Staircase

  • (Yes, this is still Step Four. I told you this one took a long time.)
  • Faculty from all over Europe (something the Britannica doesn't mention)
  • Lyonel Feininger, American who moves to Germany, heads the printmaking shop
  • Paul Klee, Swiss, teaches theory of color
  • Wassily Kandinsky, Russian, gives lessons in color and shape
  • Oskar Schlemmer, German, choreography, t heater, sculpture
  • Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, German, teaches introductory classes
  • Johannes Itten, Swiss, runs carpentry, stained glass, and mural workshops
  • The boys in the Bauhaus
  • Some problems
  • Marching to different drummers
  • And what about "without regard to age or sex"
  • Women relegated to the weaving workshop

The weaving workshop at the Bauhaus

Research alert: How about a research paper on the Bauhaus' approach to gender? Maybe something on the attitude of Bauhaus artists toward gender, on the one hand, the participation of women in the Bauhaus on the other? You like textiles? How about something on the weaving workshop?

 

And of course we need to know about the larger context (still Step Four, just more hunting and gathering)

  • Bauhaus survives in Weimar with Social Democratic support
  • Social Democrats on their way out
  • And the Bauhaus identified as reds

Gropius, monument to those murdered in March (Communists and Socialist who resisted the Kapp Putsch and connections again, remember that stray bullet and the Rubens painting? ) in Weimar (the stuff the Britannica never bothered to tell me!)

  • And Bauhaus can't pay the bills
  • Gropius insists that Bauhaus workshops become “essentially laboratories in which implements, capable of reproduction and typical of today, are carefully developed as models and continuously improved."
  • At attempt to put on a show to demonstrate: "Art and Technology: a New Unity"
  • Too little, too late

Herbert Bayer's design for money during the hyperinflation

Step Five: Taking a Deep Breath and Taking Stock

So where are we with a thesis?

  • Maybe Weimar was a Renaissance but it wasn't Alberti's
  • Bauhaus isn't a German institution exclusively
  • Bauhau artists have many visions of the new world
  • Britannica completely silent on how some makers end up weavers: Doesn't even start to ask questions about gender
  • Britannica dodges the explicitly leftist political leanings
  • And at least Gropius was interested in "stark steel-and-high glass high-rise buildings" as part of a much larger concept
  • Not yet ready for a thesis, but we've moved pretty far from the one in the Britannica

Step Six: You guessed it, back to hunting and gathering

Bauhaus moves to Dessau (another city in Germany with a socialist government that will support it)

The Bauhaus, Dessau

Dessau, main square of the city

  • Dessau is an industrial town
  • And the Bauhaus focuses on products that lend themselves to industrial production

 

Herbert Bayer, Design for a Kiosk

And a matchbox designed by Bayer

  • Also lamps and rugs (the women figure out how to make some money)
  • Hannes Meyer, an architect as new director
  • And Gropius realizes his dream: “Building means shaping the different processes of living.”
  • Gropius leaves, Meyer becomes director in 1928, makes workshops central to the Bauhaus' mission (crafts elevated over art)

Step Seven: Hunting and gathering outside the Bauhaus to test the comparative claims

The Britanica has told us the Bauhaus is the "most important institution in Germany for the expression of Modernism’s aesthetic and cultural vision"

  • Comparative language invites comparisons: Formulating a counter-argument or how research sometimes begets research
  • Bruno Taut and the Horseshoe Estate
  • Taut comes out of Werkbund/work league
  • Has his utopian moment

Taut's Glass Pavilion

  • But goes to work on working-class estates
  • Cooperative financing, municipal assistance in Berlin
  • The Horseshoe Estate

And pictures from my summer vacation when I was already thinking about the Core Course lecture in February

  • Taut will work in the USSR, 1932-33, back to Germany in February 1993, then to Switzerland, Japan, and Turkey in 1937 wher ehe works for Turkish Ministry of Education

Step Eight: Pushing the envelope--Maybe the Britannica really got it all wrong or formulating a counter-argument

  • So was the Bauhaus really necessary?
  • We'll never know what might have been because the times, they are a' changin' (and for the worse)
  • The Bauhaus in big trouble
  • Leftist associations: Meyer leaves in 1930, charged with leading students down the path of Communism
  • Kandinsky leads the charge against Meyer
  • Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung (Workers' Illustrated Newspaper, remember Heartfield?) denounces the Bauhaus: "a revolutionary Bauhaus was an illusion in a capitalist state"
  • Bauhaus retreats to Berlin, shut down by Nazis in April 1933
  • Meyer ends up in Soviet Union (stays until 1936, then to Switzerland, then to Mexico where he's a professor of urban planning)
  • Gropius will leave to, first for England, then for US

Mies van der Rohe, monument to Liebkneckt and Luxemburg, 1926

  • Internal dissension

  • And external enemies
  • Exile and movement in different directions

Mies van der Rohe, New York City

Mies van der Rohe, apartment buildings in Chicago

And Herbert Bayer

Research alert: The story of Bauhaus artists in exile and the influence of Bauhaus artists and architectures on the countries to which they emigrate--hmm..., that might be an interesting research topic. I wonder if there's somebody on the Art History faculty who could help me with that. I wonder if Professor Moeller could point me in the right direction?

And still other legacies? (another form of research?)

Step Eight: An attempt at a thesis of our own (Yes, but, yes, we accept parts of the Britannica, but we've developed an independent position)

[A bit of Britannica remains, but we've taken what we can use, added some, and left other parts behind.]

Building a house that can become a home for artists and craftspeople, the famous and the unknown, vegetarians and carnivores, radical revolutionaries and non-violent pacifists is not easy. But it was just such a house that Walter Gropius attempted to construct in the 1920s. The Bauhaus expressed the political utopianism and the openness to artistic innovation that defined what was best about the Weimar Republic. Artists from throughout Europe and the United States flocked to Germany to participate in Gropius' grand experiment. But Gropius was ultimately unable to translate his conception of "Art and Technology: A New Unity" into reality. External pressures and internal divisions rocked the house that Gropius had built. The legacy of the movement he defined lived on less in Weimar and Dessau than in New York, Chicago, and in affordable, mass-produced designs for living that make us all the children of the Bauhaus.

[And in the meantime, with all that hunting and gathering behind us, we have the pieces that we'll be able to weave together (like Bottom? like Shakespeare?) to write a really interesting interpretive paper. Developing this thesis may end up being more than can be accomplished in the 8-10 page limit set for you in the spring. But picking and choosing, focusing and refining, is part of the process of moving from thesis to yet another revision of the thesis so that you come up with something that you can develop and defend in the 8-10 pages you'll fill in the spring.]

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