20th century AD

Apollo, May, 2006 by Alan Powers

There is a familiar story about Britain and the Bauhaus that is still told today. (1) A backward island, bereft of modernism, entertains almost unawares a handful of the world's most progressive designers, but fails to find them adequate employment, so that they move on to the USA. When applied to three former staff of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Marcel Breuer, this seems to correspond to the facts--and history has awarded the Bauhaus a prime position in the period. But while modernism was late in developing in Britain compared with Germany, a national habit of self-denigration has meant that the positive aspects of Bauhaus reception in Britain, and of equivalent endogenous modernisms, has consistently been overlooked.

FIRST SIGHTINGS

Before 1934, only fragmentary and misleading information about the Bauhaus appeared in British publications, mainly because France had long been seen as the prime source of modernist ideas. Gropius was the subject of an article in The Architectural Review in 1924, part of a series on German architects by a German-American writer, Herman George Scheffauer, and apparently the only reference in print in Britain to the Weimar Bauhaus. (2) An article by the critic Horace Shipp in Artwork magazine in 1928 included an enthusiastic if rather outdated account of the Bauhaus as a centre of craft-work. (3) In October 1929, Oscar Bie reviewed the tenth anniversary exhibition of the November Group in his regular column. 'Letter from Berlin' in APOLLO. His account of this meeting point for many future staff of the school, noted that 'all the friends and teachers of the Bauhaus have sent contributions ranging from purely linear fantasy to dancing rhythms.' (4) This seems to be about all there was, although Bauhaus designs were licensed to Daler, the makers of drawing paper, and at least one other English company. (5)

The Bauhaus building in Dessau itself received only tangential discussion in the architectural press. Even in Bruno Taut's Modern Architecture, published in London in 1929, the single illustration of the Bauhaus is captioned 'House for Students at Dessau.' (6) In 1931, a feature on 'Glass as a walling and roofing material' by P. Morton Shand, the critic who later translated Gropius's book The New Architecture and the Bauhaus into English, was uncomplimentary about both the school ('a sort of technical school for severely functionalised arts and crafts') and the building, which he seems not yet to have visited ('It is rumoured that in strong sunlight the glare is so blinding that the students have to be provided with screens'). (7)

The Studio was more progressive than the architectural magazines around 1930, and carried an article on the Trades Union School by Hannes Meyer, who succeeded Gropius as director of the Bauhaus in 1928. (8) Apart from this, Meyer was little known, although it was he, rather than Gropius, who was responsible for the concept that the British identified as a purely scientific version of functionalism. More surprisingly, a writer in The Spectator enthused over the German Pavilion at the Barcelona Exhibition of 1929, designed by Miss van der Rohe, who in 1932 became the third and final director of the Bauhaus. (9)

From this brief and doubtless incomplete survey, it can be seen that anyone relying on the British press for information about the Bauhaus before 1934 would have been in difficulty. It is probable that the Bauhausbucher, surveys of staff and student work, including Gropius's own writings, were available in London. Recorded British visitors to the school at Weimar or Dessau are much rarer, however. Leonard Elmhirst, who with his wife, Dorothy, founded the Dartington Hall Trust in 1926, visited Weimar twice, and Gropius begged for money from them for the 'Hans am Horn' exhibition of 1923. (10) In 1931, Serge Chermayeff, Wells Coates and Jack Pritchard made a journey together through Germany, and included the Bauhaus in their itinerary. (11) There may have been four British students enrolled in the school, but information on this is conflicting, and none made a feature of this background in any subsequent activities. (12) In November 1932, The Studio noted the closure of the school in Dessau at the instigation of the local Nazi party, mentioning the threat of demolition, and noting that 'from the very beginning the Bauhaus had been non grata to the conservative element both in political and artistic circles.' (13) Mies moved the school to Berlin, where its final voluntary closure in 1933 in the face of mounting difficulties seems to have gone unnoticed by the British press.

THE BAUHAUS EMIGRES IN LONDON

Around 1934, more in response to internal pressures than to the arrival of emigre modernists, Britain began to take modern design more seriously. A better informed and more reverent attitude to Gropius and his school appears in Morton Shand's series on the background to modern architecture 'Scenario to a Human Drama', which began to appear in The Architectural Review from July 1934. Shand traced the roots of the modern house back from Gropius to Soane, mentioning Le Corbusier only in order to advance the claims of Gropius as a more significant figure. (14) 'The Bauhaus left an indelible impression on German building', Shand claimed, a judgement that seems overstated in the light of historical knowledge, and in strange contrast to his facetiousness of 1931. The explanation seems to reside partly in the adoption of Gropius as an honorary Englishman, in the belief that he demonstrated the validity of a moderate approach to modernism.