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.14This apparently simple statement was made by Mies in 1933.It was necessary to pointout the difference between the various Bauhaus periods in Germany because, from apolitically influenced vantage point, the contours of the Bauhaus s Weimar, Dessau,and Berlin permutations began to fade.It would have been helpful to bring this mes-sage to America as well, for two of the most noteworthy changes in the image of theBauhaus before 1936 involve the perception of the school s location and character.There was an obvious tendency to identify the Bauhaus with only one of the threephases of its existence, that of Dessau.Weimar On founding the Bauhaus in April 1919 in Weimar, the city of Germanclassicism, Walter Gropius presented a utopian manifesto calling for anarchitecture of the future in which all the arts would be united.To this end, a new kindof artist was to be trained; the crafts were to be the basis of his creativity.To teach himand to instruct him in production, Gropius assembled artists and craftsmen in mater-ial-specific workshops.In addition, all students would attend an obligatory course inthe elementary issues of aesthetic design.They would be allowed to enjoy a free andexperimental approach to the material of design and to unfold their creativity, learnself-criticism, hone their senses, and attain a degree of self-assuredness in dealing withthe methods specific to the various visual arts.In 1923, Gropius was forced to recog-nize that the realities of technological civilization demanded a reorientation of hiscrafts-based program.In order to unify art with technology at the Bauhaus, the work-shops were now to develop functionally and aesthetically considered products and11  Revolution Reflected in the  New Art of Germany, 256.The collaboration attempted at theBauhaus among craftsman, artist, and architect is also represented in Scheffauer,  The Work ofWalter Gropius, 50.12 See, in particular, Milton D.Lowenstein,  Germany s Bauhaus Experiment, 1; P.Morton Shand, Scenario for a Human Drama, 39; George Nelson,  Architects of Europe Today: Gropius,424f.;  The Bauhaus (Art Digest), 27f.;  Revolution Reflected in the  New Art of Germany,256.13 Philip C.Johnson,  Historical Note, in Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Philip Johnson, and LewisMumford, Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, 18ff.14 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, letter to Ministerpräsident Freyberg, Staatsministerium Dessau,13 July 1933, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, Archiv Sammlung.110 THE IMAGE OF THE BAUHAUS AS RECEIVED IN AMERICAprototypes for industrial mass production.Thus, the Bauhaus became Gropius s an-swer to the problem of the appropriateartistic education in the machine age.The3.1 Bauhaus Weimar, letterhead.(Bauhaus DessauFoundation.)painter Johannes Itten, who originated thefamous foundation course in Weimar andthus contributed greatly to the initial character of the school there, left as a result ofthis programmatic shift and the consequent friction between him and Gropius.Theaim of creating a communal life at the Bauhaus remained even after the changes in thecourse of studies.Only few sources of information in the United States, among them the earliestpublications and those from around 1935, mention the first years in Weimar.Thedifferences in philosophical orientation, professional aim, and pedagogic orientationbetween the program before 1923 and that of later phases was consequently little pub-licized.The school s further development under the banner of a unity between art andtechnology was also largely ignored.15If Weimar was mentioned at all in the literature after 1925 and before the publi-cation of The New Architecture and the Bauhaus, it was only as a result of an author sdesire to offer a complete bibliography.An exception to this rule was Hitchcock s Mod-ern Architecture, which discussed the expressionism championed at the Weimar Bauhausby the painters Kandinsky, Klee, and Feininger, and the emphasis placed on interiordesign in the early phases of the architectural course of studies.Hitchcock rightfullycited Henry van de Velde s pedagogic and architectural influence on the Bauhaus.Nonetheless, he did not recognize the revolutionary step taken in the school s found-ing, an achievement that had been appreciated by earlier articles.He speaks of Gropiusmerely  assuming the directorship of the  Weimar School of Art and of its  reorgani-zation as the  Bauhaus Institute. Thus, he implies a philosophical and institutionalcontinuity that did not exist in reality.16 The first explicit and detailed depiction of thedifference between the Weimar and Dessau periods was Gropius s The New Architectureand the Bauhaus, and the publications that followed the book.The first German democracy was christened in Weimar in the same year as theBauhaus [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]