The Bauhaus is the most celebrated artistic institution of our time. In the fourteen years of its existence in Weimar Germany, the Bauhaus became a center where the ideas that would dominate art in the twentieth century clashed and became defined. The ideas forged within the school literally transformed our landscape. Almost nothing we read, wear, or live in is devoid of its influence. Yet there has been a history of the Bauhaus. For the first time, Elaine S. Hochman sets the school in the context of the turbulent times to which it was born following the collapse of Imperial Germany in 1919. The Bauhaus emerged just as radical social and political upheavals swept through Europe in the wake of World War I, a product of the convulsions of an age when the contest between ideologies was fought with the fervor of a religious war. Left was pitted against right of the streets, and these battles penetrated the walls of the Bauhaus as well. They shaped the destiny of the fledgling school and those who taught there, including some of the most illustrious names in the world of modern art - Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky. Hochman's access to the school's archives, previously off limits to Western scholars, provides an intimate day-to-day perspective of the school which reveals a different Bauhaus than the one projected by its latter-day champions in the U.S. This is the Bauhaus of its contemporaries, for whom the political and cultural implications were often more important than aesthetics.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
Frank Whitford's Bauhaus (1984), a frank, judicious, muscular, and dispassionate chronicling of the art school's fortunes written by a savvy European, remains the basic one-volume history of the Bauhaus. To that account, and to the larger, formidable bibliography on the Bauhaus, Hochman (Architects of Fortune, Fromm Internat., 1990) adds information drawn from archives, diaries, letters, and secondary sources that have been published or become available since 1984. Hochman takes a decidedly biographical approach, also exploring the successive political landscapes of Weimar Germany in which the Bauhaus was born, developed, and died. Ironically, and to the book's detriment, she hardly mentions or seems moved by the legacy of art and design to which the Bauhaus gave birth, a world that is almost coterminous with our own. Still, this is a good complement to Whitford for larger design and architecture collections.?Peter S. Kaufman, Boston Architectural Ctr.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
A concentrated study of the conditions in Weimar Germany that spawned the Bauhaus, its struggles to survive, and its eventual destruction. Critically wounded in WW I, the architect Walter Gropius returned to Berlin ``burning with hope, throttled artistic impulses, and pain,'' and it was in this condition that he opened the doors to an arts and crafts school in the xenophobic city of Weimar. Gropius, writes Hochman (Architects of Fortune: Mies van der Rohe and the Third Reich, not reviewed), had been inspired by the idea of a medieval workers' guild. For the next decade the state-funded school would weather the country's strikes, economic catastrophes, and power swings, but it would never thrive with the ideological and artistic unity that Gropius had hoped to achieve. The Bauhaus failed financially, and eventually Mies van der Rohe took over, moving the institution to Berlin, where he bankrolled it himself until it was raided by the Gestapo in 1933 and closed permanently. Meanwhile, America's infatuation with the Bauhaus ideal had begun in 1926, when Alfred Barr, who would soon head up the Museum of Modern Art, began to write about the new ideas coming from Bauhaus-nurtured architects and designers. But whereas ``the tenets of Gropius' Bauhaus emerged out of the trenches of war, Barr's interpretation of them developed within a milieu of elegant lunches,'' and this, Hochman thinks, was not a good thing. Stripped of its ideological fervor, American Bauhaus ``lacked substance,'' contenting itself with bastardized versions of a style that was never really coherent in the first place. While the author's socio-historical approach fills in a neglected dimension, she pauses too rarely to emphasize what the Bauhaus was producing amid the chaos; the narrative is thus more about the obstacles the Bauhaus faced than what it accomplished. (16 pages b&w illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Bauhaus Is Our House,
By James W. Hull (Tarrytown, NY USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism (Hardcover)
This interesting book addresses an important gap in America's understanding of the Bauhaus - the social/political and historical context that gave rise to the architectural school and artistic vision that has come to permeate our everyday lives. Hochman convincingly argues that only by understanding the combat experiences of Walter Gropius during WWI and the chaos of the Weimar Republic, can one appreciate the socialist and utopian ideology that was at the core of the Bauhaus. Her descriptions of Gropius' ongoing struggle to protect his school, the valiant efforts of Dessau's mayor Fritz Hesse, and Mies van der Rohe's attempts to reign in the radical communist student faction, are particularly vivid. At times the narrative is hard to follow, but in fairness the author is trying to describe one of the most confused and chaotic periods of modern German history. If you're interested in the Bauhaus, Weimar Germany, or would just like to know how and why most of our houses and offices came to look the way they do, this book's for you.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Bauhaus, Yet Another History Text,
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This review is from: Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism (Hardcover)
Somewhat dry reading, but quite detailed and informative.
This book doesn't touch much upon the actual art/design that came out of the Bauhaus, but rather is concentrated on the social-political-historical context of the environment that existed at the time. From previous books on the subject I have read, I knew that things weren't easy for Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus. This book clearly brings things into a sharper focus. This book was not exactly what I was expecting, but nevertheless I still found it informative and interesting. The *extensive* notes cited in the back of the book, belies the fact that some serious homework was done and it shows.
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
BAUHAUS,
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This review is from: Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism (Paperback)
I believe I reviewed the shipment of this book. It arrived in excellent condition, and I am satified with the seller.
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