Bauhaus origins.

BEFORE THE BAUHAUS

By John V. Maciuika. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2005. [pounds sterling]55

The very title of this book is an act of protest, underlining its claim that the Bauhaus did not spring independently into existence as reported by Gropius, but grew rather out of a developing tradition of art schools that took place across Germany. Many Bauhaus 'innovations' had already occurred elsewhere, in one or other of the cities where culture developed in parallel in that recently united country: Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart, Darmstadt, Breslau. That the Bauhaus was influenced by the English Arts and Crafts as Pevsner claimed in Pioneers is certainly true, but his shortcut story left out the intermediate stages, the awkward stuff less suited to a Modernist polemic. This book sets out clearly and systematically to fill the gap.

Maciuika is well-informed and writes in a clear and scholarly way, filling in the political background in some detail to reveal the bureaucratic structures of Wilhelmine Germany and the crucial connections between the arts, government and manufacturing. In the process, some shadowy figures on the edge of Modernism are illuminated: architect-teachers like August Endell, Theodor Fischer, Henri van de Velde, Heinrich Tessenow, Richard Riemerschmid and Hans Poelzig. The central hero, if there is one, is Hermann Muthesius, whose reporting back from Britain around 1900 embraced a surprisingly broad range of concerns, and whose subsequent domestic work was as significant for the type of political and industrial client it represented as for its style. One is constantly reminded of a socially more stratified age, when aristocrats enjoyed enormous power as patrons, architects could consider themselves pure artists and rise to prominence without training, and craftsmen were struggling into the middle class. It was also a time when now-familiar institutions were just being formed, and they appear in a fascinating foetal state. This era of history has been too long neglected, partly because of the great political changes of 1918, partly because the style shift of the 1920s wholly undermined the innovations of the previous generation, leaving them, like John the Baptist, as mere preparers for the real revolution to come. Now that we know the International Style was no style to end styles, we cannot dismiss their contribution so lightly.