Word: gropius
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That lyrical and nostalgic strain was amplified by Johannes Itten, the unlikely man Gropius first picked to teach the entry course. A vegetarian, Zoroastrian and state-of-the-art bohemian, Itten knew more about yoga than he did about factory floors. In the years when he set the tone for much of what the school produced, the would-be school of industrial art could seem more like a hippie craft shop. A product of the Bauhaus could be a hand-thrown pot or a funky hand-carved chair...
...turning point came in 1923, when Gropius dismissed Itten and replaced him with the resolutely modern Hungarian Constructivist László Moholy-Nagy. In the same year, the school mounted an exhibition with the no-nonsense title "Art and Technology--A New Unity." The painter Oskar Schlemmer announced the back-on-track Bauhaus ethic in a polemic that was only partly tongue in cheek: "Death to the past, to moonlight, and to the soul...
...thinking, geometric abstraction was the language of modernity, and the grid was one of its most powerful instruments, a formal system that could confine Expressionist excesses. In the catalog to the MOMA show, which was organized by curators Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, there's a color photograph of Gropius' righteously Cartesian office, with a right-angular chair resting on a grid-patterned carpet and a grid-patterned tapestry hanging on one wall...
...government of Thuringia, which funded the school but regarded it as a left-wing, bohemian swindle. When the provincial legislature stopped paying faculty salaries in 1925, the Bauhaus relocated to the more welcoming industrial city of Dessau, where it eventually occupied its famously forward-looking new building designed by Gropius. But a few years later, he stepped down as director in frustration over continuing pressure from right-wing enemies of his school...
...abstract work, but it was no use. In 1933, with Hitler firmly in power, Mies arrived one morning at the converted factory where the school was housed to find it surrounded by black-uniformed Gestapo. Soon after, he shut it down for good and made for the U.S., where Gropius, the Alberses and Moholy-Nagy would also end up as hugely influential teachers and practitioners. The Bauhaus was gone, but its gospel would go on. Decades later, Tom Wolfe would call his lightheartedly reactionary takedown of modernism From Bauhaus to Our House. No matter what you think of the book...