In 1919, Walter Gropius, putting on his best hierophant's voice, declared that the goal of the

Bauhaus was to help create a new unified art (reaching its apogee in Gropius' own discipline,

architecture) “which will rise one day towards heaven from the hands of a million workers like the

crystal symbol of a new faith.” In the process, architecture and the 'fine arts' would be restored to a

state of grace from which they had fallen. They would be “rescued” from their respective

“isolation” in the Goshen of the “salon” and given back their “architectonic spirit.”1

Although this proclamation, which was accompanied by Lyonel Feiniger's woodcut,

“Cathedral of Socialism,” was more headily messianic in its tone than was typical for Gropius, it

was dealing with issues that had already concerned him before the German Revolution, before even

the first world war, and which would continue to concern him all his life.

In “The Theory and Organization of the Bauhaus,” written four years after the

“Proclamation,” Gropius once again returned to the subject, more systematically and at greater

length. Here we learn that the “'academy'”

shut off the artist from the world of industry and handicraft, and thus brought about his complete isolation from the community. In vital epochs, on the other hand, the artist enriched all the arts and crafts of a community because he had a part in its vocational life...

With the development of the academies genuine folk art died away. What remained was a drawing room art detached from life.

Worse, the “lack of all vital connection with the life of the community led inevitably to barren

aesthetic speculation” on the part of fine artists. For Gropius, art has suffered a “disastrous

secession … from the workaday life of the people” so that our entire aesthetic life is impoverished.2

In registering this impoverishment, Gropius was standing in an honourable and, by then,

well established tradition stretching through the architect and designer, Henry van de Velde and

going at least as far back as William Blake. Although the issue is rarely spoken of in the dire

apocalyptic terms of a Blake or a Gropius, it is in fact an anxiety that continues to be felt to this day,

1 Walter Gropius, “The First Proclamation of the Weimar Bauhaus” in Bauhaus 1919-1928 ed. Herbert Bayer, Walter Gropius, and Ise Gropius (Boston: Charles T. Banford Company, 1959), p. 16.

2 Walter Gropius, “The Theory and Organization of the Bauhaus” in Bauhaus 1919-1928 ed. Herbert Bayer, Walter Gropius, and Ise Gropius (Boston: Charles T. Banford Company, 1959), pp. 21-24.

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and several attempts have been made to explain its existence which cut rather deeper than Gropius'.

Terry Eagleton suggests that the retreat of art from life into an autonomous existence is a

kind of pressure release valve for humanity's aesthetic impulses which are not easily accommodated

by the narrow (and typically philistine) instrumentality of commodity production. For Eagleton,

“Art comes to signify pure supplementarity, that marginal region of the affective/instinctual/non-

instrumental which a reified rationality finds difficulty incorporating.” But this occurs precisely via

art's integration “into the capitalist mode of production” because when art becomes, in and of itself,

a commodity, “it is released” from its older ties to the world.3

Esther Leslie, channelling Walter Benjamin, suggests that the retreat of art into itself can be

understood in terms of a “schism within the bourgeois class.” The isolated artist is here the figure of

the “critical bourgeois bohemian” in “defiance against philistine segments of the class” who come

to regard the producers of art as “redundant” and perhaps too devoted to ideals to be quite

trustworthy.4

Both authors equate this phenomenon with the “moment of modernity.”5

It is clear that any systematic history of the divorce of art from life would have to take into

account both these arguments, among others. Nevertheless, what both Leslie and Eagleton show is

that the divorce of art from life is a structural tendency for our aesthetic life under capitalism,

although one which unfolds unevenly and over time. To historicise this further, it is surely

significant that even in Germany the two people generally credited with bringing attention to this

divorce are English: John Ruskin and William Morris6. England had had its bourgeois revolution

long before Germany finally overthrew the Kaiser, and it was also in England that the Industrial

Revolution began – it is hardly surprising, therefore, that England would also engender the first

protests against that period's effects upon the aesthetic life of its people (although it is true that

Morris would only gain the theoretical framework with which he thought through this protest via

3 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 367-368.4 Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (London: Pluto Press, 2000), p. 184.5 Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, p. 368. Leslie writes “Modernism begins in this period of coerced

marginalization” – which she dates as being around 1852 in the France of Napoleon III (p. 184).6 The are explicitly named in “The Theory and Organization,” p. 21.

2

his engagement with the ideas of a German revolutionary: Karl Marx).

And it is in Morris' life, work and writing that Gropius, as well as the rest of the staff and

students at the Bauhaus, would have had the first model for the “reunion between creative artists

and the industrial world”7 which was so sought after. Morris gives three closely interrelated reasons

for what he regarded as the degraded state of the so-called “decorative arts,”8 the first is capitalist

alienation which makes labour into a drudge and so obviates the very possibility of art in its

products (Morris, after Ruskin, defines art as “man's expression of his joy in labour.”). According to

Morris, the “modern state of society,” is therefore “founded on the art-lacking or unhappy labour of

the greater part of men.”9

The second has to do with the priorities of capitalist production – put briefly, profits. And

the third is the net result of the development of the division of labour, aided by the particular form

in which capitalism develops the forces of production (especially machinery). Morris predicted that

the full development of this system would lead to production owned by a ruling class blind to

ugliness and indifferent to beauty and managed by technicians directing a labour process so

thoroughly routinised that no space could be required (or even desired) for the labourer's skill and

intelligence.10

Morris' solution to this was the famous workshops of the Firm of Morris & Co. in which the

division of labour was reduced to a minimum and every worker trained to be skilled in as much of

the production process as possible11 – that is to say, Morris' solution was craft work. Although craft

was also to play its role in the Bauhaus, the simple factor of time and development meant that

7 Ibid. 8 He defines these in contradistinction to “Intellectual” art, which “addresses itself wholly to our mental needs … the

[Decorative Arts], though so much of it as is art does appeal to the mind, is always a part of things which are intended primarily for the service of the body.” William Morris, “Art Under Plutocracy” in Political Writings of William Morris ed. A.L. Morton (New York: International Publishers, 1973), p. 59.

9 Ibid. p. 67. This is one of those instances where the fashion of using 'man' as a stand-in for the species is not only irritating, but actually obscures the meaning. Should we translate his definition as “humanity's expression of joy in its (collective) labour” or as “a human being's expression of joy in their labour”? This is an elision of some importance. It would be nice to excuse this phallocentricism on his times, but, in point of fact, Morris was a sexist even by the relatively low standard set by the socialist left of the 1880's.

10 Ibid. p. 70-72.11 E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary 1st American edition (New York: Pantheon Books,

1977), p.104-105.

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handiwork could not possibly be imagined as a commercially viable basis on which to build a

unification of art with life that would have any meaning for the aesthetic life of the German people.

Morris' model, which never produced affordable work in mass quantities, could not reasonably be

transplanted into the Germany of the 20s.

Gropius created a school centred around craft workshops under the twin direction of a form

master and a craft master, with the intention of allowing students to synthesise the abilities of both

in their own practice. Gropious, who in the “Proclamation” wrote, “Architects, sculptors, painters,

we must all turn to the crafts,” probably thought of this process in terms of art becoming productive

– but in fact, it would be more accurate to say that it tried to make production into art. It is clear

enough from the way the Bauhaus was run that Gropius regarded craft as being aesthetically empty.

The purpose of the craft masters was to provide what was thought of as purely technical know-how

for the workshops, they “were not included in the Masters' Council; they had no votes, and were

consulted only as occasional advisers.”12 Eva Forgacs even quotes Gropius as saying “the

composition corresponds to the historical evolution of the Bauhaus, which owes its concept and

inception not to craftsmen but to artists … And this is a spiritual, not a technical, concept.”13 The

role of craft training is therefore merely to familiarise the students with the nature of materials and

processes so that they would possess in themselves a total understanding of production – the better

to design for production. For Gropius, the “craft workshops [should] develop into industrial

laboratories: from their experimentation will evolve standards for industrial production.”14

The obviousness of this solution prevents us from seeing its true audacity. Gropius was

thoroughly aware of the anxieties regarding division of labour in the factory:

The principal difference between factory production and handicraft lies … in the fact that in the factory each operation involved in manufacturing a product is performed by a different man, whereas the craft product is made entirely by one person.15

12 Eva Forgacs, The Bauhause Idea and Bauhaus Politics Trans. John Batki (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1995), p. 46.

13 Gropius, “An die Werkstattenleiter', 22 April 1922, Bauhaus Archiv, Berlin, Gropius documents, unit no. 7/5, quoted in ibid. p. 47.

14 Gropius, “The Theory and Organisation” p. 25.15 Ibid. p. 25.

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But if Morris believed that this division of labour was partly responsible for the sorry aesthetic

quality of its products and therefore needed to be resisted, Gropius solution is to follow this division

all the way through. He was essentially theorising a new branch of labour emerging at this time

within the total social division of labour: aesthetic labour. Paradoxically, it is precisely by accepting

the reifying logic of capitalist production which threatened to expunge art from everyday life that

art's place there could be guaranteed.

The formal implications of this strategy are perhaps best exemplified in the chairs of Marcel

Breuer. His tubular chairs in particular (figure 1), which he began to develop in 1925, represent a

high watermark for clean and efficient modernist design. They are constructed from extruded and

bent metal tubes, making use of no more nor less material than was strictly required for comfort and

stability, and stretched fabric made from steel-thread for the seat and back rest. The Bauhaus'

insistence on familiarity with materials and techniques is clearly on display in the soundness of its

design and the innovative use of the chrome-plated tubes, while its pleasing and unassuming

neatness display an elegance and facility with form that is still imitated today.

No doubt with such objects in mind, Forgacs claims that the “Bauhaus objects made” in this

period are “flexible,” “graceful,” and possess an “aesthetic appeal”16 – she is wrong on two counts.

The first is in her definition of 'aesthetic appeal' which here can only mean roughly 'nice looking.'

She is thus operating under a fairly careless understanding of the aesthetic (which I have also had to

make some use of in this essay), but if by 'aesthetic appeal,' we were to mean instead an appeal to

the affective or the libidinal (which Eagleton suggests we should), then it would have to be pointed

out that this is precisely what the designers of the Bauhaus had managed to expunge from their

designs by the mid to late twenties.

Secondly, she is making an ontological error. To understand this, and in order, furthermore,

to understand the transformation that art underwent in its attachment to industrial design at the

Bauhaus, it is useless to look at a single chair: Breuer's chairs do not have a singular existence; we

16 Forgacs, The Bauhaus Idea, p. 200.

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need to view them en masse (figure 2). In their multiplied, reiterated, existence, the chairs become

abstractions of themselves. The objects, as it were, are not the real thing. Breuer's 'chair' would not

be diminished by the destruction of a single unit, nor by any number of units, nor by every last

tubular chair in existence. Breuer's chair is not in the objectly chair, but in its design, which has

acquired a Platonic, metaphysical existence that makes the actual chairs the equivalent of so many

(exactly identical) flickering shadows on the walls of a cave. Whatever charms it may possess

belong properly to this essence, the concrete objects are rather the medium by which we access

these charms.

The technical requirements of elevating the idea of an object into its unalterable code that

must be transcribed without error or mutation by material production, means that as a technical

practice, the development of design itself comes to mirror the development of machinery under

capitalism already touched on in the discussion of Morris' production philosophy. As Harvey

Braverman points, out under the rule of capital,

Machinery comes into the world not as the servant of “humanity,” but as the instrument of those to whom the accumulation of capital gives the ownership of the machines. The capacity of humans to control the labour process through machinery is seized upon by management from the beginning of capitalism as the prime means whereby production may be controlled not by the direct producer but by the owners and representatives of capital.

Thus, the unifying feature of mechanisation in the factory is

the progressive elimination of the control function of the worker, insofar as possible, and their transfer to a device which is controlled, again insofar as possible, by management from outside the direct process.17

For Braverman, therefore, (as for Morris) the development of mechanisation in the factory

exacerbates the reification of labour precisely because machinery takes the form of capital – by

definition, an instrument for the domination of labour.

Gropius and the Bauhaus designers turned this into a virtue. As Marcel Fransiscono

observes,

17 Harvey Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degredation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974), pp. 193 and 212.

6

for Gropius the advantage of [mechanisation] lies just in its assurance that the designer's intentions will be carried out to the last detail and not left to the mercies of incompetent or indifferently minded artisans.18

Breuer's tubular chairs, built from homogenised materials along a regular and machine

formed geometry, are designed precisely to allow and to demand exact repetition at every step of

the production process.19 And although this is in one sense an understandable desire on the part of

an artist eager to preserve the integrity of his work – we should remember that the choice to accept

the role of 'aesthetic labourer' as separate from material production was a deliberate one on the part

of the Bauhaus.20 Furthermore, although this choice was more or less inevitable given their goal to

bring art into industry, this goal itself was not entirely innocent. It was in fact part of a liberal

nationalism which wanted “quality work,” at least in part because this was “necessary in order to

compete in foreign markets.”21

It seems, therefore, that the betrothal of art to industry effected by the Bauhaus came at a

heavy price – and this has to do, in part, with the inability of its theoreticians to see the possibilities

of craft as a distinct aesthetic practice and strategy. The progression of Bauhaus chairs once again

offers a demonstration of this. In 1926, Breuer prepared a tongue-in-cheek film strip which he titled

“A Bauhaus Movie lasting five years,” and listed the author as “life demanding its rights;” a

different chair is in each frame of the strip and every chair is attached to a year (figure 3). The first

is his oppressively solid “African chair” of 1921; this is followed by the much more pleasant and

comfortable looking “chair with coloured wool straps,” which he made with Gunta Stolzl dated

18 Marcel Fransiscono, Walter Gropius and the creation of the Bauhaus in Weimar: The ideals and artistic theories of its founding years (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971) p. 33.

19 This issue offers an opportunity to discuss a related one, that of handiwork. Handiwork is often fetishised – e.g.: John Ruskin or Bernard Leach. I don't think it is sustainable to claim that immediate muscular contact with materials is by its very nature superior to labour mediated by tools or machines. Still, it is the case that most machines and many modern materials are designed precisely to cut the direct producer off from their product, whereas certain materials and processes (while certainly not banishing the possibility of alienation and reification) are by their nature less homogenised and more recalcitrant. Working with such materials and processes necessarily means that each act of production is somewhat distinct from every other. This in turn requires the direct producer to make certain decisions afresh every time – in other words, to apply their skills and knowledge to the subtly different problems posed by each distinct act of production. It is this character which makes them relatively resistant to total reification and open to variability. Such processes are obviously not suited to 'total management' by people standing above the workforce and so are comparatively unattractive for capitalist industry. For this reason, it has generally been left to the crafts and artisan labour to explore their aesthetic potential. I suspect that this, probably more than anything else, is the rational kernel behind the romanticism surrounding the hand.

20 Forgacs, The Bauhaus Idea, p. 104.21 Fransiscono, Walter Gropius, p. 19.

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1921 ½; followed by one of Breuer's “easy chairs,” 1924; then by Erich Dickmann's “kitchen chair,”

which shares the year 1925 with the chair that follows it; one of Breuer's early “Wassily chairs;”

and the final frame is an image of a woman sitting cross legged, suspended in the air, given the date

19??.

Two parallel, and I believe intertwined, progressions are apparent in the film strip. The first

is the increasing de-materialisation of the chairs, culminating in the image of a woman sitting on

nothing at all. The second is the movement from craft to industrial design. This begins with the

African chair, folky, mawkish, ostentatiously a craft object (if not a very good one) is followed by

the three lighter constructions (or perhaps, deconstructions) more and more borrowing the spare,

geometric vocabulary of modernist design but still produced by the artists themselves, and finally

ends with the industrially manufactured Wassily chair.

The link between these two progressions is provided by Breuer himself, who wrote:

A piece of furniture is … in itself impersonal, it takes on meaning only from the way it is used or as part of a complete scheme.

… It must be able to serve both those needs which remain constant and those which vary. This variation is possible only if the very simplest and most straightforward pieces are used...22

For Breuer, therefore, furniture's only goal is functionality. It accomplishes this goal, as we have

seen, via the instrumentalised efficiency of its production, but also by being itself unobtrusive,

invisible (and what better way to achieve this than by replacing the chair with air?).

The kind of relationship to the work required to produce such an aesthetic is, in my view,

precisely one which already sees the work as essentially un-material. What is required is that such

psychological investment as the artist makes is placed not in the executed objects but in their

intellectual conception. Craft works very much in contradistinction to this.

Forgacs opines that “craftsmanship is not merely style and technique, but an approach as

well, a worldview embraced by the traditional folk artist, and craft methods cannot create anything

22 Marcel Breuer, “Bibl. no. 15” in Bauhaus 1919-1928 ed. Herbert Bayer, Walter Gropius, and Ise Gropius (Boston: Charles T. Banford Company, 1959), p. 126.

8

contrary to the craft worldview, or transcending it.”23 Apart from the lazy equation of craft with folk

art, I am not really sure what any of that is supposed to mean. She seems, in effect, to be accusing

craft of being ineluctably reactionary – but whatever the claim exactly is, any survey of

contemporary studio crafts would probably convince her that it is less than accurate. What she gets

right, however, is that there is an ethos indigenous to craft production and which is distinct from the

ethos apparent in the kind of industrial design exemplified by Beuer.

The contrast between this design ethos and the one which Gropius himself attributes to craft

production could not be more stark:

The craftsmen sit between the doors of their stalls and [their] work. When a stranger asks about the price of their wares, they answer in a sullen monotone; for they are in love with their work and will not be disturbed. They part only unwillingly even from their finished work.24

Because craft lacks the division between the one who conceives and the one who executes the work,

it is necessarily devoted to the material production of objects. Gropius' craft worker, in fact, is so

invested in the objects they produce (via their unalienated labour), and is apparently so little

enamoured of functionality, that they are hardly willing to sell them at all: a step which would be

necessary if the object's potential to function is ever to be activated. Without taking the

exaggerations of the fable too seriously, the point still stands: contrary to popular belief, craft, as an

aesthetic practice, does not necessarily fetishise functionality. Function is not its goal, it is its idiom

and the typical arena in which it does its aesthetic labour. It works precisely by what it does in

excess of functionality.25

In fact, with its obdurate refusal of industrial divisions of labour, craft processes are by

definition obsolescent in relation to the average standards of capitalist productivity – it already

requires an investment of labour greater than the average. More importantly, precisely because its

23 Forgacs, The Bauhaus Idea, p. 105.24 Walter Gropius, “Baugeist oder Kramertum?” Die Schuhwelt (Pirmasens), no. 37 (October 15, 1919), p. 821. in

Marcel Fransiscono, Walter Gropius and the creation of the Bauhaus in Weimar: The ideals and artistic theories of its founding years (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971) p. 19.

25 I am not aware of any theorist of craft that has put this case quite this baldly. The closest approximate to this formulation that I have come across is Theodore Adorno's claim that “purposefulness without purpose is ... really the sublimation of purpose” from Adorno “Functionalism Today” in Craft in Theory ed. Glenn Adamson (Oxford: Berg, 2010) p. 398.

9

aesthetic work exists in its objectly self and not in its design or conception, it cannot afford to be

invisible. Craft objects must insist, as the 'fine arts' do, upon a response to them that is conscious

and operates at the level of the “affective/instinctual/non-instrumental” which Eagleton insists

belongs to a more fully developed aesthetic life – but which, unlike the operation of the 'fine arts,' is

situated in the 'workaday life' of its users. That such a production practice would be absolutely

incapable of penetrating widely into people's general lives under capitalism may at this point be

taken for granted.

It seems therefore that we are left with two alternatives to art's divorce from everyday life.

The first, is a design practice which rescues the aesthetic for life, but only at the expense of

truncating it drastically – and which, moreover, is dependent (to varying degrees) upon capitalist

reification. The second, is a studio craft practice which resists reification and attempts to prefigure

in some dim way an aesthetic life unmarked by art's retreat from the world but which is from the

beginning incapable of actually producing that life at a general level.

Gropius banned politics at the Bauhaus,26 in so doing he cut the school off from participating

in the only process that could have broken the Gordian Knot presented by these two alternatives. It

is tempting and amusing to argue, in moralistic fashion, that the Bauhaus should have raised a

slogan such as 'Neither craft nor design, but social revolution,' but the truth of the matter is that this

would not have saved Germany from Fascism nor the bungling leadership provided by the

revolutionary wing of the German working class (the various anarchists, left communists, and

Spartacists) or the disastrous advice of the Comintern.27

The most likely result of greater radicalism on the part of the Bauhaus staff is simply that

they would have been shut down sooner. What we got instead was one of the most productive

experiments in industrial design of the twentieth century – and the one which made all subsequent

experiments possible. Whatever else one might think of the Bauhaus, its politics, its ethos, or even

26 Forgacs, The Bauhaus Idea, p. 41.27 The best history of the defeat of the German Revolution is Pierre Broue, The German Revolution: 1917-1923, trans.

John Archer (Leiden: Brill, 2005)

10

its products – that is no mean achievement.

Work cited:

Adorno, Theodor. “Functionalism Today” in Craft in Theory. Edited by Glenn Adamson. Oxford: Berg, 2010.

Braverman, Harvey, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degredation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974.

Breuer, Marcel. “Bibl. no. 15” in Bauhaus 1919-1928. edited by Herbert Bayer, Walter Gropius, and Ise Gropius, 126. Boston: Charles T. Banford Company, 1959.

Broue, Pierre. The German Revolution: 1917-1923. Translated by John Archer. Leiden: Brill, 2005.

Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.

Forgacs, Eva. The Bauhause Idea and Bauhaus Politics. Translated by John Batki. Budapest: Central European University Press, 1995.

Fransiscono, Marcel. Walter Gropius and the creation of the Bauhaus in Weimar: The ideals and artistic theories of its founding years. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971.

Gropius, Walter. “The First Proclamation of the Weimar Bauhaus” Bauhaus 1919-1928. edited by Herbert Bayer, Walter Gropius, and Ise Gropius, 20-29. Boston: Charles T. Banford Company, 1959.

Gropius, Walter. “The First Proclamation of the Weimar Bauhaus” in Bauhaus 1919-1928. edited by Herbert Bayer, Walter Gropius, and Ise Gropius, 16 Boston: Charles T. Banford Company, 1959.

Leslie, Esther. Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism. London: Pluto Press, 2000.

Morris, Williams. “Art Under Plutocracy” in Political Writings of William Morris. Edited by A.L. Morton. New York: International Publishers, 1973.

Thompson, E.P. William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. 1st American edition. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977.

11

Figure 1: Marcel Breuer, Chair (B33), 1927-28

32 15/16 x 19 5/16 x 25 3/8"

Source: The collection of The Meuseum of Modern Art

Images:

12

Figure 2: Bauhaus Auditorium, chairs by Marce Breuer. 1926.

Source: Bauhaus 1919-1928. edited by Herbert Bayer et al.

Figure 3: A Bauhaus Movie lasting five years

Source: Bauhaus 1919-1928. edited by Herbert Bayer