GUIDE TO LIFE ARCHIVE GUIDE TO LIFE ⇒

These are quotes I typed up from a book about the Bauhaus. I'm not sure what book is was and I'd tried to re-read the quotes to edit them to see if there was anything useful there, but I became strangely tired while doing it...

The pathos and futility of such idealism…..

“Alienation shows itself not only in the result, but also in the process of production within productive activity itself…..the more the worker expends himself in work, the more powerful becomes the world of objects which he creates in face of himself, and the poorer he himself becomes in his inner life, the less he belongs to himself…The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, takes on its own existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, and alien to him, and that it stands opposed to him as an autonomous power. The life which he has given to the object sets itself against him as an alien and hostile force.” Marx, 1844

Schlemmer: “Our times lack a great unifying idea or religion. The artists are striving to create one, and the way to it appears to be through absolute individual subjectivity.”

“For spiritual considerations are more important than material ones, and higher than function, material and technique stands form. The first three aspects may be impeccably achieved, but if form is ignored we are still living in a coarse and brutish world.” Muthesius

“Architecture….is moving towards standardization (Typisierung). Only by means of standardization can it achieve the universality characteristic of ages of harmonious culture.” Standardization was for Muthesius a philosophical as well as a practical imperative; it was a metaphor for universality and the expression of unity in art, architecture and design. It involved the transcendence rather than the suppression of individuality.

Van de Velde: “So long as there are artists in the Werkbund….they will protest against the imposition of orders or standardization. The artist is, in essence, a total individualist, a free spontaneous creator: he will never, of his own accord, submit to a discipline which imposes on him a canon or type.”

Gropius: “…for the artist possesses the ability to breathe soul into the lifeless product of the machine, and his creative powers continue to live within it as a long ferment.”
(Video: breath soul into machine products or living spaces)

Gropius: “We are living in chaotic times. We find ourselves in a colossal catastrophe of world history, in a transformation of the whole of life and the whole of the inner man.” Society must be transformed “not by large spiritual organisations, but from within, by small, secret self-contained groups”. Inspired by individuals, individualism will be transcended in the creation of the total work of art “which will shine its abundance of light on to the smallest objects of everyday life.”

The promotion of the ideal of the “collective” implied a rejection of individualism in both the product and the producer.

Hölzel initiated studies of “old master” paintings, not within the context of art historical or academic analysis, but as expressions of form, as well as emotion, demonstrated through light and shade.

Gropius: “The Bauhaus’ responsibility consists in educating people to recognize the basic nature of the world in which they live, and in combining their knowledge with their imagination so as to be able to create typical forms that symbolize that world.”
“If the words “art” and “religion” were answered with silence, then they might be able to regain their substance.”

Itten: “Only when form and material are brought into intimate fusion through an independent mind can creative work be achieved. Only in this way is it possible to come nearer the objective that craft is not only a prerequisite for a work of art but that in a work of art spiritual work and manual work form a single entity.”

Gropius: “Thus the basis upon which our work is built cannot be broad enough. Today this basis is too small rather than too large. This is made clear by news of Russian experiments, similar to ours, which have incorporated music, literature and science as coming from one source.”
“big transformation from analytic to synthetic work.”

Kandinsky: “The collapse of the atom was equated in my soul with the collapse of the whole world. Suddenly the stoutest walls would crumble. Everything became precarious and insubstantial.”
“when art possesses no outstanding representative….At such blind, dumb times men place exclusive value upon outward success, concern themselves only with material goods, and hail technical progress, which serves, and can only serve the body, as a great achievement.” Art as such times is “without a soul”.
Music is the art which is “completely emancipated from nature, does not need to borrow external forms from anywhere in order to create its language.” The painter who does not wish merely to imitate “natural appearances” envies the musician: “Hence the current search for rhythm in painting, for mathematical, abstract construction, the value placed today upon the repetition of colour tones, the way colours are set in motion etc.”
The new “grammar of painting” still had to be defined, but it would be “constructed not so much on the basis of physical laws…but rather upon the laws of internal necessity”. Without the recognition of these spiritual laws, an exclusive preoccupation with “pure colour and independent form” would lead to the creation of “works having the appearance of geometrical ornament, which would – to put it crudely - be like a tie or a carpet.”

Attempts to achieve a “synthetic” method of design had to proceed from analysis of the simplest shapes and “systematically progress towards more complicated ones.” Investigations of form were initially confined to the “three basic elements – triangle, square and circle” and volume “to the basic solids deriving from them – pyramid, cube and sphere.”
Kandinsky: “geometrical figures – the circle, the triangle, the square, the rhomboid, the trapezoid, etc. are forms belonging to the first sphere of graphic language.” “this sphere of draftsmanship with its limited means of expression is akin to a language without declensions, conjugations, prepositions or prefixes.”

Klee “as though new-born, knowing nothing about Europe, nothing, knowing no pictures, entirely without impulses, almost in an original state.”
The artist must “place himself at the starting point in creation.” “You will never achieve anything unless you work upwards towards it. You can’t break in halfway through the process, and least of all can you start with a result. You must start at the beginning. Then you will avoid all trace of artificiality, and the creative process will function without interruption.”
“The artist has studied this world of variety and has, we may suppose, unobtrusively found his way in it. His sense of direction has brought order into the passing stream of image and experience. This sense of direction in nature and life, this branching and spreading array, I shall compare to the root of the tree. From the root the sap flows to the artist, flows to his eye. Thus he stands as the trunk of the tree, he does nothing other than gather and pass on what comes to him from the depths. He neither serves nor rules – he transmits. His position is humble. And the beauty at the crown is not his own. He is merely a channel.” “His growth in the vision and contemplation of nature enables him to rise towards a metaphysical view of the world and to form free, abstract structures which surpass schematic intention and achieve a new naturalness – the naturalness of work. Then he creates a work, or participates in the creation of works that are images of God’s work.” “Art does not reproduce the visible, but makes visible.” “The object is surely dead. The sensation of the object is of first importance.”

Wilhelm Worringer “Abstraction and Empathy”: “The precondition for the urge to empathy is a happy pantheistic relationship of confidence between man and the phenomena of the external world.” “The urge to abstraction is the outcome of a great inner unrest inspired in man by the phenomena of the outside world.”

Kandinsky: “The progress achieved by systematic research will give birth to a dictionary of elements that, developed further, will lead to a “grammar” and finally to a theory of composition that will overstep the boundaries of the individual arts and refer to “Art” in general.”

Kandinsky and Klee were demanding a more scientific and at the same time a more transcendent experience of form.

International Faction of Constructivists – Van Doesburg, Lissitzky and Hans Richter: “We define this progressive artist as one who fights and rejects the tyranny of the subjective in art, as one whose work is not based on lyrical arbitrariness, as one who accepts the new principles of artistic creation – the systematisation of the means of expression to produce results that are universally comprehensible.”
Lissitzky: “The new art is formed, not on a subjective, but on an objective basis. This, like science, can be described with precision and is by nature constructive. It unites not only pure art, but all those who stand at the frontier of the new culture. The artist is companion to the scholar, the engineer and the worker.”
Dadaists were “destructive constructivists”, attacking current complacency in order to “annul the divorce of transcendental and everyday reality.”

Moholy-Nagy: “I tried to analyse bodies, faces, landscapes with my “line”, but the results slipped out of my hands. The drawings became a rhythmically articulated network of lines, showing not so much objects, as my excitement about them.”
“Many of my paintings of that period show the influence of the “industrial landscape” of Berlin. They were not projections of reality rendered with photographic eyes, but rather new structures, built up as my own version of machine technology, reassembled from the dismantled parts…on my walks I found scrap machine parts, screws, bolts, mechanical devices. I fastened, glued and nailed them on wooden boards, combined with drawings and painting.”
He painted what he called his “transparent pictures”, “completely freed of elements reminiscent of nature”. “I wanted to eliminate all factors which might disturb their clarity – in contrast, for example, with Kandinsky’s paintings, which reminded me sometimes of an undersea world. My desire was to work with the peculiar characteristics of colours, with their pure relationships. I chose simple geometric forms as a step towards such objectivity.”

Montages were primarily a demonstration of the architectonic, rather than the expressive potential of material, and this was emphasised through photography, which presented them in abstract space, light and shadow being essential components in their composition.

Moholy: photography has the potential to transform rather than destroy art; at the same time however it had the potential to destroy what he described as “the personal touch” so highly valued in previous painting.

Schlemmer: “I have moved from the geometry of the one-dimensional surface to the half-plastic (relief), and thence to the fully plastic art of the human body….There is also a geometry that applies to the surface of the dance floor, though only as part of and a projection of spatial solid geometry. I am working out a similar geometry of the fingers and the keys on the piano, in an effort to achieve identity (or unity of movement and bodily form) and music.”

Break the conventions of content and the customary form of typography, and with it, symbolically, the content and form of society which applied its great rules of the past only mechanically.

Gropius: “The creation of types for useful objects of everyday use is a social necessity. Modern man who wears modern clothes, needs an equivalent modernity in housing and household equipment.”

The designer, part artist, part technician/craftsman, would combine his understanding of the laws of form with his knowledge of the nature of materials and the processes of manufacture so that his work would be “the inevitable logical product of the intellectual, social and technical conditions of our age.” The designer could be trained to interpret “the will to form”.

Gropius: “Even today a knowledge of counterpoint is essential for a musical composer. That is now the solitary example of the theoretic basis every one of the arts formerly possessed but all the others have lost: something in fact, which the designer must rediscover for himself. But though theory is in no sense a ready-made formula for a work of art it certainly remains the most important prerequisite of collective design.”
Theory was related to objective laws rather than personal convictions; these laws, like counterpoint, provided a structure or base for determining design solutions which bore no relation to tradition or to past achievements. There were no precedents or models for contemporary design and architecture.

Klee: “One learns about the things that form a connection along the way between cause und reality. Learns to digest….Learns logic. Learns organism….All this is fine, yet it leaves a void: intuition, after all, cannot be entirely replaced. One proves, explains, justifies, one constructs, on organizes: these are good things, but one does not arrive at “totalization”.

Herbert Read: “In every practical activity the artist is necessary to give form to material. An artist must plan the distribution of buildings within a city; an artist must plan the houses themselves, the halls and factories and all that makes up the city; an artist must plan the interiors of such buildings – the shapes of the rooms and their lighting and colour; an artist must plan the furniture of these room, down to the smallest detail, the knives and forks, the cups and saucers and the door handles. And at every stage we need the abstract artist, the artist who orders materials till they combine the highest degree of practical economy with the greatest measure of spiritual freedom.”

Muche: any attempt at a unity between fine art and industrial form destroys the validity of both. For the artist “disproves his own existence”, while “industrial form” becomes a surrogate for art – in other words – style. “The forms of industrial products, in contrast to the forms of art, are super-individual in that they come about as a result of an objective investigation into a problem. Functional considerations and those of technological, economic, and organizational feasibility, become factors determining the forms of a concept of beauty that in this matter is unprecedented… Art and technology are not a new unity: their creative values are different by nature. The limits of technology are determined by reality, but art can only attain heights if it sets its aims in the realms of the ideal.”
“We can say to ourselves that this is terrifying and the end of all art – but actually it is a question of mass-production, technically very interesting – but why attach the name of art to this mechanization of all visual things, why call it the only art of our age and, moreover, of the future?”

Kandinsky :”The obsolete word Art has been positively resurrected at the Bauhaus. And linked to the word, The Deed.”

Breuer: “The pieces of furniture and even the very walls of a room have ceased to be massive and monumental, apparently immovable and built for eternity. Instead they are more opened out, or, so to speak, drawn in space. The hinder neither the movement of the body nor of the eye. The room is not longer a self-bounded composition¸ a closed box, for its dimensions and different elements can be varied in many ways.”
“Our work is unrelenting and unretrospective; it despises tradition and established custom.”

Breuer: “The individual life functions must be intensively analysed and taken into account as much as possible. The house, in other words, should be based on the body.” Efficiency rather than ergonomics “ furniture that is independent because it has the simplest form, furniture with no composition – neither beginning nor end, standardized units for the closets and all the cupboards in the house, chairs, beds, tables should be good, well-formed, independent models, whose main characteristics are mobility, lightness, and where possible, transparency.”

Fabrics/tapestries: “Their special distinction, as against painting, is the wealth of possibilities they offer for varying surface effects by using different materials, such as wool, cotton, linen, silk, rayon, metal, and glass, to obtain smooth, rough, glossy, matt, coarse, fine, soft, hard, thick and thin effects.”

Albers: “In my own work I am content to compete with myself and to search with simple palette and with simple colour for manifold instrumentation. So I dare further variants.”

Moholy: Typography as a means of both reflecting and initiating social change.
“Why do we write and speak with two different alphabets? We do not speak with a capital “A” and a small “a”; to convey one sound we do not need large and small letter symbols. One sound, one symbol.”

Bayer in “Herbert Bayer” 1967 provides a “design analysis” of 5 of his posters “hoping to discover guidelines for a more precise visual language”.

Meyer: “All things in this world are a product of the formula: function times economy. All these things are, therefore, not works of art: all art is composition and, hence, is unsuited to achieve goals. All life is function and is therefore unartistic. The idea of the “composition of a harbour” is hilarious! But how is a town designed? Or the plan of a dwelling? Composition or function! Art or life???”

Meyer design for Trades Union School 1927: “One hundred and twenty students of both sexes were organized in twelve cells each of ten members. Two students roomed together and five of these groups of two formed a cell whose members lived together separate from the others. They ate together in the dining room, studied together in the lecture room, and formed a section in physical training…..The purpose of this rigid grouping was to give the individual worker….the opportunity to identify himself with the communal life of the school as quickly and as closely as possible through comradeship with his room-mate and through the life of the cells.”

Today no designer or design organisation could or would contemplate universal solutions to the problems of design for the real world. We are still in search of a theory, social commitment is still elusive, so we indulge in our fantasies, ironies and pastiche, which are more comforting (and more profitable) than that “respect for stern realities” that Gropius demanded from architecture and design.