ABSTRACT
Objects produced at the Bauhaus occupy an uneasy juncture between the canonical history of modern art and architecture, period culture, and issues such as the production and consumption of modernism.1 In 1923, Walter Gropius articulated the aims of the Bauhaus with the proclamation, “art and technology-a new unity,” which advanced the use of new materials, more stripped-down forms, and a spare, functional aesthetic. His successor Hannes Meyer pronounced instead: “people’s needs instead of luxury needs”
2.1 Otto Rittweger and Wolfgang Tümpel, Stands with Tea Infusers, 1924, German silver (Photograph by Lucia Moholy, 1925, printed c. 1950), gelatin silver print
(Volksbedarf statt Luxusbedarf)—but would he have been moved to make such a declaration if Gropius had successfully carried out his stated aims? The failure of Gropius’s Bauhaus to merge art and technology-to move from the production of individual, luxury objects to mass reproduction-is the subject of this essay. To be discussed are the objects produced under Gropius from 1923 to 1928, the period of his overtures to industry. This repertoire of specialized objects-including silver and ebony tea services, modern chess sets, and children’s toys, to name just a few canonical works-represents a paradigmatic example by which to examine the relationship between modernism’s discourse and its material results. Expensive in their day, original Bauhaus products are now art objects displayed in museum vitrines as individual works of art. Often hailed for the mythic merging of forward-thinking ideas and modern production techniques, they are asked to illustrate modernism’s unflinching belief in the powers of industry. And they are presented as objects of discourse, the material evidence of a series of debates on handcraftsmanship, machine production, and taste. This essay considers and contextualizes the ways in which the Bauhaus produced its modern objects and the extent to which, despite its egalitarian ideals, the school ultimately spoke to-and designed for-an elite. The products of the Bauhaus, ostensibly intended for mass production, were expensive, difficult to fabricate, and never sold on a widespread basis, reflecting the economic realities of producing and purchasing modern objects. Essential to this discussion is the problem of reproduction itself. Engaging Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” this chapter will recognize that, ideologically, the Bauhaus protagonists were willing to call the status of the objects the Bauhaus produced into question-to sacrifice their “aura” and status as “art” in order to achieve their mass reproduction; yet, in practice the Bauhaus was unable to do so.2 This failure was due to the limits to the reproducibility of Bauhaus objects-themselves a product of their place in the Weimar social order that they also sought to transform.
