ABSTRACT
It is May 2009 and I am visiting an exhibition: Das Bauhaus kommt aus Weimar. In the New Bauhaus Museum, Weimar, Goethe’s exquisitely arranged blocks of colour, dissections of leaves and pulverisations of natural materials are gathered in glass cases displayed amidst the copious artifacts, paintings, design drawings and photographs of the Weimar Bauhaus. Goethe’s ‘exercises’ are scarcely distinguishable from those of Johannes Itten and his pupils on the Foundation Course of the Weimar Bauhaus over a hundred years later, which lie beside them. Bauhaus masters and students alike had access to Goethe’s work, these very same startling combinations of textures and colours, these robust forms and their often fragile reality, their freshness, their scientific precision and their aesthetic beauty. The parallels are extraordinarily exact. Once more one senses the later impact of the new Dessau context on the pedagogical, aesthetic, ethical and social ideals of the earlier Weimar Bauhaus: the profound shift from a historically rooted Weimar idealism, whose gaze was ultimately directed heavenwards above the grinding machines of industry and the dusty factory floor, to the transformed faith in Dessau that determined to engage strongly with a modern Germany, an emerging economy and practical hopes for a better society. The teachers who guided this brave and ethical shift (for ethical it was) without the Bauhaus descending into utilitarianism and functionalism were only able to do so because of the prevailing ethos of the Weimar Bauhaus, a system in which the world was felt to be interconnected, formed, deliberate, purposeful, a belief system which continued to be held by its leader Walter Gropius, and the lecturers who taught there, László Maholy-Nagy, Joseph Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee: and above all Oskar Schlemmer who led the Theatre Workshop, the ‘beating heart’ of the Dessau Bauhaus (Goldberg 2003), and, as he put it, a ‘force for order’ (January 1926) (Schlemmer [1958] 1972: 189).
