The life of Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus

Gropius: The Man Who Built the Bauhaus. By Fiona MacCarthy. Belknap Press; 560 pages; $35. Published in Britain as “Walter Gropius: Visionary Founder of the Bauhaus”; Faber & Faber; £30.

“IF I HAVE a talent it is for seeing the relationship of things,” reflected Walter Gropius in 1967, not long before he died. The world remembers him as an innovative architect of pared-down modernist buildings and the founder of the Bauhaus, a revolutionary school of art and design. His aim was to bring architects, designers and artists together in a working community to create what he called the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art.

Charismatic, gifted, idealistic and well-connected, he wanted to do something new and life-affirming after fighting in the first world war. His invitation to join the Bauhaus was taken up by the most vibrant artists and designers of his day, including Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. The teachers and students led quasi-communal lives; their parties were legendary. In its various incarnations—starting in Weimar in 1919, then moving to Dessau and finally to Berlin—the fabled school lasted a mere 14 years, after which the Bauhäusler dispersed across the globe, many, including Gropius, to America.

Gropius was born in 1883 in Berlin into a cultured upper-middle-class family. His first job was in the office of Peter Behrens, a successful architect and designer who had already taken on a young Mies van der Rohe and a little later recruited Le Corbusier. In 1910 Gropius left to set up his own practice and was soon working on the Faguswerk in Alfeld, a futuristic factory built from glass, steel and yellow brick that became his first important building.

As Fiona MacCarthy’s new book recounts, his private life was chaotic. In 1910 he had an affair with Alma Mahler, an accomplished society beauty who at the time was married to the composer Gustav Mahler. After Gustav died she took various lovers, including the painter Oskar Kokoschka, but she and Gropius were married in 1915. Their daughter, Manon, was born the following year. Then Alma started an affair with the writer Franz Werfel; after she and Gropius divorced, she made it hard for him to see his child. In 1923 Gropius found his life’s companion in Ilse Frank, an independent-minded woman who was 14 years his junior. (He persuaded her to change her name to Ise, perhaps because it sounded less bourgeois.)

By then the Bauhaus was in full swing, but in 1928 Gropius left the school to devote more time to his neglected architectural practice. He and Ise settled in Berlin, where their home became a hub for the avant-garde. After the Nazis came to power, his commissions dried up (Ise, meanwhile, began a relationship with a former Bauhäusler, the graphic designer Herbert Bayer). The school suffered, too. Gropius had tried hard to keep politics out of art, but the Nazis were increasingly hostile to the Bauhaus, branding its output degenerate. Starved of funds, it closed in 1933.

Germany’s loss proved the world’s gain. In 1934 Gropius moved to London, but he found the artistic climate uncongenial. Soon he was offered the chairmanship of a new graduate architecture programme at Harvard, where he made a deep impression on a generation of students. After the second world war, with a group of colleagues half his age, he started an architectural practice which was to become America’s largest and gave him the chance to design many striking buildings. He spent the last few years of his life burnishing the story of the Bauhaus and managing its legacy.

Ms MacCarthy, who has previously published books on William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, among others, met Gropius (and Ise) decades ago and determined that one day she would write his biography. She eventually got round to it in time for the Bauhaus’s 100th birthday this year. The result is a riveting book about a man who nurtured a vastly ambitious project through extraordinary times.