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Miller on Harrod, 'Bruno Paul: the Life and Work of a Pragmatic Modernist' H-German Miller on Harrod, 'Bruno Paul: The Life and Work of a Pragmatic Modernist' Review published on Sunday, July 1, 2007 William Owen Harrod. Bruno Paul: The Life and Work of a Pragmatic Modernist. Stuttgart: Edition Axel Menges, 2005. 128 pp. $69.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-932565-47-2. Reviewed by Wallis Miller (School of Architecture, University of Kentucky) Published on H-German (July, 2007) Forgotten Modernist In a beautifully produced book, typical of this publisher's productions, William Owen Harrod introduces an English-speaking audience to the German designer Bruno Paul (1874-1968). One might call Paul a polymath because his oeuvre included illustrations and caricatures as well as furniture, interior, and architectural designs. Indeed, Harrod's monograph chronicles Paul's career in terms of a Gesamtkunstwerk (from illustrations for the periodicals Jugend and Simplicissimus to standardized furniture, ship interiors, and villas for a range of clients) subject to Paul's evolving stylistic approaches. But Harrod is also able to insist on a certain degree of consistency in Paul's work by identifying several principles that underpinned all of his efforts: a regard for a non-professional audience, especially a middle-class one; an eagerness to define and refine modern form without a fear of history; an attention to craft; and the belief that the integration of art in all aspects of daily life would produce a harmonious culture. Bruno Paul was, above all else, a practitioner and not a theoretician. He seldom wrote about design. Aside from posing a problem for discussing content, this fact points to the issue of evidence for such a discussion in the first place. Harrod diligently works around this situation--and around the loss of much of Paul's personal archive during World War II--by looking at Paul's buildings, interiors, furniture, and illustrations themselves, as well as the publications that recorded them; by finding his correspondence in other collections; and by interviewing family members as well as others who knew him. In this way, Harrod succeeds in building a context that allows us to understand Paul's approaches to design. One result is that Harrod integrates Paul's personal and professional life, drawing, for example, a compelling parallel between his modest character and his moderate view of modern design. Until the publication of this book, Bruno Paul's modesty has extended to his reputation. Paul is usually cited as one of the Berlin architects, along with Peter Behrens, who employed Mies van der Rohe before Mies established his own office in 1913. While histories of architecture acknowledge Mies as one of the great modern architects and one of the greatest German architects of all time, Paul has only been recognized as providing a preface to Mies's career and to modern design more generally. In tracing the evolution of Paul's career, Harrod frees Paul from his secondary role and relocates him to a more central position in the history of modernism. But, rather than casting Paul as a long-term member of the avant-garde and a proponent of the radically new, Harrod demonstrates that Paul's relationship to reform and invention shifted as new generations of architects and Citation: H-Net Reviews. Miller on Harrod, 'Bruno Paul: The Life and Work of a Pragmatic Modernist'. H-German. 09-30-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/reviews/45155/miller-harrod-bruno-paul-life-and-work-pragmatic-modernist Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-German designers emerged during the course of his long career. (Paul died in 1968 at age ninety-four.) The first such shift occurred around World War I. "Prior to the war," Harrod writes, "Paul had been a leader of an avant-garde committed to the reform of popular taste; by 1925, he had emerged as a reformer of the avant-garde and a champion of mainstream modernity" (p. 72). Harrod uses Paul's moderate position to enrich rather than dilute the discussion of modern design. The audience, or client, is definitive here. Moving out of the realm of elite culture and radical theories, Harrod enters the context of Paul's modern practice, in large part inspired by a middle-class audience, not the working class or the wealthy patrons who commanded the attention of the avant- garde. A 1905 article already identified the quintessential middle-class style--Biedermeier Neoclassicism--as the source for formal aspects of Paul's interiors. Specifically, the article linked an interpretation of Paul's forms as abstract and universal with an historical style (p. 25). By 1908, when Paul built Haus Westend, his first architectural project, Biedermeier had more profound ramifications for him. Still associated with the middle-class, Biedermeier was the source for a pre-industrial conception of cultural harmony rooted in "the equitable relationship between patrons, artists, and craftsmen that had existed prior to the industrialization of the nineteenth century" (p. 30). Although Paul abandoned Biedermeier by 1912 in favor of an increasingly geometricized set of forms that were remote from any precedent, he did not abandon the middle class. He continued to design Typenmöbel, standardized furniture that made the custom pieces he designed for his wealthier clients available to working- and middle-class customers (p. 38). After World War I, Paul resisted the utopian visions of the "new avant-garde." Instead, he used actual commissions to disseminate a modern design language to industrialists and members of a commercial class with money yet little access to political power (pp. 60-61), whom Harrod loosely refers to as "middle-class." Not only did this loyalty keep him in business during a time when most projects remained on paper, but it led to the crystallization of his design approach, which Harrod calls "pragmatic modernism." Since the 1920s, Paul's use of modern forms was conditioned by an explicit respect for his clients' needs and desires. Harrod distinguishes Haus Fraenkel, one of the first houses Paul designed in this period, from "the majority of Expressionist projects," characterizing it as a "comfortable home that ... was modern, without promoting a revolutionary social or political ideology" (p. 62). In his analyses of Paul's later projects, built during the 1920s and 1930s, Harrod favorably compares some of them to projects by recognized modernists such as Erich Mendelsohn and Mies van der Rohe, arguing that Paul's projects sacrifice a dogmatic commitment to a modern artistic vision in favor of fulfilling his clients' "middle-class standards of comfort and convenience" (p. 81). "Pragmatic Modernism" also reflects Paul's view of construction and technology. Paul's designs essentially criticized avant-garde architects for their use of impractical building techniques. Finding adequate solutions to such issues as water drainage even led Paul to sacrifice using the flat roof, so sacred to modernists, for a roof with a pitch in several residential projects. The pitch was often quite shallow or concealed with parapets, however, so as to appear flat and preserve the building's modern identity. Unlike the better-known modernists of the younger generation and their ideological predilection for the new, Paul selected technologies and construction techniques according to what would work best: "Although Paul was unwilling to compromise proven and efficient design solutions, he was responsive to the possibilities offered by technological developments" (p. 78). These possibilities included using electrically operated picture windows, which Mies made famous in his Citation: H-Net Reviews. Miller on Harrod, 'Bruno Paul: The Life and Work of a Pragmatic Modernist'. H-German. 09-30-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/reviews/45155/miller-harrod-bruno-paul-life-and-work-pragmatic-modernist Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-German Haus Tugendhat, or adapting American commercial construction practices to his 1928 Kathreiner- Hochhaus in Berlin. The respect for practice that led Paul to respect his clients' needs and favor pragmatic approaches to building was central to his pedagogy as well. In 1906, Paul was appointed director of the School of Applied Arts in Berlin. Until he resigned on January 1, 1933, in the wake of severe criticism by the Nazis, he led the school through a series of political, cultural, and institutional changes, including a merger with the art school of the Prussian Academy in 1924 to become the Vereinigte Staatsschulen für freie und angewandte Kunst. Paul's directorship was characterized by a program of reform based on the lessons he was learning from practice. Immediately after his appointment, he transformed the program from one defined by classroom-based skill development to a curriculum that nurtured creativity through practical experience. In this new context, students entered an introductory curriculum that educated them in all areas of design. Later, they specialized, often assisting professors on actual commissions. Harrod argues that the similarities of the Bauhaus curriculum established by Walter Gropius in 1919 to Paul's program are not accidental, even though Gropius seldom mentioned Paul's reforms. When Gropius did, as in a speech he delivered in 1920 to secure local support for the Bauhaus, he relegated Paul to a previous generation in order to "clear the way" for something new (p. 71). Against Gropius's attempts to marginalize Paul, architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner "concluded that the Bauhaus and Paul's Vereinigte Staatsschulen had been the two most important schools of art in the Weimar Republic" as early as 1936 (p. 71). Pevsner credited Paul, not Gropius, with balancing the fine arts with craft and design (p. 71). Paul's consistent attention to the fine arts was certainly a reflection of his own experiences as a designer, but it was also a part of his other professional activities as a founding member of the Werkbund.
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