WATTER GROPIUS AND IYONEt FEININGER MAN IFESTO. 1919 CHARLES W. HAXTHAUSEN

The untitled four-page broadsheet produced by \Talter Gropius at the Ages as a code to designate something fundamentally ne% yet end ofApril r9r9, commonly known as the "Bauhaus manifesto," indeterminate," and this, I believe, is how Feininger's Kathedrale is aJanus-faced document (cats.38,39). It is the founding proc- should be understood.a lamation of an institution that has become synonymous with Gropius's choice of Feininger to illustrate the mani- visual modernity, exerting a profound influence on design, artis- festo seems hardly to have been a matter of mere convenience. tic practice, and art education that extends down to our own Feininger had a long-standing love affair with medieval churches; day. At the same time, it looks back to a romantically idealized indeed his first woodcut, made only the previous year, was of medieval past as a model for the radical transformation of con- the fourteenth-century Gothic church in the Baltic village of temporaryvisual culture. This exhibition is primarily about the Zirchow - a motif of which he had already made seven painted first face; this short essay is mostly about the second. versions, culm inatingin Zirchow VI I of ryfi (cat. 4z).5 The wood- The Bauhaus manifesto beginswith awoodcut bylyonel cut medium,which originated in the late Middle Ages and was Feininger, Katbedrale, as an untitled cover page. Three pages of revived by the German Expressionists,was particularlywell text by Gropius follow- a ferventlyutopian one-page mission suited to the ethos expressed in the manifesto. As the critic Paul -Westheim -' statement and a two-page program outlining the principles and wrote at the time, the woodcut was "the passion of pedagogical organization of the school. The text proceeds from the young generation ofartists," satisfying their urge to "return the premise that , sculpture, and architecture, once to a primitive style and to manual craftsmanship."5 integrated in the "great building," have become mutually iso- Moreover, Feininger's Cubist-inspired artwas unques- lated, to the detriment of all three. The goal of the Bauhaus is tionably one of the strongest German examples of easel paint- to reunite them, and to do so by reviving the lost tradition of ing that, though not integrated into architecture, was filled with Handuterk, manual craft. Gropius calls for the creation of a "new what Gropius, in the Bauhaus manifesto, called the "architec- guild of craftsmen," ending the "arrogant class division between tonic spirit." The critic Adolf Behne, who was both personally artisans and artists." He concludes with a heady exhortation: and professionally close to Gropius, considered Feininger sec- (Let us collectively desire, conceive, and create the newbuild- ond only to as the leading exponent ofarchitectonic ing of the future, which will be everything in one structure: archi- painting in , which he designated "Cubist" as opposed tecture and sculpture and painting, which, from the million to the more lyrical "Expressionist."T To be sure, Behne took an hands of craftsmen,will one day rise towards heaven as the idiosyncratically utopian view of , divining in it "a secret crystalline symbol of a new and coming faith."1 urge to an ultimate unity" and the self-appointed task "to change To illustrate this utopian proclamation, Gropius, sig- the European." Most significantly, he believed he saw in it a rebirth nificantly, avoided the kind offuturistic architectural fantasy of the spirit that had inspired the Gothic and nineteenth-century that was so common at the time in the German avant-garde. Romanticism.8 Instead he asked Feininger, his first faculty hire in-, XThether Feininger intended it or not, his Catbedral to provide the illustration - not a fantastic projection of the was the perfect embodiment of this idea of an affinitybetween Zuhunftshatbedrale, the "cathedral of the future," as Gropius the Gothic and Cubism. The structure of the cathedral can be called it elsewhere, but a cathedral from the medieval past, a read most easily in the first proof of the first version, in which Gothic cathedral.'While the manifesto makes no explicit men- it stands isolated against a black ground (cat.4o). It has three tion of such a building, Gropius cites it in virtually every other discrete gabled portals, three tiers of flying buttresses, and text from these years, as he also invokes the Bauhiitten, the rnedi- three spires, each crowned by a gleaming star embedded in eval mason's lodges "in the golden age of the cathedrals," which 2 -Ihe inspired the name "Bauhau s." Bauhiitten served as a model 38,39 for the Arbeitsgemeinscbaft, the small community of architects, Lyonel Feininger, cover illustration, artists, and craftsmen who would collaborate on the longed- and , text for Einheitskanstuerh, the unified art work.3 As the art historian Prog ra m m des Sta atliche n Bauhauses in (Program ofthe state Bauhaus in Horst Claussen has remarked, Gropius "employed the Middle known as the Bauhaus manifesto). April Cat.38: front and back; cat.39: inner Woodcut with letterpress on green paper she" ttl/a x 7 (3o .z x t8 .6 cm) Harvard Art Museum, Busch-Reisinger Museum. Gift of Julia Feininger 65r

= -

C T

C

Di" l,"it."g des Sr,"tliche" 8a"1"."." i. W"i-e. - Wili.i Gtupis.

o

PROGRAMM DLS STAATI,ICHEN BAUHAUS ES IN WEIMAR

\UAI"'T'8R {;ROPIUS intersecting diagonal shafts oflight.e The hierarchical arrange- visual arts, they were indissoluble components of the great art ment of these triads, with the central portal and tower larger of building." Following on the image of the cathedral, this text than those flanking them, corresponds to the idea expressed in appears as a kind of commentary on it - the woodcut evokes the manifesto, of painting and sculpture finding their ultimate the working communities of craftsmen and artists of yore that fulfillment-and glory-in their subordination ro architec- were now to be revived. Then, following the exhortation to ture. Feininger used a second state ofthis print for the cover of erect the "new building of the future, which will be everything the first proof of the manifesto, with the name of the school in one structure," one moves to page three and the program, the printed beneath it (cat.4r). means to achieve this goal, where for the first time the name Dissatisfied rvith this first version, Feininger recut "Bauhaus" appears - now so much more effectivelyplaced than the image, now reversed, on a larger woodblock.lo The impos- in the first version. In short, the manifesto has a tripartite sequen- ing scale of this woodcut, now filling a sheet almost twelve tial structure: model, mission, means. inches in height, makes it much more effective than the first The ideas in Gropius's manifesto were hardlynew. Some proof, which, with its title, might be falsely construed as iden- ofthem can be traced back more than a century to the Berlin tifying the Bauhaus with neo-Gothic architecture. Feininger's architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel and to the German Romantics; final woodcut (cat.38) is not only larger in scale, it is also dra- others were common in the discourse around , espe- matically more luminous, and its strongly faceted structure cially in the heightened expectations brought about by Germany's matches Gropius's evocation of the future cathedral as a "crys- November r9r8 revolution.tt Nfhat distinguishes Gropius from talline symbol of a coming faith." his contemporaries, however, is that unlike them he was appointed The rhetorical effect of the Bauhaus manifesto in its director ofa state-supported school, where he was able actually final state seems artfully calculated. One first encounters the to implement these theories and, over the next eight years, to image of the cathedral, without label or title. Then, turning the moderate and refine them in the face ofthe sobering realities of page, one reads the lines "The ultirnate goal of all artistic actirLity practice, with lasting consequences for the history of modern is the building! To decorate it was once the noblest task ofthe visual culture. t. The standard English translation appears in Hans Maria Wingler,The Bauhaus: Weimar, 8. lbid., pp.37-38. Murray kindly informs me that "triPle Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, ed. )oseph Stein (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1959), pp. 9. The historian of Gothic architecture stephen towers in the western frontispiece of a Gothic cathedral never occur in reality-the 3r-33; in this essay I have in places offered my own translation. Lake while western portals 2, Walter Gropius, "Antworten aufeine Umfrage des Arbeitsrates fijr Kunst," in Hartmut closest you get is in the Mormon Temple in Salt City....And portals hav- Probst and Christian SchSdlich, eds., Wa lter Gropius. Ausgewdhlfe Schnlten (Berlin: Verlag are often gabled (Amiens, Reims, Laon) there is no precedent for the lateral And no fiirArchitektur und technische Wissenschaften, r985), 3:7o. ing their own roof structure projecting out beyond the body of the building. the author, z, zoog' 3. See various texts by G ropius from t91 6 to 1919 in ibid., pp. 6o, 6t, 62,65,67,7o,74. precedent for flyers against towers." Murray, e-mail to January Weber, 4. Horst Claussen, Wd lter Gropius: Grundzilge seines Denkens,Studien zur Kunstgeschichte 10. see Feininger, letter to G ropius, April 26, r9r9, quoted in Klaus "'Clearly I'm at Bauhaus," in Ingrid Mdssinger and vol.lg (Hildesheim: Olms, r986), p. 32. for the Printing Workshop': Lyonel Feininger the Watercolors, 5. Leona E. Prasse, lyo nel Feininger; a Defnitive Catalogue of His GraphicWork: Etchings, Kerstin Drechsel, e ds., Lyonel Feininger: Loebermann Collection, Drawings, Lithographs, Woodcuts. Das Graphische Werk: Radierungen, Lithographien, Holzschnitte Prints ( and : Prestel, 20o6), pp. 113-14. The most thorough discussion (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum ofArt, and Berlin: Gebriider Mann, r97z), p. rr2, c4t. W1. of Feininger's woodcut and its evolution is Mathias Schirren's "Lichtreflexionen: Lyonel der modernen Architektur," 5. Paul Westheim, D as Holzschnittbuch (Potsdam: Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag,1920, p. 5. Feiningers Architekturvisionen und die romantische Tradition Retrospektive der ln rgzo Gropius published an essay on wood, which he called the "ur-building material" in Roland Merz, ed ., Lyonel Feininger: von Gelmeroda nach Manhatton: ofthe human race, and thus fitting for the "primitive beginning of our new life that Gemiilde, exh. cal. (Berlin: G+H, r998), pp. 253-6r, specifically pp. 256-59' ideas remains Marcel Franciscono, is taking form." G ropius, "Neues Bauen," in Probst and Schiidlich, eds., Walter Gropius. ll. The best account of Gropius's relationship to these Creation ofthe Bauhous inweimar:The ldeols and ArtisticTheories Ausgewiihlte Schriften , 3:78 . walter Gropius andthe (Urbana: I 1971)' z. Adolf Behne, Die Wiederkehr der Kuist (Leipzig: Kurt Wolff, tgtg), pp. zz-24. of lts Founding Years University of llinois Press,

40 L1 Lyonel Feininger Lyonel Feininger

Kath ed ral e (C athedr al). t 9t 9 Progromm des Stoatlichen Bauhauses in Woodcut on paper weimor (Prcgtam of the state Bauhaus

Composition: 7%6 x 413he" (r8 x rz.3 cm), in Weimar), preliminary design. r9r9 sheet: tt %e x 8rr/re" (28.r x zz cm) Woodcut with letterpress on green paper 3/4,, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. peh6 x 7 (31.9 x 19 -7 cm) Gift ofJulia Feininger Harvard Art Museum, Busch-Reisinger Museum. Gift of Julia Feininger