My dalliance with the Bauhaus, and ‘less is more’
I never studied at the Bauhaus, a veritable temple of modern design, though occasionally I’ve had to remind myself of that.
Such was the profound impact on me of the revered art school, which would be 100 this year if the Nazis hadn’t forced its closing in 1933. I was born the following year, so my attraction to it was fated to be what physicists call action at a distance.
The Bauhaus was founded in Weimar, Germany. It was a citadel of the new. It gave birth to sleek chairs with tubular-steel legs that gave them the look of a bicycle’s handlebars. One faculty member, Wassily Kandinsky, painted the first purely abstract painting.
I was raised in Albany Park, where overstuffed armchairs were enveloped in plastic slip covers. My parents were traditionalists. The children of immigrants, my mother and father had barely made it into the middle class. They wanted their apartment to look like those of Americans who inherited an elevated social standing.
I dimly recognized that I was witnessing the ageold battle between the avant-garde and the bourgeoisie. My father made it clear which side he favored.
Once he dragged me into a chi-chi art gallery. It featured paintings by the offspring of Kandinsky’s revolution. “I’m looking for something for over the sofa,” my father told the proprietor. “Something to complement its silverthread accents.”
It was his way of telling me: “Don’t take this artistic thing too far.”
Because I had a modest talent, he had enrolled me in drawing classes at the Art Institute. I’d have been a lonely defender of the muses, except for the Bauhaus’ afterlife.
A former Bauhaus faculty member, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, had transplanted the Bauhaus’ pedagogy to Chicago. Its premise was that, like a child, an artist needs to crawl before he can walk. So students at MoholyNagy’s Institute of Design, like their predecessors in Germany, didn’t design anything useful before leisurely playing with various raw materials.
When Moholy-Nagy died, an American disciple, John Walley, brought the Bauhaus tradition to the University of Illinois on Navy Pier. I had Walley for a freshman course. We played with free-form plaster. We joined basswood strips into bridges without fasteners or glue.
My mother called that potchkeeing — cooking a dish without a recipe. Try this; try that. But why anyone would do so with plaster or basswood? That stumped her.
Yet something about Walley said there was method in apparent madness. He’d suggest an appropriate tool for a project followed by a literary or sociological observation. Another student noted: “In Walley’s class you learn about the circular saw and Thorstein Veblen” — a radical economist.
Walley could calmly analyze a thorny aesthetic or political issue. If that ever happened where I came from, I missed it.
By my sophomore year, I was an adjunct member of Walley’s household. He and his wife lived on two floors of an old building, repurposed according to a maxim of the last Bauhaus director: “Less is more,” the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe said.
The Walleys lived in a large open space on the top floor. I’d never seen an apartment with nary a partition. Or a teapot as streamlined as a diesel locomotive. The silverware wasn’t silver, but stainless steel without a smidgen of decoration. The few walls were painted white, an article of the Bauhaus faith.
Part of the lower floor was a metalworking shop. The Bauhaus taught that if artists doubled as craftsmen, factories could make quality furniture available to the masses.
Another section was a design studio where I drafted plans for Walley’s commissions. It doubled as guest quarters. Folding beds came out of the walls for houseguests like the folksinger Richard DyerBennet, and the futurist Buckminster Fuller. Studs Terkel would pop in. Conversation was nothing like table talk at my family’s bar mitzvahs.
When Walley needed surgery, I took his over clients’ projects. Me, a kid from Albany Park had become point man for the avant garde!
When Walley returned, I reverted to my previous rank, draftsman. The next semester I took architecture classes with other professors. They were boring. We made renderings of cookie-cutter suburban houses. So shortly I switched to the University of Chicago’s Great Books curriculum.
Still, even a third-hand experience of the Bauhaus had left its mark.
As I moved from one student apartment to another, I continued to paint every wall white. Even today, the Bauhaus is with me. I seek solace in its mantra whenever an editor says: “We have to cut a couple paragraphs out of your piece.”
“Less is more,” I mutter. “Less is more.”