Читать книгу Bauhaus. 1919-1933 - Michael Siebenbrodt - Страница 3

The artistic and pedagogical achievements of the Bauhaus were revolutionary in Germany as well as in Europe as a whole. Its intention to renovate art and architecture was in line with other similar efforts, from which it drew numerous ideas for its own work.

Still, the school’s historical significance cannot be overestimated. The Bauhaus did not develop in empty space. On the one hand, one of stereotypes of Bauhaus history is that the school broke with all traditions and started from scratch. On the other hand, there is a general trend to omit hardly any art movements or important artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when discussing the sources of the Bauhaus.

The conditions leading to the development of the Bauhaus are, indeed, complex and widely ramified. Its sources in humanistic and social history reach back into the nineteenth century. Furthermore, the issue addressed by the Bauhaus has its roots in the Industrial Revolution, that lasting cataclysm beginning in England in the middle of the eighteenth century and resulting in industrial manufacturing and industrial society. This modernisation process had led to tensions in almost all areas of life: a radical change occurred when mechanical tools replaced age-old tools of the trade. For lack of new concepts, art and architecture reverted to a historical vocabulary of shapes, which increasingly led to contradictions. The changed conditions for the production of articles for daily use required a new design, now aligned with machine production. It took until the middle of the nineteenth century for the attempts at solving this problem to take concrete shape. The Bauhaus was part of a traditional line of initiatives and efforts called “modernism,” which issued from here and strove to re-establish unity between the areas of artistic and technical production, which had been separated by emerging industrial production. The resulting social separation of the artist, his isolation and the fragmentation as well as the segregation of different types of art, was to be reversed. This led to the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk (synthesis of the arts, unified work of art), a thought which, with different accentuation in earlier centuries, strove to synthesise in reality all the arts involved in construction and manual trades. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk was allied with the utopian claim that it could further the solution of society’s social and cultural problems on the basis of a unified aspiration.