The Rise Of The Weimar Republic

The Bauhaus became the most famous art institution in the late 19th century, and was established during the formation of the Weimar Republic. Its innovation of art with industry reflected a new era, even though it only lasted until the Nazis came into power in 1933. Nevertheless, it left its own imprint in which new artist that came into the institution learned new crafts and artistic skills that they applied into their own work. This would eventually lead the institution to influence contemporary artist with modern design, style, architecture, and art. The Bauhaus purpose was to implement all the arts together with industry. However, it had to be appealing and pleasing to the eyes. Their aesthetic work had to reflect simple, linear, geometric,

Walter Gropius was an architect; and was born in an upper middle class family, where his father, Walter Adolph Gropius and his great-uncle, Martin Gropius were architects as well. In addition to that, Gropius was a lieutenant in the Signal Corps during WWI where he was able to see and experienced the horrors and atrocities of the war. For example, Gropius was “both buried under rubble and dead bodies, and shot out of the sky with a dead pilot” (Paul Davies). For his courageous and fearless acts he was awarded the Iron Cross twice. After the army, Gropius would eventually go to an architect school where he spent four semesters in Berlin and Munich. This would lead him to start working alongside the industrial designer and architect Peter Behrens, who was the AEG (the German equivalent of General Electric) creative consultant. Gropius would also take part in a number of installations that they constructed that “attempted to combine functionalism with aesthetic principles” (Friedrich 157). That same year he opened his own company where he “designed his own furniture, wallpapers, and objects for mass production, automobile bodies, and even a diesel

The idea was supremely simple: that mankind had failed to control the arrival of the machine, and that this control could, with a certain amount of ingenuity and energy, be recapture” (156). What Friedrich meant by this was that Gropius saw how the art of crafting was losing its value, especially the objects that were being made, since most artist were rejecting the idea of the machine. However, Gropius saw the advantage of using the machine for the purposes of bringing all the different arts together. He wanted the new generation of artist to incorporate and integrate the machine – the craftsmanship with art because this new type of industry would dominate a new era. According to Friedrich, Gropius saw that the machine “could do good work just as well and just as cheaply as bad work… in short, the artist, instead of rejecting the machine, or fighting it, or ignoring it, should try to take control of it”