Koen
Whilst I respect your great knowledge, I am surprised you call my statement incorrect.
Josef Hoffmann is a figure indisputably linked to the Bauhaus..there is no question in my mind.
Apart from the recognised reference books I have mentioned that you dismiss as
'the result of accuracy in the description of the historical context'
there are 39,000 hits for 'josef hoffmann bauhaus' on Google, are you saying they are all inaccurate ?
*warning* some of the links are for knock-off furniture 😉
http://tinyurl.com/ykd78c5
Dear Robert,
I understand your surprise in finding so many references under google for the combination of Joseph Hoffmann and the Bauhaus. As I said, the two come up, in part because you can not describe the historical context of the founding and existence of the Bauhaus without referring to almost all contemporary movements and institutions. The Wiener Werkstätte was certainly one of them. Just to satisfy my own curiosity I looked at a number of them and the majority of those I opened were distributors of furniture that carry both Joseph Hoffmann reproductions as Bauhaus reproductions. As you might have understood from previous contributions, I am not a great fan of searching the net but just for fun I read and noticed that the Wikipedia page on the Wiener Werkstätte does not say a word on either Walter Gropius or the Bauhaus and in all the listings of artists and craftsmen that designed for the different workshops I see no reference to anybody related to the Bauhaus.
I am not ignorant enough to overlook the fact that Gropius started a love affair with the composer Gustav Mahler?s wife Alma, who became Oskar Kokoschka?s love after Mahler?s death before moving back to Walter Gropius and later on to Franz Werfel. In her early years she had a very close relationship with Gustav Klimt, a relationship that is usually described as ?kisses? in order to keep the great painter out of hotter water. Although Gropius met Alma outside of Vienna, it is unlikely that such a socialite like Alma would not have given Gropius the opportunity to meet with her Viennese circle. But it still does not mean that there was anything other than curiosity and superficial influence. There is no record at all, at least not from what I have seen that Walter Gropius ever did anything at or for the Wiener Werkstätte. He was not very handy, so I guess it would be design work that he did. I am very surprised that Antonella would have some evidence of that and I count on her generosity to share them with us. Gropius certainly was very opposed to much of their ideology. He knew very well that the Werkstätte ideals of accessibility of their products by the people were in contradiction with their motto: Better one product in 10 days than ten products in one day. He must have agreed to a large extend but he could also see the simple fact that the Wiener Werkstätte, in spite of their ideology, could only survive because of the high middle class Jewish Viennese intellectual elite and the fact that they had continuous financial support from Fritz Wärndorfer. It is ironic that the most well known piece of those socially motivated architects and artists was a Palace for the Stocklet family.
cont.
As far as influence is concerned, we should not forget that the Wiener Werkstätte was one of the last in Western Europe to get motivated by William Morris and his Arts and Crafts movement and the form language, although influenced by the Wiener Sezession was not all that original. The chair cubic chair shown on your pictures on the right is a good case in point. It is not only an introduction to the Le Corbusier Grand Comfort, but a similar chair was already shown in the 1900 exhibition in Paris in the pavilion designed by and for the products of Gustave Serrurier-Bouvy, a Belgian architect and furniture designer and producer that was singled out together with Willy Finch, a Belgian who would start the school of applied arts in Helsinki, by German art critics as the two most influential people in the development of the modern movement in Germany (why Van De Velde was not mentioned is either a mystery or a reason to mistrust that assessment).
I tried to see if there was a serious link between some people of the Wiener Werkstätte and the Novembergruppe of which Gropius and a few other Bauhaus people like Mies van der Rohe, Lyonel Feininger, Gerhard Marcks and Laslo Moholy-Nagy were active members. The link is unlikely because the Novembergruppe was, with members like Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil, further left than most and the Wiener Werkstätte was a progressive but rather bourgeois institution. But even there I can not see any overlapping names or common events.
I hope we can continue this discussion because I obviously have a lot to learn.
Just for the fun of it I googled: Bauhaus Le Corbusier. We know that the only connection is the fact that both Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius were trained (as untrained architects) by Peter Behrens. Yet Google comes up with 281.000 references.
Certainly no one
should believe that "hits on google" linking two names somehow indicates which name influenced which. .
A line like "There isn't a publication about the Bauhaus that doesn't mention him, yet you say. . ." indicates a fault in reasoning, as I see it. Many books contain any number of names which are only peripherally connected to each other. . .no ?
We don't want to base all of what we know on anonymous sources on the Internet -- or on any one publication.
'peripherally connected'
would suit the OP's initial question I should think.
I wasn't basing anything on Google hits, just pointing out his name is synonymous with that of the Bauhaus.
He came from the Wiener Werkstatte and nowadays his Kubus sofa and chair are a recognised icon of Bauhaus design.
Maybe it's just me, but I see that as a link..
My approah to DA is...
My approah to DA is conversational rather than academic. I apologize if I've led anyone astray, but merely inaccurately recalled info...but hoped it lead to a deeper and correcting discussion. Thank you Koen your detailed contributions (and mild scolding).
Let us not forget that the Bauhaus was influenced by numerous circumstances, such as Russian modern art movements (Constructivism, Suprematism etc), De Stijl, Cubism and a growing industrial demand. We can easily see the conversation of various views, including the WW, contributing to the Bauhaus development. Would it be safe to say that the Bauhaus, in a way directly or indirectly, a reaction to the WW just as the WW was a development of the Arts & Crafts movement...which was a reaction to Victorian industrialization? Regretfully, what I've read on the Bauhaus has been leisurely and not studiously. As one of the most important contributors to Modernism, it should be better understood.
Two books I recall reading are
Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism by Elaine Hochman
The Bauhaus: Weimar Dessau Berlin Chicago by Hans Wingler
I'm positive Elaines book delves into the relationship between WW and the Bauhaus, including Gropius. I did some basic online sleuthing...what I came up with hopefully adds to this conversation positively. Sorry you'll have to cut/paste.
http://www.mastersofmodernism.com/?page=Modernism
http://vladivostok.com/SPEAKING_IN_TONGUES/glazova24eng.htm
It is
tempting to assume that, because we see similarities in the product of two designers or institutions, that one designer or institution was influenced by the other. In order to determine actual degrees of influence, the researched must sift facts such as 1) what each of the individuals involved is known to have said or written about the matter, and 2) the dates of publication of images or other matter which might have come to the attention of other parties concerned.
I'm
not certain that such inspiration is always documented, indeed it might even be subconscious.
I think all designers are probably influenced by what is happening around them, the zeitgeist, if you like.
Clearly some might cite their inspirations and reference points, other may not, or not even realise.
Thank you Woofwoof...
for the two references. The first one is clear and concise. The second one is interesting in many ways but would also take more than a forum like this to correct...for instance Van De Velde's position in the Kunstgewerbeschule Weimar is completely misunderstood. But some statements are new to me and interesting to research. I knew about some of the changes Mies van der Rohe introduced when he became director, but to make the Bauhaus a-political is new to me and...surprising for someone who build the monument for Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht...but it fits nicely in the transition from the Novembergruppe to the Seagram building.
Google again
One point that seems to have been missed in the above (and which I tried to subtly point up) is that while searching Google may or may not validate a claim, citing numbers of sites returned in simple searches of multiple words (like the three mentioned above) betray a misunderstanding of the nature of search engines, and will prove nothing. You see it all the time in newspapers, at least in the UK, when lazy and stupid journalists use a Google search as a way of showing relative popularity. The most egregious examples are those that try to use Google to show that, say, Star Wars is more popular than Christianity: a search on "christianity" returns x number of hits, say the journos, while one on "star wars" returns vastly more.
What these journos (and, I'm sorry to say, Robert, above) have misunderstood is that the "star wars" search (without quote marks) will return any site that mentions the words anywhere on the site, and not necessarily together. And that's before you even start worrying about semantics: i.e. how many of the sites in such a search would be about Reagan's defence policies, and how many about George Lucas's movie? And how many about neither of these, but which simply and coincidentally mention the two words separately within the text of the site? A simple search won't discern.
Similarly, "josef hoffmann bauhaus" will return every (indexed) site that mentions these words, but these may be 39,000 sites that say "Josef Hoffmann had nothing to do with the Bauhaus". They may be sites that mention the Bauhaus, and then in a separate paragraph or article, mention Hoffmann. Hell, there could be sites showing up in those results written by a guy called Hoffmann, where he mentions how much he loves listening to Bauhaus, and how much he admires Josef Stalin. Essentially, though, simple searches like this (or, as I hope I've shown, "william shatner bauhaus" or even "le corbusier bauhaus") are essentially meaningless if you're looking at sheer numbers. They certainly don't prove or disprove a causal link between terms. So, they're not germane to any argument.
Again
'I wasn't basing anything on Google hits, just pointing out his name is synonymous with that of the Bauhaus.
He came from the Wiener Werkstatte and nowadays his Kubus sofa and chair are a recognised icon of Bauhaus design.
Maybe it's just me, but I see that as a link..'
But yes, I see your point on the Google thing.... rather amusingly, the top google hit for 'bauhaus wiener werkstatte' is this thread.......
Saying something
is "Bauhaus design" -- even if a lot of people do so -- is not proof that it deserves to be so called. Categories and pigeonholes just begged to be filled; man's unending search for "meaning" and order lead him again and again to oversimplify.
Wiener Werkstatte and the Bauhaus were two separate entities. In/at/for which of these entities were Hoffman's furniture pieces designed ?
It is difficult to reorganize our personal mental file drawers once we have set them up in a certain order. But perpetuating a filing error does no one a favor. . .it seems to me.
I do not want to distract you from...
the subject but I am so ignorant about search engines that I actually learned something from Andrewj. So I put my own name and Bauhaus on the google search page and found 26.300 links...thanks Andrewj!
I do not want to put our hosts on the spot, but I am curious about the status of the Stoclet palace in Brussels. I understood that the building as such was now a Unesco protected site, but what about the furniture and the large collection of art. I remember a very impressive collection of Chinese and Japanese art. (I had the chance to visit the place with a friend of the Stocklet family in 1959-1960?) Do you know anything about the most recent developments Alix/Patrick?
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