Ise Gropius

Ise Gropius, c. 1935

Born: IIse Frank, March 1, 1897, Wiesbaden, Germany

Died: June 9, 1983, Lexington, Massachusetts, USA

Joined: 1923

Locations: Germany, UK, USA

The honorary title “Mrs. Bauhaus” (Frau Bauhaus), bestowed on Ise Gropius by admirers in the 1920s, was less a reflection of her being the spouse of the school’s founding director—“Mr. Bauhaus” Walter Gropius—and more about her evangelical embrace of the Bauhaus ethos. A tireless fighter for the cause and a conversationalist as lovely as she was clever, Ise Gropius even inspired the mayor of Dessau, Fritz Hesse, during talks about the Bauhaus’s relocation, to note: “During these meetings, her words carried substantial weight, as her external beauty was accompanied harmoniously by a high intelligence.”

From her start at the school it was clear that Ise Gropius’s future lay not in one of the workshops but, because of her gift for languages, in its administration and the public presentation of the Bauhaus. It is not on account of her artistic talent that Gropius holds a special place among female Bauhaus members but because of her contributions to the life of the school. She established contacts with influential personalities throughout the German Empire, kept in touch with the influential Bauhaus Circle of Friends (Kreis der Freunde des Bauhauses), saw to a large portion of her husband’s correspondence, and converted his manuscripts into printable form. Through her public relations work, highly developed communication skills, and talent for forging lasting networks, she helped the Bauhaus achieve the recognition and renown that assured its continuation in Dessau. Her tragedy, however, lies in that two of her greatest wishes in life remained unfulfilled.

On her deathbed, plagued by strokes, the person she longed to see one last time was Herbert Bayer, former young master at the Dessau Bauhaus, director of the advertising department and, to many, the most attractive man at the school. In the early 1930s, the two had had a passionate love affair lasting several years, until Gropius decided to save her marriage with her husband who was fourteen years her senior. The true drama of this love-triangle arose from the special relationship between Bayer and Walter Gropius, who—after the untimely death of Bayer’s father—became a father-figure to him. Ise Gropius saw herself in the role of Queen Guinevere, wife of King Arthur and lover of Sir Lancelot, who ultimately relinquishes her to his lord. Her last letter to Bayer—written as she faced death—still conveyed the tenderness of years long past but also the heartbreak of this great, lost love.

The character of Guinevere remained childless, as did Gropius. According to Walter Gropius’s biographer Reginald Isaacs, a medical error during an appendectomy in a sanatorium in August 1925 caused her to lose her baby at an early stage, and left her unable to have children. Her own more plausible account states that, early in 1924, “under the wrong treatment in the hospital at Weimar I lost… my two months old baby.” Subsequently, she spent two months in a sanatorium in Loschwitz. It was also rumored that, as early as the fall of 1923, on their “secret” honeymoon in Venice, Gropius had an abortion with complications. She never substantiated this claim, and it remains unclear whether the child was conceived with her first fiancé—a cousin, whom she left for Walter Gropius in mid-July, a day before their wedding was to take place—or with Gropius, with whom she had already shared a hotel room in Cologne in early July. Whatever the case, in 1936, while in exile in Britain, the couple adopted their nine-year-old niece Beate (“Ati”), the daughter of Ise Gropius’s sister Hertha, who had died in January of that year.

Remembering her adoptive mother, Ati Gropius explained that it was while in London that Ise became the “essential Mrs. Gropius, without whom her husband could hardly have functioned. She could speak English, she could charm and glitter in London society… [and] be presentable at court.”

Walter Gropius on board the Columbus, during the passage to New York, 1928. Photograph by Ise Gropius

This continued with Walter Gropius’s appointment to Harvard University and their immigration to the United States of America in 1937. Ise Gropius quickly absorbed the American way of life, the everyday freedoms, technical progress, and its urban and natural landscapes. Though a near-fatal car accident in the late 1940s severely limited her ability to walk, it did not prevent her from accompanying her husband on extended trips abroad. Her true realm, however, was the family “castle”—a two-story bungalow similar to the Dessau Masters’ Houses designed by her husband—which she jokingly referred to as “Schloss Gropius,” in Lincoln, Massachusetts and which offered a hospitable arrival point in the USA for many Bauhaus exiles. Unbeknown to the guests, the house’s basement contained Lucia Moholy’s original negatives that Walter Gropius had taken without her knowledge. He kept them from her for decades, so he could fine-tune his Bauhaus legend on an international scale.

The Gropius House in Lincoln, Massachusetts, USA, 1949

Some emigrants, such as Irene Bayer did not share in the rosy opinion of Ise Gropius. In an impassioned gesture, Bayer wrote to her husband, who had already immigrated to the USA, shortly before joining him there in 1938: “If I were confronted with a creature the likes of mrs. gropius again, and had to endure the humiliations and indignities again, I would kill myself and my child without hesitation.” This could be written off as the reaction of a deeply hurt wife to her rival, were it not for an earlier letter from March 1926, written shortly after her marriage to Herbert Bayer. Irene Bayer expresses: “mrs. gropius wrote me. why? she is cunning and deceitful. she does nothing without a reason. she wants something, either from you or from me.”

“[She was] my father’s essential work partner, serving as his international secretary, editor, translator, hostess, and PR department.”

Ati Gropius

Gropius’s most significant legacy, however, is the “diary” that she left behind, kept between September 1924 and March 1928, the last years of the couple’s time in Dessau. The term “diary” is misleading, because, as she admits herself, it is not composed of intimate records made for personal reference, as are commonly entrusted to a diary. Rather, it details the goings-on at the Bauhaus and Walter Gropius’s activities; more accurately described as a “Bauhaus chronicle,” which (though still unpublished) serves as a uniquely valuable source on the institution’s history. Comprised occasionally of merely notes in shorthand after long workdays, but frequently of longer records of conversations and discussions concerning the survival of the institution, Ise Gropius’s lines provide many details from the end of their time in Weimar and the Dessau years. The diary complements, and at times amends, the semi-official files on the Weimar period housed in the Thuringian State Archives. By April 1928, Ise and Walter Gropius were no longer official members of the Bauhaus and the couple relocated to Berlin, after which she gave up the diary: “I never picked up the habit of writing a diary again, because I felt we had returned to a private existence which did not require a day-to-day account of events.”

Walter and Ise Gropius, 1929

Ise Gropius visiting a Gropius exhibition, Berlin, Germany, 1971

Even as a very young woman, Gropius, born Ilse Frank, burned with a passion for the Bauhaus idea from the time that, together with her sister, she heard its founder, Walter Gropius, lecture at the Lower Saxony State Museum in Hannover on May 28, 1923. The oldest of four siblings, Frank had just moved back from Munich, where she had worked for a newspaper, to the Hannover suburb of Waldhausen, directly next door to artist Kurt Schwitters, whom she and her siblings frequently visited in his Merzbau. She was working in a local bookshop and preparing to marry her cousin Hermann, to whom she had been engaged for eighteen months. She caught the Bauhaus bug from Gropius’s lecture, and the famous architect fell in love the moment he laid eyes on his striking listener. Their intense correspondence in those early days, which Ise Gropius cites extensively in her recollections of those “First Encounters,” leaves no doubt that she was fascinated not only by this man, but equally if not more by his mission and belief in a better world, and by the optimistic mood at the Weimar Bauhaus. With her portable typewriter as her indispensable companion, she made his idea her own and, as their daughter witnessed, “[She was] my father’s essential work partner, serving as his international secretary, editor, translator, hostess, and PR department.”