During the final stages of preparation for the Bauhaus exhibition in early August, Ise Frank moved to Weimar to begin her life with Walter Gropius. The attack from Carl Schlemmer had had an impact, however. To avoid further opprobrium from the citizenry of Weimar, the Bauhaus’s director did not want to be seen living with a woman to whom he was not married. The knowledge that Ise had just canceled her wedding to someone else on Gropius’s behalf was scandalous enough. Ise Frank moved in with Paul and Lily Klee, whose reputations were beyond reproach.
Meanwhile, Lily Hildebrandt had announced her plan to come to town for the opening. Gropius had her stay in a summer resort some distance from the town center. They saw each other in public only at the last event of Bauhaus Week, the great masked ball on August 19, and no one else knew them behind their disguises. The following morning, Ise Frank and Walter Gropius snuck away for a vacation in Verona and Venice.
Ise and Walter were married on October 16, 1923, at a civil ceremony in Weimar. The witnesses were Wassily and Nina Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Shortly thereafter, they went to Paris, on what was in effect their honeymoon but was mainly a trip to visit Le Corbusier, who considered Gropius one of his few colleagues of merit. The Swiss architect met them at Deux Magots, a café that was only a short walk from the small seventh-floor walkup apartment where he was living with his Monegasque girlfriend, Yvonne Gallis. The Gropiuses went with Le Corbusier to see the house he had recently built for Amédée Ozenfant, which had a large and well-lit painting studio as its core, and the Maison La Roche, a villa for a Swiss banker that was mainly intended to present the owner’s collection of paintings by Braque, Picasso, Léger, Ozenfant, and Le Corbusier himself. These two groundbreaking exemplars of Le Corbusier’s use of the latest technology in domestic habitation made a great impact on Gropius. Le Corbusier had a sense of visual rhythm that set him apart, but he shared Gropius’s desire for the connection of art and industry, and for the importance of giving equal attention to every aspect of visual experience, from the design of ashtrays to the layout of closet interiors to the choice of one’s shoes to the construction of building façades. What we see and touch affects how we feel and who we are.
IN WEIMAR, where Ise and Walter lived on Kaiserin Augustastrasse, they adhered to that goal of good design in every object within their sight. They had one particular possession that especially pleased them in its appearance and capability: a gramophone. They were the first Bauhauslers to own one. Guests would often listen with rapt attention, with Klee picking up a baton and conducting. Sometimes Klee would show up with his violin so that he could play alongside the machine that emitted recorded music.
The new Mrs. Gropius opened the house to the younger people at the Bauhaus as well as to the faculty. “The students had felt rebuffed by Alma, but were immensely attracted to the gracious Ise”—at least according to Gropius’s biographer Reginald Isaacs, who was writing when Ise was still alive. She was, he says, as warm as her husband was optimistic, multiplying the effects of his positive energy. Ise delighted in quoting Gropius saying, “I am totally immune to disappointment because I do not see people and situations for what they are at the moment but for what they might become.”160
There is, of course, no knowing what anyone was “really like,” since a portrait always depends on the person giving it. Yet Anni Albers, my main living source for most of these people, while she could be a master of negative memory, also was incredibly perceptive. She saw Ise as a form of relief for Gropius, stable but slightly dull after Alma and his other women. Ise wasn’t without her fire, however. What Isaacs leaves out of his book, and is not written in the many histories of the Bauhaus, is that when Gropius eventually resigned as director, one of his main motives was to get his wife away from Herbert Bayer, with whom she was having an affair.
Bayer was probably the Bauhaus’s leading playboy. A photo Josef Albers took of him shirtless makes clear that he was dashing, and whenever Anni thought back on him at the Bauhaus, she would roll her eyes and say, “Oh zatt Hehrbert,” maintaining that he was irresistible. Ise, on the other hand, was not, in Anni’s eyes, a very nice person. When they were all living in the United States after World War II, the Alberses visited the Gropiuses at their house in Lincoln, Massachusetts. On one occasion, they were sitting in the living room when Ise’s strand of pearls broke. Anni immediately got down on her knees and began to pick up individual pearls as they rolled away. Ise kept on talking as if nothing had happened. Finally, Anni looked up from the floor and asked, “Do you know how many pearls there were on the strand?” Ise replied that she had no idea, because these were not her good pearls. In the most condescending of voices, she informed Anni that if pearls are of true value, like the better strand she was not wearing that day, they have tiny knots between them so that this sort of spill would not happen.
The incident may seem trivial, but to Anni Albers it was immensely significant. As someone who had grown up wealthy, with more jewelry than she wanted, she knew about pearls, and as a textile artist, her understanding of knotting was better than Ise’s. For Anni, the Bauhaus was the place where the most elemental aspect of putting beads or precious stones on a string, a practice almost as old as humankind, could be appreciated and understood for its true significance: the juxtaposition of the solid and the flexible, the wish for women of whatever financial circumstances to embellish themselves with something sparkling against the skin. When nothing else was available during World War II, Anni had made jewelry by stringing bobby pins, small metal washers, and grommets from a hardware store, and she had crafted clay beads by hand. By the time Ise derided her attempted helpfulness in the 1950s, thirty years after the two women first met, she at that moment represented the snobbery Anni associated with German class attitudes—precisely what the Bauhaus was meant to overturn. And she showed a lack of kindness, a will to make someone else feel bad: immensely significant for any human being, but especially for the wife of the director of the Bauhaus.
Nonetheless, it is probably true that Ise bolstered Gropius’s optimism. The remarried Gropius was both happier and more settled than he had been before, and while he stayed friendly with Lily Hildebrandt, they ceased being lovers. For a brief period, Gropius confined himself to one woman only.
HE DID WELL TO concentrate his energies. The forces that had already begun to converge against the Bauhaus became even more ferocious when the Ordnungsbund (Coalition for Law and Order) came to power in 1923. This new regime was hostile to the ideas of the Bauhaus and resented the incursion of nonconformists in the capital of the new republic. They quickly reduced government funding for the school, and high-ranking officials issued statements that the Bauhaus was riddled with Communists and that its students and faculty lived immorally. Some Bauhaus foes also charged that the school’s precepts were destroying private enterprise.
On November 23, 1923, a Reichswehr soldier stormed into Gropius’s office. He demanded to be taken immediately to Gropius and Ise’s house on Kaiserin Augustastrasse. A search warrant had been issued, although the soldier did not have a clue about what they were hoping to find. Gropius looked on while seven men rifled through his belongings.
The following day, Gropius wrote a letter to the local military commandant. “I am ashamed of my country, Your Excellency,” he declared. He insisted on an immediate inquiry and said he would report the incident to the minister of defense.161 But he never received a satisfactory response and never knew what they were looking for.
While the Bauhaus workshops thrived—and Klee and Kandinsky, among the greatest painters in the world, worked peacefully in their studios—Gropius continued to have to do battle on a daily basis. By 1924, he was up against the German Volkische party after an election in the Thuringian parliament, the government body that had jurisdiction over Weimar and the Bauhaus, made these right-wing opponents of the school the majority.162
On March 24, while Ise was in a sanatorium because of an unidentifiable stomach ailment, Gropius wrote her that the newspapers in Jena and Berlin were reporting that this new government would not extend his teaching contract. This was a way of firing him, and the Bauhaus masters were going to meet to decide whether they would stay if it really happened. They were aware, however, that it was possibly a moot point; rumors were flying that the authorities hoped to dissolve the Bauhaus completely.
Gropius met with a government minister whom he described to Ise as resembling “a long dead clerk of the court … a dry bureaucrat without a personal opinion,”163 but he could not get further information. Then some of the masters at the school, Klee and Kandinsky among them, wrote a letter to the minister of state to voice their unequivocal support of Gropius and also to say they would resign if he was no longer director.
The letter succeeded for a while in keeping the authorities from making Gropius the scapegoat for their general opposition to the Bauhaus. The Ministry of Culture, however, continued to campaign against the school. To fight for the preservation of his institution, Gropius wrote an article that appeared in the Weimar newspaper Deutschland on April 24, 1924. He responded specifically to statements from Volkische party officials challenging government support of the Bauhaus and questioning “the moral qualities of the Director.”164 Gropius enumerated the school’s achievements. Of the 129 current Bauhaus students and the 526 who had been at the school since it opened in October 1919, a number had become apprentices in industry. While many students had had to leave for financial reasons, even the Bauhaus dropouts had become employed by German industry specifically because of the training they had received at the school. The director outlined the tremendous achievements that had been made in the realms of artistic development and education. He also defended the Bauhaus against attacks that pointed out that some of the other masters were not German. Gropius declared that this xenophobia was disgraceful and argued that the foreigners on the faculty did nothing but enrich German culture.
As for the critique concerning his own character: here Gropius said that these libelous attacks were the result of specious accusations made by disgruntled former employees of the school. He had, he wrote, initiated an official investigation into such attacks, with the Ministry of Education concluding that they were “unfounded” and “irresponsible … Retribution for these insults through public legal action is about to be concluded.” Similarly, when his character was attacked the previous year, all accusations had been dismissed as unwarranted. This “ignorance and malicious slander of the most humiliating kind”165 had to come to an end, the beleaguered director declared.
Few of the people around him were aware of it, but at this same time Gropius was again battling Alma. They had agreed that Mutzi would visit Weimar twice a year, but Alma was not keeping up her end of the deal. When Gropius wanted to see his child, he had to go to Vienna. This was problematic not only because the long journey kept him away from the Bauhaus for more time than he could afford, but also because Ise was unwilling to go there with him. Gropius’s new wife was still insecure about his infamous ex.
When Gropius finally succeeded in getting a lecture invitation that covered the cost and justified the time of a trip to Vienna, he tried mightily to convince Ise to join him, but she refused, and he went alone. Ise’s reluctance was well-founded: she would have been miserable to see the grip that Alma still had on her former husband. Gropius was overjoyed to be with the eight-year-old Mutzi, but Alma was determined to keep them from getting too close. Although Alma was completely committed to Franz Werfel, she was upset that Gropius had remarried. She hovered over the reunion in a way that made Gropius feel as if an evil spirit were present with him and his daughter.
Shortly after Gropius returned to Weimar, the “Yellow Brochure” appeared. It repeated the accusations that the Bauhaus was politically based, essentially Bolshevist and anti-German. The authors of the popular document were all former Bauhauslers who had been dismissed, Carl Schlemmer among them. To counter the fervent anti-Bauhaus sentiment in Weimar, the students papered the town with posters supporting their school, and the masters rallied against the “Yellow Brochure” specifically. Gropius survived this latest attack, but the city that had provided such a fertile environment for the Bauhaus at its start was becoming so inhospitable to the school that the future was bleak.