Tear It Down
Virginia Smith
Art education from the famous past came out of a solid foundation of ideas. During the Russian Revolution and the Weimar Republic, artists brought their worldview into their classrooms. Can we teach graphic design today without such a foundation?
Graphic design today acknowledges two influential schools of style: the Bauhaus style of geometric abstraction and constructivism, the expression of Russian revolutionary theory. Both schools based their courses on theories of art developed by original thinkers such as Oskar Schlemmer in Germany and Varvara Stepanova in the Soviet Union. What those two shared was an overflowing richness of mind. From the depth of thought that motivated their own lives and actions, theoretical richness overflowed into teaching. At the Bauhaus it was intellectual-spiritual-mystical-rational; at Vkhutemas it was polemical-political. Both ideologies arose from allegiance to grand ideas that existed before any curriculum.
Schlemmer was the master considered by some to be closest to Walter Gropius’s thought in founding the Bauhaus. So, it is not surprising that a month after Schlemmer joined the Bauhaus in Weimar, Gropius asked him to develop a curriculum. Schlemmer wrote his wife: “Gropius says he would like to start drawing from the nude for sculptors and would I take it over. I have agreed gladly and he says he will propose it. They should study the nude. Something may come of this. I am pleased about it.”1 What came of it was one of the most remarkable classes in the Bauhaus or any art school curriculum—Schlemmer’s course on “Man.” As a platform for this course, the theoretical foundation on which his lectures and twice-weekly classes were based, Schlemmer drew upon philosophers, poets, psychologists, and natural scientists all the way back to Heracleitus, with stops at Voltaire and Lao-tzu or any other thinker that had something to say to him. Over two hundred pages of notes—some of them typed syllabi, some of them charts and diagrams—survived and were later published.
“Man,” as a course, is a richly confusing attempt to divide the study of a human being into areas of the natural sciences, philosophy, and psychology, based on man’s trinity of mind, nature, and soul or mind, nature, and psyche (sometimes called normative, biological, and philosophical)—and a tumultuous outpouring of notes and sketches. Impossible to follow as a curriculum, the notes Schlemmer left indicate the intensity of his interest in the subject and his will to completely rethink the education of artists through drawing. Schlemmer endorsed the Bauhausler’s cry, “We the modern moderns,” and accepted the challenge of defining the “new life” of modernism.
A goal of early European modernism was to improve the life of humanity through art. Modernism was, in part and for Bauhaus masters like Gropius, a reaction against the war, poverty, and class divisions of the past. The human being was at the center of modernism. Schlemmer’s course, intellectually based and creatively inspired, had nothing to do with the craft interests of the Bauhaus and everything to do with Schlemmer’s views on the human body in relation to the universe, views derived from study with his teacher Adolf Holzel and obviously acceptable to Director Gropius. Schlemmer thought man a “cosmic being.” This means that he saw the human being as both a world in itself and as a unit in relation to the world. For an artist to draw this grand and cosmic creature, the draftsman needed to understand the history of mankind, the origin of man, the theory of race. His biology must be understood, also his sexuality; his relationship to air, light, warmth, and clothing; his anatomy; his nervous system; and his capacity for movement—this last especially interested Schlemmer, who directed the Bauhaus theater and taught in the theater department. Man as a philosophical creature must be shown, through an awareness of materialism, realism, idealism, concepts of God, and insights into the psyche, the will and the imagination. All this exists in Schlemmer’s notes—the basis for his classes. The lists of books he consulted are by German authors whose names are not common to Americans: Ranke, Sachs, Schider, Dubal, Buschan, Hufeland—unless I’m alone in not knowing them. We know some of the philosophers he listed in his syllabus for studying the origins of life and “substances”: Locke, Pascal, Descartes, Giordano Bruno, Hume. The corpus in Schlemmer’s cosmos was no simple bag of bones.
To vary teaching possibilities, the class moved to the Bauhaus stage. There, dramatic contrasts of light and dark could be achieved with theatrical spotlights and shadows. The drawings from the course show fluid, strong abstractions of the figures. What seems remarkable is that the students themselves served as models, and in the nude. As much as anything else, the existence of nude drawings of students testifies to the total commitment of the Bauhaus community to the primacy of art over convention. Female models seem to have worn underpants, while male models are seen fully nude. The drawings are abstract, rather than realistic.
Schlemmer himself made drawings. In translucent renderings of the human body, he showed the organs nestling within; in some, the skeleton neatly inhabits the flesh, and in others, the musculature strolls along with the skin.
Though the course “Man” was based on a long bibliography, it must have motivated students mainly through the force of Schlemmer’s charm as a person. All photographs of him—in costume for his Triadic Ballet, fencing on the roofs—and the diaries and letters he left reveal a playful, tolerant man with passionate convictions. With Itten, Kandinsky, and Klee, Schlemmer was part of the mystical faction that influenced the Bauhaus before the communism of Hannes Meyer or the avaricious intellectuality of Mies. In his notes on the “Man” course, Schlemmer quotes Goethe’s vision of an ideal community from Wilhelm Meister’s Travels (a book I read at the Yale School of Art in a desperate, but unconscious, attempt to compensate for the intellectual barrenness of classes at that school). Wilhelm Meister is the story of a young German student’s search for meaning through his Wanderjahre around Europe. The paragraphs Schlemmer extracted describe an ideal atmosphere for learning, a vision of what the Bauhaus could be. In Goethe’s community, the facial expression of the inhabitants, the gravity of their manner, revealed “a secret spirit leading towards one great goal.” Did the Bauhaus house such spirits? I think so.
Itten, who dressed in monk’s clothes and demanded vegetarianism in the kitchen, was the most influential on the early Bauhaus, though not as well known as those masters who emigrated to America (Albers, Gropius, Mies, etc.). As one of the first masters appointed in 1919,2 he originated the famous Foundation Course, the model at many art schools to come, through the influence of his book.3 Itten was a mystic who believed in the liberation of the creative artist through exercises on the roof and in the classroom, swinging the hand before picking up a pencil. Itten’s method of teaching was intuitive, contrasted with Schlemmer’s, which was based on summarizing the intellectual thought of all the ages. But both were powerful influences at the early Bauhaus.
At the other major school of art to which graphic design is connected, through constructivism, the spiritual was less important than the political. This art school was the state arm of the Russian Revolution. Malevich said in 1919 that “cubism and futurism were revolutionary movements in art, anticipating the revolution in the economic and political life of 1917.” Artists such as Rodchenko, Tatlin, and Stepanova thought they had gone as far as they could by the early 1920s with Malevich’s abstract painting, “reducing form to zero,” and they turned to the useful task of teaching art to implement the ideals of the revolution. The school, called Vkhutemas (initials of the Vysshie Khudozhestvenno-Tekhnicheskie Masterskie or Higher Artistic Technical Studios), was an arm of the People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment. The radical teaching faculty4 held conflicting opinions about the goal of the people’s revolution, but aspects of constructivist theory such as composition, construction, and facture were settled in the 1921 debates among Varvara Stepanova and Aleksei Gan (later executed in a gulag) and radical artists Ossip Brik and El Lissitzky. In addition to creating curricula at Vkhutemas, constructivist thinker Stepanova formulated theoretical key issues of constructivism, namely, facture.
Facture, also called tectonics, derived, she said, from the “structure of communism and the effective exploitation of industrial matter.” A rough surface demonstrated anti-elegance, the anti-aesthetic of the people. Fine printing was disdained as expression of a corrupt bourgeois who valued finish over content, the superficial over the deep truths of the text. Glossy paper, embossing, other luxurious traditions of printing were seen as demonstrations of wealth and exploitation of labor. Facture was a way of turning “art” into “production” by Stepanova and the constructivists. Her influential lectures resolved the matter that constructivism was “intellectual production.”5
Stepanova wrote that the constructivists’ cry (did everyone have a cry?) was, “Down with aesthetics and taste.” Facture had no taste; it showed material honestly and showed the hand of the worker who had made it. His labor was evident in his work; the work a tribute to himself. Book covers and posters were not designed under orders of rich industrialist oppressors. Imperfect type, rough paper, and foreign materials exemplified facture. There is no “quality control” in communism; it must be a capitalist concept. The style of constructivist graphic design resulted from available paper, found art, and the constraints of the letterpress printing presses in and around Vkhutemas.
What is the ideological foundation supporting graphic design programs today? It’s not political, it’s certainly not spiritual, and can we say it’s intellectual? No, it must be technological. Everyone has a computer; more and more time is spent before the screen. As Americans, we have always excelled in technology, and perhaps we should accept that our basis for doing everything is faith in technology and let go of imitating alien styles; tear down the foundations that really don’t reflect who we are. We should be confident in the profundity of our contemporary style; it reflects our true ideology. As the Apple (you recall that eating the apple gave the secret of knowledge to Eve) gets stronger and faster, we’ll spend more time before the electronic altar. We are building on a sophisticated technical foundation; it is our intellectual base. Let us adopt the cry, “Up with the mouse and on with the millennium,” and construct our curriculum on that mighty piece of plastic.
Notes
1. Oskar Schlemmer to Tut Schlemmer, May 1, 1921, in Diaries and Letters, ed. Tut Schlemmer (1958; reprint, Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1972).
2. With Lyonel Feininger and Gerhard Marcks.
3. Design and Form: The Basic Course at the Bauhaus and Later, rev. ed. (New York: Van Nostrand-Reinhold, 1975).
4. Kandinsky was the crossover figure, living in Moscow, Munich, at the Bauhaus, and in Paris, teaching at the Bauhaus in 1922–33, overlapping with Schlemmer, Klee, and Itten. A spiritual figure, he remained Russian Orthodox throughout his life and wrote The Spiritual in Art, expressing his mysticism.
5. Alexander Lavrentiev, Varvara Stepanova: The Complete Work (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988).