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And so I get to Germany and revolution. Up on my red shelf in the dome are also my Bauhaus pots. They are stacks of porcelain.
The Bauhaus is revolution in itself.
When Walter Gropius is made director of the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919, he declares that this school will ‘raze the arrogant wall between artist and artisan, and clear the way for the new building of the future’. Bauen, building, gets used a lot in the manifestos. It suggests that learning is a process of bringing component parts together, in different ways. Architecture is a kind of large-scale building set. Imagine the wooden blocks that children play with, learning about balance through pleasure as towers topple and bridges give way; this is Bauspiel, playing with form.
This is how pots fit together too. You learn to be a potter here by throwing elements and joining them to make objects. A teapot needs a spout, a body, a lid, lugs for a handle, but, says the ceramics master, they can be like this, or like this.
Lucia Moholy photographs these pots – greys and whites and blacks – in graphic combinations, on the edge of a table. Everything returns to the image. The world is to be rearranged, played with in order to find the most dynamic way that objects and rooms and buildings and people can work.
What are the potters doing here? Is it a laboratory or is it an art school or is it a factory? We must find, writes Gropius after examining their pots, ‘some way of duplicating some of the articles with the help of machines’.
The Bauhaus potters are making vessels by hand that yearn to look like pots made by machines. The designer, Wilhelm Wagenfeld, clever and astute across glass and metal, was rueful: ‘dealers and manufacturers laughed over our products … Although they looked like cheap machine production, they were in fact expensive handicrafts.’
This hurts. And the cheap/expensive uppercut rings true.
In the revolutionary Bauhaus, you make your pots with definition and hard angles and you glaze them with clean glazes to catch an aura of the machine. You do this because repetition is the rhythm and the pulse of the moment.
‘We don’t live in a time when the cultural face is determined by ceramics,’ writes a critic with asperity in the magazine Die Form. ‘The preferred material of the 1930s is not clay but metal … concrete and architectural glass.’
Or a white material that is clean, barely clay. Porzellan is the coming material.
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You want the most modern vessel? Open Die Form in 1930 and there is Marguerite Friedlander’s porcelain for the Staatliche Porzellan-Manufaktur in Berlin. She is a young potter, trained at the Bauhaus, and this is her first industrial commission. It is stacked as if it has just been taken from the kiln and it stacks beautifully. And by the side, is a photograph of distilling vessels and a mortar.
All porcelain aspires to this, returns to this. You need the clean severity of the chemist’s bench, the grammar of the alchemist, to make your porcelain. Here is Tschirnhaus again, and his need for crucibles for his experiments, Wedgwood giving away his porcelain retorts to colleagues at the Royal Society, William Cookworthy making mortars for apothecaries in his Coxside Works in Plymouth.
‘There will always be a need for mortars.’
When Philip Johnson curated Machine Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1934, this is what he chose. He displayed capsules used for drying or incinerating chemicals from the Coors Porcelain Co. In the catalogue he gave the prices. They cost from fifteen cents up to twenty-five cents. ‘In spirit, machine art and handicraft are diametrically opposed. Handicraft implies irregularity, picturesqueness, decorative value and uniqueness … The machine implies precision, simplicity, smoothness, reproducibility.’
Johnson, just back from his tour of the Third Reich, wants ‘vases as simple as laboratory beakers’.
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And in the Third Reich this is possible.
The first exhibition celebrating a vision for the new Germany opens in Berlin on 21 April 1934. It is called Deutsches Volk, Deutsche Arbeit – German People, German Labour. It has been designed in part by Mies van der Rohe and his partner, the designer and architect Lilly Reich.
You enter up shallow steps. The columns to the building are the handles of four gigantic sledgehammers, twenty metres high. A cog holds the swastika on the roof above you. Inside the building is a spectacle of machinery, pistons, the engine of a train. There are vast images of German workers pouring steel, men deep in mines, women in endless fields of wheat. This is the theatre of materials, resources, possibilities, of people extending into a future. There is a wall of salt. The cover of the catalogue shows a circlet of whitened oak leaves.
The exhibition celebrates work and work is about repetition and repetition is what saves the individual, brings you towards the perfect oblivion of the collective good.
And Lilly Reich, given the brief to display ceramics, installs thousands of undecorated porcelain vessels. They are stacked deeply and they are stacked high. Nothing is out of place. There are hundreds of bowls, thousands of cups, thousands of plates. It is a parade of objects, as white as the tunics of the gymnasts, twisting in perfect synchronicity in the new, white-columned stadia from Leni Riefenstahl’s films.
Reich calls her installation Bright Earth, Fired Earth. German earth is transfigured through fire, ‘reduced by fire to purity’.