Tel Aviv glorified by Bauhaus architecture

Avraham Soskin House, 12 Lilienblum St 

by Zeev Rechter, 1933. Dezeen

Sir Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) was a Scottish urban planner, and having publicised his Cities and Town Planning Exhibition 1911, he was involved in town planning work mainly in India. But he was committed to Utopian ideals to be applied to the new Jewish homeland.

When Tel-Aviv became a city in 1921, Meir Dizengoff was elected mayor. In 1925 Dizengoff asked Geddes to submit a mas­t­er plan for the city, the limits being the Yarkon River in the North and Ibn Gvirol St in the East. Ged­des presented a great report in 1927, soon ap­prov­ed by the City Council. He brief was to cr­eate a European Garden City for 40,000 citizens, planning wide, main streets on a grid pattern, single plots for family homes, small pub­lic gar­d­ens in side streets and open access to beaches. He sp­ecified mixed residential-commercial use on the main roads.

This building designed for photographer Avraham Soskin was divided into two asymmetrical wings, each with its own entrance and stairwell. The front wing for the family had a flat roof with a pergola and a horizontal emphasis, expressed in rows of windows and the balconies' elongated ventilation slits. The large more industrial rear wing, invisible from the street, had 2 floors and basement for the photography studio. The balconies, windows, entrance details and roof pergola were all reconstructed meticulously according to historic plans and photographs. Three new flats were built in the back wing.

Cinema Theatre, now Cinema Hotel

1 Zamenhof St, 1934

Jerusalem Post

See the 1931 Master Plan of Tel-Aviv, drawn up by the Engineering Dept, on the original Geddes master plan of 1927. The primary roads, containing the city’s com­m­ercial activity, ARE broad and flow N-S. The second­ary roads, residential, DO flow E-W. Wide tree-lined streets increased shade and colour, and provided a pleasant public space.

Inevitably Geddes’ plan had to be modified. The city’s density soon needed growth to cater to the flood of 1930s imm­igr­ants. By the height of British Mand­ate, the city was home to 150,00 people and 8,000 buildings! Of Geddes’ 60 public gardens, only half were ever built. The population today is c498,000!

The German Jews who arrived brought with them modernist architectural ideas from Le Corb­usier and Walter Gropius. Just as Tel-Aviv was burgeon­ing on the Mediterranean (1933), many of the lead­ing Bau­haus ar­chitects left Germany for Britain and USA, at least 20 Bauhausers and their colleagues migrated to the British Mandate in Israel.

By the mid-1930s it was the only city anywhere being built largely in the Bauhaus Style; its simple concrete curv­es, boxy shapes, small windows set in large walls, glass-brick vert­icals, asymm­et­ric­al fac­ades, horizontal lines and balcon­ies all washed in white. Tel-Aviv was a vis­ion of startling white: c4,000 buildings, all built from 1933.

65 Shenkin St. 1935

Archinect

Tel-Aviv city council design­ers chose the Bau­haus style because of four ideological reasons:

1. Tel-Aviv architecture wasn't historically consistent with buildings from the past; there WAS no past.
2. The architects’ job was to improve so­c­iety: housing for working famil­ies, trade unions, free clinics.
3. Prefabricated blocks of reinforced concrete, flat roof and sheer façade, no cornices or decoration saved money. Plus a three storey limit.
4. 20+ energetic Bauhaus-influenced architects fled Germany in 1933. Tel-Aviv city council drew on this amazing pool of available talent.

Bauhaus elements were characteristic of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, with some local Tel-Aviv adaptat­ions. Glass was used sparingly, and narrow, horizon­tal win­dows appeared on many of Tel-Aviv’s Bauhaus buildings. Vertical windows were used on stairwells.

Along the Mediter­r­anean, balconies in­creased the movement of breezes and sea views. So overhanging brows blocked dir­ect rays of sunshine from entering the win­dows. This changed in the 1930s when desperate, homeless immigrants were arriving. Bauhaus lines were then obscured by ugly balcony enclosures, while giving an extra bedroom.

Bauhaus interiors in Germany were already white, functional and plain. But Tel-Aviv has a hot climate, so rooms had to be as cool as possible. No wall-to-wall carpets and curtains; marble floors instead; and shutters could close windows entirely. And space could be used flexibly, of necessity.

first pilotis in TA, designed for Engel House, 1933

garden under house; trees around the building

architect Ze'ev Rechter,

84 Rothschild

The original Bauhaus build­ings might have ended up being bull­dozed, but a miracle happened: In 1991 the Engin­eer­ing Dept of Tel-Aviv municipality created a Modern Heritage Preservation under architect Nitza Szmuk. Bauhaus Renovation Foundation organised a Conf­er­ence for May 1994 for 2,000+ inter­nation­al particip­ants. Along with Dizengoff, Geddes planned a Garden City of wide tree-lined boulevards, small roads with smaller green spots, clean-lined, boxy buildings with little ornamentation and a beach focus. In 2008 Tel-Aviv opened a Bauhaus Museum in Bialik St to dis­play its furnishing designs etc.

 
Tel Aviv is now home to c4,000 buildings of Bauhaus architecture (2,000 protected under preservation law), the world’s largest collection of Bauhaus-inspired buildings. With the hearty help of Dizengoff, Geddes planned a Garden City of wide tree-lined boulevards, small roads with smaller green spots, clean-lined, boxy buildings with very little ornamentation and a beach focus.

Concrete pilotis/stilts raised the buildings off street level, creat­ing space for green gardens and air flow. As with the balconies, some of the once-open area from stilts were later enclosed. European Bauhaus buildings already had flat roofs, not shingled and slanted roofs. While Tel-Aviv roofs sometimes did not feature roof gar­d­ens a la Le Corbusier, they DID serve serve some building res­idents.

White kitchen and eating area

in a Tel Aviv Bauhaus flat

Thank you to Bauhaus in Tel Aviv.

Miracles & Madness in German art Guardian

Nolde's Crucifix, 1912
was in Städtisches Museum in Halle

I’ve not read The Gallery of Miracles & Madness: Insanity, Art and Hit­l­er’s First Mass-Murder Programme by Charlie English, 2021 because I was more interested in the fate of Germany’s degenerate artists than in men­t­al patients in asylums. So here is Kathryn Hughes’ fine review.

In 1922 Heidelberg psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn’s book Artistry of the Mentally Ill fired up the art world. Since the C19th, doctors in asylums pored ov­er the drawings, paintings and sculptures of their patients. Could doctors spot schizophrenia just by looking at how someone coloured in the sky? Could they discern neurosis in an patients who simply painted models with incomplete faces?

But using art diagnostically was not Prinzhorn’s issue. His interest in the patients’ art was aesthetic and philosophic eg when a delusional Ham­b­urg metalworker Franz Bühler produced The Choking Angel, an intense version of God’s messenger with a shining crown and a torturer’s face, Prinz­horn seriously compared the work to Albrecht Dürer’s!

Bühler, Angel, 1909

The Guardian

This was certainly not art to soothe the soul, but of course soul-soothing was not what mod­ern art was about. From the late C19th, Gustav Klimt, Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele focused on describing the agony of modern selfhood. Feel the ris­ing tide of madness in Munch’s horrified scream or Schiele’s warped bodies. And it was that madness, a heroic refusal to fall for the easy remedies of civilised soc­iety, that Prinzhorn’s asylum artists easily accessed. While sane art­ists scraped off layers of social condit­ioning and acad­emic train­ing before they could reach Freud’s hidden parts of themsel­ves, asylum in­mates had a shortcut to their unconscious. Rather than being patronised, these artists of the interior were to be revered and copied.

Paul Klee, teaching pictorial theory of form at Bauhaus, greeted the images in Prinzhorn’s book rapturously. In these oddly shattered shapes, with jagged outlines, perspective shifts and incomplete­ness, Klee saw an authent­ic response to all post-WW1 world crises. See his Prophetic Woman (1923), a prim­itive figure in­debted to Lamb of God, a dense geometric pen-ink drawing by an insane banker.

Angel of Suffocation by Franz Karl Bühler, 1909 on book cover of:

Artistry of the Mentally Ill: Psychology and Psychopathology of Configuration

Hans Prinzhorn, Amazon

Among the Surrealists, Prinzhorn’s book also succeeded. Max Ernst drew inspiration from August Natterer, an Upper Swabia engineer who believed he was a direct Napoleonic descendant. Natterer’s intensely detailed, densely coloured works, which came to him in a vision, provided in­spiration for Max Ernst’s 1931 Oedipus. Salvador Dalí borrowed from madmen but, to his credit, tried hard to go insane as a way of improving his own painting, never quite managing it.

Having failed 2 entrance exams to pre-WW1 Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts, self-taught art­ist Adolf Hitler scraped a living by copying postcards of pleasant Munich views and selling them in bars. Until he ended up in a Bavarian prison, screaming at the admitting psychologist! A ps­ych­ologist had assessed Hitler as a mor­bid psychopath, with hysteria and an inclin­ation toward a mystical mind­set. Hitler was imprisoned for his part in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, in which he led 2,000 Nazi storm­troopers in a failed attempt to end the Weimar Republic. His fort­unes were about to change and within 10 years he was Chancellor of Germany, but his ideas about art did not change. In fact they hard­ened into a dogma that be­came a founding principle of the Third Reich’s German culture and pure Aryan race.

Hitler’s outrage at modern art focused on abstract, distorted and angry works. This worsened in WW1’s devastating aft­ermath in Germany, exaggerated colours, expressive brush strokes and gory subjects only ex­acerbated Germany’s societal divisions, and econom­ic and political cris­es. For Hitler, on the other hand, Healthy Art was an art that painted exactly what was in front of its nose, plus some ex­tra swagger. People should look like Ary­ans, with firm limbs and rosy cheeks, and land­scapes should resemble the tourist postcards he once churned out. So the Füh­rer introduced legislation to en­sure that painters followed his rules.

Any art that did not follow these rules was Degenerate, seen as a deliberate ploy by the Jewish-Bolsheviks to destroy Germany. To ensure this didn’t happen, Hitler ordered the confiscation of all trouble­some art from Ger­man galleries and museums in 1937. This collected treasure, includ­ing a number of pieces by the Prinzhorn artists Klee, Marc Chagall and Otto Dix, was put on display in the Degenerate Art Exhibit­ion that year. Lat­er iterations of the immensely popular show cont­rasted modern­ist art with art made by the Heidelberg patients, in order to show the conn­ect­ion between biological and artistic degeneracy.

Otto Dix. Storm Troops Advancing under Gas, 1924.

Kunstsammlung Nordhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf.

By this time the patients were extremely vulnerable. Most profess­ional artists whose work featured in the Degenerate Art Exhib­ition had gone. Klee was in Switzerland, Chagall, Dalí and Ernst were in New York, while Oskar Schlemmer and Dix were in hiding. So there was no-one left to speak up for the asylum artists when, in autumn 1939, Hitler set out to exterminate them.

The rationale was eugenics. Psychiatric illnesses like schizophrenia were heritable, so it made sense to purge the un­for­tunates who “rep­res­ented life unworthy of life”. Actually cost-cutting was possibly the more immediate driver: long-term psychiatric care cost money and, as Ger­many prepared for war with Brit­ain, the money could be better spent on tanks. 30+ of Prinzhorn’s artists were among the 250,000 in­mates put into gas chambers early in the war. The lucky ones got away with forced st­er­ilisation.

Great Exhibition of German Art catalogue cover, 1937. 

ancient, classical, proud

Charlie English’s book was as beautiful as it was bleak. Thank you Kathryn Hughes

Degenerate Art Exhibitions: from 1937 Germany, USA and France.

How do we remember art exhibitions held decades ago? This question is the key to an understanding of post-modernist practices. Reesa Greenberg called it the Remembering Exhibition, and used the term for modern exhibitions that recalled specific exhibitions from the distant past. We think of exhibitions as isolated moments in time, Greenberg said, and refer to extraordinary exhibitions as Landmarks, implying a journey where history was forever changed.

endless queuing at the Degenerate Art Exhibition, 

Munich 1937

Greenberg said the common form of remembering exhibition is the replica. This mode copies as much of the original art work as possible, even if reproductions are needed in a space employing the initial installation structure.

Remembering Exhibitions may be found in other historical displays. This device can convey a broader sense of the period than that provided by the art works alone. But since the 'remembering exhibition' is distant in time from the original exhibition, the art often needs to be supplemented by archival documentation. We can jog modern viewers’ memories by displaying photographs and documents relating to the show’s reception.

For me there have been many landmark shows, but none as powerful as the Entartete Kunst-Degenerate Art exhibition which started in Munich in 1937 and wandered around German and Austrian cities for 4 years. I have written and lectured about it at length.

works intentionally displayed badly, 

Degenerate Art Exhibition, 1937

 So of all the examples that Reesa Greenberg used, I am currently interested in two. The first was the 1937 Entartete Kunst/Degenerate Art exhibition, remembered in curator Stephanie Barron’s 1991 Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany. Assembled by the Los Angeles County Museum, 150 art objects from the original German exhibition were included.

Fate of the Avant Garde in Nazi Germany Exhibition, 

1991

The reconstruction was not entirely faithful to the original exhibition. In 1937 the original Entartete Kunst exhibition was shown in a number of very different warehouse spaces; these changed as the show travelled around Germany and Austria. By contrast, the 1991 reconstruction of Degenerate Art consisted of a free-standing corridor with a raised floor in the middle of an exhibition gallery. The effect of this structure was that of entering a time tunnel.  Only some of the reproduced art works were positioned in a crowded manner similar to the way they had been encountered in 1937. It was intended to convey something of the intensity of the experience of the original Nazi exhibition.

The second, more fascinating modern exhibition was the 1997 Exiles and Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler which featured a replica space based on Frederic Kiesler’s Art of this Century Gallery in New York. It was originally designed in 1942 for Peggy Guggenheim.

Barron and her German associate, Sabine Eckmann, vividly illustrated a nearly forgotten aspect of the late 1930s: the American public was largely unaware of Nazi persecution and in any case, mainstream America had little sympathy for the people the Nazis persecuted, especially those weird abstract artists. People who appreciated and supported the creative talent of the avant-garde were few indeed. The 1997 exhibition recognised some of the most prominent ones, such as Peggy Guggenheim, Alfred Barr and Reinhold Niebuhr. Notably missing, however, were the contributions of the American Friends Service Committee, whose Friendship House became a gathering place for refugee artists. They succeeded in convincing the sponsors of the 1939 New York World's Fair to include an exhibit of art banned by the Nazis!

Exiles and Emigres Exhibition, 

1997

Could the hysteria of the 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition be relived 60 years later, knowing that many of the artists identified as degenerate had to flee into exile or face the Nazi regime? Could we imagine ourselves standing for hours in long long queues, waiting to see the modernist art, before it was sold off or destroyed?

Probably not, but we moderns could develop insight into why the Nazi party was so offended by the degenerate artists and their work. And we can at last unwrap the irony of Nazi taste setters displaying the very art that they wanted desperately to hide from the public. The 1937 Entartete Kunst exhibition was to give, at the outset of a new age for German people, a close survey of the gruesome last chapter of those decades of cultural decadence that preceded the Great Change.

Stephanie Barron, Susan L Caroselli et al wrote Degenerate Art : the fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, published by Abrams and Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1991. It is well worth reading. So is Exiles + Emigrés : the Flight of European Artists from Hitler, written by Stephanie Barron, Sabine Eckmann and Matthew Affron. Published by H.N. Abrams in 1997, the book could have been a text for my lectures - Varian Fry, Bauhaus architecture, Marc Chagall, Surrealism in exile etc.

Degenerate Art Exhibition, Musée Picasso Paris, 2025

sortiraparis.com

Until mid May 2025, the Musée Picasso in Paris has an exhibition entitled "Degenerate Art: The Trial of Modern Art under Nazism". This is a dark dive into art history, exploring the Nazi regime's persecution of the avant-garde. Based on an analysis of the Entartete Kunst exhibition held in Munich in 1937, see 600+ works by 100 modern artists, including Otto Dix, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Vassily Kandinsky, Emil Nolde, Paul Klee and Max Beckmann, in a setting designed to provoke visitors' disgust.

modern chair design 1920-> Bauhaus Aalto

Depending on view, the Bau­haus Movement (1919-33) either gave birth to, or nourished modern design, a de­sign style recognised by its clean, simple lines and truth to mater­ials.                         

Le Corbusier LC3, 1928

                             

Architect and designer Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was a well known exponent of International Style modernism. His refined philos­ophy had become a catch phrase throughout C20th design. Mies van der Rohe's early architectural career in Berlin included train­ing in Bruno Paul’s office in 1905-7 and in Peter Behrens’ office in 1908-11 (with co-workers Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius). He open­ed his own pract­ice in Berlin in 1913 and developed arch­it­ecture that used the pure formalism of the International Style.

Bauhaus Academy opened in 1919, and soon had a popular furniture work­shop; it creat­­ed objects that borr­owed from the designs of their pred­ec­es­s­ors. How­ever they had more front-line materials and their production techniques were improved. Their furniture was made from ply­wood forms, glass slabs, steel tub­ing and geo­m­etric shap­es, increasing the influence of Bau­haus and spreading it out from Germany.

The Chair with Colourful Woven Seat (1921) was designed by Marcel Breuer and Gunta Stölzl. Though built of wood and quite tradit­ional in form, the woven seat and back showed the infl­uence of De Stijl's bold primary-colours.

Under Marcel Breuer’s leadership from 1924-8, the workshop re-­th­ought the crux of furniture, often seeking to reduce con­ventional forms to their min­imal state. Here are the classic chairs of the Bauhaus movement in his era:

From 1926-32 Mies van der Rohe was vice president of the Deutsche Werkbund, designers and architects whose main aim was the development of well-designed, mass-producible architecture and home objects via an alliance of art and industry. In 1927 the Werk­­­bund presented an exhib­ition that incl­uded the Weissenhof Housing Estate, ex­p­eri­men­tal blocks of flats in Stuttgart, designed by Le Corbusier.

Under Mies van der Rohe's direction, some young architects who collabor­ated on the project designed furniture for the flats. A graceful, elegant and well proportioned MR chair, developed from a 1924 design for a cantilevered chair by Mart Stam, was int­ro­duced by Mies van der Rohe at the 1927 Stuttgart Exhibition. Note the tubular steel and cane seat, and note the armless design.

Mies van der Rohe, MR chair, 1927

The Model B3 Chair was designed by Mar­cel Breuer (1925) while he was the head of the cabinet-making workshop at Bau­haus, Dessau. Ins­p­ired by the sleek body of Breuer’s bicycle, the Mod­el B3 featured a steel tubular structure finished in bright chrome, while the seat and back were covered by strong leather strips. Note the chair was not designed for the non-objective painter Was­sily Kand­in­s­ky who was also on Bauhaus’ staff. Kan­dinsky had simply ad­mir­ed the final design, so Breuer built a copy for his friend's rooms. Inspir­ed, Breuer continued to exp­eriment with metal furniture, ultimately creating lightweight, mass-producible chairs, some used in the Dessau building theatre.

The foldable design of another Breuer chair, the D4, suc­ceeded with all audiences in 1927. Breuer’s fully ergon­omic design led it to be one of the most iconic Bauhaus furniture pieces to have hit the market then. The tubular design with the canvas seat and back ensured sturd­iness and comfort, an  innovative combin­ation.

Breuer folding D4 chair, 1927

While an architect, Le Corb­us­ier’s passion for furniture design was unparalleled. Out of all his chairs, the LC3 armchair (1928) was the most famous one. The thick design of the chair offered modularity with the cush­ions, sleek, comfortable and sophisticated.

The Barcelona Chair was designed by arch­itect Mies van der Rohe, in col­labor­at­ion with architect Lilly Reich. This Bauhaus piece whose impact continued because of the minim­alist design, chrome and black aest­hetic, created for the Barcelona Inter­national Expos­ition (1929). It featured 2 slim rectangular cushions over a light, stainless-steel frame. The chair frame was in­itially designed to be bolted together, but it was redesigned using stainless steel, allowing it to be formed from a seamless piece of metal.

Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona, 1929

The Bauhaus was forced to close down in 1933 under Nazi pressure. The lecturers and students left for other countries as soon as they could, and continued to spread their philosophies and skills in the USA, UK and the rest of the world. Mies van der Rohe, last director of the Bauhaus, left Ger­many for America where he headed the Architecture Faculty at Illinois Institute of Technology.

*Now a new question (for me) is: how did Finland’s famous architect and a key figure of mid-century Modernism Alvar Aalto (1898–1976) make his int­er­national mark in furniture? How closely linked to Bauhaus was he?

Aalto studied with Josef Hoff­mann & Wiener Werkstätte, and was inspired by Eliel Saarinen and by Gebrüder Thonet. In the late 1920s and 1930s he, working closely with his designer-wife Aino Aalto, also focusing much of her energy on furniture design. His furniture designs were a natural extension of his archit­ectural thinking, using wood (mainly Fin­n­ish birch) and be­coming the first chair designer to use the cant­il­ever principle.

The Paimio Chair (1932) was named after the Paimio T.B Hospice in SW Finland. The chair was designed by Aalto to furnish the Hospice, part­icularly for sitting T.B patients. The chair was first shown to the public at an exhib­it­ion held in conjun­ction with the Nordic Build­ing Forum in Helsinki in 1932. The experim­ent­at­ion in bent ply­wood chairs, especially the Paimio chair and Mo­d­el 60 stacking stool (1933), was very sig­nific­an­t. The arm­rests and legs were made by bending thin slats of solid timb­er to shape in a mould, at first in beech. The beech was replaced by birch in 1934 so the chair could be marketed as truly Finnish.

Aalto, Paimio,1932

The Aalto spouses founded the Artek Co. in 1935 in Finland, to sell Aalto pro­ducts (fur­niture, lamps, textiles) and other imported products. They became the first furn­iture designers to use the cantilever principle in chair design using wood.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Berlin's amazing Neue Nation­algalerie

Neue Nationalgalerie was the sole European building that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe  (1886-1969) designed, after he departed for U.S in 1937 amid the rise of the Nazis. Its design qualified it as one of the more elegant struc­tures of its kind anywhere. Mies, famous at the Bauhaus School that was closed by Nazis in 1933, always prioritised funct­ion­alism over déc­or­ation dur­ing his career. And like many of his other works, this build­ing was mostly made of industrial materials like steel. From the out­side, Neue Nation­algalerie (opened 1968) is unusual, since much of the art on view can’t be seen from its glassed-in second-floor façade.

Crown Hall at Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago.

This was the centre-piece of Mies’ larger campus plan, just before WW2.
The Art Story

Neue Nationalgalerie was planned as a vital cornerstone of the cult­ural centre Kulturforum, situated between Landwehr Can­al, Potsdamer Platz and Tiergarten Park in central Berlin. The site was once a resid­ent­ial area built in the C19th, but parts of it were torn down by the Nazis to give space to Hitler and Speers’ New Berlin. Kulturforum was to become a modernist answer to Museum Is­land, and Neue National­galerie was to become its centrepiece.

The gallery’s history was closely linked to the pol­­it­ic­al division of Germany and of Berlin post-WW2. The founding in 1949 of two Ger­man states, with different pol­itical systems and diff­er­ing id­eologies con­cerning the role of art in soc­iety, marked the end of a unified col­l­ection. And with the division of Berlin, most of the cult­ural buil­dings finished up on East Berlin’s side of the wall. As a res­ult, plans for West Berlin’s new cultural centre started in the 50s.

National­gal­erie’s collection, first shown at the Museum­sinsel Ber­l­in then at the Kronprinzen-Palais on Unter den Lind­en, was origin­al­ly managed by the Greater Berlin Authority. The West Berlin au­th­or­ities wanted to rebuild the collection by setting up a Gallery of the C20th.

In the late 1950s Mies van der Rohe had already been comm­is­sioned to design a new office for Cu­b­an liquor Bacardi, in Santiago de Cuba. He planned a large roof plate supported by 2 col­umns per side and in concrete, instead of steel. Bacardi fell through, but when Mies was invited to des­ign the Ber­lin museum in 1961, he used his Cuban id­eas, although diff­erent in scale. The new museum was said to be an hom­­age to Schink­el’s Altes Mus­eum on Museum Island.

The archit­ect’s new museum had to house both the collection of C19th art and the Gallery of the C20th. Mies’ long-term preocc­upation with creat­ing fluid, open spaces led to the des­ign of the upper pav­ilion of the gallery. This open-plan flexible space was very different from trad­itional museum idea of a closed building with exhibition rooms.

Neue National­gal­er­ie by Mies

Opened in 1968

In Sep 1965, Mies travelled to Berlin to lay the foun­dation stone. And two years later he attended the most spectacular con­struction stage: hydraul­ically raising of the gigantic steel roof into place. Note Mies’ designed the upper exhib­it­ion hall and the giant floating steel roof plate, resting on 2 cruciform steel pillars on each side. The glass walls and the open floor plan created a space, made possible when Mies put most of the build­ing's space under the podium i.e all ser­v­ice areas, offices, exhib­it­ions spaces and café. It was Mies’ last building project.

When it was built, the museum was standing on the edge of what was then West Berlin. The building’s architectural structure ch­ang­ed lit­tle but the urban setting in which it stood under­went rad­ical chang­­es. Thanks to the reunific­ation of Germany and of Berlin, and the en­suing construction heart at Potsdamer Platz, Neue National­gal­er­ie was no longer in a wasteland but in the busy city centre.

The Staatsbibliothek emerged at the same time as the Neue National­galerie, on the opposite side of Potsd­amer Strasse, and was follow­ed by the Kammermusiksaal-chamber music hall erected next to the exist­ing Philharm­onie. These buildings were joined several mus­eums in the form of the Kulturforum (as above), and after German reunific­at­ion, by the urban redevelopment of Potsdamer Platz.

Neue National­gal­er­ie, airy galleries

Opening day in 1968

The New National Gall­ery shows C20th art: Expression­ism, Cubism, Bauhaus, Surr­eal­ism and works by Pablo Picasso, Ernst Ludwig Kirch­ner, Joan Miró and Wassily Kandinsky. It was opened Sept 1968, sig­nalling the start in West Ber­lin’s cul­tural rebirth. And with its steel roof and aust­ere architecture, Neue National­gal­erie stood in honour to a vis­ion­ary C20th architect. He died shortly after (1969)

In the decades after­ward, the Museum began to age, and British arch­it­ect David Chipperfield was asked to repair it in 2012. The museum was reopened in 2021 following $168 m renovations. Now in Jan 2022 the museum hopes to become a UNESCO World Her­it­age site. Thanks to The 25 Best Museum Buildings of the Past 100 Years and Atlas of Places.

Naum Gabo - Russian and internationalist Constructivist artist

Only twice have I ever mentioned Naum Gabo in my blog. Firstly in the mid 1930s Ivon Hitchens lived in a Hampstead studio, within a circle of avant-garde artists known as The London Group. The group included the other members of the 7 & 5 Society, plus new exciting artists like Englishman Paul Nash. They were soon joined by Naum Gabo who had moved from Russia to Munich and Paris for years, then Britain in 1936. Secondly Ben Nicholson married the sculptress Barbara Hepworth in 1938 and with the outbreak of WW2 in 1939, they decided to settle in St Ives. Gabo and the artists made sleepy old West Cornwall trendy.

Russian Naum Pevsner Gabo (1890–1977) was a pioneer. In Moscow, he was involved in the early growth of Construct­ivism and supported the international development of this movement after he left Russia in 1922. Living and working across Europe, Gabo int­eg­­rat­ed into the artistic scene of cities like Moscow, Munich, Par­is, Ber­l­in and London, and influenced some C20th artistic movements. In Britain he joined commun­ities of modern artists in London and St Iv­es where his geometric abstraction found inspiration in natural forms. Gabo was also known as a designer, sculptor, painter and printmaker. And as a theorist and writer, he lectured con­sis­t­ently throughout his career. Best of all, he married Miriam Israels in London.

  

 Naum Gabo 

Constructed torso, 1917

cardboard

Tate London

Gabo’s legacy has influenced several generations of prac­titioners across the world including artists and architects working with ab­s­t­ract and organic forms, kinetic and installation artists. Even when he settled in the U.S in 1946, Gabo gained sig­nif­ic­ant fame via publications, lectures and public commissions. Now back to his theory base:

1) Art should drive social change Gabo believed art could challenge audiences and make them think about the world in diff­erent ways. His practice aimed to communicate themes about modern life and to establish the essential role of art within society.

Gabo was keen that his artistic ideas were not exclusive. He wanted art to be a part of daily life through architecture, film and live arts. And he advocated the use of widely available industrial mat­er­­ials like glass and sheet metal as well as contemporary innov­at­ions like Perspex and nylon cord. He believed art that refl­ec­ted the concerns of the modern world could bring about social change

2) Art should be realistic Co-signed by brother Ant­oine Pevsner, the radical The Realistic Manifesto (1920) redefined con­vent­ion­al approaches to sol­id mass, volume, line and colour and advocated for the inclusion of space, time and movement.

The decree also proposed art be taken out of galleries and onto the streets, bringing it closer to real life. Their ideas were comm­un­ic­­­­ated through a poster, hung on official hoardings across Mos­cow! The manifesto accompanied an open-air exhib­ition of paintings and sculptures by Gabo and Pevsner on the city’s busy Tverskoi Blvd.

Gabo meant that art should be grounded by the pre­s­ent. It should express actual experiences, not illusions. He chal­l­enged the ev­ol­ving styles of modern painting such as Fut­ur­ism and Cubism, which were gaining influence across Europe. These art forms translated a visual experience of real life in­­to two-dimensional representation. Gabo felt they had not gone far enough rejecting artistic tradit­ions. He wanted art to be non-representational, dynamic and interactive, to be univ­er­sal­ly relevant.

3)  Art should reflect the time we live in The Realistic Manifesto advocated that art should reflect the modern age and that art should be constructed. Gabo thought, as society progressed, art should to. This would be in accordance with the ethical, scientific and technological developments of the day. In Moscow he taught at the Free Art Studios, because it was fostering the new generation of artists engaged with public art, architecture and design. 

 Naum Gabo 

Head #2,  1916

steel

Tait St Ives

In Germany Naum became central to contemporary issues, so naturally he collaborated with the Bauhaus School in 1928. Bauh­aus was the vitally important and rather revolutionary school of art, architecture and design established by Walter Gropius at Weim­ar in 1919. In mid 1923 he visited Bauhaus with El Lissitzky, but this did not result in any longterm contract for either artist. 

In the 1930s Gabo moved to Paris to escape growing Nazism. During this time, he joined a group of international abst­ract artists who were opposed to surrealism’s ideals. They proposed uni­v­ersal harmony in abstract forms as a response to the political and social upheavals then. This was captured in Gabo’s 1937 text The Constructive Idea in Art published after his move to London.

4) Art should be for all Gabo saw art as a universal form of communication that transcended social, political and cultural bar­r­iers. Gabo created schemes for monuments and build­ings to be seen in the public realm. His practice covered the arts from theatre, film, design and architecture, to sculpture and paint­­­ing, specific­ally so his art could reach the widest audience. A number of his sculptural models were turned into large public commissions in Rotter­d­am, Lond­on, Oslo, Princeton and Baltimore.

In the UK his work is in London Tate and Tate St Ives in Cornwall. Gabo was an integral member of the modern arts, based on the Cor­n­ish coast throughout WW2. Post-war he settled with his wife and child in the U.S. He gained inter­national fame via touring shows, public commissions, teaching and writing. Gabo's id­eol­ogies remain­ed central to international debates on abstract art from 1920s on.

Naum Gabo’s exhibition, Art For The Modern World, returned to Cornwall for first major exhibition in 30 years. Closing in March 2020 amid Covid19, Tate St Ives reopened the Gabo exhibition in Aug. With 80 works drawn largely from the Tate and the Berlinische Gal­erie collections, the exhibition analysed the manifesto’s principles to Gabo’s varied arts. The range included pioneering kinetic works, Perspex and ny­lon sculptures, unrealised architectural plans for a high-rise heli­pad and Stalin’s Palace of the Soviets, designs for Sergei Diag­hil­ev’s 1927 ballet La Chatte and sketches for an experimental film.

  

?

Naum Gabo

Construction in Depths, 1944

oil paint

Guggenheim

Thank you to the Tate for Gabo's theory bases and images.

Wassily Kandinsky - artist and art theorist

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) was born in Moscow, and spent his childhood in Odessa, fostered by a relative. In high school he learned to play the piano and cello. Then he enrolled at the Moscow University, studying law and economics, succeeding in teaching law.

Kandinsky’s youthful fun with colour symbolism and psych­ology continued into adulthood so it wasn’t surprising that he wanted more art stud­ies. In 1889 he was part of a research group that trav­elled north of Mos­cow. He wrote that the houses and chur­ches were decorated with such shimm­ering colours that on enter­ing them, he felt that he was moving into a painting.

By 30 Kandinsky had given up his promising career teaching law ..to enrol in the Munich Academy. He was not accepted, so he began learning art on his own. That same year, before leaving Mos­cow, he saw an exhibit of Monet paintings and loved the impress­ionistism of Haystacks 1890.

In 1896 he settled in Mun­ich, studying at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts.

Wassily Kandinsky, Winter Landscape, 1909
Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.

In 1902, Kandinsky successfully ran a summer painting classes in the Alps near Munich. It was then that he em­erged as an art theor­ist as well as a painter. The number of his paintings in­creased in the early C20th, especially the land­scapes and towns on which he used broad strips of colour. Humans appeared in few of his works eg Sunday, Old Rus­sia 1904. Riding Couple 1907 depicted a man on horseback, tenderly holding a woman as they passed a Russian town with bright walls; the river reflections sparkled with spots. Fauvism and pointillism were appar­ent in these early works.

Perhaps the most important of his paintings then was The Blue Rid­er 1903, showing a small cloaked figure on a speed­ing horse in a rocky meadow. The rid­er's cloak was medium blue, in the fore­ground were blue shadows, and trees in the background. This became an increas­ingly conscious tech­nique used by Kand­in­sky in subsequent years, culminating in the abstract works of the 1911–4 period. 

Wassily Kandinsky, Blue Mountain, 1909
107 x 98 cm
Guggenheim Museum, New York

Kandinsky travelled across Europe, set­tling in Bavaria. The Blue Mountain 1909 showed his move toward abstraction - a mountain of blue flanked by two broad trees, a yellow and a red. A proc­ess­ion, with 3 riders and others, crossed at the bottom. The Fauv­ist faces, clothing and saddles of the riders were each a single colour, while the walking figures were undetailed. Blue Mountain’s broad use of colour illust­rated how colour was presented independ­ently of form, and which each colour was given equal attention.

Music was important to the birth of abstract art, since music was itself abst­r­act; it did not try to represent the exterior world, but expressed the soul. Kan­d­insky could use musical terms to identify his works; he called his most spontaneous paint­ings im­prov­isations and his more elaborate works as compos­itions. After attending a concert in Jan 1911 in Munich, Kand­in­sky was sympath­etic to Arnold Schoenberg; he was looking to free visual art from formal strictures similar to those that Schoenberg was rebelling against in music. As a result Kand­insky created Impres­sion III Concert.

Art theorist Kandinsky probably infl­uen­ced the history of Western art more from his theoret­ical writ­ings than from his paintings. His analyses on forms and colours resulted not from simple associations but from the painter's inner experience. He spent years creating abs­tract, rich paintings, endlessly observing paintings and noting their effects on his sense of colour.

Kandinsky helped form the Mun­ich New Art­ists' Association, becoming pres­ident in 1909. How­ever the group could not integrate his rad­ic­al approach with normal artistic concepts, so the New Artists’ Ass­ociation dissolved in late 1911. 

The Blue Rider Almanac, 1912
1st edition of book with articles and artwork by the Blue Rider Group of Artists. 

When Kandinsky met Paul Klee, August Macke and Franz Marc in 1911, he had them in­cluded in his avant-garde Munich exhibition in 1912. Kand­insky then form­ed a new group in Munich, Der Blaue Reiter/Blue Rider, with his closest artists eg Macke, Marc, Albert Bloch and Gab­riele Münter. Kandinsky and Marc were the main fig­ur­es in the new Expressionist art group; they influenced the vigorous forms that were the ext­er­nal expressions of their creativity. His books On the Spir­itual In Art 1910 and The Blue Rider Almanac 1912 prom­oted abst­ract art. 

In Britain Kandinsky partic­ipated in the 1910 Allied Artists' Ex­hibition held at London's Royal Albert Hall; his work was well praised in The Art News. By 1912, his essay On the Sp­iritual In Art was re­viewed by Michael Sadler in the London-based Art News and was soon tran­slated into English. And this publicity led to Kandin­s­ky's first works entering a British art collect­ion. Sad­ler bought wood-prints and the abstract painting Fragment for Composition VII dur­ing a 1913 visit by Sadler to Munich. These works were disp­layed in Leeds University and in the Leeds Arts Club, from 1913 on.

Der Blaue Reiter held two exhibits and more were planned, but the outbreak of WWI in 1914 intervened and sent Kandinsky back to Mos­cow. Following the Russian Revolution, Kandinsky helped est­ab­lish the Mus­eum of the Culture of Painting. In 1916 he met a woman (1899-1980), they married in 1917 and had a son that year. But by then his sp­ir­itual outlook was clashing with Soviet society values. He returned to Germany in 1920, just as Walter Gropius, director of Bauhaus, was hiring modernist designers like Marcel Breuer, Klee, Kandinsky and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

Macke, Tower of Blue Horses, 1913

Kandinsky’s movement lasted for a short, but important time. While the art com­munity never embraced his radical expressionist ideas, the ideas of Der Blaue Reiter artists helped lay the groundwork for abstract experimentation.

Nikolaus Pevsner - greatest architectural historian ever?

Susie Harries’ Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life is an interesting book because it focuses on my hero’s personal life rather than his lecture notes. Nikolaus Pevsner (1902–1983) was born in Leipzig into a com­fortable and cultivated Jewish family. Father Hugo (1869-1940) was a fur merchant and mother Annie Perlman (1876-1942) was a pianist. Pevsner attended Leip­zig, Munich, Berlin and Frank­furt Universities.

It was clear in his diary that Nikolaus Pev­sner wanted to be a real German and was embarrassed by his parents’ Judaism and his father’s association with trade. In 1919 his bril­l­iant brother Heinz committed suicide, so Nikolaus aband­oned Judaism and con­verted to Lutheran­ism that same year.

Receiving his PhD in 1924, Pevsner married Karola Lola Kurlbaum, daughter of the respected appeal judges in Germany. It was a life­­­long, sometimes unstable marriage, with 3 children. Lola was al­so Jew­ish but considered herself 100% Prussian and hoped to raise her husband up to her own cultural standard.

Pevsner's doctoral thesis, Leipziger Baroque (1925) was a study of It­alian man­n­erist and baroque painting. Soon he was working as As­s­istant Keeper at Dresden Gallery (1924–8), assisted the dir­ec­t­­or of the Dresden International Art Ex­hibition in 1925 and became lecturer at Göttingen University in art and architectural history (1929–33). Loving English art, he travelled widely in England in 1930.

Back in Germany Pevsner found elements that were admirable about the Nazis, indicat­ing how much his outlook on art history matched theirs. And he really DID support Goebbels in his drive for pure, non-decadent German art. Apparently he said of the Nazis in 1933 "I want this movement to succeed. There is no alternative but chaos".

Yet to the Nazis, Jewish-born Pevsner’s 1921 conversion to Prot­est­antism was nothing; he would always would be a Jew. And his passion for med­iev­al Saxon sculp­ture, the glory of German art, didn’t prove his Germanness either. The young man was caught up in the ban on Jews being employed by the Nazi state and lost his job at Göttingen in May 1933.

In 1934 the family emigrated and friends found Nikolaus a research post at the University of Birmingham. In 1936 he est­ablished his name by publishing Pioneers of the Modern Design, the single most widely read book on modern design.

He had no social life and little sleep. After a day looking at buildings and taking endless notes, Pevsner worked on his notes at night and planned the route for the following day.

Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life 
by Susie Harries
Random House, 2013

Isle of Wight
one of Pevsner's Architectural Guides

He wrote mostly about English architecture, yet what he really admired was the modern functionalist German style. Pevsner traced the evolution of the C20th architect­ure from sev­eral sources, from William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Nouveau and Victorian architecture, to Walter Gropius and his Bauhaus colleagues who broke with the past! Be still, my beating Bauhaus heart!

During WW2, Huyton Liverpool was an internment camp for prisoners of war. “Enemy alien” Pevsner was imprisoned there in 1940 and was not released until the Director Gen­eral of the Minis­try of Information intervened. Then Pevsner settled in London and caught up with the other German speaking refugees: Walter Neurath who founded Thames & Hudson art pub­lishing, and art historian Ernst Gombrich.

I agree that architecture was the most important of the arts because it was the most closely connected with family life. Sad­ly Pevsner found that the study of archit­ect­ural history did not win as much academic in­terest in Britain as it did in Europe. Social changes, the power of the Church and the Nobility, the rise of the estate of burgesses and eventually the emergence of the urban pro­letariat, underpinned his Outline of European Archit­ec­ture (1943).

By war's end, Pevsner was established as an art-historian who loved “soothing, civilised” England, becoming a British citizen in 1946. But it was not until the UK was safely post-war that Pevsner told his children about their Jewish Russian-German heritage. Or that the grandparents had been killed in Leipzig in WW2.

Pevsner joined the acad­em­ic staff at the Univ­ers­ity of London and also edited Architectural Review (1942-45) which ran until 1957. The Pelican History of Art, und­er Pevsner's general editorship, became one of the most authoritative works on the visual arts in English. From 1949 to 1955 he was Slade Prof of Fine Art at Oxford (1968-69), and a Fellow of St John's College Cambridge.

[Apart from Nikolaus Pevsner, my art history students were asked to read the brilliant works of Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, EH Gombrich, Adolf Katzenellenbogen, Otto Kurz, Fritz Saxl and Rudolf Wittkower. Note that they were all trained at German-speaking universities!]

Pioneers of the Modern Movement
by Nikolaus Pevsner, 1936

Nikolaus Pevsner and his books, in 1980

Pevsner was, and is best known for editing the monumental series, The Buildings of England (1951-74). Intending to cover every single building of architectural interest across Britain, he wrote 32 of the books himself and 10 with collaborators, personally visit­ing every building he described. A further 4 of the original series were writ­ten by others. This series became Pevsner Architectural Guides.

In 1958, Pevsner became founding chairman of The Vict­orian Society for the study and protection of Victorian and Edward­ian art and architecture, thankfully saving houses, churches, railway stations and other Victorian monuments.

In 1959 he became the first Professor of the History of Art at Birkbeck College, University of London. He focused on A History of Building Types 1976, cov­ering national monuments, government build­ings, town halls, law courts, theatres, libraries, museums, hospit­als, prisons, hotels, banks, warehouses & offices, rail­way stations, market halls, exhibition buildings, shops and fact­or­ies.

This Mittel-European Jew of Russian descent became a Protestant Englishman, knight of the realm, lecturer at the BBC, academic and publishing phenomenon, founding-father of academic architectural history in Britain. Pevsner died in London in 1983, memorialised in Church of Christ the King, Blooms­bury. He was buried in St Peter Wiltshire churchyard.

Bauhaus exhibitions, 100 years in Germany

I wrote about Bauhaus' 100th anniversary: 1919-2019 a few months ago. Basically, when the tragedies of WW1 finally ended, architect Walter Gropius founded Bauhaus School of Art & D in Weimar Germany to design for the new world. Although operating for only 14 years (1919-33) be­fore being shut down by the Nazis, Bauhaus was said to have become the most influential art and design academy in history.

In 1976 the Galerie am Sachsenplatz in Leipzig sold 148 Bauhauser works to the City of Dessau. The objects kept in this dist­inctive Dessau Collection told the story of teaching and learning, free design, the development of indust­r­ial prototypes, artistic experiment and links with the market­place. And consider its stars across a range of dis­cip­lin­es, including typo­grapher Herbert Bayer, textile art­ist Anni Albers and sculptor Mar­ianne Brandt. Teachers included artist Wassily Kandinsky and arch­itect Mies van der Rohe.

The Bauhaus Museum Dessau design came from Barcelona, selected from 800+ submissions in a 2015 international competition. The jury want­­ed a soaring steelwork block in a glass envelope, designed in the Bauhaus spirit and paid for by the Federal and the State Governments in Germany.

Architect FRS Yorke and designer Marcel Breuer. 

RIBA Collections

The foundation stone for the new museum was laid in Dec 2016. The transparent ground floor, the Open Stage museum foyer, serves as an open platform offering temporary exhibitions of cont­emporary works. The museum is located in the city park in the centre of Dessau, connecting the central business district and the periphery of the park. In Sept 2018, the upper floor and roof area were completed.

The opening of Bauhaus Museum Dessau in Sept 2019 was a highlight of the centenary. And the unique collection, with 49,000 catal­og­ued objects, has been on display. Called Versuchs­stätte Bauhaus - The Collection visitors can travel the historical exhib­it­ion that follows the history of the school in Dessau. See the furniture, lamps, text­iles and works of visual artists. The Arena con­nects directly to the social understanding of his­toric Bau­haus as a collective community. An Open Stage as platform for contemporary and temporary exhibitions on the ground floor.

For the school's 100th anniversary year in 2019, art and design museums and galleries around the world have hosted, and will host events. The Moscow, Sao Paulo, Munster, New Delhi, Berlin, Gera, Rotterdam, London, Essen, Tel Aviv and Chicago exhibitions have already ended.

Note the following important exhibitions and conferences that will be continuing into 2020 and beyond:

April–Oct 2019 In Herzogliches Museum in Gotha Germany, the exhib­it­­ion focused on the life and work of Oskar Schlemmer: Bauhaus and the Path to Modernity, famous for his multi-disciplinary work as a painter, graphic artist, sculptor, stage designer and muralist.

March 2019–Jan 2020 Centred around his Haus Schulenburg in Gera Germany, this exhibition explores the life and work of modernist architect and artist Henry van de Velde. It also features his neo-impressionist paintings and book designs.

April 2019–March 2024 The Neues Museum in Weimar is celebrating the legacy of the school with the early works of modernist Weimar art, and its relat­ion­ship to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. See Van de Velde, Nietzsche and Modernism.

Sept-Oct 2019 Operating over 3 consecutive weeks in three different cities (Berlin, Dessau and Weimar), the Triennale der Moderne has built a network of modernism.

Architect William Lescaze
High Cross House, Devon, 1932
RIBA Collections

Architect Marcel Breuer  
Sea Lane House, West Sussex, 1936-7
The Modern House

This exhibition highlights include:
A] Drawings and plans by the partnership of Walter Gropius and Maxwell Fry, including the unbuilt Isokon 3 building;
B] Unseen illustrations, sketches and personal photography from the archive of Leslie Martin;
C] Furniture & interiors by Marcel Breuer & Wells Coates;
D] Photographs by ex-Bauhaus student Edith Tudor-Hart;
E] Works by Elizabeth Denby, Sadie Speight, Margaret Blanco-White, Norah Aiton & Betty Scott, important female architects engaged with modernist avant-garde ideals.
F] Archival 1930s films incl László Moholy-Nagy; and
G] Personal correspondence and ephemera that tracked the personal lives of the key protagonists

Oct 2019–Feb 2020 The Royal Institute of British Architects/RIBA in Lon­don explores the development of British modernist architecture via the Bau­haus movement. The exhibition foc­uses on 3 notable Bau­haus­ers: Wal­t­er Gropius, Marcel Breuer and László Moholy-Nagy, and their impact on Britain. In 1936 Breuer left Germany for England and associated with British architect FRS Yorke, which led him to some design motifs he later used.

Enjoy the article “Bauhaus exhibitions in 2019 celebrating the school’s centenary”.

Alma Schindler Mahler - music, sex, cultural elite

If I thought there was a lot of sex going on in the late 1960s, those of us interested in turn of the century Vienna had to do some rethinking. Here is my old post republished, now with a greater look at contemporary anti-Semitism.

Alma Schindler (1879-1964) was born to famous landscape artist Emil Schind­ler and singer Anna von Bergen. Emil was known as an anti-Semite while Alma became an anti-Semite herself, even after her father died when she was only 12. This was strange, since 2 of Alma's 3 husbands were Jews, as were 3 of her favourite lovers.

After her father's death in 1892, Alma's mother married her late husb­and's pupil Carl Moll (1861–1945), painter and co-founder of the Vienna Seces­sion. Moll’s Secessionist connections were important for young Alma; her lively social life expanded as she met the other Vienna Secession artists, including the very attractive Gustav Klimt (1862–1918). Klimt adored her but I am not sure her considerable musical talents were being supported by her cultivated colleagues.

Alma played the piano from childhood and loved composing. She met Jewish composer Alexander von Zemlinsky (1871—1942) in 1897, and learned composition with him until 1901. Zemlinsky had been a great teach­er for the very Jewish Arnold Schönberg (1874–1951) and a great contact for Alma. Zemlinsky and Alma fell in love, although Alma teased her lover about his ugly Jewish features. The relationship failed.

Gustav Mahler and his sister Justine, 1902

Family photos

In 1901 Alma attended Bertha Zucker­kandl’s literary salon, famous in cultured Jewish Vienna, where she began an affair with Austrian Jewish composer Gustav Mahler (1860-1911). Note that Gustav Mahler could only become the director of the prestigious Imperial Vienna State Opera if he converted to Catholicism. So he did.

While still in a relat­ion­ship with Zem­lin­sky, Alma started an aff­air with Mahler, and became engaged. In March 1902 they married and moved into a home near the Opera House where two daught­ers were born. With her own career nipped in the bud, Alma became the chief supporter of Gust­av's music. Probably Mahler had never liked Alma and Zemlinksy being lovers. But it was only when Gustav finally realised his wife had comp­os­ing talent that he helped her prepare her songs for public­ation in 1910. Good grief.

Mahler and Alma trav­elled together to New York, where Gustav work­ed as a conductor. In 1911 he tragically died, soon after their return to Vienna.

In 1910, Alma met and became very close with the young archit­ect Walter Gro­p­ius (1883–1969), my fav­ourite Austrian architect and event­ual­ly director of the world’s best art school, Bauhaus School of Art and Design.

Oskar Kokos­ch­ka, 

The Bride of the Wind, 1913

Kunst­museum Basel 

Oskar Kokos­ch­ka, 

Lovers with Cat, 1917

Kunsthaus Zürich

After Mahler's 1911 death, Alma also had a passionate affair with young Czech Christian artist Oskar Kokos­ch­ka (1886–1980). Alth­ough they later broke up, Kokoschka continued an unrequited love for Alma and paint­ed The Bride of the Wind 1913 and Lovers With Cat 1917 in her honour.

Kokoschka enlisted in the Austrian Army, so Alma resumed contact with Gropius who was a soldier himself. She and Grop­ius married in 1915 and had a child together, Manon Grop­ius, who died tragically at 18. Brilliant composer Alban Berg wrote a violin work in Manon’s honour.

With Gropius still in the army, Alma began a very public affair with Jewish Czech poet and writer Franz Werfel (1890–1945) in 1917. Within a year, Gropius and Alma agreed to a divorce which became final in 1920. However Alma and Werfel did not marry until 1929. Gropius, on the other hand, married Ilse Frank in late 1923 and they remained happily together until his death.

In 1938, Werfel’s Jewishness became critical. Soon after the Aust­rian Ansch­luss, Werfel was forced to flee to France; so Alma joined him in Southern France from 1938-40. With the German occup­at­ion of France, Werfel faced Nazism directly and needed to imm­ig­rate to the USA urgently. Luckily Varian Fry, organiser of a priv­ate Am­erican relief and rescue organisation, was saving intellect­uals from Mars­eilles. Fry arranged for the Werfels to walk across the Pyrenees into Spain and Portugal, and by ship to New York.

I do not understand why Alma went into exile with her Jewish husband since a] she had never liked the Jewish community, b] she was not opposed to Nazism and c] she actively supported Franco in Spain. Perhaps love and sex were more powerful than anti-Semitism.

Mahler and Werfel

In the USA Werfel had great suc­c­ess with his novel, made into a film in 1943. But sadly Werfel died in the USA in 1945. None­­theless Alma soon became a USA citizen and remained a major cultural figure in New York where she wrote her two Mahler biog­raphies. It is interesting that when Alma died in 1964 in New York, she chose to be buried back in Vienna, along­side her first husband Gustav Mahler. She had been a core member of Vienna’s cultural elite AND the main authority on Mahler's life and works.

Early in life Alma und­erstood that in male-dominated cultural Vienna, her role was to be a muse for brilliant men, in bed and out. But I wonder if being a famous socialite and active supporter of Alexander Zemlinsky, Gustav Mahler, Walter Gropius, Oskar Kokoschka, Franz Werfel and others was enough for her. Her own musical talents were never given the same professional support that the men received. Bride of the Wind: life and times of Al­ma Mahler-Werfel was written by Susanne Keegan