Bauhaus: The Cult

Circle Packing

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Line generation

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Bauhaus: The Cult Columbia University

This essay investigates occult influences on the Bauhaus - from Gropius’s vision of the school to Itten’s strict diets and Kandinsky’s spiritual references. The project was developed at Columbia University in Mark Wigley’s Extreme Design course on the Bauhaus for the school’s 100 year anniversary.

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Bauhaus: The Cult

Hasan Hachem

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Weimar

Weimer set the precedent for the spiritual culture at the Bauhaus. After the formation of the school, Gropius selected Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinksy, and Paul Klee as well as Gerhard Marcks, Lyonel Feininger,

Oskar Schlemmer, and László Moholy-Nagy as the early masters. Itten, Kandinsky, and Klee played a large role of introducing spiritualism into the Weimar Bauhaus curriculum early on with contributions from other professors such as Gertrud Grunow and Lothar Schreyer. 7

Johannes Itten was on the extreme end of the spectrum (in relation to his contemporaries) for his radical approach to achieving the gesamtkunstwerk. Itten developed the required preliminary course on basic form, colors and materials where students were enrolled for one year before being placed into a workshop. Itten was influenced by Mazdaznan, a religion that treats the

body as a vessel for achieving enlightenment. Under Itten’s direction, his students performed breathing exercises and engaged in strict diets including mashed vegetables with garlic and porridge from wheat and barley (Droste, 1988). Extreme accounts recall Itten encouraging his students to puncture their skin and rub oils over the wounds, believing it would cleanse their bodies (Droste, 1988). Itten was forced out of the Bauhaus in 1923 after developing tension with Gropius, however, his introductory course can be 8

7 This is a simplified list of professors influenced by spiritual guidance. Occult practices were quite popular among intellectuals across Europe in the early 20th century; meaning other professors (i.e. Georg Muche) may have been influenced in smaller degrees. 8 Itten prohibited meat and tobacco.

Johannes Itten and his color wheel (beyond)

Mazdaznan symbol

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Dessau

The Bauhaus was a cult and the building was its lodge. The Weimar Bauhaus was placed in the building that was formerly occupied by van de Velde’s School for Arts and Crafts from 1919 to 1925. This moment in the school’s

development proved critical in its early influence of theosophical virtue, however, Dessau Bauhaus was Gropius’s masonic lodge. Beyond being designed by Gropius himself, the building complex performed internally and externally to support the Bauhaus order. 10

Gropius developed a preliminary design of the Dessau Bauhaus in 1925 and it was completed in 1926. The design included an asymmetrical building consisting of three wings, a five-story student-housing block and master’s housing that was a walking distance to the school. Each wing accommodated a specific function that included the four-story workshop with the glass curtain wall, the arts and crafts wing and the elevated administration building that connected the two production spaces.

Both student and master housing served as the backdrop for their claim to the new domesticity. This meant the conflation of live and work under a single lifestyle, similar to the masonic lodges. For students, their rooms became just as critical as the workshops as spaces of production. For masters, it was the

10 Haus am Horn, designed by Georg Muche, can be considered as an early attempt to view objects as central to the one’s life. The small exhibition building organized a series of rooms around the central living space where work can be placed. I chose to focus on Dessau Bauhaus due to its overall significance and its inclusion of living and working space, more similar to a mason’s lodge.

Dessau Bauhaus (Designed by Walter Gropius, furnished by Bauhaus workshops)

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An Opportunity for Acknowledgement

In 1953, Robert J. Lifton published Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. In the book, Lifton interviews 25 Americans held captive during the Korean War and 15 Chinese who fled their homeland after indoctrination attempts by universities. From the research, Lifton developed his “Eight Criteria of Thought Reform” in which he explains the techniques the communist organizations employed in attempt to alter and influence one’s thoughts. The points include: milieu control, mystical manipulation, demand for purity, confession, sacred science, loading the language, doctrine over the person, and dispensing of existence.

It is unclear if the Bauhaus employed every tactic identified by Lifton, specifically, formal confessions or debating the right of existence. Yet, the majority of Lifton’s characteristics are applicable when analyzing the Bauhaus.

From the isolation in Dessau to the school curriculum to the housing arrangements, there was total control over every individual’s daily life at the Bauhaus. Although students were able (and encouraged) to express themselves, it was always towards the gesamtkunstwerk, the Bauhaus’s philosopher’s stone. This doctrine was practiced and explored through different mediums and techniques; it was considered to be the truth and superior to any individual person. Students and professors endured rigorous diets and health plans in order to cleanse themselves for divine and spiritual advancement through the production of their work. In turn, the word of the Bauhaus was proliferated by their prolific media production that represented their avant-garde ideol

Unidentified masters and their families at a master’s house.

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