After Bauhaus

Muche rebelled during the Dessau years more and more against what he called his surrender to the Bauhaus. He wrote as explanation for leaving it in 1927,

“I lost my true identity in the Bauhaus and when I found myself again, I left it.”

Muche had always been a dreamer and visionary, notwithstanding his interest in technology. In 1930 he created a “Novel in Images” which he called “To Dream Somewhere.” He has continued to dream and draw his dreams ever since; occasionally they turned into nightmares.

After four years as teacher at Itten’s School in Berlin, he joined his friends Schlemmer and Molzahn at the State Academy of Art in Breslau in 1931.

His large oil, Mass Scene, of 1932 was carefully and patiently built up with thousands of small brush strokes, these slowly grew in his studio before Muche moved back to Berlin. This was his way, to transform and exercise the fear of Nazi menace. Georg Muche has always been one of the most sensitive and thought-provoking draftsmen of Germany.10

Muche often crossed paths with former Bauhaus colleagues. In 1931, Johannes Itten was appointed head of the newly founded School of Surface Art in Krefeld In the autumn of 1937, Itten received his resignation, the Flächenkunstschule ceased operations at the beginning of 1938. In autumn 1938, the newly established training classes at the Higher Technical School for Textile Industry were under the direction of Georg Muche.11

In the drawing, World of the Spider (1914) Muche anticipated not only the experiences of the sinister Hitler years during which he painted only clandestinely, teaching at the Textile School in Krefeld, but it is to him also a symbol of the artist’s will and industry “to spin the yarn” irrespective of circumstances. In his later years he has done monumental frescoes, a technique he studied in Italy.10