Introduction
By Alexander Watt

Walter Dexel, the author of this rather bad-tempered critique of the Bauhaus’s popular reputation, was not by any means a reactionary, nor did he represent a countertendency to modernism in Germany. Born in Munich in 1890, he had studied art and art history before the First World War and begun to move in avant-garde circles. On the outbreak of war, he joined the Bavarian Jaeger Battalion but was invalided out of the army. At this point he returned to his studies of art history while taking up a post as exhibition organizer at the Jena Kunstverein (artists’ association) that would shape his subsequent career.¹ At Jena, Dexel immersed himself in the major art and design movements of the day, curating exhibitions on constructivism (1923), modern architecture (Neue deutsche Baukunst, 1924), advertising (Neue Reklame, 1927), and photography (Neue Wege der Photographie, 1928). In the course of these projects, he came to know many of the leading figures of the modern movement, including Kurt Schwitters, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Bruno and Max Taut, László Moholy-Nagy, Oskar Schlemmer, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and, above all, Theo van Doesburg. Throughout the 1920s, therefore, he positioned himself at the center of the most radical movements in modern art, design, and social change. He was equally active on the theoretical front, writing essays and newspaper articles on various aspects of contemporary culture.² His most substantial publication at this time was the book that he wrote with his wife, Grete, Das Wohnhaus von heute (The house of today, 1928), which included architectural designs and furniture by various Bauhaus masters.

With regard to Dexel’s own painting, his friendship with Theo van Doesburg that developed in 1921–22 marked a shift away from his early expressionist manner toward a more systematic abstract art informed by the Dutch group De Stijl. This visual style would become the model for his commercial work once Dexel began to practice as a graphic designer, a field in which he would become one of the most important figures of his generation. A poster for the 1922 Deutsche Gewerbeschau (German trade exhibition) in Munich is one of his earliest essays in graphic design. Dexel, however, quickly acquired great facility in the handling of multidirectional text, asymmetrical layout, photography, and photomontage: the design features most closely associated with the New Typography, as defined by Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, and Jan Tschichold. In 1928, at Schwitters’s invitation, Dexel joined the Ring neue Werbegstalter (Ring of new advertising designers). At this time he had begun to teach graphic design in the Magdeburger Kunstgewerbe- und Handwersschule (Magdeburg school of arts and crafts), one of the more progressive craft and design colleges in Weimar Germany. This phase of his career came to a close with the rise of the Nazis. Dismissed from the college in 1934 and forbidden to work in his constructivist style, Dexel retreated to Braunschweig (Brunswick) in Lower Saxony, where, as curator of the local museum, he built up the “Formsammlung” (Form collection), one of the most impressive collections of vernacular utensils. The culmination of his work in the museum was the publication Das Hausgerät Mitteleuropas (The household goods of Central Europe; 1962), a synthetic study of the form and design of domestic goods across a huge area and wide chronological period.

What this potted biography indicates is that Dexel was an active participant in the world of contemporary art and design in Germany, a theorist and practitioner at the forefront of radical innovation, and a full supporter of the values that were enshrined in the post-1923 Bauhaus manifestos. He was also a pioneer in what would now be described as the study of material culture and therefore well placed to assess the impact of the Bauhaus on design. As such, Dexel’s criticism is not directed fundamentally against the Bauhaus itself but against an uncritical and undifferentiated view of the college’s reputation. Dexel attacks the exaggerated and unjustified celebration of the Bauhaus as a unique source of modernist design and laments, in particular, the development of a concept of “Bauhaus style.” One can well imagine the irritation of many progressive designers whose careers in the 1920s and 1930s did not intersect with the Bauhaus but who felt that they were laboring in the same fields and often achieving more effective results. Dexel belongs to that group of artist-designers who remained in Germany and whose careers were cut short by the rise of Nazism. Not only did these figures become marginalized in their native country, but they did not participate in the construction of the exceptional image for the Bauhaus in the United States as the primary, if not exclusive, source of modern architecture and design.

If in 1964 Dexel found the close identification between the Bauhaus and modernist design to be a misconception, how much further have we come in the succeeding half century? Specialists may want to qualify the assumption that the Bauhaus is synonymous with modernism, but there is no question that this view has entered popular consciousness. The events and publications of this centenary year may be a moment to reintroduce a note of caution or even doubt. Is the concept of Bauhaus style “a myth”?

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“Bauhaus Style”—a Myth (1964)

In my opinion, it is not the case that the Bauhaus in its time produced all the ideas that are today conveniently described as “Bauhaus style.” People wrongly call everything that occurred in the twenties by that term. In truth, it is rather the case that the Bauhaus, which entered into contemporary events with a completely different character and with quite different aims from what are now attributed to it (one only has to read carefully the founding proclamation of 1919), was carried along by the broad current of the time. It did not invent—or even less, direct—the architectural and formal developments that had already begun almost simultaneously in many European countries. On the contrary, the Bauhaus was gripped by these developments until it finally gained its identity during the final years at Weimar and the first years at Dessau.

From then on, however, the contribution of the Bauhaus—I stress, contribution—soon became very significant because, bearing in mind the poverty of the time, the college’s considerable resources, its dedicated buildings and workshops, and its accumulation of positive support and never-ending propaganda were a considerable impetus to success. The Bauhaus had far more momentum than, for instance, the much earlier De Stijl movement in Holland. For many years under Theo van Doesburg, De Stijl led an initially futile battle against the ideological romanticization of handicraft that still dominated in the early years of the Bauhaus—an extremely important struggle to establish what would later be called industrial design.

It is clear that the new ideas that emerged in the twenties did not originate at the Bauhaus. I say that from the point of view of a very close observer and a dear friend of many of those involved, both from within the Bauhaus itself and from the cohort of numerous critics.

1. 1 Dexel studied art history under Heinrich Wölfflin in 1910 and subsequently with the historian and artist Fritz Burger in Munich. In 1916 he completed a doctoral thesis on French illuminated manuscripts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
2. 2 A brief selection of Dexel’s articles includes the titles “Neue Wege zur Kunsterziehung” (New directions in art education; 1922), “Reklame im Stadtbild” (Advertising in the cityscape; 1926), and “Neue Typographie” (New typography; 1927).