Walter Gropius – Insufficient drawing talent made access to architecture difficult
Walter Gropius was born in Berlin on 18 May 1883. The son of a Prussian architect and civil engineer, he grew up in comfortable circumstances and was able to explore the intricacies of architecture at an early age. Corresponding studies at the Technical Highschool in Munich and Charlottenburg were broken off early in 1908, however, because, by his own admission, he did not feel mature enough to meet the demands of drawings and had to constantly call on help – a reservation which he still was not able to overcome in his later world career as architect. The art dealer Karl Ernst Osthaus nevertheless mediated him a position in Paul Behrens’ architectural office, where famous colleagues such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier had also worked. In 1915, Walter Gropius married Alma Mahler, the widow of the composer Gustav Mahler, with whom he had already led a passionate affair during her husband’s lifetime. The marriage broke down five years later.
Gropius becomes an icon as director of the Bauhaus
During the First World War, Walter Gropius served for four years at the Western Front; he was badly wounded and awarded the Iron Cross. Through this experience, he decisively rejected the war. In 1918, he joined the November Group to carry the revolutionary spirit into art, whereby he postulated a supremacy of architecture. Although Gropius belonged to the leading circle of the group, together with César Klein and Adolf Behne, his engagement in this respect is hardly known – in complete contrast to his work for the Bauhaus in Weimar, whose direction he took on in 1919 at the suggestion of the Belgian-Flemish architect Henry van de Velde. As director, he traversed the most important station of his career and left his mark on German as well as international art history, but above all on the building industry. He explored the unsolved problems of mass residential building and took part in the ambitious city planning project Neues Frankfurt. In his planning, Gropius also greatly took into account the requirements of industry, thus ensuring the most rational construction methods possible, which did not always take the needs of the residents and aesthetics into account.
National Socialists push Gropius to emigrate
In 1925, Walter Gropius married Ilse Frank - who left her fiancé for the architect – and who wrote most of his texts as Ise Gropius. The marriage lasted until Gropius’s death, despite Ise’s affair with the Austrian photographer Herbert Beyer. Together with the German theatre director Erwin Piscator, Walter Gropius worked to create a Total Theatre in which they strove to abolish the boundary between stage and auditorium. The increasing hostility of the National Socialists towards the Bauhaus, however, prompted Gropius to emigrate to London; there he was able to study at close quarters the Isokon Flats of his Canadian colleague Wells Coates, where other celebrities such as Agatha Christie, Marcel Breuer and Laszlo Mohol Nagy lived. In 1937, his path led to the USA where he held a professorship at Cambridge and in 1938, he moved into a house built especially for him which today bears his name and is a National Historical Landmark. His collaboration with Konrad Wachsmann was particularly successful, with whom he developed the famous General Panel System, amongst other things. In the 1950s, Gropius completed several contracts in Berlin, including the erection of a nine-story residential block in Hansaviertal.
Walter Gropius died in Boston, Massachusetts on 5 July 1969.
Walter Gropius - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
