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Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism
By Elaine S. Hochman
Fromm International, New York 371 pages; 61/4" x 914"; 22 b&w illustrations; $29.95 (clothbound)
In 1910, Austrian composer Gustav Mahler underwent psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud, who determined that he was suffering from an Oedipus complex. As self-treatment, the 50-year-old musician decided to abstain from all sexual activity, a decision that greatly disheartened his wife, the enchanting Alma Mahler, who was 20 years younger and much sought after in Viennese society. Soon after, she started a steamy, clandestine romance with a young German architect, who appeared at the Mahler home demanding that Gustav and Alma divorce. The ailing composer refused, but a year later he died-on the architect's birthday.
That audacious young architect, as we learn in this riveting, well-written book, was none other than Walter Gropius, remembered today as the founder of the Bauhaus, the most influential art and design school of the 20th century. When he and Alma first met, he had just been fired from the architectural office of Peter Behrens, not for his curious inability to draw, but for miscalculating a ceiling height. His career might have been ruined had his brother-in-law not introduced him to an enlightened industrialist who was planning a shoe last factory.
By its substitution of a glass-andsteel facade for load-bearing walls, that building, called the Fagus factory, secured Gropius a place in architectural history.
Meanwhile, he had become...