PositiveLiterary ReviewGropius is sometimes characterized as anti-feminist. MacCarthy responds that the Bauhaus had as many female students as male ones, the most famous being Anni Albers (the subject of a recent retrospective at Tate Modern). However, as Alan Powers points out in Bauhaus Goes West, female students like Albers were streamed into the weaving or textile workshops thought appropriate for women. To redress the balance, MacCarthy, who claims to have been struck by the octogenarian Gropius’s sexual charisma, slices up his life according to his many affairs. It doesn’t quite redeem him, but it makes for an incredibly readable and rounded biography and gives credit where it’s due to the formidable women who shaped him.
