Biographies of artists are an unwieldy yet wildly rewarding genre, with authors heroically flexing their muscles to do justice to both the personal histories and artworks of their subjects. Fiona MacCarthy’s thick and scrupulously researched Walter Gropius: Visionary Founder of the Bauhaus is no exception ... MacCarthy’s middle chapters more than do justice to Gropius’s visionary approach to architecture as a complete, totalizing art ... MacCarthy regales readers with wonderful details ... MacCarthy also peppers her tale with the first grumbles of discontent, possibly peer envy, among Bauhaus circles ... Throughout, MacCarthy presents a mostly wholesome image of Gropius as a consummate, apolitical artist, but she does make note of some of his flaws ... Walter Gropius is a luminous, vigorous study of a prodigiously gifted man driven by singular passion.
Do we need another architect hero? Gropius himself might cringe at [MacCarthy's] approach, as he spent much of his career working against the idea of the singular genius, and for an architecture that collaborated with many other fields. His roof and his curriculum gave other people room to develop their talents, and that’s a kind of building worth celebrating. MacCarthy doesn’t seem to appreciate the importance of collective innovation. Instead, she gives the reader a sea of names, the details of a surprising number of pre- and extramarital love affairs, leaving it to others to provide commentary on the work ... MacCarthy’s biography, from the cover and preface on, doesn’t read like a product of 2019. Heroism, romanticism, the singular designer—these are not the preoccupations of architecture and design history now ... The Bauhaus building, as an avatar of the school, and as a piece of architecture, is one of Gropius’s most important achievements. It deserves to be described in detail and in context ... This should be a career apex for Gropius, both individually and for the Bauhaus as a group, and MacCarthy speeds by ... MacCarthy gives short shrift to TAC [the Architects Collaborative] ... The lives and skills of Gropius’s partners hardly come alive. They seem like gray shadows compared with the Bauhaus students ... Yet TAC’s experiment with nonhierarchical leadership, its inclusion of women as equal partners, and Gropius and Harkness’s call to dismantle the cult of the lone male genius, are far more relevant to the discourse in architecture today than one man, one skyscraper.
This is not the man portrayed in Tom Wolfe’s 1981 book From Bauhaus to Our House, which pilloried Gropius as a bore, concerned only with the elitist project of modern architecture. MacCarthy transforms him from a dull institutionalist...into a stylistic rebel who lived and loved in an exuberant community of artist outcasts that would be scattered across the world after Weimar Germany became the Third Reich. Whereas critics of the Bauhaus have seen it as the harbinger of giant faceless office towers and superhighways slicing through cities, MacCarthy presents the school as a fount of idealism ... Most of all, MacCarthy shows that Gropius’s true legacy was the talent he nurtured in others—I.M. Pei, Philip Johnson, Paul Klee, Marcel Breuer, and Wassily Kandinsky, to name but a few ... If, as has been said, the Bauhaus was the ultimate art school, Gropius was the definitive dean.
...[a] meticulously researched, balanced and brilliantly written biography ... For MacCarthy, answering the question is as much about telling the story of Gropius as it is about sifting through the layers of noise that have built up around his name over the years. MacCarthy’s poetic archeology restores Gropius to his rightful place—carefully sifting through the complex topography of an anything-but-simple life ... MacCarthy refuses the often ill-researched reductionist characterisations of Gropius as the arrogant, dour modernist. Instead, she passionately weaves a gripping and powerful narrative deserving of a wide audience while also making for essential reading for anyone studying architecture and design.
It’s lucky for Gropius, luckier than he deserves, that Fiona McCarthy is a superb biographer. She seems to find nothing elusive about her subject ... McCarthy is a wonderfully sympathetic biographer, and her reading and research in these pages is vast. In her search to provide the endearing flesh-and-blood human behind the Bauhaus legend, she’s obliged to supply most of the flesh, blood, and humanity herself, but this is a fascinating thing to watch in its own right. And she frequently steps back to view her subject in an attractively broader perspective ... Architecture aficionados who feel compelled to read an entire long biography of Gropius will never need to read another after this one.
Gropius 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.
As a biographer, MacCarthy has a gift for making a not immediately attractive man compelling ... While I may never be convinced by Gropius the architect, by the end of MacCarthy’s commanding, intelligent, gripping biography, I was, like Alma, Ise and those three spurned lovers, strangely mesmerised by Gropius the man.
MacCarthy neatly dramatises her point that Gropius’s real genius was for coming up with ideas and creating a context in which they could flourish ... In the history of 20th-century design, it is too easy to fall into the old trap of believing that modernists valued ideas and form – and more particularly ideas about form – over living, breathing people with all their warm mess. In this brilliantly recuperative biography MacCarthy provides the same service for Gropius as she did 25 years ago for William Morris. In short, she shows us the man behind the forcefield. Go to Ikea and you’ll see how much we still owe him.
MacCarthy tells [Gropius's] dramas in plain and factual prose, its sentences short to the point of jerkiness, interweaving private life with the historically significant acts of Gropius as an architect ... MacCarthy’s book does justice to these achievements, detailing the ever-precarious financial and political circumstances in which this astonishing cultural supernova briefly flared. She demonstrates Gropius’s underappreciated skill in bringing together some of the greatest artists of the time, along with precocious unknowns such as the young designer-architect Marcel Breuer. She presents Gropius’s Bauhaus not as a rigid design factory but as a place of 'creative dissidence,' ... MacCarthy’s book doesn’t claim to offer deep analysis of all of Gropius’s or the Bauhaus’s artistic output. But, as a way of bringing the human stories of this extraordinary phenomenon to life, it’s hard to beat.
Who is Walter Gropius? This is the question that MacCarthy...answers in her comprehensive portrait of the German-born architect best known for founding the Bauhaus ... MacCarthy offers a buoyant account of her subject’s life, or, as she suggests, his lives[.]
The book, generally, is too hagiographic for its own good, driven by an apparent sense that Ms. MacCarthy must rescue her subject from his many detractors ... Like Gropius’s late work, [Gropius] is functional and revealing, with the occasional moment of charm.
A fresh biography ... MacCarthy...brings insight and sensitivity to a sweeping, penetrating life of Walter Gropius ... Altogether, she produces a multidimensional portrait of a towering, complex figure ... Engrossing, impressively researched, and keenly perceptive.
