by And a Berlin surprise: Oscar Wilde, furniture designer and interior decorator?
BERLIN — Just as I did two years ago in Vienna, this summer while in Berlin I hit the museums that feature furniture and furniture design to unearth their treasures. What I found not surprisingly connected the ascendance of the National Socialists in 1933 with what came before and after World War II in terms of furniture design and the home, a legacy that is now global.
Let’s start with that historical grounding, which is on display at the Museum of Things in central Berlin. While the main displays focus on everyday life and everyday objects as history, laced with the narrative of these exhibits is a history of the Deutscher Werkbund, a pan-industry collective that among many other things spawned Bauhaus. In fact, the formal name of the museum is Werkbund Archiv: The Museum of Things.
I have long admired Bauhaus and, by extension, the modernist design movement of which the Bauhaus School was a key driver. Yet, I had never heard of the Deutsche Werkbund, a far-reaching federation of leaders in the fields of art, industry and politics “who sought to promote the modern and functional design of industrially manufactured products, architecture, and living environments,” according to literature at the museum. Founded in 1907, this movement prioritized functionalism, sustainability and honesty with respect to materials, and it not surprisingly renounced decoration and ornamentation. That’s right, sustainability was a thing in Germany nearly 120 years ago.
Prominent in the museum is a 1925 quote from Bauhaus pioneer and Werkbund leader Walter Gropius, one that articulates the philosophy of Werkbund (Google translated it for me from the German):
We value “restriction to typical basic shapes and colors that are understandable to everyone. [We believe in] simplicity, economical use of space, fabric, time and money. . . . The life needs of the majority of the people are mainly the same. House and household appliances are a matter of mass needs; their design is more a matter of reason than a matter of passion.”
In service to the goals Gropius articulated, the Werkbund and Bauhaus struggled with just what modernist design should include and exclude. Some clear principles emerged: Sleek, functionalist, technically austere industrial styles made possible by machine production. Furniture began featuring a great deal more glass and metal, as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s design showcase.
Long-fingered legacy
These imperatives, this functionalist philosophy, would long outlast the Nazis, though no one could know this in the early 1930s.
Seeing the dangers of “Nazification,” which sought to co-opt all aspects of German life, including the Werkbund, Gropius emigrated to England in 1934. In contrast, van der Rohe thought the Werkbund could work with the Nazis and would not leave Germany until 1938. By then, the Nazi Party had elected its own members to the Werkbund’s board before dissolving it into the Reich Chamber of Culture, then dissolving it altogether.
I saw this contrast in reactions to and awareness of the existential threat the Nazis’ rise posed to Germans of all stripes and varieties, a threat that in the hindsight of history seems obvious, but that in real, lived time proved much more complex. Some members of the Werkbund, for example, ended up in the Third Reich’s “Beauty of Labour” propaganda office.
Before it was infiltrated by Nazis, the Werkbund curated collections of “good’ and “bad” design, exhibitions and product guides. Good meant simple, functional and affordable. Bad meant decorative, affected and unnecessarily expensive. The Museum of Things embodies this philosophy today by celebrating good design, including a smattering of Bauhaus and a van der Rohe homage, but also by presenting a section of bad design, much of it now kitsch.
After the war, the Deutscher Werkbund re-established and continued to focus on modern design. Designers in East Germany also revived modernist design approaches from both the Werkbund and the Bauhaus, and this makes perfect sense. East Germany, like West Germany, had to rebuild quickly and cheaply. We saw the legacy of both the destruction and rapid rebuilding all over east Berlin, where we had an Airbnb flat for the month.
From worst to first
Here’s something else I did not know prior to my visit: Prior to this shift to mass production in the 1940s and 1950s, German goods, including and even especially furniture, had a rather crap reputation internationally. The move to becoming a modern industrial state with an expanding consumer market gave Germany the opportunity to sort of start over, to replace the prevalence of historical influenced design with a greater consistency and higher overall quality. This really explained for me much of what I used to regularly see at Köln Messe each January when covering that big trade fair in the 1990s.
Next, let’s go just a few stops on the U-Bahn to the Bröhan Museum to check out all its wonderful Bauhaus. Only we can’t, because it doesn’t have any Bauhaus, despite a website telling all that the museum is a celebration of Bauhaus and its century of contributions to modern living.
Fortunately, redeeming the visit was the surprise of finding Oscar Wilde featured as a collaborator with the great British furniture designer Edward W. Godwin, the subject of a multifaceted exhibition that took up most of the Bröhan’s second floor, or, if you call the ground floor “0” as they do in Europe, the first floor. So confusing.
The exhibition served as a wonderful counterpoint to the Werkbund, because Wilde (and Godwin) was anything but simple, functional and unpretentious. The exhibition title is a cue: “Edward W. Godwin and Oscar Wilde: Dandies, Decadence, Modernism.” Explored are the artistic partnership, shared vision and cultural impact of Godwin (1833-1886) and Wilde (1854-1900), much of this a reaction to the excesses of Victorian design.
I had never heard of Godwin, one of the more innovative and radical architect-designers of Victorian England. He pioneered the Anglo-Japanese style and what was called “Art Furniture,” a style that rejected the ornate clutter of mid-19th-century Victorian. His pieces were known for their clean lines and functional simplicity, connecting us again to the philosophy of Bauhaus and the Werkbund.
Wilde ride
Both Godwin and Wilde believed in the complete integration of art, design and lifestyle, and they believed in the permeation of aesthetics into all facets of everyday life. This includes interiors, clothing and, as one of Wilde’s elaborate capes on display in the museum punctuates, personal habits. I kept thinking of Kim Kardashian, Beyoncé, Maria Sharapova, Justin Bieber and their interest in design and in collaborating with designers.
The centerpiece of the Wilde-Godwin collaboration, and of the exhibition, as well, is Wilde’s commissioning of Godwin in 1884 to redesign Wilde’s newly acquired residence at 16 Tite Street in Chelsea, London. Godwin transformed the townhouse into an icon of Aestheticism, featuring stark white and pale pastel interiors, Japanese-inspired minimalist arrangements, customized built-in furniture and subtle color harmonies that, according to the exhibition’s curators, shocked contemporary London society.
Both men also shared a deep passion for theater, costume design and historical dress, and Godwin’s work on stage productions and costume design mirrored Wilde’s interest in dandyism, fashion as self-expression and performance in public life. The result is as visually interesting as any furniture you will see.
I don’t need to say much more; the photos tell the story, illustrating Godwin’s favoring of geometric structure, modular elements and stripped-down ornamentation. These are, rather poetically in service to this column, the precursors to Modernism, which Bauhaus exemplifies. Another product of these shifts is Art Deco, my personal favorite, which also is spotlighted at the Bauhaus-less Bröhan.
