Well timed for the Bauhaus centenary, this is the first biography of Walter Gropius (1883–1969) since Reginald Isaacs’s Gropius: An Illustrated Biography of the Creator of the Bauhaus was translated from German and abbreviated in 1991. Isaacs worked on his original tome with Gropius and his second wife, Ise. Now Fiona MacCarthy breaks some new ground, writing in a popular style but relying heavily on Isaacs’s classic. Her quest is to elaborate on the personal Gropius while leaving his inventive architecture and celebrated pedagogy in the background.
McCarthy, who has written biographies of William Morris and Lord Byron and was a design writer for The Guardian, met Gropius when she was a young reporter. She had expected he would be formal and stern, and was surprised by his charm and sexual charisma. The impression influences her portrait and contrasts with her terse descriptions of Gropius’s architectural practice and how he ran the Bauhaus like an opera impresario. Before meeting Ise, Gropius yearned for domesticity, and we can see why after reading bits of tormenting letters his notorious first wife, Alma Mahler, wrote to him while he served as a cavalry officer in World War I. The fanciful Alma dismissed her husband as a dullard and refused to easily share their child, Manon. Deeply troubled by his painful marriage and suffering battle nightmares, Gropius started the Bauhaus in Weimar and got a divorce.
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