When you mention the Bauhaus, images of classic products like a Marianne Brandt teapot, an Anni Albers weaving, or a Marcel Breuer chair come to mind. But the Bauhaus was more than just an art school; it was the birthplace of a radical new design philosophy, led by Walter Gropius and featuring Kandinsky, Klee, and Moholy-Nagy.
Celebrated biographer Fiona MacCarthy grippingly chronicles the narrative of the ground-breaking architect's life beginning with his shattering experiences in World War One before his troubled marriage to the legendary Alma Mahler and the tragic death of their daughter. She investigates Gropius' life in exile after his agonizing decision to flee Nazi Germany in 1933, tracking how a disorienting period in London evolved into a happy marriage with Ise Gropius, and his late leading position in twentieth-century architecture in America.
MacCarthy's current reappraisal of Gropius' interior life, which challenges conceptions of Gropius as a doctrinaire modernist, is biography at its best: smart, funny, and magnificently three-dimensional.