The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism
Ten Surprising Facts fromThe Bauhaus GroupAlma Mahler made Walter Gropius's private life a sort of living hell at the same time that he was founding the Bauhaus.Paul Klee was an inventive and competent cook who specialized in offal.Wassily and Nina Kandinsky had had a son who died at age two in Moscow, but at the Bauhaus never even referred to his having existed and kept this tragedy a private matter.Years after the Bauhaus closed, Nina Kandinsky was murdered in her chalet in Gstaad.Mies Van der Rohe invented his name.Anni Albers, when asked who she would have liked to be, replied "Mae West."A woman at the Bauhaus claimed that she was pregnant with Josef Albers's child but that they had never had sex.The real reason Gropius gave up the reins of the Bauhaus was, as much as anything, because it was a financial mess.The Mazdaznan sect, which favored rituals that included the ritual use of powerful laxative, had a major presence at the Bauhaus.While Josef Albers came from a working class Catholic family, and Anni Albers from a rich and cosmopolitan Jewish one, her parents found her so difficult that they told Josef they were thrilled she had found him, and that he could always seek refuge with them.--Nicholas Fox Weber(Photo © Marion Ettlinger)