Craft Becomes Modern: The Bauhaus in the Making

FROM THE BOOK

According to a widely circulated story—which is considered apocryphal but may even be true—Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, and Fernand Léger visited the first Paris Air Show together in 1912. There, they came across an airplane propeller and were struck by the perfection of its form. Duchamp is famously supposed to have remarked that painting was finished because no painter could ever produce an object superior to that one. Over the ensuing decade or so, each of the three artists created works that have come to be interpreted as responses to the challenge implicit in that verdict. Not too long thereafter, Duchamp himself gave up painting and conceived the first readymades and objets trouvés. Léger went
on to produce at least two versions of Les Hélices (The Propellers, 1918), Cubist compositions that deconstruct manufactured form into planes of color and largely abstract shapes. Brancusi’s sculptural masterpiece Bird in Space (1923) captures the polished elegance of the propeller and even manages to evoke its potential for flight, as argued persuasively by Rosalind E. Krauss.

Apocryphal or not, the story is a useful parable insofar as it encapsulates major issues surrounding the relationship between art, craft, and design in the early twentieth century. The timing of its occurrence very nearly coincides with the achievement of the automated assembly line at the Ford Motor Company in 1913, a symbolic marker of mass production. How were artists, craftspeople, and designers supposed to deal with the coming of the so-called “machine age” and the much-touted obsolescence of handwork? The paths chosen by the three respective men point to different answers.

By acknowledging that the artist’s role was no longer about making things but about framing a concept and staging it as a situation, Duchamp invented an entirely new vision of art. In the process, he also conceded the point that machine-made objects can possess aesthetic value in their own right, no matter how abject their purpose (e.g., a urinal). In giving precedence to intellectual conception over manual execution, Duchamp’s position is not too far removed from that of the archetypical industrial designer—a professional who creates meaning through form by bridging the gap between ideas and the products of manufacture.

Léger’s response is an affirmation of art as critical discourse. The painting does not mimic the propeller or try to compete with it in terms of formal qualities, but uses representation as a means of analyzing the deeper meanings behind the object, as well as evoking an aesthetic response. This is the modern artist’s position, par excellence. Art is not a reflection or copy of mundane appearances, but an alternative reality of form and language that serves as counterpoint to the contradictions of society. Handwork (the artist’s labor) thus becomes a gestural expression of political consequence.

Brancusi’s solution is, perhaps, the one most closely aligned with the post-Renaissance ideal of the work of art as masterpiece. His reaction to the purported superiority of the propeller is to produce something even more beautiful and graceful, independently of its purpose in utilitarian terms. Through virtuosity of hand and physical exertion, Brancusi disingenuously demonstrates that, though painting may fall short of the propeller’s elegance, sculpture is up to the task. This demiurgic attitude is in line with centuries of workshop hubris. Handwork, here, is the empirical manifestation of creative genius.

These positions define a range of possible responses to the relationship between art, handwork, and machinery shortly before the First World War. In very crude terms, they could be categorized as mental, discursive, and bodily—categories that are, by no means, mutually exclusive. Rather, they are markers along a spectrum of possibilities existing between the two extremes of idolatry for the machine—rightly or wrongly associated with Constructivism, De Stijl, Purism, and L’Esprit Nouveau— and hatred of it, as evoked by Bernard Leach’s characterization of fanatical second- and third-generation heirs of the Arts and Crafts movement, “at daggers drawn with the machine.” In order to grasp fully how these positions combined in differing proportions to constitute modernist visions of art and craft, design and architecture, it is requisite to understand the origins of the hand versus machine debate.