A Bauhaus table for a desk is no guarantee of good writing
There was a piece in the International New York Times this morning about a tour through sites in Germany associated with the Bauhaus. The centenary of its founding by Walter Gropius arrives in 2019 and the article’s writer, Charly Wilder, was getting a head start on the celebrations by following the ‘Bauhaus trail’. It’s a good article and full of useful information about the school’s history, its associated artists and architects, and the artefacts and art it produced in the relatively short life it was allowed before the rise of the Nazis put paid to its modernist approach. However, as Wilder says at the end of the article,
“The great irony of Nazi persecution of the Bauhaus is that driving it out of Germany only served to spread its ideas.”
I came across my first piece from the Bauhaus in the basement of a house in London’s St John’s Wood in 1982. The house belonged to a relative of Lucien Freud and I remember the walls of the house upstairs — when I sneaked up to look when the residents were away at weekends — were hung with many of the painter’s works.
It was summer and I was staying in the basement as substitute for a friend I had made on a teaching course who had gone travelling. He lived there rent-free and his only duty was to stay there at weekends to ensure the property was always inhabited and to cut the grass. I was happy to take over the less than arduous quid pro quo for staying in a majestic house — ‘basement’ does not really convey the comfort in which I lived — and in a very wealthy area.
But best of all was the table. In the main room that served as my bedroom and living room — and which had sliding patio doors out onto the lawn that I cut rarely during that late summer — was a Bauhaus table. The owners told me it was a Bauhaus table and I had no reason to doubt them. At the time I knew very little beyond the name.
It was made of a beautiful wood the colour of caramel and was solid; inches thick. It must have been about ten feet long. Maybe three feet wide. The top of the table wasn’t flat; it had a graceful convex surface that make the wood feel alive but not of a shape to be inconvenient or troublesome. The legs were solid and there was a bar on which to rest the feet.
When I wrote at the table, it seemed to give my notebook a suitable shape and resting place. For all the table’s beauty and the provenance of its manufacture, I’m sorry to say that what I wrote while leaning carefully on it was dreadful and has been long ago destroyed.
I wonder where the table is now. Still in the basement of the house in St John’s Wood, perhaps. It is a piece of furniture I still remember vividly and is the only piece of furniture that I have ever coveted.
I have a Taschen copy of the Bauhaus Archiv 1919–1933 and have looked in vain for images of that table but have never found it. Maybe the memory is better than any proof of its existence.
