William Owen Harrod. Bruno Paul: The Life and Work of a Pragmatic Modernist. Stuttgart:
Edition Axel Menges, 2005. 128 pp. $69.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-932565-47-2.
Reviewed by Wallis Miller (School of Architecture, University of Kentucky)
Published on H-German (July, 2007)
Forgotten Modernist
lows us to understand Paul’s approaches to design. One
result is that Harrod integrates Paul’s personal and professional life, drawing, for example, a compelling parallel
between his modest character and his moderate view of
modern design.
In a beautifully produced book, typical of this publisher’s productions, William Owen Harrod introduces
an English-speaking audience to the German designer
Bruno Paul (1874-1968). One might call Paul a polymath because his oeuvre included illustrations and caricatures as well as furniture, interior, and architectural
designs. Indeed, Harrod’s monograph chronicles Paul’s
career in terms of a Gesamtkunstwerk (from illustrations
for the periodicals Jugend and Simplicissimus to standardized furniture, ship interiors, and villas for a range
of clients) subject to Paul’s evolving stylistic approaches.
But Harrod is also able to insist on a certain degree of
consistency in Paul’s work by identifying several principles that underpinned all of his efforts: a regard for a
non-professional audience, especially a middle-class one;
an eagerness to define and refine modern form without
a fear of history; an attention to craft; and the belief that
the integration of art in all aspects of daily life would produce a harmonious culture.
Until the publication of this book, Bruno Paul’s modesty has extended to his reputation. Paul is usually cited
as one of the Berlin architects, along with Peter Behrens,
who employed Mies van der Rohe before Mies established his own office in 1913. While histories of architecture acknowledge Mies as one of the great modern
architects and one of the greatest German architects of
all time, Paul has only been recognized as providing a
preface to Mies’s career and to modern design more generally. In tracing the evolution of Paul’s career, Harrod
frees Paul from his secondary role and relocates him to a
more central position in the history of modernism. But,
rather than casting Paul as a long-term member of the
avant-garde and a proponent of the radically new, HarBruno Paul was, above all else, a practitioner and not rod demonstrates that Paul’s relationship to reform and
a theoretician. He seldom wrote about design. Aside invention shifted as new generations of architects and
from posing a problem for discussing content, this fact designers emerged during the course of his long career.
points to the issue of evidence for such a discussion (Paul died in 1968 at age ninety-four.) The first such shift
in the first place. Harrod diligently works around this occurred around World War I. “Prior to the war,” Harrod
situation–and around the loss of much of Paul’s personal writes, “Paul had been a leader of an avant-garde comarchive during World War II–by looking at Paul’s build- mitted to the reform of popular taste; by 1925, he had
ings, interiors, furniture, and illustrations themselves, as emerged as a reformer of the avant-garde and a chamwell as the publications that recorded them; by finding pion of mainstream modernity” (p. 72).
his correspondence in other collections; and by interHarrod uses Paul’s moderate position to enrich rather
viewing family members as well as others who knew him.
than
dilute the discussion of modern design. The auIn this way, Harrod succeeds in building a context that al1
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dience, or client, is definitive here. Moving out of the
realm of elite culture and radical theories, Harrod enters the context of Paul’s modern practice, in large part
inspired by a middle-class audience, not the working
class or the wealthy patrons who commanded the attention of the avant-garde. A 1905 article already identified the quintessential middle-class style–Biedermeier
Neoclassicism–as the source for formal aspects of Paul’s
interiors. Specifically, the article linked an interpretation of Paul’s forms as abstract and universal with an
historical style (p. 25). By 1908, when Paul built Haus
Westend, his first architectural project, Biedermeier had
more profound ramifications for him. Still associated
with the middle-class, Biedermeier was the source for a
pre-industrial conception of cultural harmony rooted in
“the equitable relationship between patrons, artists, and
craftsmen that had existed prior to the industrialization
of the nineteenth century” (p. 30). Although Paul abandoned Biedermeier by 1912 in favor of an increasingly
geometricized set of forms that were remote from any
precedent, he did not abandon the middle class. He continued to design Typenmöbel, standardized furniture that
made the custom pieces he designed for his wealthier
clients available to working- and middle-class customers
(p. 38).
construction and technology. Paul’s designs essentially
criticized avant-garde architects for their use of impractical building techniques. Finding adequate solutions to
such issues as water drainage even led Paul to sacrifice
using the flat roof, so sacred to modernists, for a roof with
a pitch in several residential projects. The pitch was often
quite shallow or concealed with parapets, however, so as
to appear flat and preserve the building’s modern identity. Unlike the better-known modernists of the younger
generation and their ideological predilection for the new,
Paul selected technologies and construction techniques
according to what would work best: “Although Paul was
unwilling to compromise proven and efficient design solutions, he was responsive to the possibilities offered
by technological developments” (p. 78). These possibilities included using electrically operated picture windows, which Mies made famous in his Haus Tugendhat,
or adapting American commercial construction practices
to his 1928 Kathreiner-Hochhaus in Berlin.
The respect for practice that led Paul to respect his
clients’ needs and favor pragmatic approaches to building was central to his pedagogy as well. In 1906, Paul
was appointed director of the School of Applied Arts in
Berlin. Until he resigned on January 1, 1933, in the wake
of severe criticism by the Nazis, he led the school through
After World War I, Paul resisted the utopian visions of a series of political, cultural, and institutional changes,
the “new avant-garde.” Instead, he used actual commis- including a merger with the art school of the Prussian
sions to disseminate a modern design language to indus- Academy in 1924 to become the Vereinigte Staatsschulen
trialists and members of a commercial class with money für freie und angewandte Kunst. Paul’s directorship
yet little access to political power (pp. 60-61), whom Har- was characterized by a program of reform based on the
rod loosely refers to as “middle-class.” Not only did this lessons he was learning from practice. Immediately afloyalty keep him in business during a time when most ter his appointment, he transformed the program from
projects remained on paper, but it led to the crystalliza- one defined by classroom-based skill development to a
tion of his design approach, which Harrod calls “prag- curriculum that nurtured creativity through practical exmatic modernism.” Since the 1920s, Paul’s use of mod- perience. In this new context, students entered an inern forms was conditioned by an explicit respect for his troductory curriculum that educated them in all areas of
clients’ needs and desires. Harrod distinguishes Haus design. Later, they specialized, often assisting profesFraenkel, one of the first houses Paul designed in this pe- sors on actual commissions. Harrod argues that the simriod, from “the majority of Expressionist projects,” char- ilarities of the Bauhaus curriculum established by Walacterizing it as a “comfortable home that … was modern, ter Gropius in 1919 to Paul’s program are not accidental,
without promoting a revolutionary social or political ide- even though Gropius seldom mentioned Paul’s reforms.
ology” (p. 62). In his analyses of Paul’s later projects, When Gropius did, as in a speech he delivered in 1920 to
built during the 1920s and 1930s, Harrod favorably com- secure local support for the Bauhaus, he relegated Paul
pares some of them to projects by recognized modernists to a previous generation in order to “clear the way” for
such as Erich Mendelsohn and Mies van der Rohe, argu- something new (p. 71).
ing that Paul’s projects sacrifice a dogmatic commitment
Against Gropius’s attempts to marginalize Paul, arto a modern artistic vision in favor of fulfilling his clients’
chitectural
historian Nikolaus Pevsner “concluded that
“middle-class standards of comfort and convenience” (p.
the
Bauhaus
and Paul’s Vereinigte Staatsschulen had been
81).
the two most important schools of art in the Weimar Re“Pragmatic Modernism” also reflects Paul’s view of public” as early as 1936 (p. 71). Pevsner credited Paul,
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not Gropius, with balancing the fine arts with craft and
design (p. 71). Paul’s consistent attention to the fine arts
was certainly a reflection of his own experiences as a designer, but it was also a part of his other professional activities as a founding member of the Werkbund. Established in 1907, the Werkbund rejected the notion that the
applied arts were only a business and, instead, sought to
celebrate them as a form of art (p. 37). Its ultimate goal
was to integrate art with daily life in order to create a harmonious modern culture. In 1914, when the famous controversy erupted over whether the Werkbund should promote standardized production or artistic freedom, Paul
found himself maintaining a centrist position defined by
his “pragmatic modernism,” which not only echoed his
own practice but also “sustained the often-fractious German Werkbund in the years prior to the war” (p. 30).
ognized in Germany as a significant national figure but
virtually ignored in England and America (p. 98).
With this book, Harrod certainly begins to redress
Paul’s absence from English-language understanding of
modern design. Although relatively recent books on Paul
have been published in German–by Sonja Günther and
edited by Alfred Ziffer, both published in 1992–Harrod’s
is the only one in English. It is not the case, however, that
Paul was always absent from English texts on modern
design; he was included in Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers
of the Modern Movement (1936), the first book in English
by the then-recent German émigré, who became one of
the most famous architectural historians of the twentieth
century.[1] Pevsner’s book is in fact the source for Harrod’s characterization of Paul as a “pragmatic modernist.”
Pevsner gave Paul, and not Walter Gropius, credit for
changing popular taste and praised his work for its “comfort, cleanliness and abolition of tawdry fuss” (p. 30). By
calling attention to Paul, Harrod also directs our attention back to Pevsner and to his canonical work on modern architecture and design. It is the text which scholars
readily identify as the source of the term “Modern Movement.”
Paul’s moderate position did not win him any friends
during the Nazi period and its aftermath, making a difficult situation even worse. The Nazis had already denounced him in 1932 and criticized his Weimar projects,
although “his earlier work was favored by ranking members of the NSDAP” (p. 89), and his designs continued
to appear in magazines until 1942 (p. 92). After 1945,
he tried to regain his teaching position at the Vereinigte
Staatsschulen but failed. His decision to stay in Germany
during the war led some to believe that he had been a
member of the Nazi party. Others rejected him because
he had not been rehabilitated by the Allies; when he tried
to rectify the situation, an official explained to him that
he could not be rehabilitated because there was no record
of his party membership (pp. 93-94). He sustained himself and his new family (he divorced and remarried in
1941) with a variety of projects: designs for resettlement
houses during the war, which Harrod argues were neither political nor polemical, but “simple, efficient, and familiar” (p. 92), and work for industry, reconstructions,
rebuilding, and even some furniture designs that were
never produced.
In the end, Harrod’s goal is to use the example of
Paul to contribute to an account of the Modern Movement more nuanced than the one we have inherited from
critics and historians such as Philip Johnson and HenryRussell Hitchcock or Siegfried Giedion.[2] Many scholars
would include Pevsner in this group, which is why Pevsner’s inclusion of Paul is so interesting and begs for a bit
more discussion. “Paul’s practice,” Harrod writes in his
conclusion “raises fundamental questions about the nature of Modernism and the validity of Modernist historiography, and–perhaps even more important–the position that his work should occupy in the Modernist canon”
(p. 100). Even in English, though, the desire to move beyond the canonical literature on modern German architecture and design is not entirely new. For example, BarPaul retired from architectural practice in 1958, not bara Miller-Lane’s Architecture and Politics in Germany
because he was eighty-four years old but because, ac- 1918-1945 (1968) discusses modern approaches to design
cording to Harrod, he felt that there was no place for re- within complex cultural and political situations, while
form within the confines of postwar practice. The Nazis Rosemarie Haag Bletter’s “Mies and Dark Transparency”
had destroyed the academy Paul had transformed and (2001) situates the architect within a cultural and politdriven his forward-thinking colleagues out of the coun- ical context marginalized and ignored by the very histry. According to Harrod, “There was no new aesthetic tory that placed him at its center, a history that Harrod
movement in Germany for Paul to reform in 1954,” and by is also seeking to challenge.[3] Monographs such as Stan1958 he realized that “the building arts”–defined by the ford Anderson’s on Peter Behrens (2000) discuss one of
marriage of art and craft so important to him–were no Paul’s most important Wilhelmine contemporaries while
longer agents for reform but had become tools of historic Kathleen James’s book on Erich Mendelsohn (1997) foreconstruction (p. 97). When he died in 1968, he was rec- cuses on an architect often sidelined in “official” histo3
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ries of German modernism in the 1920s.[4] Institutions
also appear in new light: Frederic Schwartz’s work situates the Werkbund in a theoretical context focused on
consumption.[5] One can also refer generally to recent
research on canonical figures such as Mies, the relationship of gender and design in the modern period, or texts
that address history and modernism in a more conceptual
fashion to argue that Harrod joins many scholars in their
mission to expand the historiography of modern design
in Germany.[6] It would have been good if Harrod had
clarified his own role in this discussion.
Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 5th ed.
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967, 1982).
[3]. Barbara Miller-Lane, Architecture and Politics
in Germany, 1918-1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1968; 1985); and Rosemarie Haag Bletter, “Mies and
Dark Transparency,” in Mies in Berlin, ed. Terence Riley
and Barry Bergdoll (New York: The Museum of Modern
Art, 2001), 350-357.
[4]. Stanford Anderson, Peter Behrens and a New Architecture for the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2000); and Kathleen James, Erich Mendelsohn and
the Architecture of German Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Whether Bruno Paul is as unique as Harrod claims is
still in question. The answer lies in the scholarship on
the context in which Paul practiced, discussion of which
largely appears to fall outside the scope of Harrod’s book.
[5]. Frederic J. Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design TheNonetheless, his book demonstrates that Paul is an im- ory and Mass Culture before the First World War (New
portant example of a modern designer who existed out- Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
side an avant-garde position. It also makes the very sig[6]. The German literature on the topic is even larger
nificant point that popular concerns were as definitive
and
has generated a significant response in at least one
for modern designs as professional ones.
case. The exhibition “Moderne Architektur in DeutschNotes
land, 1900-1950: Reform und Tradition,” held at the
Deutsches Architekturmuseum in Frankfurt, unleashed
[1]. Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of the Modern Movelots of controversy because some critics viewed it as an
ment from William Morris to Walter Gropius (London:
attempt to rehabilitate certain architects who ultimately
Faber and Faber, 1936).
worked for the Nazis. For the accompanying catalog, see
[2]. For example, Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Moderne Architektur in Deutschland, 1900-1950: Reform
Johnson, The International Style: Architecture Since 1922 und Tradition, ed. Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani and
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1932; reprint, 1966); and Romana Schneider (Stuttgart: Hatje, 1992).
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Citation: Wallis Miller. Review of Harrod, William Owen, Bruno Paul: The Life and Work of a Pragmatic Modernist.
H-German, H-Net Reviews. July, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13455
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