1. Floating

The themes of suspension and floating featured at the Bauhaus in various guises – as motifs in architecture and fine art, and as a metaphor for a modern way of life.

In 1926 Marcel Breuer demonstrated the design of his chairs in his collage »A Bauhaus Film,« beginning with the »African Chair,« made at the Bauhaus in 1921. The series of designs culminated in a vision of a seated person floating on an »elastic column of air« – Breuer left the actual date when this might become reality open. Furniture made of steel tubing, like Breuer’s and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s cantilever chairs, are also signs of this desire to overcome material restrictions.

After the Bauhaus reopened in Dessau in 1926, students and masters began to take photographs that either showed floating people or objects or presented them as if they were about to take off. In his lithograph »The Tightrope Walker,« Paul Klee had already addressed this theme back in 1923. The figure of the tightrope walker stands for a future and more modern type of man, whose longing to escape gravity takes him into heady heights, and who yet still needs a rope under his feet and a pole for balance.

Mies van der Rohe’s design for a »Skyscraper in Glass and Reinforced Concrete« also negated all sense of weight, and the transparency of the construction gave the impression that it was about to dissolve. The same effect is true of the Dessau Bauhaus building designed by Walter Gropius, particularly when it is lit up at night. In 1923 Gropius noted:

In the Dessau Bauhaus building, there were always a number of »suspended sculptures« on show, made by students in Moholy-Nagy’s Foundation Course, which teacher saw as valuable preliminaries towards »a highly spiritual form,« and specifically »kinetic sculptures.«

Curator: Boris Friedewald