The Last Craftsman
Re-evaluating Henry van de Velde and his contribution to Modernism, the Bauhaus, and our lives.
Until 1972, the Museen Zu Berlin exhibited, among other things, a teapot and its accompanying set. From above, the teapot is around twenty-two centimetres long, thirteen-and-a-half centimetres wide, and thirteen centimetres tall. Its chrome finish gives an oil-surface ripple to the reflections of objects around it, as it shifts from dark to light to dark in its metallic gradient. This isn’t the kind of teapot we’ve seen on our elderly relatives’ coffee tables, with elephant trunk spouts and floral finishes. No, the chrome surface and stunted, resentment of a spout of this teapot places it firmly in the sphere of Modernism.
Aesthetically, it is indistinct from any other piece of kitchenware from the early Modernist period: mass-produced, purposefully unremarkable, and entirely functional. The Bauhaus produced many similar pieces. Except, this teapot isn’t from the Bauhaus. It predates the Bauhaus and the advent of Modernism by over a decade; it predates the Werkbund too. This piece, from 1904, is the work of one man, not the result of a movement: Henry van de Velde.
The clue to the artist’s identity lies in the teapot’s handle. Whereas the later, more anonymous work of the Bauhaus had functional and non-descript handles in keeping with its reductionism, this handle is ornate and a work of art in itself. Rather than the bare straight lines and semi-circles of the Bauhaus, this handle, carved from ivory, tapers to a point in the beautiful shape of a leaf — offsetting the chrome scarcity of the rest of the piece.
It is at once a piece that looks forward to the incoming wave of Modernism and back to the artistic nuances of Nouveau. The handle is not just a handle, rather it’s an identifier of the artist for whom the stark realities of Modernism were a warning; a warning of the loss of autonomy and identity. It is a symbol of the fear felt by early twentieth-century artists towards the disintegrated and chaotic urbanity of industrialisation. And yet, what is also apparent in the handle is van de Velde’s acceptance of the industrial as a tool for synthesis, in which beauty and artistic individuality need not be sacrificed to the machine nor the machine sacrificed for artistic integrity. In one small, ostensibly inconsequential, piece we can see at once the inexorable development of the Modernist aesthetic and the resistance and final gasping breaths of artistic autonomy before it surrendered to industrial simplicity and reduction.
It is no coincidence that Henry van de Velde’s work of the early-1900s bears a striking resemblance to work produced two decades later at the Bauhaus. Van de Velde is intrinsically linked to the development of Modernism and originated the aesthetic the Bauhaus would adopt soon after its founding. In an artistic landscape still at the mercy of the ideals of Morris and Ruskin, van de Velde realised that eschewing the machine was a mistake. It limited art both aesthetically and economically. In mass-production, van de Velde saw not an obstacle but a way in which to make art and beauty accessible to all, rich or poor.
It was a romantic notion and in an era in which many of the old ways were falling out of favour, especially in Germany, there was little room for romance. Now, when we speak of the beginnings of Modernism, Henry van de Velde is rarely a name that appears in anything but the periphery, despite being a founder of Art Nouveau, a founding member of the Deutscher Werkbund, director of the Grand Ducal School of Arts & Crafts in Weimar, and an eminent architect in Europe through much of the first half of the twentieth century. Here is the progenitor of the Modernist style, yet we do not remember his name or afford him any of the credit we give the canonical fathers of Modernism: Gropius, Le Corbusier, van der Rohe, and Frank Lloyd Wright.
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