Bauhaus and the Cult of Ugliness

Ethik und Ästhetik sind Eins. “Ethics and aesthetics are one,” or so the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein asserted in his 1921 treatise Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. He was by no means the first to do so. The ancient Greeks, 23 centuries earlier, formulated the societal ideal of kalokagathia, a term derived by fusing the adjectives καλός (beautiful) and ἀγαθός (good). And he would not be the last. Yukio Mishima, standing amidst the psychic rubble of his grotesque childhood, and the physical rubble of post-war Japan, would similarly insist that “beauty and ethics are one and the same,” and embark on a self-improvement program of sun, steel, and exquisite prose, while the English philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, standing amidst the aesthetic horrors of high modernism, maintained that, despite the fashionable nonsense of our times, “beauty is an ultimate value — something that we pursue for its own sake, and for the pursuit of which no further reason need be given. Beauty should therefore be compared to truth and goodness, one member of a trio of ultimate values which justify our rational inclinations.” It was the foremost reactionary philosopher of the 20th century, Nicolás Gómez Dávila, who best expressed the unique relationship between goodness and beauty:

Sólo el bien y la belleza no requieren límites.
Nada es demasiado bello o demasiado bueno.
[Only goodness and beauty do not require limits.
Nothing is too beautiful or too good.]

It does stand to reason that ethics, the general inquiry into what is good (or bad), would be closely correlated with aesthetics, the study of beauty and taste (or the lack thereof). When we stand in the presence of a Pontormo fresco in a Florentine chapel, or before a glittering reliquary in an Aachen cathedral treasury, or beneath the ribbed vaults of a Gothic nave, we cannot help but feel that the artistic beauty on display has afforded us a glimpse of divine goodness. As the architect Edwin Lutyens struggled gamely to articulate it in a 1907 letter to his wife Emily:

There is that in art that transcends all the rules, it is the divine — I use poor words — and this is what makes all the arts so absorbing and thrilling to follow, creating a furore…there is the same effect produced on all and in all work by a master mind. To short sight it is a miracle, to those longer sighted it is Godhead, if we could see yet better, these facts may be revealed before which the V[ery] God as we conceive him will fade dim.

Just as there is something heavenly in artistic beauty, there is something infernal in its antithesis, something that makes us — or at least those of us with functioning amygdalae capable of producing disgust responses — feel as William Butler Yeats did when he wrote of how:

The wrong of unshapely things
Is a wrong too great to be told;
I hunger to build them anew
And sit on a green knoll apart,
With the earth and the sky and the water,
Remade, like a casket of gold… 

The immense “wrong of unshapely things” concerned many of Wittgenstein’s contemporaries, those poets like Georg Trakl who longed for a “beautiful world filled with infinite harmony,” but feared the “godless, cursed century” to come, and those cultural critics like Karl Kraus who anticipated hyper-modernity’s “destruction of the human spirit.” And so it was that the forthright assertion that Ethik und Ästhetik sind Eins, while not particularly original, became something of a rallying cry for many aesthetically sensitive post-war Viennese intellectuals. It should be a rallying cry in our own benighted era as well.

Those who had the good fortune to attend the recent reopening ceremonies at Notre Dame de Paris doubtless experienced anew the transcendent nature of architecture as produced by the masterminds of the High Middle Ages, as light poured in through the famed rose windows, illuminating the motes of dust dancing in the air, passing over the surface of the fretted stone, and coming to rest upon the freshly-carved liturgical furnishings. Before the April 15, 2019 fire that devastated Notre Dame, some 12 million visitors were visiting the cathedral annually — a figure that is expected to grow to 15 million upon re-opening. Forty thousand visitors per day, all drawn to the venerable basilica by that divine light. Yet, as the polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz pointed out in his 1713 polemic “Against Barbaric Physics,” “it is, unfortunately, our destiny that, because of a certain aversion toward light, people love to be returned to darkness.” There are those who, for ideological or utilitarian reasons, harbor an aversion to the infinite harmony of structures like Notre Dame de Paris, and are hell-bent on producing a world of concrete and rusting rebar, a world of plastic and slave-labor junk, of brutalism and desolate sprawl, a world increasingly devoid of beauty and, consequently, of good.

“Beauty,” as Sir Roger Scruton observed in his documentary Why Beauty Matters, “is assailed from two directions: by the cult of ugliness in the arts and by the cult of utility in everyday life. These two cults come together in the world of modern architecture.” Slowly but surely, people are beginning to realize the damage that the cult of ugliness has inflicted on our civilization. Last autumn, in Germany, Alternative for Germany (AfD) legislators issued a document entitled “Irrweg der Moderne — für einen kritische Auseinandersetzung mit dem Bauhaus,” or “The Erroneous Path of Modernity — Towards a Critical Examination of the Bauhaus,” which urged the East German city of Dessau not to go ahead with plans to honor the centenary of the Bauhaus design school’s move to that city, on the grounds that the “international spread of the Bauhaus style created a porridge-like homogeneity that displaced local architectural traditions.” Getroffene Hunde bellen — a hit dog will holler — and the German Left reacted with horror and outrage at the opening of this new front in the Kulturkampf. The AfD legislator spearheading the assault on Bauhaus, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, gleefully mocked his Bauhaus-loving critics: “Your worship of Bauhaus seems very fragile … [as] if our subjecting it to a little criticism might take your precious Bauhaus away from you.”

The AfD’s “Irrweg der Moderne” presented a devastating case against Bauhaus architecture, with its “cold, unwelcoming, and unattractive [kalt, abweisend und unattraktiv]” style, its “inhuman [menschenfeindlich]” approach to social housing, and its “radical simplification and functionalization of the living environment, which often contradicted traditional and culturally anchored ideas about living spaces [die radikale Vereinfachung und Funktionalisierung des Lebensumfeldes, widersprachen oft traditionellen und kulturell verankerten Vorstellungen von Wohn- und Lebensräumen].” There is also the matter of Bauhaus’ political and social ideologies, which, as the document notes, were “clearly closely aligned with communism during the time of Hannes Meyer’s leadership [die insbesondere während der Leitung von Hannes Meyer eine klare Nähe zum Kommunismus aufwiesen],” leading to a “politicization of architecture [Politisierung der Architektur]” which continues to this day. It is worth noting, however, that a great many Bauhauslers joined the Nazi Party. Herbert Bayer was not averse to making posters for Nazi political campaigns, Wilhelm Imkamp became a Nazi war artist, and Fritz Ertl served as the deputy head of the Central Construction Management of the Waffen-SS and Police at Auschwitz, helping to design the “swimming baths” or “washhouses for special actions” — which is to say the crematoria — of the Nazi death camps.

As Tom Wolfe noted in his 1981 takedown of modern architecture, From Bauhaus to Our House, the movement’s founder, Walter Gropius, was initially “in favor of bringing simple craftsmen into the Bauhaus, yeomen, honest toilers, people with knit brows and broad fingernails who would make things by hand for architectural interiors, simple wooden furniture, simple pots and glassware, simple this and simple that.” Gropius had not anticipated that Theo van Doesburg and other attendees of the First International Congress of Progressive Art in 1922 would ridicule such a movement as thoroughly bourgeois. Gropius quickly realized, as Wolfe put it, that “van Doesburg was backing him into a dreadful corner,” and so a new motto for the Bauhaus movement was devised (“Art and Technology — A New Unity!”) and “[h]onest toilers, broad fingernails, and curves disappeared from the Bauhaus forever,” replaced by a fundamentally socialistic vision to which architectural design was subordinated.

It did not take long, under such conditions, for the Bauhaus movement to descend into absurdity. As the traditionalist blogger Wrath of Gnon has astutely pointed out, Bauhaus was “a school of arts and crafts that taught almost no arts and little crafts, and, in later years, their much talked about school of architecture was completely absent. What they did teach however was a colorful potpourri of sects, cults, theosophy, and occultism.” The so-called “Master of Form” of the Bauhaus school, the expressionist painter Johannes Itten, was pretty much a maniac, a devotee of the neo-Zoroastrian cult of Mazdaznan who shaved his head, dressed in monkish attire, and encouraged his Bauhaus acolytes to eat massive amounts of garlic, to regularly subject themselves to major enemas, and to prick their skin and then rub in exotic oils, which resulted in agonizing infections. His paintings, naturally, were terrible.

Yet for some reason we are expected to take all of this seriously. The Scottish art historian and former British Museum director Neil MacGregor, in Germany: Memories of a Nation (2014), described Peter Keler’s infamous Bauhaus baby crib, designed in 1922, as a “beautiful, elegant, practical object, circles, triangles, and squares, cheerfully painted in red, yellow, and blue — perfect Bauhaus. Any baby lucky enough to sleep in this cradle  would imagine the world as ordered, balanced, and bright.” In actuality, it is an absolutely absurd design, shaped like a deep feeding trough precariously resting on two metal circles. Neil MacGregor might be willing to put a precious newborn baby in such a ridiculous contraption, but the art historian Nicolas Fox Weber apparently has a great deal more common sense, writing in his 2020 treatise IBauhaus that Keler’s design might be “original and clever” — original, maybe — but:

Imagine putting a baby in there! How many pillows would be needed to make the infant comfortable? What would the risk of those pillows be to the child, who might roll over and suffocate? And wouldn’t the pillows destroy the pure design that was the whole point anyway? Yes, the Kandinskyish coloring is delightful, and the object is fun to look at, but is it not indifferent to true human needs?

Bauhaus, as an architecture and design movement, is indeed “utterly indifferent to true human needs.” It is the architecture of menschenfeindlich, of inhumanity, and it is time that we stop pretending otherwise.

The cult of ugliness, propounded by the Bauhauslers and the other modernists and brutalists who declared that “ornament is crime,” laid the groundwork for what the Serbian-Norwegian architectural theorist Branko Mitrovič has called an “age of fraud,” one perpetrated by these modernist incompetents and scam artists. Mitrovič urges us to remember that:

Mies van der Rohe, [Frank Lloyd] Wright, and Le Corbusier were never trained to use traditional systems of ornamentation, the classical orders or spacial composition. As a student with poor graphical skills who dropped out of architectural school, it is unlikely that Gropius ever mastered them. In order to take advantage of the exceptional career possibilities that became available in the post-World War one era, Mies, Gropius and Le Corbusier had to argue against ornamentation and spatial composition. If they did not assert the irrelevance of the skills taught in architectural academies, they would have to admit their limited competence for the projects and commissions they aspired to get. This explains the fact … that the tenets of the modernist approach to design were predominantly negative and centered on the rejection of traditional systems of ornamentation and spatial composition.

Unserious design, created by unserious people, resulting in an unserious built environment.

These are perilous times, however, and they cry out for seriousness. As Justin Shubow, president of the National Civic Art Society, has persuasively argued, architecture rooted in the past has the potential to bolster our republic by anchoring it in traditions and promoting a shared civic identity, while modernist architectural design accomplishes precisely the opposite, as if by design. There is no need to idolize a school of design that produced hideous architectural monstrosities, soul-crushing housing projects that failed even to be “machines for living,” and preposterous gewgaws like the Bauhaus crib.

And this isn’t just about architecture, but every aspect of daily life and culture that leftism has beset and eaten away at like tuberculosis of the bones. I am reminded of Alexandre Dumas’ preface to his 1873 novel La Femme de Claude:

Take care, you are passing through troublesome times. You have just paid death and are not through paying for your earlier faults. It is no time to be a wit, a trifler, a libertine, a scoffer, a skeptic, or a wanton; we have enough of these for a time at least. God, nature, work, marriage, love, children, all these are serious, very serious things, and rise up before you. All these must live or you will die.

Germany, in these early days of 2025, admittedly has bigger problems than the legacy of Bauhaus architecture, including its bizarrely suicidal energy policy, as a result of which ancient forests are being chopped down and turned into wood pellets in the name of “green energy,” and its equally suicidal immigration policy, which has proven just as ruinous to its own interests. These are troublesome times, brought about by deeply unserious, genuinely self-loathing people. Aesthetic decline is a symptom of the disease, not a cause, but it does serve as something of a leading indicator. If we start to see a built environment characterized not by inhuman, cold, unwelcoming, and unattractive buildings, and instead by beauty and harmony, then we will know that serious things are being taken seriously once again.

READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky:

The Death Throes of Free Speech in the United Kingdom

Confronting Decadence and Decline

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