BILL OF FARE
Gropius Dinner, March 9th, 1937
László Moholy-Nagy
László Moholy-Nagy: BILL OF FARE [Gropius Dinner, March 9th, 1937]. London: Lund Humphries, February 1937. A4. Single sheet of Flake White Parchment printed in three-color offset, extracted from the 1938 PENROSE ANNUAL. A fine example.
Original edition of the Trocadero Restaurant menu cover for the Walter Gropius farewell dinner held on March 9th, 1937 hosted by Dr. Julian Huxley. The progressive design community attended in full force to bid farewell to Gropius, with the guest list including Noel Carrington, Serge Chermayeff, Wells Coates, Geoffrey Faber, E. Maxwell Fry, Siegfried Giedion, John Gloag, V. H. Goldsmith, Ashley Havinden, R. S. Lambert, Henry Moore, László Moholy-Nagy, Christopher Nicholson, Nicholas Pevsner, J. Craven [Jack] Pritchard, Herbert Read, Arthur Upham Pope, J. M. Richards, Gordon Russell, P. Morton Shand, and H. G. Wells, among others.
From The Architectural Review’s Marginalia, February 1937: The following letter, which appeared in The Times of Monday, February 15, formulated the proposal to hold a dinner in Professor Gropius’s honour.
Sir—
The appointment of Professor Walter Gropius to the Graduate Chair of Architecture in Harvard University has already been announced in your columns. Professor Gropius has been a resident in this country for the last three years and it was the confident hope of many people that we were to have the benefit of his outstanding talents for many years to come. In this we have been disappointed. But in his brief stay among us Professor Gropius has already strengthened his great reputation on the basis of friendship and personal inspiration, and before he leaves us for the important post to which he has been called it has seemed fitting to us that some public recognition should be given of our appreciation of his services to modern architecture.
For this purpose it is proposed to give a dinner in his honour on Tuesday, March 9, and those interested in the proposal and desirous of being present are invited to communicate with the secretary of the organizing committee, Mr. E. J. Carter, 66, Portland Place, W. 1. As the accommodation will be strictly limited it is advisable that immediate application should be made.
Yours faithfully,
Patrick Abercrombie
W. G. Constable
Charles Holden
Ian MacAlister
Herbert Read
The dinner is taking place as then proposed, on the ninth of this month. It will be at the Trocadero Restaurant and Prof. Julian Huxley will be in the chair. Places are limited, but application for any tickets (price 25 s., including wines) that still remain should be sent at once to Mr. Carter.
Within eighteen months of the dinner party the secretary of the organizing committee E. J. Carter became the organizing secretary of the RIBA Refugee Committee, offering placement assistance and references to refugee architects fleeing the rising waters of Fascism.
László Moholy-Nagy [Hungarian, 1895 – 1946] was a born teacher, convinced that everyone had talent. In 1923, he joined the staff of the Bauhaus, which had been founded by Walter Gropius at Weimar four years before. Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger and Schlemmer were already teaching there. He was brought in at a time when the school was undergoing a decisive change of policy, shedding its original emphasis on handcraft. The driving force was now "the unity of art and technology.” Moholy-Nagy was entrusted with teaching the preliminary course in principles of form, materials and construction - the basis of the Bauhaus's educational program. He shared teaching duties with the painter Josef Albers, whose career was to develop in parallel with his.
The hyper-energetic Moholy-Nagy also ran the metal workshop at the Bauhaus in Weimar and later in the purpose-designed buildings at Dessau. The metal shop was the most successful of departments at the Bauhaus in fulfilling Gropius's vision of art for mass production, redefining the role of the artist to embrace that of designer as we have now come to understand the term. The workshop experimented with glass and Plexiglas as well as metal in developing the range of lighting that has almost come to define the Bauhaus. The lamps were produced in small production runs, and some were taken up by outside factories. The royalties made a welcome contribution to the school's always precarious finances.
Although always a painter and designer, Moholy-Nagy became a key figure in photography in Germany in the 1920's. In 1928 Moholy-Nagy left the Bauhaus and traveled to Amsterdam and London. His teachings and publications of photographic experimentations were crucial to the international development of the New Vision.
In 1937 former Bauhaus Master László Moholy-Nagy accepted the invitation of a group of Midwest business leaders to set up an Industrial Design school in Chicago. The New Bauhaus opened in the Fall of 1937 financed by the Association of Arts and Industries as a recreation of the Bauhaus curriculum with its workshops and holistic vision in the United States.
Moholy-Nagy drew on several émigrés affiliated with the former Bauhaus to fill the ranks of the faculty, including György Kepes and Marli Ehrman. The school struggled with financial issues and insufficient enrollment and survived only with the aid from grants of the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations as well as from donations from numerous Chicago businesses. The New Bauhaus was renamed the Institute of Design in 1944 and the school finally merged with the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in 1949.
In Chicago Moholy aimed at liberating the creative potential of his students through disciplined experimentation with materials, techniques, and forms. The focus on natural and human sciences was increased, and photography grew to play a more prominent role at the school in Chicago than it had done in Germany. Training in mechanical techniques was more sophisticated than it had been in Germany. Emerging from the basic course, various workshops were installed, such as "light, photography, film, publicity", "textile, weaving, fashion", "wood, metal, plastics", "color, painting, decorating" and "architecture". The most important achievement at the Chicago Bauhaus was probably in photography, under the guidance of teachers such as György Kepes, Nathan Lerner, Arthur Siegel or Harry Callahan.
Moholy-Nagy served as Director of the New Bauhaus in its various permutations until his death in 1946.