Mies van der Rohe 1905-1938 (Whitechapel, till 2 March)
Artist and visionary
Mark Glazebrook
When the Whitechapel mounted retrospectives of giants such as Pollock and Rothko in the late Fifties and Sixties, these painters seemed to have sprung fully armed into our world. Uncluttered by faltering early works, these shows had come more or less from the head of Zeus, hut in the form of that Olympian institution the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The current regime at Whitechapel has wisely renewed its relationship with MoMA but do not expect images of Mies van der Rohe's iconic 1950s Seagram building, for example.
The exhibition limits itself to the architect's less familiar but rather fascinating early work in Germany, around Potsdam and Berlin between 1905 and 1938. Tom Wolfe's amusing book, From Bauhaus to Our House, pointed out how certain modern architects seem to hate the untidy way normal people actually live, thereby ruining their perfect buildings; but Wolfe — even Prince Charles — should find something to approve of in Mies's early work. There are not only conventional bricks, pitched roofs and Neo-Classical origins; there are also cosy Biedermeier features and English Arts and Crafts movement influences on the client-oriented houses and their matching gardens which he created for the German intelligentsia — as often as not cultured Jewish art collectors who became friends and helped to educate this Prussian prodigy from the lower-middle class. Aged 20, Mies built the Riehl House, described by one critic as 'faultless', for the philosopher Alois Riehl and his wife Sophie.
It is said that Le Corbusier used to paint every day. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, born in Aachen in 1886, had no formal architectural training but learned how to carve stone in his family's stone-carving business — and how to draw. He wore beautifully cut suits, smoked cigars, invented his own rather grand Dutch-sounding name, and was not unlike Le Corbusier in being fundamentally an artist and a visionary as distinct from a jobbing architect. He won his spurs working under Bruno Paul and under the even more progressive Peter Behrens before evolving his striking, minimalist ethos of 'less is more'.
The modernity of his skyscraper designs and his pioneering use of glass, concrete and steel impressed many influential people, including Goebbels. Given the depression and the persecution of his natural clientele, the difficulty of getting commissions was a concern and Mies could not be too fussy about whom he worked for. I hate to report that buried in the substantial catalogue accompanying this show is a flag, drawn by Mies, featuring a swastika. Fortunately for the reputation of Mies's elevated notions about the 'spiritual purpose' of the new technology. Hitler preferred Albert Speer. Mies was director of the Bauhaus when the Nazis closed it down in 1933, but he did not emigrate to the United States until 1938, helped by Alfred Barr, director of MoMA. He was aged 52, destined to become a demigod yet penniless. At least half the architectural projects examined in the current show were never built. He had been relying for much of his income on the tubular metal chair of 1926, which he had patented. Incidentally, this same MR chair was exhibited in the Whitechapel's Modern Chairs exhibition, arranged by Carol Hogben in 1970.
Architectural exhibitions can be boring, especially to the non-specialist. Not this one. An immense amount of thought, imagination, taste, poring over MoMA's Mies archive, scholarship, expertise and flair — plus American money, a case of less not being more — has been invested in the research and display.
We see the Neo-Classical influence of Karl Friedrich Schinkel on Mies, as well as comparative material by later architects who influenced him. Many drawings are big, rough and emotional rather than small and finicky. There is a focus on the magazine G which Mies edited. Video is used to go inside houses and to recreate the German Pavilion at the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition, thereby giving a sense of Mies's awareness of space, of his ability to generate a new sort of space and of his gift of inventing new sequences of space. There are some excellent models. There is also an exhibition within an exhibition of interpretive photographs, which dramatise the buildings, by the German photographer Thomas Ruff. Variety is the spice of this show's life and MoMA has astonished the public by revealing that their demigod had human origins.
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