Living in a Dream? The Messy Reality of Living in a “Bauhaus”

Helmut Newton, Tel Aviv, 1992 (on view at the Bauhaus Foundation, Tel Aviv, 24 October 2022-28 January 2023)

1919 was a difficult year for the world. The First World War (1914-1918) was over, but soldiers had returned home injured and deeply traumatized and the Spanish flu was killing millions all over the world. Ordinary people were struggling against poverty and disease, while politicians were trying to redraw the map of Europe. But in Weimar, a small town in Germany, a group of artists and architects led by the architect Walther Gropius were beginning to dream of a better, more equal world. Their movement would become famous as “the Bauhaus:” it called upon the fine arts, crafts and design to unite and to imagine a new way of living. Houses should be stripped of all external and internal decorations. Housing should be affordable, functional, but also beautiful in its simplicity. By changing the way people were living, the Bauhaus hoped to build a better, more equal future on the ruins of the old world.

Unfortunately, this vision was to remain a dream. In the 1930s, many German Jewish Bauhaus architects emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine to escape the Nazis. As a result, Tel Aviv can boast over 4,000 buildings in the Bauhaus style, more than any other city in the world. Given that most of these buildings were originally painted white, Tel Aviv proudly calls itself “the White City.” But over the course of many years, the hot, humid, overcrowded reality of this Middle Eastern city on the Mediterranean transformed the utopian buildings into a messy reality. Many of the buildings have been renovated in recent years, but most of them continue to stubbornly display the wounds of everyday life: balconies have been closed off to gain living space, huge air-conditioning boxes have been stuck unto facades, cables are dangling in the air, cats are confidently walking into the buildings’ run-down entrances to leave their strong-smelling personal mark.

Tel Aviv’s Bauhaus Foundation is currently hosting a small exhibition that contrast seven photographs taken by artist Günther Förg in 2001 with a photo taken by the iconic photographer Helmut Newton in 1992. While Förg’s photographs idealise the angular beauty of Tel Aviv’s Bauhaus buildings, Newton’s photograph celebrates the improvised, living reality of the buildings. One of the aims of the exhibition is to give Tel Avivians a different perspective on the buildings they pass every day by exposing them to different responses by international artists to their city. The exhibition is on until 28 January 2023.