Maybe it started with his name: Gropius. Ugly, strange, hard to place, not even obviously German, more suited to a microbe or a medical condition than a person. Then Walter – a touch comical, archaic, swotty. It – that is, the development of the public perception of the famous architect – continued with certain serious-going-on-scowling photographs of the man, with Evelyn Waugh's satire of him in Decline and Fall as the doctrinaire Otto Silenus, and with the unflattering memoir of his ex-wife Alma Mahler. A “tired twilight” was how she described their marriage.
For whatever reason, the image of Walter Gropius is generally that of a dry old stick, the name polemicists used to wield (for example, Tom Wolfe in From Bauhaus to Our House) when they wanted to berate modernist architecture for its soulless functionalism. It is a version of the man that Fiona MacCarthy wants to dispel.
Ever since she revealed that Eric Gill, revered sculptor and devout catholic, was a serial abuser of his daughters, MacCarthy's approach to biography has been to combine an appreciation of design and art with a willingness to delve into the personal lives of her subjects. This book is no exception. Amid studious accounts of his artistic development, his influences and impacts, she recounts his stormy affair with Alma, which started when the composer Gustav, her first husband, was still alive.
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