Walter Gropius: Visionary Founder of the Bauhaus

(Hardback, Main)

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'This is an absolute triumph - ideas, lives and the dramas of the twentieth century are woven together in a feat of storytelling. A masterpiece.' - Edmund de Waal

Bauhaus was more than an art school - it was the birth of a new way of thinking. In this majestic biography of its charismatic founder, Fiona MacCarthy argues that Walter Gropius's visionary ideas still influence the way we live, work, and think today. MacCarthy traces the story of this ground-breaking architect: his shattering experiences in World War I, his turbulent relationship with Alma Mahler, his concept of the Bauhaus as a gathering of talents that included Kandinsky, Klee and Moholy-Nagy, and his agonized decision to leave Nazi Germany in 1933 for a new life first in England, than in America.

This modern reassessment of Gropius' life is biography at its finest and most vivid, and will be published to celebrate the Bauhuas centenary in 2019.

Author Bio

A former Guardian critic, Fiona MacCarthy established herself as one of the leading writers of biography in Britain with her widely acclaimed book Eric Gill (1989). Her next book, William Morris (1994) won the Wolfson History Prize and the Writers' Guild Non-Fiction Award. She also received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Last Pre-Raphaelite (2011), and was awarded the OBE for services to literature in 2009. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art. She also holds honorary doctorates from the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, and has been awarded the Bicentenary Medal of the Royal Society of Arts.