Color and Architecture: Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus Wall-Painting Workshop in Collaboration, 1922 to 1926

The Bauhaus was rooted in the idea of collaboration between artist and craftsman and the visual arts and architecture. No medium was more dependent on this spirit of cooperation than painting. Instead of easel painting, Walter Gropius, an architect and the founding director, promoted wall painting. This essay examines four projects involving Gropius and Bauhaus wall painters from 1922 to 1926: the Municipal Theater and Haus Auerbach, both in Jena; Gropius’s office in Weimar; and the Bauhaus building in Dessau. In these projects, the role of paint and color in architectural form emerged as a key issue and point of conflict between painter and architect. Wassily Kandinsky’s 1924 memo on wall painting made it clear that color could emerge with form ( Entstehen ), accompany form ( Mitgehen ), or be in opposition to form ( Entgegengesetzte ) — a group of terms that might describe both the effects of wall painting and the nature of collaboration. Early on, painters such as Oskar Schlemmer and Alfred Arndt envisioned dynamic and colorful paintings in architecture. However, these transformative effects threatened to dematerialize the architecture itself, and as the 1920s progressed, Gropius increasingly rejected bold pictorial wall paintings or lively painting schemes, opting instead for restrained subordinate color. By 1926, Hinnerk Scheper, the leader of the WallPainting Workshop, used paint to subtly and functionally accentuate and enhance buildings. In their collaborations with Gropius, the Bauhaus wall painters transitioned from independent cooperators to subordinated collaborators, and ultimately they developed an approach in which color yielded to the demands of architecture.

demonstrates, in her groundbreaking study The De Stijl Environment (1983), that collaboration -difficult though it often proved to be -was a central tenet of De Stijl, as it was for other modernist painters and architects. Likewise, many individual artists and architects in the interwar years used murals and architectural color to expand the easel painting into the environment -scholarship by Romy Golan (2009) and recent exhibitions on Fernand Léger have considered some examples, particularly in France, though Bauhaus cases are less frequently discussed (Baudin 2016;Vallye 2013). For decades, the study of Bauhaus wall-painting projects has been hampered by the lack of extant paintings and limited documentation. Reconstructions in the last three decades have improved familiarity with many of these projects; however, the wall painters remain some of the most under-studied Bauhaus designers. This essay builds on the foundational work of Renate Scheper and others who have focused on specific projects and wall painters (R. Scheper 2005;U. Müller 2006;Markgraf 2006;Herzogenrath 1973;Happe and Fischer 2003). This earlier research is largely limited to individual projects or works on paper. In contrast, this paper examines the broader themes and developments of Bauhaus wall painting over the course of several projects. Using the limited available primary sources, I examine both the textual and visual evidence in order to explore the practical dynamics of how wall painting was implemented, how color and form came together, and how the painter and architect worked together in the collaborative vein that the Bauhaus sought.
In his 1924 memo, Kandinsky outlined two possibilities for how color could change a given form. His first option was the 'emergence [Entstehen] of color with the given form', whereby color and form organically develop together, and 'the effects of the form are increased and a new form is created' (Kandinsky 2001: 335). Gropius, however, edited Kandinsky's original document and changed Entstehen to Mitgehen, 'to accompany' (Wahl 2001: 335). Therefore, in the final version the first option for the interaction of color and form is 'color accompanying the given form', slightly shifting Kandinsky's original phrase (Kandinsky 2001: 335). 4 In this new wording, color is not a necessary component of form but a complement, a secondary feature, increasing the effects of the new colored form. Kandinsky's second possibility of the alliance of color and form is the reverse, 'das entgegengesetzte Gehen der Farbe', the 'opposition of color and form whereby the given form is transformed' by the powerful effect of color (2001: 335). 5 In either case, Kandinsky was clear that the combination of color and form would result in something new, color either enhancing the effects of the form or altering and transforming the form.
The architect's edits of Kandinsky's memo expose the dynamics that Gropius envisioned for the relationship between painting, color, and architectural form. While Kandinsky championed color as a powerful element of design and the equality of the arts, calling for the development of form and color together, contingent on each other, Gropius understood the arts as separate, developing alongside each other, as complements but sovereign, at least in the case of architecture. Similar tensions between architectural form and color and debates between painter and architect were taking place throughout European modernism, from Le Corbusier's polychromy to De Stijl environments. The style and extent of wall painting and color that should be included in new modernist buildings was an ongoing concern for those interested in a modern Gesamtkunstwerk, as were the logistics of how that cooperation should take place.
For Gropius, who included the Bauhaus workshops in many of his private architectural commissions, the architect was unquestionably the leader of any collaborative dynamic. This essay examines four examples that point to the varying interactions that the wall painters had with Gropius as the Bauhaus's principal architect, as well as the range of their experiments with both dynamic and subtle uses of color on the walls. Some projects were conflict free and yielded fruitful working relationships; others proved that collaboration involved complicated power dynamics. Realizing a complete building with architects, painters, and sculptors working together was hard. These experiences contributed to the development of a theory of wall painting, articulated by Hinnerk Scheper and Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp in 1930: 'If wall painting is directly subordinate to architecture, it imparts a greater outer expression; it enhances the built environment and thus has the potential to reorganize it, albeit indirectly' (Scheper and Scheper-Berkenkamp 2018: 93). Ultimately, wall painters developed approaches that prioritized architectonic structure over pictorial compositions and color and consigned the vision of the painter to the demands of the architect for clean bare walls (Pegioudis 2016). The collaboration was no longer between equals, as Kandinsky had dreamed, but a subordination of painting to architecture.

The Architect as Conductor
Gropius was an architect who famously could not draw, and his desire and need for collaborative working relationships with draftsmen, other architects, and artists originated before the founding of the school in 1919 and continued after his move to the United States with the work of The Architects Collaborative, starting in 1945. Central to the collaborative approach were debates about the relationships between the arts and the dominance of one discipline over the other. In 1919, Gropius described this with the metaphor of an orchestra: For only with sincere cooperation and collaboration among all artistic disciplines can an era produce the multi-voiced orchestra which alone deserves the name art … From ancient times, the architect has been called upon to conduct this orchestra.
(W. Gropius 1993: 198-199) In 1937, almost ten years after leaving the school, he wrote about the training of a new generation at the Bauhaus, and he amended his earlier metaphor: I … require a whole staff of collaborators and assistants, men who would work, not as an orchestra obeying the conductor's baton, but independently, although in close co-operation to further a common cause. Consequently, I tried to put the emphasis of my work on integration and co-ordination, inclusiveness, not exclusiveness, for I felt that the art of building is contingent upon the co-ordinated teamwork of a band of active collaborators whose co-operation symbolizes the co-operative organism of what we call society. (W. Gropius 1955: 7) Gropius described two different approaches to collaboration, produced 20 years apart and after numerous collaborative projects, including those discussed in this essay.
First, a singular leader orchestrates the individual arts, and second, a unified idea gives the contributors a common cause, for which the architect works as a coordinator, not a dictator.
Using the framework of psychologist Vera John-Steiner from her book Creative Collaboration, the first could be classified as 'complementary' collaboration, based on a division of labor (John-Steiner 2000: 70) and the second as 'integrative' collaboration, founded on a common ideology or vision (John-Steiner 2000: 203). The projects discussed in this essay further illustrate these distinctions. Those with a clear common cause and shared vision, 'integrative' collaborations, have the potential to transform an art form even as the architect relinquishes the centrality of being a 'conductor'.
'They thrive on dialogue, risk taking, and a shared vision', John-Steiner explains: In some cases, the participants construct a common set of beliefs, or ideology, which sustains them in periods of opposition in insecurity. Integrative partnerships are motivated by the desire to transform existing knowledge, thought styles, or artistic approaches into new visions.  Gropius and his colleagues experienced both the discord of failed 'complementary' collaborations and the harmony of 'integrative' ones. By the postwar period, as Anne Vallye (2011) has discussed, Gropius, now working in the US, saw the architect as a technocratic coordinator of 'knowledge production'. Whether in Germany or the US, however, Gropius always considered the architect the leader and final arbitrator in the implementation of the unified work, and this was particularly true for paint and color in and on his buildings. He emphasized this point in his 1919 essay, 'Architecture in a Free Republic', when he said, 'Architect, that means: leader of art' (W. Gropius 1993: 199).
Despite his emphasis on the supervisory role of the architect (or, perhaps, because of it), Gropius first hired painters for his new school and to head the Wall-Painting Workshop (Long 2006 Scheper 2005). Not surprisingly, the painters often envisioned an egalitarian role for color and painting in collaboration with the architect. For Kandinsky, the domination of one discipline over the other was a problem for a synthesis in the arts. In his program for the Soviet Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK), written in 1920 (two years before he arrived at the Bauhaus), Kandinsky explains: This dead architecture of ours has the habit of dominating painting and sculpture (which, in their subservience, play a pathetic role), even though it has no prerogative to do so. But when the renaissance occurs, architecture will become an equal member of the three arts in monumental creation. (Kandinsky 1920: 463) Conversely, Kandinsky also described the opposite case whereby the artist created his or her vision regardless of the architecture. 'The artist covered' the few walls, ceilings, and staircases allotted to them 'with whatever entered his head', without an organic connection to the architecture (Kandinsky 1920: 462).
As Rose-Carol Washton Long and others have discussed, Kandinsky had been interested in the arts coming together in a synthesis since his earliest days in Munich (Long 2013;Poling 1983). Peg Weiss (1995) has traced this interest back to his days as a student at the University of Moscow and an ethnographic trip he took in summer 1889 to a remote area of Russia and the colorful houses he saw there. His earliest Bauhausrelated works were a set of temporary, and now lost, wall paintings for the Jury-Free Art Show in Berlin in 1922 (Mehring 2009;Derouet 2013). However, other than the bold colors in his Master House in 1926, which included a black wall in the dining room, Kandinsky never personally collaborated directly with an architect or developed an architectural wall-painting scheme.
Unlike Kandinsky, Oskar Schlemmer painted many wall and mural paintings throughout his career, advocating for the artist's autonomy. 'Painting should remain what it is, perfect itself within its own limits', he wrote in 1922. 'I firmly believe that the laws of painting have not changed now and never will' (Schlemmer 1972: 118).
However, he did concede that 'the laws of architecture differ from those of painting.
When painting serves a function within architecture, it must, of course obey its laws' (1972: 118). What is the function of painting in architecture? Itten, an easel painter and pedagogue, was wary of these relationships, and on May 26, 1916, he wrote in his diary, insisting that architecture must turn into art for a successful collaboration: 'Wall painting -architecture. Only in one tiny aspect do the two come in harmonious contact; namely, where architecture becomes an end in itself, as pure art. Only then is the fundamental attitude a pure one. Everything else is a compromise' (Wick 2000: 121).
Although the goal of bringing painting and architecture together was widespread at the Bauhaus -'one of the most difficult artistic problems of our time', as the Bauhaus master Lothar Schreyer put it (Schreyer 1956: 174) -the exact dynamics of these relationships were up for debate. The examples that follow demonstrate that paint and color could transform architectural form, either destabilizing or supporting the solidity of the wall surface and the architectural design. Obliged to move beyond rhetorical and theoretical positions into practice, Gropius, his esteemed painting faculty, and the young Bauhaus students learned the complexities of compromise involved in collaboration. However, as Schreyer recalled of the early 1920s, 'in the architecture that Gropius creates today, there is no painterly work, no "picture" space, only the Anstrich [painting] or the given coloring of the materials ' (1956: 175). 6 The wall painter, working within the Bauhaus founder's buildings at least, was not the architect's equal partner, and wall painting had to yield to architectural concerns.

Jena Municipal Theater
The first large-scale public project of the Wall-Painting Workshop was the Jena Municipal Theater, which was refurbished by Adolf Meyer from 1921 to 1922. 7 The 19th-century building was modernized by cladding the existing ornament and structure on the exterior with a new clean surface and creating boxy, smooth walls in the interior (Fig. 1). Gropius   (U. Müller 2006: 32). In regards to these concerns, Schlemmer defiantly responded by stating, 'So I lead a fight' (Müller 2006: 32;Herzogenrath 1973: 29). In the end, Schlemmer was displeased with the final design, which included some color and sometimes 'too much detailing', which he described as 'colored and not colored, Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne (Herzogenrath 1973: 19). Hölzel and Fischer, a fellow professor in Stuttgart, had been working together on a variety of projects before World War I. 9 Hölzel considered the special problems of painting in architecture in the article 'Über Bildliche Kunstwerke im Architektonischen Raum' [Concerning Pictorial Artwork in Architectonic Space], in which he argued that wall painting had to take into account a wall's position in the building and the final space as a whole; the painting would be only one part (Hölzel 1909). He discussed respecting the relationship between the surface of the two-dimensional wall and the three-dimensional space. Echoing Kandinsky's later writing, Hölzel explained that either the space had to change for the painting or the painting had to be subordinate to the needs of the space. 10 He emphasized the formal flatness of the painting, reducing any sense of depth or painterly perspective that would break the plane of the wall. Later, in his 1920 book, Schlemmer's friend, Hans Hildebrandt, a Stuttgart-based art historian, echoed many of Hölzel's ideas about the nature of wall painting and the risk of creating a 'Loch in der Wand' (hole in the wall), as he put it -meaning that the walls would lose solidity and the architecture could be weakened by wall painting (Hildebrandt 1920: 197;Pogacnik 2009: 102). Schlemmer was clearly aware of these concerns, and he faced them directly in Jena.
In May or June 1922, after months of planning, Schlemmer executed a multicolored checkerboard design on the ceiling of the auditorium in Jena with the help of his nephew Hermann Müller, an apprentice of the workshop (Herzogenrath 1973: 29-30;Müller 2006: 34). In developing the design, Schlemmer told Müller to experiment with 'small regular squares of different colors', which would be uniform at a distance but would create different moods (Fig. 2). 11 The squares of Schlemmer's ceiling design mimicked the cubic quality of the architecture and added a bright colorful effect to the interior.
A wall-painting student, Andor Weininger, saw the painting in progress, which he described as 'a beautiful checkerboard design with colors' (Michaelson 1991: 33).
Weininger also described De Stijl impresario Theo van Doesburg's negative reaction to the painting: '[Van] Doesburg took one look and said: Why are they destroying the architecture with this painting?' (Michaelson 1991: 33). To van Doesburg, the colorful checkerboard ceiling confused the sculptural effect of the architecture, adding a busy pattern to the clean lines and flat surfaces of the renovations, undermining the tectonics of the space and the solidity of the wall.
Months earlier, Schlemmer had criticized van Doesburg as 'the Dutchman who advocates architecture so radically that for him painting does not exist, except insofar as it mirrors architecture ' (1972: 117). The De Stijl leader was a critic of the Bauhaus and courted many Bauhäusler, especially those who wanted to study architecture, which was not yet taught (Droste 2002: 54-57). 12 As Schlemmer specifically described, many students quickly came under the 'spell' of van Doesburg when he arrived in Weimar in The basic design of the space involves the creation of a five-cubic-meter space within a larger rectangular room. A partition wall squares off the space, and inside the large cube is a smaller cube, defined on the two walls by a framed bast-fiber wall covering and a silk curtain and on the floor with a colorful geometric carpet by Gertrud Arndt.
On the ceiling, a yellow square and complex tubular light fixture optically delineate the interior cube (Fig. 3). The ceiling of the room is painted three different colors in relation to the organization of the space: beige for the entry, yellow for the seating area, and gray for the workspace. The ceiling effects also extend onto the walls in two yellow bands, expanding the interior cube outward. The yellow bands also give the room an asymmetrical balance, a counterpoint to the yellow furniture in the interior cube. Overall, the wall and ceiling color is subtle; however, it is also a seamless and supporting element to the design of the office, a successful integrative collaboration.
All the workshops coordinated their production to enact the architect's vision, showed it to the wife and the prof., they found them very pretty, Grop [sic] did not take a position. 17 (1968: 74) From this short comment, it seems as if Gropius was either uninterested in the color scheme or perhaps had already approved it. Arndt adds that Gropius did have input on the exterior plan. Additional beams were needed beneath the winter garden on the east side of the house, and Gropius wanted to camouflage these supports. Arndt recalled Gropius saying, 'They must be treated with color so that they are not seen ' (1968: 74). 18 The general sense of this interaction is that Gropius was more concerned with the way color and paint could correct the building's external appearance than with the interior wall paintings (U. Müller 2004: 154). In the end, the exterior was primarily off-white stucco, while in the interior, almost every room was boldly colored. The renovated building and Arndt's extant plans in the Bauhaus-Archiv document these features.
The colors of each room were designed for the specific function and architectural features, with niches, windows, and stairways getting pops of color (Fig. 4). The music room, the heart of the home, offers a useful example of Arndt's approach. In both the plan and the extensive reconstruction of the wall colors, most of the walls and ceiling are painted turquoise (Fig. 5). Breaking up the turquoise is a one-meter-wide However, Arndt's design not only accentuates the dimensions of the room and the windows but also produces its own visual emphasis, distracting from the architectural elements of the design. When one looks up in the space, the strip of yellow seems to move, like a later Josef Albers painting, pushing and pulling. The yellow extends out  Gropius and Adolf Meyer, Jena, 1924. Restoration, 1994. Photograph by the author. The reasons for the architect's disinterest or his implicit consent to this bold design were twofold. First was the client; Felix Auerbach was a physics professor with a strong interest in music and the arts. He and his wife, Anna, were involved in many cultural and social organizations, including women's suffrage (Happe and Fischer 2003). Perhaps these cultured clients asked for extensive color and at least approved of Arndt's 'pretty' plan, and therefore Gropius had no problem with it. Second, Haus Auerbach was a small private commission, where Gropius was able to experiment further with spatial ideas of dematerialized walls and cubic forms. Unlike large public buildings, such as the Jena Municipal Theater or the new buildings in Dessau, which would define Gropius's reputation, at Haus Auerbach the young Arndt could freely collaborate with the established architect and his partner Adolf Meyer, and his colors could both accompany and diverge from the architecture. During this time, the Wall-Painting Workshop played with color, as Andor Weininger said: 'Whenever we got a job we'd experiment with color. Our clients were the victims, the guinea pigs. We were relieved when they were satisfied' (Michaelson 1991: 31). He further explained that they were focused on 'Raumgestaltung i.e., forming or creating space with colors. … We tried to "gestalten" (design), not just paint. If you use them right, colors have great magic' (1991: 31). 19 The power of paint and color was therefore freely used in this low-stakes private commission.
In the years following this project, Gropius continued to turn away from such bold and colorful wall-painting schemes. White was becoming a more and more important element of modernist architecture, as Le Corbusier declared in his hyperbolic Law of Ripolin: 'every citizen is required to replace his hangings, his damasks, his wallpapers, his stencils, with a plain coat of white ripolin' (Le Corbusier 1987: 188). However, like Le  Municipal Theater, it appears that Gropius provided significant feedback and criticism on the color plans before painting began; however, as with the theater, the allocation of color and wall painting seems to have been a concern.

Color and the Bauhaus Building in Dessau
The Wall-Painting Workshop and its leader planned to use colors to emphasize Gropius's structure, make it more comprehensible, and help in the navigation of the large complex. In the 1926 issue of Offset magazine, in text accompanying his Color Orientation Plan of the Bauhaus Dessau, Scheper expressed a concern for function and architectonics (1926: 365). 21 He explained that color could be used to aid in orientation in the large building by associating each workshop and its location with a color. He wanted to use color to articulate structures like beams and to emphasize the materiality of the wall surface. In Scheper's plan, bright red, for example, highlighted the large glass curtain wall and coordinated with the red of the doors all around the exterior of the building (Ridler 2019). However, in the restoration, the exterior of the building was found to be primarily white and gray and without every small burst of color that was depicted in Scheper's perspective drawings and elevations. The most noticeable example is in the east elevation drawing, in which Scheper indicated that he intended to paint a corner of the exterior wall orange. It would have stood out dramatically against the white walls, but it also would have accentuated a blank wall surface created by the abrupt end of two rows of windows and a drop in the roofline. This orange square would have been a bright and noticeable signature, demonstrating the power of color on architectural form, and making a striking color impression for guests who would see it as they arrive from the train station. However, the bold orange square was never painted (Fig. 7) (Markgraf 2006: 151). Gropius did not risk these colors distracting from or transforming his iconic white building, unlike his German colleague Bruno Taut, who used bold punches of color such as bright blue on recessed exterior walls in projects like the Horseshoe Housing Estate in Berlin in 1925. The color plan shows significant use of color on the exterior, including the orange square on the east façade. Tempera over blueprint, cut-and-pasted on gray-green paper, 68 × 100 cm. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. © Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.
Despite the toned-down color design and the many white surfaces, significant pops of color were implemented, primarily in the interior, such as in the stairwells and canteen. In the small landings of the main staircase, color is used to help clarify the architectural space. As seen in the current renovation, the ceiling is a pale yellow, a light reflective color, which draws the eye upward and the viewer up the stairs. The  A correct relationship creates a new, clear expression of space perceived as a deliberate architectonic structure' (Scheper and Scheper-Berkenkamp 2018: 93). Color could improve and accompany spaces, but for the Schepers it must not transform or displace the architectural form. In continuation with the orchestra metaphor, the color melody had to be in time with the conductor's beat.

Conclusion
These examples of collaboration between Gropius and Bauhaus wall painters demonstrate that the actual implementation of painting in architecture was far from straightforward. The working relationships and power dynamics between the wall painters and the architect were crucial to the success of the projects. By the mid-1920s, Gropius, as a collaborator with the Wall-Painting Workshop, insisted that architecture be given priority and color be used only as a support. His role was as conductor and leader of the project, not as a rank and file player. He had stymied many attempts to add colored elements and his buildings became increasingly white. Years later, Weininger wrote that in Dessau there was a discovery of white, which was never really white but rather a reflection of the colors of the surroundings: 'Previously we had used colors to improve a room. If the ceiling was too high, for instance, we'd take a heavy color to lower it' (Michaelson 1991: 44). Color could visually modify existing spaces, like in Gropius's office. In the new Dessau Bauhaus building, Weininger explained that 'there was no need to improve anything ' (1991: 44). Perhaps color, which the wall painters used to highlight, dematerialize, and enhance the architectural structure, was not needed in the perfectly proportioned Gropius building, just as the architect desired (or dreamed). However, as this paper has also shown, Gropius and the Bauhaus wall painters echoed analogous debates about architectural polychromy and color and form in interwar modernism, for example, in direct confrontations with van Doesburg or in contrast to De Stijl color design.
Despite the urge of some scholars to see Gropius's future projects and modernism in general as unremittingly white or to simply ignore the use of color (Wigley 1995;McLeod 1994;Overy 2007), the architect continued to collaborate with painters, and he did use color subtly in his later buildings. For example, after his immigration to the US, in his new home in Lincoln, Massachusetts, Gropius painted an exterior wall on the rooftop deck pale pink, which absorbs the harsh southerly sunlight. 22 He also continued to commission art for his buildings, including works by Herbert Bayer and Josef Albers for Harkness Commons in the Harvard Graduate Center. In 1966 Gropius wrote about how his American firm, The Architects Collaborative, worked with artists, still envisioning an 'integrative' collaboration: We have found that integration of architecture with paintings and sculptures succeeds best when painters and sculptors have taken direct part in the conceptual phase of the design process right from the start. Added on as an afterthought, even the best art work has little chance to become an organic part of the whole. (W. Gropius 1966: 20) The goal of the organic whole, the complete building, prevailed in Gropius's approach.
However, the postwar artworks in Gropius's buildings remained distinct objects.
They were integrated into the architecture but did not involve transformation and dematerialization through colored walls or boldly patterned ceilings; they yielded to their place in Gropius's buildings. As the four projects discussed in this essay demonstrate, over the course of the 1920s, Bauhaus wall painters evolved from independent cooperators to subordinate collaborators. Paint and the constructive and destabilizing properties of color proved dangerous to Gropius's white cubes; therefore, by the heroic Dessau period of the school, the architect maintained firm control over all aspects of the collaborative building project. Wall painting was never equal to architecture, as Kandinsky dreamed, but subservient and contingent.