From the Bauhaus to the TGP and Back: Léna Bergner and Hannes Meyer

Kristie La

In 1949, the Taller de Gráfica Popular (People’s Graphic Workshop, TGP), the artistic collective based in Mexico City that mobilized figurative prints for leftist causes, published an album in Spanish and English celebrating the group’s work since its founding in 1937. The Swiss architect Hannes Meyer and German artist Léna Bergner, partners in art and life who resided in the Mexican capital from 1939 to 1949, selected and organized the album’s hundreds of illustrations—documentary photographs, prints by workshop members, and contributions by affiliates. Near the end of this “record of twelve years of collective work,” the couple, frequent collaborators of the TGP, included four of their own designs interspersed across two pages (p. 256).1 A drawing of a tree by Meyer and a print of a landscape—The Ajusco Mountain, Seen from the Valley of Contreras —by Bergner appear on the first page, while her drawing of a tree and his print of another landscape ( Los Remedios, p. 253) divide the next. Alternating in medium and subject matter, the four works share a realist approach. They reveal the extent to which both Bergner and Meyer departed from their earlier experiences, areas of specialization, and high modernist practices—the literal and metaphorical distance traveled to arrive in Mexico and ultimately ally with the TGP.

Meyer and Bergner first met at the Bauhaus in Dessau in the late 1920s, where she studied in the weaving and graphic design workshops and he served as the inaugural head of the architecture department and then, from 1928 to 1930, as the second director of the school itself. Under his leadership, Meyer oriented the Bauhaus away from exploring traditional artistic media and aesthetic concerns in favor of utilizing technocratic methods for the fulfillment of social needs. In the weaving workshop, for example, Bergner and others pursued the development of functional fabrics made with new materials. In 1930, she graduated with a diploma in weaving, and Meyer was fired allegedly for his communist sympathies. 2 Both had moved to the Soviet Union by 1931, where they participated in Joseph Stalin’s Five-Year Plans and witnessed the rise of socialist realism. During their time in the country, Bergner designed furniture fabrics for a Moscow factory that employed mechanical jacquard looms and more than six hundred workers, while Meyer worked in several capacities, including as an urban planner in the Soviet Far East. 3 In 1936, Meyer and Bergner left the Soviet Union, narrowly escaping Stalinist repression.

Initially, the pair planned to relocate to Republican Spain, but the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War forced them to seek refuge in Switzerland, where they remained until 1939. That year, enticed by Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas’s progressive policies, Bergner and Meyer immigrated to Mexico City. At first, Meyer served as the director of the Institute for Planning and Urbanism within the newly founded National Polytechnical Institute, while Bergner worked on establishing a modern textile education program for the indigenous Otomí in Ixmiquilpan. But the election of President Manuel Ávila Camacho and changes in the country’s political climate eventually cost both artist and architect their positions. Through their participation in various antifascist groups in Mexico, Meyer and Bergner developed an increasingly close relationship with the TGP. They collaborated on several exhibitions and publications—the most extensive project being the 1949 album, which was completed just before the couple returned to Europe.4

One way to read the pair’s illustrations in the album specifically and their engagement with the TGP more generally would be to characterize Meyer’s and Bergner’s aesthetic journeys as regressive, dismissing the couple’s later practices as an abandonment of their earlier modernist convictions in favor of a return to figuration, skill, legibility, genre, and traditional graphic media. Meyer’s own introduction for the TGP album could support such a reading, as he criticizes abstract art and the cold precision of photography while affirming the power of realistic, “lifereflecting,” socially committed prints. 5 Quoting Leopoldo Mendez, Meyer argues, “‘Engraving as art is simply, like painting, a direct medium of expression.’”6 This is a far cry from his and Bergner’s stances at the Bauhaus, where they privileged the functional rather than expressive qualities of architecture and weaving, respectively.

Bergner’s and Meyer’s practices in Mexico also sometimes succumbed to primitivizing and/or colonial views. The latter’s landscape of Remedios showcases the Mexican symbols of cacti and agave in the foreground, while also featuring an arched aqueduct and water tower, Spanish colonial artifacts, and classical emblems, in the background. Snaking their way from the agave toward the arches is a family—first a child, then the father in a sombrero leading a donkey, and finally the mother carrying a baby in a rebozo sling. Not only does the print deploy stereotypical representations of Mexicans, but it also suggests an unsettling progression from foreground to background, indigenous flora to colonial landmarks, hunched mother to unencumbered child. In his introduction, Meyer also makes several questionable claims about how “the Indian subconscious emerges in [the TGP’s] best work.”7

To characterize the couple’s partnership with the collective as exclusively problematic, however, is to fail to recognize some of its complexity. In his introduction, Meyer is adamant that prints have a particular efficacy in the Mexican context. He explains, “In Mexico, where half the population is still all but illiterate, the cartoon, understood by all, is the best medium of communication and of resistance to man’s inhumanity.”8 Furthermore, he states that the goal of the TGP is to achieve the technical and economic capacity to produce and distribute affordable prints throughout the country.9 The group’s name, “People’s Graphics Workshop,” emphasizes that the form and content of their works should emerge from and contribute to mass culture. Their prints took the form of street posters, critical broadsheets, educational portfolios, press illustrations, and postcards. They also often tackled national themes. For example, Bergner, Meyer, the historian Alberto Morales Jiménez, and the TGP worked together to produce the 1947 portfolio Estampas de la Revolución Mexicana (Prints of the Mexican Revolution; pp. 262–301), which documented key events of the Mexican Revolution from the reign of Porfirio Díaz to the then present day.

In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson explicates the critical role that print capitalism played in laying the cultural basis for national consciousness—the sense of belonging to the invisible but imagined community of a nation. He pinpoints how capitalism and the technology of print joined together to yield newspapers in vernacular languages, uniting individuals previously divided by distance and spoken dialects. As Anderson states, “These fellow-readers, to whom they were connected through print, formed, in their secular, particular, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community.”10 With their prints’ approachable format, popular imagery, and relatively affordable prices, the TGP attempted to address broad audiences that were not necessarily literate or even Spanishspeaking. Dozens of indigenous communities call Mexican territory home, despite their complicated relationship to national identity. By 1949, the Mexican Revolution was at least three decades old. Yet Meyer, Bergner, and the TGP insisted with their portfolio that it was still ongoing. Their prints imagine another community—one not bound by written language, inclusive of non-Spanishspeaking populations to some extent, and still committed to and in the midst of revolution.

Although the TGP often addressed national concerns, it also cultivated an international network, especially with Meyer and Bergner’s influence. The workshop exhibited internationally and welcomed many non-Mexican artists—several of whom feature in the 1949 volume. One worth highlighting is the Black printmaker and sculptor Elizabeth Catlett, who traveled to Mexico with her then husband, Charles White (also included in the album), in 1946, joined the TGP the next year, later married one of the collective’s members, Francisco Mora, and eventually renounced her American citizenship after the government labeled her an “undesirable alien.”11 In the workshop’s album, Catlett’s prints focus on the plight of African Americans from slavery to Jim Crow, depicting themes such as lynching, segregation, and labor organizing across gender and racial lines. For the TGP, realism and political commitment always went hand in hand but not necessarily under the banner of nationalism or socialist realism. The collective’s works were more often small and critical than monumental and idealizing. However romantically and ultimately unsuccessfully, the TGP attempted to find a third way between modernism and socialist realism. This is significant considering the context of the early Cold War, which increasingly divided aesthetic production into the two camps.

The question of a third way was of utmost concern to Bergner and Meyer. At the same time they were working on the TGP album, they were also planning one on the Bauhaus under Meyer’s directorship. From 1947 until Meyer’s death in 1954, the couple not only contacted dozens of Bauhäusler all over the world to collect photographs, notes, and other materials, but they also assembled a maquette laying out the book’s structure.12 Though the album was never published, it reveals how Meyer and Bergner viewed their work with the Bauhaus and the TGP as compatible rather than contradictory.

The couple did not plan to produce an album exclusively focused on the Bauhaus’s past activities and accomplishments. Instead, the book was also to include later works by Bauhäusler to demonstrate the school’s continued significance. In addition, Bergner and Meyer were adamant that the volume should critically reflect on the Bauhaus from the standpoint of the present. As Bergner explained in a 1947 letter to the architect Arieh Sharon, the album should address “what of our previous activities we would find important in today’s actuality, what we would build on further, and what we would today find obsolete and anachronistic.”13

Bergner and Meyer’s experience with the TGP did not lead them to abandon their Bauhaus views but to reevaluate and adapt them. That is, it changed what they would “find important of [their] previous ideas.” In a letter to Sharon from 1948, Meyer further explained, “Now for the Bauhaus-Album: it should not be a sentimental memory book but an instructive work of discussion about our past and present production in the service of a ‘social architecture and a socially oriented, realistic, and plastic art movement.’”14

The TGP was central to how Meyer and Bergner conceptualized their new position on realism. As Meyer stated in the same letter, “We are sending you a prospectus and postcard series from [the TGP] press, so that you can see with what type of realism we are busying ourselves.”15

Though the couple apparently finished a maquette for the Bauhaus album in 1950, the extant maquette located in the ETH’s History and Theory of Architecture Archive in Zurich is incomplete. It shows only a few works from after the Bauhaus period—four posters by former student Theo Ballmer from the 1930s. Using simple graphic elements and sans serif type, the posters protest war, fascism, and the prohibition of legal abortion. They employ elements typical of modernist graphic design, but their social commitment and figurative language also link Ballmer’s posters to TGP prints. For Bergner and Meyer, modernism could learn from realism and the Bauhaus from the TGP. A third way was not just necessary but possible.

1. Hannes Meyer, ed., TGP Mexico: The Workshop for Popular Graphic Art, a Record of Twelve Years of Collective Work (Mexico City: La Estampa Mexicana, 1949).

2. María Montserrat Farías Barba, Marco Santiago Mondragón, and Viridiana Zavala Rivera, “Lena Bergner— From the Bauhaus to Mexico,” trans. Lawrence Nunny, in “Learning From,” special issue, Bauhaus Imaginista, no. 2 (2018), http://www .bauhaus-imaginista.org /articles/2485/lena-bergner -from-the-bauhaus-to-mexico; and Éva Forgács, “Between the Town and the Gown: On Hannes Meyer’s Dismissal from the Bauhaus,” Journal of Design History 23, no. 3 (2010): 265–74.

3. Bernd Grönwald, “Zum Tode Lena Meyer-Bergners,” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift (HAB Weimar) 28, no. 1 (1982): 24; and Daniel Talesnik, “The Itinerant Red Bauhaus, or the Third Emigration” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2016), 185–88.

4. Barba, Mondragón, and Rivera, “Lena Bergner”; and Raquel Franklin, “Of Art and Politics—Hannes Meyer and the Workshop of Popular Graphics,” in “Learning From,” special issue, Bauhaus Imaginista, no. 2 (2018), http://www.bauhaus-imaginista .org/articles/2771/of-art-and -politics/en.

5. Hannes Meyer, “Introduction,” in TGP Mexico, xi–xiii, xxiii.

6. Ibid., xiii.

7. Ibid., ix.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., xvii.

10. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 2006), 57.

11. Melanie Herzog, Elizabeth Catlett: In the Image of the People (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2005).

12. Ursula Muscheler, Das rote Bauhaus: Eine Geschichte von Hoffnung und Scheitern (Berlin: Berenberg, 2016), 143–44; and Hannes Meyer and Lena Bergner, “Maquette for a Bauhaus Album, ca. 1947–1953,” in Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur Archiv, ETH Zürich, Zurich. The album is often attributed solely to Meyer, but evidence suggests that he and Bergner worked on the project together.

13. Lena Meyer-Bergner to Arieh Sharon, July 9, 1947, in Letters from Lena and Hannes Meyer—1930s–1950s, Arieh Sharon Digital Archive, https://www.ariehsharon.org /Archive/Bauhaus-and-Berlin /Letters-from-Hannes -and-Lena/i-Q8ZMHSH/A. All German-to-English translations are my own.

14. Hannes Meyer to Arieh Sharon, April 27, 1948, 2, in Letters from Lena and Hannes Meyer—1930s–1950s, Arieh Sharon Digital Archive, https://www.ariehsharon.org /Archive/Bauhaus-and-Berlin /Letters-from-Hannes-and -Lena/i-PFsV3Hj.

15. Ibid., 1.