Self-Criticism in German Modernism, Author

¶ … Self-Criticism in German Modernism," author Alan Colquhoun explores the dynamics of architectural movements in the first thirty years of the 20th Century. In other words, what occurred in the arts and contemporary design in the thirty years of industrialization prior to the advent of fascism and Hitler is of interest today because art and architecture are inevitably fused with social and political institutions and changes. Interestingly, Colquhoun (page 27) offers the idea that the role of the arts and the artist - "in forming a concept..." - was just as pivotal in creating machine / industrial production as it was in the creation of art and crafts. Hence, Colquhoun is alleging that there was a commonality between the artist and the industrial world of economics and society, and this helps historians understand the past as well as the present and perhaps the future.

More specifically, Colquhoun alludes to the influence that European painting genres had on architectural design in the second decade of the 20th Century. To wit, Cubism, futurism and especially expressionism - seen as a repudiation of commonplace, imitative art and "a denial of the solidity of finality of forms" - came to be joined at the hip with German modernist art. Some saw this German modernism as breaking down the hitherto strict barriers between art and real life. And in time, "expressionism" (previously only identified with art) came to reflect not only paintings, but also the revolutionary kinds of architectural drawings by those associated with the Arbeitsrat (a group formed by workers and dedicated to bringing art to a wider general audience).