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Architecture, Individualism, and Nation: Henry van de Velde's 1914 Werkbund Theater Building

2012; College Art Association; Volume: 94; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00043079.2012.10786040

1559-6478

Katherine M. Kuenzli,

Art, Politics, and Modernism

Henry van de Velde's Werkbund Theater stood at the center of a controversy over the nature of artistic individualism and its relation to national identity, a debate that surfaced at the German Werkbund's 1914 exhibition only months before World War I began. The artistic relationships that contributed to the design of the theater—conceived as a “total work of art” involving painters, sculptors, and theater directors—were no less complex. Van de Velde's building reveals the central, but contested, role that theater architecture, and the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, played in the German Werkbund and the shaping of German modernism.