Bauhaus and Map Collecting
/Yes, they’re connected!
This is a bit I just encountered, and which is staying in the book, but it’s such a tasty little morsel that I can’t stop myself from sharing it now.
I have long thought that there’s a great study to be done of the interrelations of art deco and mapping, although I really don’t have the background to do it myself.
I have long known, for example, that the main uses of early maps in the twentieth century has been for interior decoration. This is apparent from several bits of data:
• the practice of certain antiquarian dealers (R. V. Tooley comes to mind) to apply color to uncolored maps, so that they appeal to interior designers seeking to match a particular color palette (and cared little about the region mapped).
• the sentiment I have heard expressed by map collectors: you know you’re a real collector when you run out of wall space for your maps.
• the significance of the practice of breaking early atlases and selling off the individual plates at fairs and markets, in department stores, and in antique stores, etc., is attested in the entries on the map trade and collecting in Cartography in the Twentieth Century, Volume Six of The History of Cartography (Baynton-Williams 2015; Karrow 2015).
It is clear that this practice began in the economic boom of the 1920s. What I have not realized, however, is that the phenomenon of collecting early maps for decoration was motivated, at least in part, by a change in aesthetics entailed by the art deco movement and, more especially, by the Bauhaus (1919–33).
I learned of the connection when a book arrived in the mail, yesterday. Hans Wertheim (1897–1938) was an art and antiquarian book dealer in Berlin, who also ran a company specializing in printing art books called Der Bibliographikon (Bagrow 1939). In 1931, he organized an exhibition of early maps in his store. At the same time, he published a small book to educate potential clients about the nature of maps and map history and to serve as a catalog of the maps he had available to sell (Wertheim 1931a). He also published it in English (Wertheimer 1931b). (Library and dealer catalogs all say/imply that only fifty delux, hand-colored, linen-bound copies of the English book were produced, as per the colophon; however, what arrived yesterday was an unnumbered, uncolored, and soft-cover copy, suggesting that the English translation was more widely distributed.)
Wertheim opened the book with a short section about the aesthetics of space, the hanging of art, and the appeal of maps:
The New Interest in Old Maps
Nowadays there is undoubtedly a marked tendency to eliminate ornament and by emphasising space on the one hand and the essential forms of the object on the other to arrive, as it were, at the “thing in itself.” The use of pictures in decorating rooms has likewise been revolutionised along these lines. The predominance of the oilpainting has been shaken. The broad pretentious gold frame which so often destroyed the effect both of the picture and the room as a whole has disappeared. Today everything is subordinated in some way ot other to the effect of space as a whole, to spatial harmony. The function of all forms of wall ornament is now to break up the wall surfaces artistically and decoratively in order to emphasize the significance and unity of the wall, whereas formerly a wall was rather something on which to hang a picture. The more self-contained character of the graphic arts, the fact that their very nature makes them more suitable for treatment as part of the wall itself, the relative unimportance of the frame, have brought them much closer to the modern man.
This explains why now, after so many years, old maps are again attracting attention. Although they are not pure works of art but, being intended for practical purposes, really a form of applied art, the appreciation of their charm and of the artistic qualities which are to be found in the works of the old map-makers is steadily growing.
However much old maps act at first sight more as a purely decorative breaking up of the wall surface than as an intellectually conceived subject, nevertheless to whoever studies them more closely they give a vivid impression of the countries treated in consequence of the quaint, fantastic details they contain. They reveal the open-eyed and open-eared vitality of the Renaissance men who made them, who conquered the world and depicted it then with all the childlike belief in fairy-tales, miracles and superstitions which was characteristic of them. It is this which, perhaps more important and more attractive than their decorative quality, makes old maps, particularly of any given period, so extraordinarily fascinating. They, the last living witnesses of a past age, enable us to appreciate it and its landscape, which they show us as it appeared then and in process of development or discovery, better than many a picture or book could do.
Some idea of the history of the period in which the modern vision of our globe arose, and the main dates in connection with hte development of cartography as such, are necessary for a full appreciation of oldmaps.
(Wertheim 1931b, 3–4)
Wertheim’s reference to the “‘thing in itself’” indicates his influence by the Bauhaus. The idea is from Immanuel Kant—Ding an sich—to refer to an object as it exists independent of observation. It became a key concept in Walter Gropius’s architectural theories. Design, it was argued, should reveal the object, not obscure it behind ornamentation. Decoration was thus recast as a means to emphasize and reveal the nature of the object, not to obscure or mistreat it.
This passage certainly expands for the me the discussion of art and cartography in the twentieth century.
Note also that Wertheim’s modernist aesthetic led him to recast the traditional narrative of map history. In that narrative, already a century old by the 1930s, medieval map makers (at least of world maps, mappaemundi) had been “childlike” in their productions, but that childishness had fallen by the wayside with the Renaissance raising of the West into rational adulthood. Wertheimer extended the era of supposedly juvenile mapping. At the same time, in directly equating map makers with the grand explorers and adventurers—who were rarely the same people, especially in the context of the makers of the maps he was selling, who were all Dutch craftsmen and publishers—Wertheim still adhered to the established narrative’s insistence the those explorers and adventurers were integral to the transition from medieval European culture to modern Western culture. Like all summary narratives of the history of “cartography,” it’s complicated!
There’s a lot more that might be said about this connection between aesthetics and mapping in the early twentieth century. Please let me know if you should go romping about in this field!
p.s. I encountered Wertheim and his book as I was reading up on the formation of the journal Imago Mundi. The journal is generally remembered as the brainchild of Leo Bagrow, the Russian émigré in Berlin. but it is clear that the journal was jointly created by Bagrow (who had the academic pretensions) and Wertheim (who also funded the first issue) (Heffernan and Delano Smith 2014). But after the first issue of the journal was published by Bibliographikon in 1935, the Jewish Wertheim finally left Berlin. (The Nazi regime had already ended the Bauhaus.) Unfortunately, having found refuge in Brussels, Wertheim fell ill and died in 1938.
p.p.s. I also appreciate Wertheim’s pun—whether intended or not—that maps provide “vivid impressions,” given that the kinds of maps he sold were all printed (i.e., “impressed”).
References
Bagrow, Leo. 1939. “Hans Wertheim.” Imago Mundi 3: 104.
Baynton-Williams, Ashley. 2015. “Map Collecting in Europe.” In Cartography in the Twentieth Century, edited by Mark Monmonier, 248–51. Vol. 6 of The History of Cartography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Heffernan, Michael, and Catherine Delano Smith. 2014. “A Life in Maps: Leo Bagrow, Imago Mundi, and the History of Cartography in the Early Twentieth Century.” Imago Mundi 66 supplement: 44–69.
Karrow, Robert W., Jr. 2015. “Map Collecting in Canada and the United States.” In Cartography in the Twentieth Century, edited by Mark Monmonier, 245–48. Vol. 6 of The History of Cartography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wertheim, Hans. 1931a. Alte Karten: Ein Leitfaden für Sammler und Liebhaber. Berlin: Das Bibliographikon.
———. 1931b. Wertheim, Hans. 1931. Old Maps and Charts: A Short Guide for Collectors. Berlin: Das Bibliographikon.
