The Last Craftsman

Re-evaluating Henry van de Velde and his contribution to Modernism, the Bauhaus, and our lives.

Until 1972, the Museen Zu Berlin exhibited, among other things, a teapot and its accompanying set. From above, the teapot is around twenty-two centimetres long, thirteen-and-a-half centimetres wide, and thirteen centimetres tall. Its chrome finish gives an oil-surface ripple to the reflections of objects around it, as it shifts from dark to light to dark in its metallic gradient. This isn’t the kind of teapot we’ve seen on our elderly relatives’ coffee tables, with elephant trunk spouts and floral finishes. No, the chrome surface and stunted, resentment of a spout of this teapot places it firmly in the sphere of Modernism.

Aesthetically, it is indistinct from any other piece of kitchenware from the early Modernist period: mass-produced, purposefully unremarkable, and entirely functional. The Bauhaus produced many similar pieces. Except, this teapot isn’t from the Bauhaus. It predates the Bauhaus and the advent of Modernism by over a decade; it predates the Werkbund…