3 - 1935: ‘Art crystallises the emotions of an age.’ Musicology and the Art of Espionage

Summary

1935 was an eventful year. It opened ominously with the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini creating Libya out of the Italian colonies of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. A week later he signed an agreement with the French Foreign Minister, Pierre Laval, where they accepted each other's colonial claims. On 13 January a plebiscite in the Saarland showed that 90.3 per cent of voters wished to rejoin Germany. Two months later Adolf Hitler tore up the Versailles Treaty and launched a programme of German rearmament. In Germany, National Socialist denunciations of modern architecture and ‘Degenerate Art’ reached their height in 1935 with examples of modern art hung next to photographs of people with deformities and diseases, graphically reinforcing the idea of modernism as sickness. Artists from the Bauhaus, closed down in July 1933, left Germany en masse for friendlier, more supportive, climes; Klee went to Switzerland and Kandinsky to Paris. László Moholy-Nagy followed Gropius to London, staying initially as Jack Pritchard's guest in the Lawn Road Flats before moving into Flat 16. The radical furniture designer Marcel Breuer spent two years in Zurich working with the art historian Sigfried Giedion, before he too moved into the Flats, also in 1935.

Marcel Breuer and Moholy-Nagy shared similar backgrounds. Breuer was born in Pécs in 1902, near the southern border of Hungary; Moholy-Nagy in 1895 in Bácsborsód, a large village and municipality in Bács-Kiskun county in the Southern Great Plain region of southern Hungary.