Architecture, as numerous historians have pointed out, is the most expensive of the arts. Without generous patrons, architectural visions remain two-dimensional fantasies. Indeed, with the exception of architecture endowed by wealthy and often eccentric individuals, architecture is usually the product of a variety of collective forces, a complex and often confusing combination of social, economic, cultural, as well as aesthetic needs and desires. Peter Behrens was one such artist that thrived on experimental architecture and built a bridge between the past and the present at the turn of the century. Due to the enlightened governmental and industrial patronage in Germany, Behrens flourished and was recognized the world over as a great industrial architect.
Peter Behrens was born in Hamburg in 1869. Behrens studied painting from 1886 to 1889 at the Karlsruhe School of Art, and then in 1889 in Düsseldorf under Ferdinand Brütt. 1890 he visited the Netherlands before settling in Munich. He was a member of the Munich Secession and mixed with the artistic radicals of his day.
In 1897, after a visit to Italy in 1896, he was one of the founders of the Munich Vereinigte Werkstätten (United Workshops). His interest in crafts led him to seek out the problems of industrial design for machine production.
Behrens formed a close friendship with Otto Eckmann and designed for “Pan”. Behrens designed covers for Otto Julius Bierbaum’s advanced literary magazine, Die Insel , his Der Brunte Vogel and for his Pan im Busch . His early career as a painter and graphic artist reveals him as an exponent of Jugendstil artwork .
The popularity around the world at the end of the nineteenth century of such design movements as Art Nouveau and the Jugendstil movements which employed the curving lines of plants and other natural forms, were part of a reaction against the Industrial Revolution, another pendulum swing. Antonio Gaudi is regarded as having conceived of the structure of architecture in an extremely rational manner, but his architecture shares much with the Art Nouveau and Jugendstil movements and was in its own way a reaction against, or a pendulum swing back from, the Industrial Revolution as well. At the start of the twentieth century, however, architects such as Peter Behrens advocated rationalism, and the pendulum swung back to that extreme with the Bauhaus and Modern Architecture movements.
