There is no single historical model for the fictional Bauhaus-trained architect and American immigrant in “The Brutalist,” which is nominated for 10 Academy Awards in Sunday’s ceremony.
Among its inspirations is Herbert Bayer, whose life and work in Aspen from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s informs aspects of the fictional “Brutalist” played by Oscar-nominated Adrien Brody in this swaggering cinematic epic. The Bayer-designed Aspen Institute campus and buildings, in fact, are just up the Roaring Fork Valley from “Brutalist” writer-director Brady Corbet’s early childhood home in Glenwood Springs.
Corbet and co-writer Mona Fastvold sought a story arc of a Jewish artist/architect who trained at the Bauhaus school in interwar Germany, survived the Holocaust and then immigrated to the U.S. to create and build in the postwar years. Consulting with the late architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen and the Bauhaus Archive, they found no such person existed.
So the filmmakers borrowed biographical and aesthetic details from many Bauhaus architects and emigres whose lives and works are echoed in the film.
Much of the fictional László Tóth’s arc mirrors Bayer’s story: Bayer was a Bauhaus artist and designer who fled Nazi Germany for New York in 1938, and then was recruited by the visionary industrialist Walter Paepcke to build what would become the Aspen Institute in a remote and then-little-known valley in the former silver-mining region of Colorado. The fictional Tóth is a Bauhaus artist and designer who flees to New York in the postwar mid-1940s, and is plucked by the fictional industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (played by Guy Pearce) to build an institute in a remote stretch of Pennsylvania coal country.
The difference of the years of emigration is significant. Most Bauhauslers actually left Germany much earlier than Bayer and the fictional Tóth. The bulk of the Bauhaus alums left closer to 1933, following Hitler’s election and his Gestapo raiding the school.
László Moholy-Nagy, a Hungarian Bauhausler like Toth, left in 1934. Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius also left in 1934. Marcel Breuer, whose “Wassily Chair” gets a nod in the film and who went on to make prominent Brutalist work in the U.S., left in 1935.
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Bayer stayed longer, attempting to remain apolitical in Berlin and continue his successful graphic design work, even taking commissions from the Nazi government. He fled soon after he was blacklisted and included in the Nazi’s 1937 “Degenerate Art” exhibition and out of concern for his Jewish wife and daughter.
The Bauhauslers who stayed later than that were generally murdered (like the mother of modern art therapy, Friedl Dicker) or became Nazis (like Fritz Ertl, who designed gas chambers for Auschwitz).
“The Brutalist” is packed with allusions and bread crumbs that lead to Bayer.
The film begins with a quote from Goethe, the German poet-philosopher whose bicentennial in 1949 inspired the first major international gathering in modern Aspen — organized by Paepcke with Bayer — and spawned the Institute and the forgotten boomtown’s second life as a resort.
The movie’s opening title cards, by Sebastian Pardo, are directly inspired by Bauhaus typography from the period when Moholy-Nagy and Bayer ran the school’s print shop and pioneered new ground with its san serif typefaces, asymmetry, dots and rules (the Resnick Center for Herbert Bayer Studies and Letterform Archive have a current exhibition in Aspen exploring these breakthroughs and displaying some of the original work that inspired Pardo).
The film depicts Tóth showing building models to a town-hall audience of skeptical local bureaucrats and residents. It is reminiscent of the real-life Aspen meetings with Gropius and Bayer as they advocated for modernist buildings and historic preservation.
There has been some misguided criticism of “The Brutalist” from the design community for its oversimplified depiction of architectural practice, for not explaining Brutalism, for laying on thick melodrama and cinematic flourishes. I view it instead as a humanizing invitation to moviegoers to learn more about this esoteric-seeming world of Bauhaus architects and emigres like Bayer, the impact they made on the U.S. and their continued relevance.
Today people can walk Bayer’s 40-acre Aspen Institute campus of cinder-block buildings, hexagonal rooms, earthworks and sculptures and can hear docents say it is considered the fullest expression of the Bauhaus movement in the U.S. They can check out his Denver public sculptures including his iconic 85-foot-tall concrete “Articulated Wall” (aka the “french fry” sculpture on Interstate 25) and recent posthumous creations at Broadway Park including his “Four Chromatic Gates” (2021) and “Forest Sculpture” (2023).
Bayer’s work speaks for itself in many ways, but all that clean concrete and steel can’t communicate a messy human-scale story the way “The Brutalist” does. The film has opened new doors of curiosity for the public, sending people down Brutalism and Bauhaus rabbit holes on YouTube, or perhaps into the Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art or the Denver Art Museum or the Aspen Institute’s Bayer Center. There, we try to make Bauhaus ideas accessible to the widest possible audience, not just scholars and curators and art world people but also pre-K-to-college kids from across Western Colorado in the same community that bred “Brutalist” director Corbet. President Trump targeting modernist and Brutalist architecture in one of his many Inauguration Day executive orders last month, along with renewed German political anti-Bauhaus efforts, underscore the relevance of this period of design history.
As much as it alludes to Bayer and others, the film is about the Bauhausler lives and livelihoods unrealized, Corbet has said at the tail end of this Oscar season: “The film would serve as a kind of memorial, because it’s absolutely fictional.”
Andrew Travers is an Aspen-based journalist and Penner Manager of Educational Programs at the Aspen Institute.
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