Birthday Card: Marcel and Connie Breuer, 1943

While a student at the Bauhaus, Breuer became one of Gropius’s most talented and prolific protégés. In 1925, he was invited to run the school’s furniture workshop, where he piloted the use of tubular steel in furniture. He followed Gropius to London in 1935, and then, two years later, to Harvard. On his card, Breuer depicts himself in anguish, thinking about his new wife, Connie. The image doubtless was a joke between Breuer, formerly a confirmed bachelor, and Gropius. The allusions made by some of these cards would have been clear to Gropius, but to us, decades later, the deeper meanings can be obscure.