1919–1933 · Art school

Bauhaus

An art school that lasted only 14 years, in three cities and under three directors. The Bauhaus set out to unite art and craft, and later art and industry. Its workshops produced lamps, chairs, typefaces and houses whose forms still shape our everyday lives.

A manifesto with a cathedral

In April 1919, a few months after the end of the First World War, a new school in Weimar sent out a four-page leaflet. Its cover bore a woodcut by Lyonel Feininger: a cathedral of crystalline lines with three stars shining above it. Inside, the architect Walter Gropius wrote: “The ultimate aim of all creative activity is the building!” And further: “Architects, sculptors, painters, we must all return to the crafts!”

The Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar was formed by merging the art academy with the former school of arts and crafts. The name alludes to the medieval masons’ lodges (Bauhütten), where craftsmen and artists worked together on cathedrals.

Workshop instead of academy

At the Bauhaus there were no professors and students, but masters, journeymen and apprentices. Each workshop, whether carpentry, weaving, metal, ceramics or printing, was at first run jointly by an artist as master of form and a craftsman as workshop master.

Everything began with the preliminary course. Johannes Itten had the students feel materials, do breathing exercises and study contrasts. From 1923 László Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers took over the course and oriented it more strongly towards material, construction and technology. Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky taught form and colour theory. Oskar Schlemmer led the stage workshop, where figure, space and movement came together.

Art and technology

In 1923 the Bauhaus showed what it could do in a large exhibition. Gropius issued a new motto: “Art and technology – a new unity”. With the Haus am Horn, designed by Georg Muche and furnished by the workshops, a model house with a fitted kitchen and clear spaces was created. Around 1923–24, Wilhelm Wagenfeld and Carl Jakob Jucker developed their table lamp of glass and metal, which is still produced today.

Conservative politicians in Thuringia regarded the school with suspicion. In 1924 the new state government drastically cut its funding, and the Bauhaus moved.

Dessau: the Bauhaus as a building

The industrial city of Dessau took in the school in 1925. Gropius designed a new school building with a glass façade in front of the workshops, studios, a student residence and a canteen, together with the Masters’ Houses in a nearby pine grove. The Bauhaus Building opened in December 1926 and, together with further buildings in Weimar, Dessau and Bernau, is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Many of the designs now regarded as typical of the Bauhaus were created in Dessau. In 1925 Marcel Breuer built his tubular steel club chair, inspired, as he himself recounted, by the handlebars of his bicycle. Herbert Bayer designed a typeface consisting only of lower-case letters, and the Bauhaus largely dispensed with capitals in its printed matter. Marianne Brandt, the first woman to join the metal workshop, created teapots and lamps from simple geometric forms.

Women at the Bauhaus

The Bauhaus advertised that it treated women and men equally. In practice, the school’s leadership steered many female students into weaving. Yet it was there that some of the most successful work was produced. Gunta Stölzl ran the weaving workshop from 1927 as a junior master and is regarded as the only woman to attain the rank of master at the Bauhaus. Anni Albers developed fabrics there that combined function and abstraction, and later, in the United States, became one of the most important textile artists of the 20th century.

Meyer, Mies and the end

In 1928 Gropius handed over the directorship to the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer. He put social usefulness first: “the people’s needs instead of luxury needs”. In 1930 Meyer was dismissed for political reasons, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe succeeded him. Paul Klee moved to the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 1931.

In 1932 the Dessau municipal council, dominated by the National Socialists, closed the Bauhaus. Mies continued it as a private school in a former telephone factory in Berlin-Steglitz. In April 1933 the police searched the building and sealed it. In July 1933 the masters dissolved the Bauhaus themselves.

The Bauhaus in the world

Many Bauhaus members went into exile, and the school’s ideas spread with them. Josef and Anni Albers taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina from 1933, Gropius at Harvard from 1937, Mies van der Rohe in Chicago from 1938. Moholy-Nagy founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937. In Tel Aviv, architects including Bauhaus graduates such as Arieh Sharon shaped the “White City”. In Ulm, the School of Design took up the teaching from 1953 under Max Bill, himself a former Bauhaus student.

For the centenary in 2019, new Bauhaus museums opened in Weimar and Dessau. The Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin is currently being extended and renovated.

Why it still matters

The Bauhaus stands for the idea that good design should benefit everyone, from the house to the door handle. Its foundation course lives on in design and art schools worldwide, and its name has become shorthand for modernism. Yet the Bauhaus was never a single style, but a place of experiment, full of contradictions and conflict.