Bauhaus
The melting pot of modernity

1.
A REVOLUTIONARY ART SCHOOL

On 12 April 1919, in the German city of Weimar, a new pedagogical project was launched: the Bauhaus. This art school incorporated many of the postulates of the avant-garde. Its faculty hailed from German Expressionism and it maintained ties with the Vkhutemas school in Russia, El Lissitsky’s Russian Constructivism, and Theo van Doesburg, the Dutch artist behind the De Stijl movement.

Its director, the architect Walter Gropius, signed the founding manifesto. Amongst other things, it read:

‘The decoration of buildings was once the noblest function of the visual arts, and the visual arts were considered indispensable to great architecture. Today, they exist in complacent isolation, from which they can only be rescued by the conscious co-operation and collaboration of all craftsmen.’

‘There is no essential difference between the artist and the craftsman.’

‘Let us strive for, conceive and create the new building of the future that will unite all disciplines.’
Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Manifesto, Weimar, April 1919

The Bauhaus would stay open for only fourteen years, but it would revolutionize how art is taught and would forever change how architecture, the visual arts, design, theatre, decoration and urban planning are understood.

2.
A NEW PEDAGOGY

‘Art cannot be taught. [Art schools] must return to the workshop.’
Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Manifesta, Weimar, April 1919.

Admission

‘It will be open to any person of good repute, regardless of age or sex.’
Walter Gropius, 1919

Of the 84 women and 79 men who initially applied to the Bauhaus school, 51 women and 61 men ultimately enrolled following the subsequent selection process. Gropius wanted to prevent the school from acquiring a reputation as a women’s school of applied arts.

Vorkurs

Students began with a six-month preparatory course (Vorkurs), taught by the Swiss painter Johannes Itten, who was later replaced by Lászlo Moholy-Nagy y Josef Albers

In the Vorkurs, students were taught, above all, to ‘unleash [their] creative forces’. They were encouraged to create based on subjective perceptions and experimentation with materials, compositions and colours. Itten neither corrected nor rectified them, so as not to inhibit their spontaneity. This idea became the pedagogical cornerstone of the Bauhaus.

The workshops

After the Vorkurs, students were assigned to different workshops: stone, wood, metal, ceramic, glass, weaving… Most of the women were directed towards the weaving and ceramics workshops; most of the men, towards painting, sculpture and architecture. The teachers chose the content of their workshop freely.

The students remained in the workshop for three years, learning about the practice. The workshops were communities for work and group life.

3.
MASTERS OF COLOUR

Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky ran the free painting workshop. Kandinsky was also in charge of the mural painting workshop.

Klee’s teaching was based on nature. He sought to explain how it works and captured it in an overlay of artistic techniques. He prepared his classes carefully and explained his conclusions without imposing dogmas.

Kandinsky had been in contact with the Russian avant-garde and with the education system that emerged from the Soviet revolution. He had also distilled a spiritual interpretation of art, which he reflected in a pictorial geometrization that sought to synthesize various artistic fields. In 1922, he became deputy director of the school, and he remained at the Bauhaus until 1933, when the Nazis insisted he be expelled. He championed colour and line, as well as an abstraction that penetrated to the essence of things, where the idea replaces beauty as the objective of art

Gunta Stölzl enrolled at the Bauhaus in 1919. Her work in the textile workshop was so outstanding, that, in 1925, she was placed in charge of it. However, because she was married to the Jewish architect Arieh Sharon, in 1931, the Nazis succeeded in pressuring Mies van der Rohe, then director of the Bauhaus, to force her to resign.

4.
VERY PRODUCTIVE PARTIES

In the Bauhaus, there was an atmosphere of freedom and creation, with talks, poetry, music, costume balls, and theatre, all with a festive etiquette.

Parties were part of the Bauhaus school’s inherent daily life and teaching programme.

‘The big parties, the Chinese Lantern Festival, the Stars Party, were unforgettable. For weeks and weeks, the workshops worked exclusively for those parties.’

‘Everyone makes his or her own costume, so there is nothing like it or even close to it.’
Lothar Schreyer, teacher of the stagecraft workshop from 1921 on.

The parties fostered companionship between teachers and students beyond their work. They united the group and made it possible to criticize and ridicule anything that caused tension.

At the parties, fun was also poked at theatrical standardizations. This became the seed for a new type of theatre, in which pacing, gestures, figures, props, colour, lighting and sound sought to generate surprise. They were exploring space and, in particular, its relationship with art and technology.

This exploration culminated in the idea of the Total Theatre, designed by Gropius in 1926, which was never built. The layout of the stage could be changed and the spotlights or projectors turned the walls into moving images. The Total Theatre was intended to have a spatial impact that would generate new ideas, eliminate the barrier between spectator and actor, and strengthen new relationships of participation, creation and tension.

5.
EMBLEMATIC HEADQUARTERS IN DESSAU

In 1924, the conservatives won the elections in the city of Weimar and cut off funding for the Bauhaus. The school had to seek a new location, which it found farther north, in the city of Dessau, home to modern industries.

Gropius designed the building that would house it. With various asymmetrical wings and white or glass-covered façades, the building has become an emblem of the modern movement.

At the new headquarters, new workshops were opened, on metal working, photography and set design. Finally, in 1927, the architecture workshop was created under the direction of the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer. Gropius also tapped Meyer to succeed him as the school’s director, when he left due to differences with the municipal Dessau government.

Gropius had striven to prevent the school’s politicization. In contrast, Meyer was openly leftist. ‘Our aim is to serve the people’, he said, and he provided students with spaces for political debate. The school’s public funding was jeopardized when word began to spread that the Bauhaus was a nest of radicals, and Meyer had to resign.

6.
DESIGN AND INDUSTRY

In the Bauhaus, for the first time, industrial design was treated as a profession with its own techniques, rules, and purposes.

‘The Bauhaus workshops are laboratories in which prototypes of products suitable for mass production are developed and constantly improved. In these laboratories, the Bauhaus will train and educate a new kind of collaborator for industry and the crafts, who has an equal command of both technology and form.’
Walter Gropius

The Bauhaus promoted a style characterized by avoidance of ornamentation, the reduction of all production to the essential, and a rational and elegant use of modern materials. This style was applied to lamps, chairs, chess sets, and even typography.

The products had to exemplify qualities such as durability, lightness and stability and had to be easy to disassemble and transport. Industrial mass production was to make it possible to make quality consumer products available to the general public, in order to adapt to human life and improve the world.

One standout in this regard was Marianne Brandt. After studying in the metal workshop, in 1928, she took over its management and negotiated contracts with industry to mass-produce the lamps that it had designed.

Marcel Breuer likewise came to head the carpentry workshop where he once trained. His Model B3 chair dates from this period. It was the first steel-tube chair for household use. He would later settle in the United States and go on to design such famous buildings as the Whitney Museum in New York or the UNESCO building in Paris.

7.
ARCHITECTURE, THE ULTIMATE GOAL

‘The ultimate goal of all artistic activity is construction!’ So proclaims the heading of Gropius’s 1919 manifesto. However, it was not until April 1927 that the Bauhaus’s architecture department opened its doors.

Only the most advanced students enrolled. And they chose to prioritize function over artistic consistency. They designed according to the activity the building would house and the setting where it would be built.

Hannes Meyer, the workshop’s first director, emphasized social aspects. During his brief tenure as the Bauhaus director, in addition to prioritizing the study of people’s needs and the search for harmonious social organization, Meyer allowed the Bauhaus to become politicized. Fearing that the students would be radicalized, the mayor of Dessau and some of the teachers lobbied for Meyer’s dismissal.

The more conservative architect Mies van der Rohe took over the school’s management. Political activities were banned and architecture was given precedence, but in relation to the design of individual homes. Students were to seek aesthetic perfection with the minimum number of elements.

The architect Lilly Reich accompanied Mies van der Rohe in the Bauhaus. She was placed in charge of the interior design workshop. She had collaborated with Mies van der Rohe on the German Pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition, Villa Tugendhat in Brno, and the Haus Lange in Krefeld. The successful furniture attributed to Mies van der Rohe, such as the Barcelona chair, was designed during the years in which they collaborated.

8.
FROM THE NAZIS TO THE WORLD

The rise of right-wing parties had already pushed the Bauhaus to abandon Weimar; it was the rise of the Nazis in the Dessau town council that forced the school to close. In October 1931, students and teachers tried to resume their daily tasks in a former telephone factory in Berlin.

Mies van der Rohe walked a thin line with the Nazis. But on 11 April 1933, the police and SA sealed the premises and arrested 32 students. Unable to accept the conditions imposed by the new regime, Mies van der Rohe was forced to close the school permanently on 20 July 1933.

It was also the Nazi persecution that spread the Bauhaus philosophy throughout the world. Gropius left for the United States. Under the motto, ‘less is more’, Mies van der Rohe exported a new way of thinking about architecture and design there. Moholy-Nagy opened a New Bauhaus in Chicago. Six former Jewish students settled in Tel Aviv. As a result of their work and influence, today the city is home to some four thousand Bauhaus-style buildings.

The Bauhaus has also clearly left its mark in many other fields: industrial design, graphic design, theatre, urban planning… and, of course, the teaching of fine and applied arts.