Beginnings of Bauhaus

"If today's arts love the machine, technology and organization, if they aspire to precision and reject anything
vague and dreamy, this implies an instinctive repudiation of chaos and a longing to find the form appropriate to
our times."

The Bauhaus, named after a German word meaning "house of building", was founded in 1919 in Weimar,
Germany by the architect Walter Gropius. In 1915 he had taken over the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and
Crafts, and it was through the merger of this institution four years later with the Weimar Academy of Fine Art
that the radical new design school was formed. In conceptual terms, the Bauhaus emerged out of late-19th-
century desires to reunite fine and applied art, to push back against the mechanization of creativity, and to
reform education. At the same time, the development of Russian Constructivism in the 1910s provided a more
immediate and stylistically apposite precedent for the Bauhaus's merging of artistic and technical design. When
the Bauhaus opened its doors in 1920, however, it was a sign of its debt to the aesthetic fashions of the previous
decades it took up residence in the former sculpture studio of the Grand-Ducal Saxon School, designed in the
Art Nouveau style by the school's penultimate director Henry van de Velde.

Gropius called for the school to show a new respect for craft and practical technique, suggesting a return to the
attitudes towards art and craft that had characterized the medieval age. He envisioned the Bauhaus as
encompassing the full totality of artistic media, including fine art, industrial design, graphic design, typography,
interior design, and architecture.

Bauhaus: Concepts, Styles, and Trends

The Bauhaus Teaching Curriculum

Central to the school's approach was its original and influential

curriculum. This was characterized by Gropius as a wheel made up of
concentric rings, with the outer ring representing the vorkurs, a six-
month preliminary or 'basic course', initiated by Johannes Itten, which
concentrated on the fundamental aspects of design, in particular the
contrasting properties of various forms, colors and materials. The two
middle rings represented two intermediary three-year courses, the
formlehre, which focused on problems related to form, and the werklehre,
a programme of practical, workshop-based instruction oriented around
technical crafts and skills. These classes emphasized functionalism, in
particular the use of simple geometric forms that could be reproduced
with ease, a conceptual lynchpin of modernist architecture and design
across the decades to come. At the center of the wheel were courses specializing in building construction,
teaching students the essentials of architectural design, engineering and construction, though with an emphasis
on personal craft and workmanship that was felt to have been lost in modern building processes. A key aim of
the pedagogical approach, one which applied across all courses, was to eliminate competitive tendencies, to
foster not only individual creativity but also a sense of community and shared purpose.
The Bauhaus Faculty

Responsible for the design and delivery of this program were the fabulously talented faculty that Gropius had
attracted to Weimar. The avant-garde painters Johannes Itten and Lyonel Feininger, and the sculptor Gerhard
Marcks, were among Gropius's first appointments. Itten was particularly important to the school's early ethos:
with his background in Expressionism, he was responsible for much of the initial emphasis on romantic
medievalism that defined the Bauhaus, in particular the preliminary vorkurs, which he had designed. Famously,
his Expressionist and esoteric tendencies put him at odds with Gropius's scientific, sociologically-minded
approach, and the two soon came to blows.

By 1923, Itten had left, to be replaced by László Moholy-Nagy, a more natural kindred spirit for Gropius; Moholy-
Nagy refashioned the vorkurs into a program that embraced technology, and the social function of art.
Nonetheless, the Bauhaus retained a mixture of aesthetic influences across the brief course of its existence.
Though figures such as Moholy-Nagy are now associated to some extent with the technological ethos of
Constructivism, other important early appointments included Expressionist and Expressionist-influenced
painters such as Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. They also included artists working across a range of media,
from sculpture to choreography, including Georg Muche and Oskar Schlemmer.

The Bauhaus in Dessau

In 1925, the Bauhaus moved to the German industrial town of Dessau, initiating
its most fruitful period of activity. Gropius designed a new building for the
school which has since come to be seen not only as the Bauhaus's spiritual
talisman, but also as a landmark of modern, functionalist architecture. It was
also here that the school finally created a department of architecture, something
that had been conspicuously lacking in its previous incarnation. However, by
1928 Gropius was worn down by his work, and by increasing battles with the
school's critics, including conservative elements in German culture. He stood
down, turning over the helm to the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer. Meyer, who
headed up the architecture department, was an active communist, and
incorporated his political ideas into student organizations and teaching
programs. The school continued to grow in strength, but criticism of Meyer's
Marxism grew, and he was dismissed as director in 1930. After local elections
brought the Nazis to power in Dessau in 1932, the school was again closed and relocated, this time to Berlin,
where it would see out the final year of its existence.

In Berlin, the Bauhaus briefly survived under the direction of the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a famous
advocate of functionalist architecture latterly associated, like Gropius, with the so-called International Style.
Mies van der Rohe struggled with far poorer resources than his predecessors had enjoyed, however, and with a
faculty that had been stripped of many of its brightest stars. He attempted to extricate politics from the school's
curriculum, but this brief rebranding effort was unsuccessful, and when the Nazis came to power nationally in
1933, the school was closed indefinitely under intense political pressure and threats.

Later Developments - After Bauhaus

 In the decades following its closure, the influence of the Bauhaus would
travel as far as its former faculty members, many of whom were forced
to flee Europe as the stultifying effects of Fascism took hold. After his
relocation to the United States in 1937, Gropius taught at the Graduate
School of Design at Harvard University, and was seen as vital in
introducing International Style architecture to America and the
Anglophone world. So too was Mies van der Rohe, who arrived in the
U.S.A in the same year as Gropius, becoming Director of the College of
Architecture, Planning, and Design at the Illinois Institute of
Technology. Four years earlier, Josef Albers had been appointed head of
the painting programme at the legendary Black Mountain College in
North Carolina, where his students included Robert Rauschenberg and
Cy Twombly. After his own flight from Germany in 1933, the Jewish-
born Hungarian László Moholy-Nagy formed what later became the
Institute of Design in Chicago.

In the years following the Second World War, the national legacy of the Bauhaus was also revived, through the
formation of the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm in 1953. This school was in many ways the spiritual
successor of the Bauhaus, with former Bauhaus student Max Bill appointed as its first rector. Bill, Moholy-Nagy,
and Albers were especially important in adapting the Bauhaus philosophy to a new era: Moholy-Nagy and
Albers refashioned it into one more suitable to a modern research university operating in a market-oriented
culture, while Bill played a significant role in spreading geometric abstraction throughout the world in the form
of Concrete Art, a successor movement to Constructivism.

Most Important Art

Red Balloon (1922)
Artist: Paul Klee

Paul Klee was one of the most talented and enigmatic artists to be associated with the Bauhaus, a visionary whose work
combined stunning formal innovation with a curious kind of primordial innocence. In this canvas from 1922, delicate,
translucent geometric shapes - squares, rectangles and domes - are picked out in gradations of primary color. A single
red circle floats in the upper center, revealing itself, on inspection, to be the titular hot-air balloon. This illustrative
flourish exemplifies Klee's whimsical, associative use of the geometric compositional arrangements for which the
Bauhaus became famous. In the artist's unique idiom, emphasis shifts restlessly between the abstract and the figurative,
between narrative association and esoteric symbolism. The glowing shapes, reminiscent of stained glass, are placed
asymmetrically to create a visual rhythm, conducted by vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines, that seems both ordered
and spontaneous.

Born in Switzerland in 1879, Klee had been associated with various Expressionist and modernist groupings in Northern
Europe during the 1900s and 1910s, including Der Blaue Reiter group, before taking up a post at the Bauhaus in 1921,
teaching mural painting, stained glass, bookbinding, and various other subjects. He published his art lectures in his
Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch (Pedagogical Sketchbooks) (1925) in the Bauhausbücher series. Famously beginning with the line
"[a]n active line on a walk, moving freely, without goal," this work became hugely influential, establishing, as the critic
Mark Hudson puts it, "[Klee's] reputation as one of the great theorists of modern art...[as] he attempted to analyze every
last permutation of his wandering lines." For Klee, the line, developing from a single point, was an autonomous agent,
spontaneous, which through its movement forged the development of the plane. This metaphor for the germination of
compositional form became a fundamental tenet of Bauhaus design philosophy, influencing many of Klee's
contemporaries, including Anni Albers and Klee's lifelong friend Wassily Kandinsky.

Klee's presence at the Bauhaus from 1921 until his resignation in 1931 gives the lie to stereotypes of the institution as
overly preoccupied with rationality and dry, formal methods. Klee's work - both sophisticated and primitive, figurative
and otherworldly - had a noted impact on later artists in America and Europe, including Jackson Pollock, Adolph
Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Nolan, Norman Lewis, and William Baziotes. As Clement Greenburg wrote in
1957, "[a]lmost everybody, whether aware or not, was learning from Klee."

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Bauhaus Artworks in Focus: