BAUHAUS

Often misunderstood as a single entity with a consistent program and body of work, the
Bauhaus was an educational program that occupied three successive sites in post-World
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War I Germany: Weimar (1919–25), Dessau (1925–32), and Berlin (1932–33).
Distinguished by its changes in location, direction, and faculty, the program’s turbulent
history is reflected in the various articulations of the Bauhaus program that, although not
wholly distinct from one another, appeared as separate phases of development.
The first Bauhaus (literally, “house of building”), located in the legendary city of
German arts and letters, Weimar, was founded by the German architect Walter Gropius in
April 1919, several months after the surrender of Germany and the formation of the
Weimar Republic. Taking up residence in a building that formerly housed Henri van de
Velde’s School of Arts and Crafts, the “First Proclamation of the Weimar Bauhaus”
(officially known as the Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar) declared the formation of a new
school dedicated to the arts and crafts, a “new guild of craftsmen, without class
distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist.” Modeled on a
medieval guild, Gropius’s “new guild” would harbor artists and craftsmen who would
“together…conceive and create the new building of the future, [a new building that] will
embrace architecture, sculpture and painting in one unity and which will rise one day
toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new
faith.” The frontispiece of the program, a woodcut designed by Lyonel Feininger,
constituted an emblem of this new faith. Depicting a Gothic cathedral with three stars
radiating the light of the heavens, the symbol hearkened back to another age, an age
idealized in the literature and art of German Romanticism.
A director of the revolutionary group Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Work Council for Art),
Gropius’s early appointments to the Weimar faculty, or “Council of Masters,” indicate
his vision of an internationalist, pluralist program in which students and faculty alike
could share their views and aspirations for artistic and social revolution. Including
Gerhard Marcks, Adolf Meyer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Georg Muche, Paul Klee, Oskar
Schlemmer, Lyonel Feininger, Johannes Itten, Lothar Schreyer, and Wassily Kandinsky,
the Bauhaus masters were supplemented by an “Honorary Council of Masters,” a group
whose members were drawn from countries across the whole of Europe. Ranging in age
from 17 to 40, students were from the north and south of Germany and Austria,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Baltic countries; two-thirds were men, and half had
served in the army.
Curricular studies included mural painting, sculpture, theater, dance, and music.
Reflecting the program’s affiliation with medieval guilds, students developed from
apprentices to journeymen in order to finally reach the title of “Master.” In accordance
with Gropius’s vision, the early years of the Bauhaus were marked by the engagement of
a variety of movements, styles, and pedagogical methods, including German
Expressionism, Dada, Russian Suprematism, and Constructivism. Aptly characterized by
Wolfgang Pehnt as an “expressionist art school,” the Weimar Bauhaus did in fact exhibit
a pronounced bias toward Romantic themes, including social unity, subjective artistic
expression, vernacular Christianity, and collective artistic expression, a tendency that was
modified over the course of the program’s evolution. The presence of Johannes Itten, a
practitioner of the Perozorastrian religious sect, further exaggerated this view. Charged
with teaching the required preliminary course (Vo rkurs ), Itten espoused individual expression over
collective responsibility while introducing his students to a cultlike way of living that
depended on the elevation of subjective visions, the rigors of individual self-discipline,
and bodily and spiritual purification. On the other hand, the empirical visualization
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techniques and allegorical figuration of Paul Klee (Ways of Nature Stud y; The Thinking Eye ) and the Russian painter Wassily
Kandinsky, along with the other Bauhaus masters, mediated Itten’s influence.
Internal and external criticisms of the Bauhaus, a school never fully adopted by either
the citizens of Weimar or the government of the state of Thuringia (where Weimar is
located), were continual problems for Gropius, who spent most of his time defending the
program as the controversy increased. Both as a defensive measure and as a signal of the
evolving nature of the Bauhaus curriculum and aims, a new motto, “Art and Technics: A
New Unity,” and a new seal, Oskar Schlemmer’s “Constructed Man,” were adopted in
1922. Tempering Gropius’s earlier proclamation of social revolution through art, the
attempt to unify “art and technology” sought to counter what many Bauhäusler, students
and faculty alike, perceived as the subjective and mystical excess of certain aspects of the
program. Officials of Thuringia regarded the program as a waste of resources and a
hotbed of foreign influence, a reading of Gropius’s original intentions that was not
dissuaded by the school’s new motto and seal. Students, dismayed by the constant
upheavals within the school and searching for an alternative to Expressionist drama, were
drawn to forms of Constructivism. Sensing an opportunity to achieve an even greater
impact for his own artistic ideas during the Dada-Constructivist Congress held in Weimar
in 1922, Theo van Doesburg, founder of the Dutch Constructivist movement De Stijl, set
up an atelier in Weimar. Students began to migrate to van Doesburg’s studio, perhaps in
search of an objective, delimited, and scientific (mathematical) approach to art, and this
inevitably led to the import of van Doesburg’s ideas and influence within the Bauhaus
itself. A master of compromise bent on sustaining his educational program, Gropius
approached the problem directly, hiring the Hungarian Dada-Constructivist Lazslo
Moholy-Nagy, a student and associate of van Doesburg, to teach the preliminary course.
This arrangement brought about a relative truce between van Doesburg and Gropius.
In further response to the criticism leveled by his peers and colleagues,
Gropius sought to assuage various factions, elaborating his views with the
publication of Idee und Au fbau des Staatlichen Bauhaus es Weimar (Idea and Construction of the Weimar Bauhaus) in
1923. Although Gropius’s vision of the Bauhaus program had evolved into
a more comprehensive plan (including admissions policies, a program
constitution, and a more carefully articulated curriculum), Idee und Aufbau retained
several ideas from his original vision, ideas now wedded to a focus on
demonstrating outcomes.
The more abstract courses taught by Klee and
Kandinsky were supplemented by carpentry, stained-glass, pottery, metal, weaving, stage, wall-painting, and architecture workshops. The 1923
Bauhaus exhibition—an event requested by the Thuringian Legislative Assembly—
provided a report of the Bauhaus’s accomplishments to date. The exhibition, spread
mainly throughout the school, featured a one-family house (“Haus am Horn”), built and
furnished entirely by the Bauhaus students, and included lectures, performances, and
“other entertainments,” such as the Bauhaus jazz band.
A whole greater than the sum of its parts, the Weimar Bauhaus program sought to
overturn the “decadence of architecture” and the “elitist and isolating effects of the
academy” with an “awareness of the infinite [that can only be] given form… through
finite means.” Uniquely combining Elementarist theory, nature study, representational
techniques and methods, and quasi-scientific experimentation with materials and
processes, the Bauhaus curriculum sought to promote a seamless integration of “practical
building, building experiments, and the engineering sciences.” Seeking a revolution of art
with the intention of providing a revolutionary impulse for humanistically based change,
Gropius’s “guiding principle” was centered on “the idea of creating a new unity through
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the welding together of many arts and movements: a unity having its basis in Man
himself and significant only as a living organism.” The prolific output of Gropius and the
Bauhaus masters and students, coupled with the support of numerous critics, scientists,
architects, and artists, could not forestall the antagonisms and threats of the state
government (Thuringia). The decision to leave Weimar was made on 26 December 1924.
Students and masters of the Bauhaus finally vacated the premises of the Bauhaus at
Weimar in the first few months of 1925. By this time, 526 students had been trained at
the Bauhaus, although far more took only the preliminary course.
Fortunately, the close of the Bauhaus at Weimar did not represent the end of the
Bauhaus program. During the period of greatest controversy in Weimar, Gropius secured
permission from the mayor of the city of Dessau, Dr. Fritz Hesse, to transfer the Bauhaus
to Dessau, where it remained relatively free of state criticism for several years. Almost all
the former Bauhaus masters transferred to Dessau, and five former students—including
Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, and Marcel Breuer—were appointed masters. Gropius
designed a new suite of buildings to house the program, moving the program from its
temporary quarters in Dessau in 1926. Sharing its premises with the Municipal Arts and
Crafts School, the Dessau Bauhaus included the technically innovative school building
(including a laboratory workshop, administration offices, and technical school) and a
dormitory with 28 studio apartments, baths, dining hall (which acted as an auditorium
and included a stage), and laundry for the students. Near the Bauhaus, Gropius designed a
series of houses for the Bauhaus masters and director, all of which were supplemented by
the Bauhaus workshops. The curriculum was modified as well, enlarging the architecture
program and adding a department of typography and layout. The principles were also
clarified, with the purpose of the Bauhaus defined as “1. The intellectual, manual and
technical training of men and women of creative talent for all kinds of creative work,
especially building; and 2. The execution of practical experimental work, especially
building and interior decoration, as well as the development of models for industrial and
manual production.” A Bauhaus Corporation, chartered for the express purpose of
handling the business aspects of the various Bauhaus models, was also installed.
The Dessau Bauhaus continued to thrive. In 1926 Gropius received an additional
commission to design 60 housing units for a new housing community in Dessau, a
commission that grew to 316 houses by 1928, all of which were partly furnished by the
Bauhaus workshops. In 1926 the new generation of Bauhaus masters—Albers, Breuer,
and Bayer among them—began to elaborate the practical experiments of the Bauhaus,
producing furniture, typography, graphic design, photography, weaving, light fixtures,
and domestic objects that have come to be known as representative of the “Bauhaus
style.” Parallel studies in painting and sculpture also developed, with the figurative
lyricism of Klee and Schlemmer providing a foil for Kandinsky’s continued experiments
with analytic abstraction.
Because of the relative stability of the program, the over-whelming administrative
burdens placed on him in the position of director, and a substantial increase of
professional work, Gropius resigned in early 1928, recommending as his successor the
head of the Department of Architecture, the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer. Because of
various conflicts with municipal authorities, Meyer resigned in 1930. His replacement,
the German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, moved the Bauhaus to Berlin in 1932,
continuing to oversee the program until it was closed by the reactionary National
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Socialist regime in April 1933. The closure of the Bauhaus, presaged by the program’s
original commitment to humanistically based change, pedagogical experimentation,
innovation, and internationalism, did not in fact spell the demise of the Bauhaus.
Guaranteed by the numerous graduates of the program and facilitated by its prominence
as a premier program for the study of the arts and architecture, the Bauhaus program was
incorporated into various design curricula throughout Europe and the United States.
Bauhäusler, including Mies van der Rohe, Moholy-Nagy, Gropius, and Albers, were
appointed to head schools of art and architecture, and many other members of the
Bauhaus received teaching positions in universities, colleges, and schools of art. Together
with their advocates, Bauhäusler revolutionized the way in which art and architecture
were taught while reinforming modern American business and commerce with new ideas
about modern life (domestic and corporate) and advanced methods of communication. As
Mies so deftly phrased the impact of the Bauhaus, it was not a style, an institution, or
even a program for study; rather, “it was an idea, and Gropius formulated this idea with
great precision…. The fact that it was an idea, I think, is the cause of this enormous
influence the Bauhaus had on every progressive school around the globe. You cannot do
that with organization, you cannot do that with propaganda. Only an idea spreads so far.”