Bauhaus Beginnings

Almost mythic in status, the Bauhaus is seen as one
of the most influential schools of art and design of
the 20th century. Established in 1919, the Bauhaus
sought to erode distinctions among crafts, the fine
arts, and architecture through a program of study
centered on practical experience and diverse
theories. Until the school’s forced closure by the Nazi
regime in 1933, students and masters worked with
a variety of traditional and experimental media and
continually reconceived the role of art and design
in contemporary society. Despite its relatively brief,
itinerant existence, the Bauhaus occupies an outsize
position in the cultural imaginary.
Marking the 100th anniversary of the school’s
opening, Bauhaus Beginnings reexamines the founding
principles of this landmark institution. The exhibition
considers the school’s early dedication to spiritual
expression and its development of a curriculum based
on elements deemed fundamental to all and every
form of artistic practice.
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History of the Bauhaus
Masters and Apprentices
Master László Moholy-Nagy
Principles and Curriculum
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“Art and the people must form
an entity … The aim is an
alliance of the arts under the
wing of great architecture.”
Walter Gropius, et al.
Following the end of World War I, the provisional government
of the short-lived Free State of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach in
Germany initiated an effort to reestablish two schools, the
Weimar School of Applied Arts (Weimar Kunstgewerbeschule)
and the neighboring Academy of Fine Arts (Hochschule für
bildende Kunst), as a single, unified institution. Upon the
recommendation of Belgian architect Henry van de Velde, who
had previously directed the Weimar School of Applied Arts,
the Berlin architect Walter Gropius was invited to head the new
school. Gropius’s request to rechristen the institution under a
new name, Bauhaus State School (Staatliches Bauhaus), was
approved in March 1919.
1904 ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS BUILDING, WEIMAR
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1926 THE BAUHAUS DESSAU BUILDING
1930
ERICH MROZEK
1927
HILDE REINDL
1925
LÉNA BERGNER
1921
LYONEL FEININGER
Study for Vassily Kandinsky’s
Farbenlehre’s
course on color
Color wheel and tone study for
Paul Klee’s Course
Carpet design detail
Villa am Strand
(Villa on the shore)
The school officially opened on April 1, 1919. In a rousing
manifesto laced with mystical analogies between creative
production and spiritual awakening, Gropius set forth a
vision for a new model of education that would unite the
divisions between the fine and the applied arts. The director
hoped that various forms of artistic practice—painting,
sculpture, architecture, and design chief among them—could
work in harmony at the new school to produce the socially
oriented and spiritually gratifying “building of the future.”
Gropius asked one of the earliest figures to be hired at the
Bauhaus, the painter Lyonel Feininger, to graphically evoke
the spiritual possibilities of this new art pedagogy. Feininger
illustrated Gropius’s future-oriented vision somewhat
counterintuitively with a woodcut image of a gothic cathedral
replete with flying buttresses, pointed arches, and rays of
light emanating from its steeples. A preindustrial building
form, the cathedral promised the possibility of realizing
the Gesamtkunstwerk, or the total work of art, in which
designers, artists, and artisans worked together toward a
single, spiritual goal.
Gropius’s radical pedagogical vision subjected the school
to considerable political pressure throughout its short life,
particularly from the increasingly conservative forces that
took hold in Weimar Germany. For this reason, the school
was forced to relocate from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, and
then from Dessau to Berlin in 1932. The school’s demise
came at the hands of the Nazis in 1933. Despite continual
turmoil throughout the Bauhaus’s itinerant existence, its
radical pedagogy cemented the school’s legacy as a site for
artistic experimentation well into the 21st century.
Architecture promised the possibility of realizing the total
work of art, in which designers, artists, and artisans worked
together toward a single, spiritual goal.
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“We want to create the
purely organic building,
boldly emanating its inner
laws, free of untruths or
ornamentation.”
Walter Gropius
Walter Gropius was asked in early 1919, at the age of 35,
to lead the new school of art and design in Weimar. Earlier
in the decade, he had established himself as a leading
modernist architect committed to languages of rationalism and
the burgeoning “machine aesthetic,” with explicit influences
stemming from factory architecture and processes of industrial
standardization. The unprecedented horrors of mechanized
warfare that he experienced in World War I, however, forced
the young architect to rethink his commitment to rationalism and
industry. By 1919 Gropius had become increasingly focused on
exploring the possibilities of romanticism, Expressionism, and
socialism in architecture.
As the head of the newly established Bauhaus, Gropius
recruited major, international figures associated with prominent
artistic groups in Germany—such as Der Blaue Reiter in
Munich and Der Sturm in Berlin—and members of the Russian
avant-garde to teach at the school. Reflecting both his turn to
Expressionism and his commitment to bringing together
diverse disciplines, Gropius’s earliest recruits included artists
Lyonel Feininger, Johannes Itten, Gerhard Marcks, and
Gertrud Grunow. In the following years, Gropius hired other
leading artists such as Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, and
Vassily Kandinsky. Though these figures were in large
part committed to the production of art objects, it was
Gropius’s conviction that a revolutionary form of spiritual
expression should not be constrained to the domain of fine art;
he sought instead to imbue objects of everyday life with an
artistic spirit, too.
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1883-1969
WALTER GROPIUS
1899-1994
ANNI ALBERS
1879-1940
PAUL KLEE
1885-1947
LILLY REICH
Walter Gropius’s vision for creating “a new guild of craftsmen”
was not restricted to the painting of artworks or the design
of everyday objects.1 The first students who arrived at the
Bauhaus were confronted by a peculiar provision outlined
in the school’s program. One of its key principles dictated
that students participate in extracurricular activities such as
“theater, lectures, poetry, music, [and] costume parties,” at
which they were expected to contribute to a “light-hearted”
or “cheerful” atmosphere.2 Students not only lived and
dined together but also spent their free time playing sports,
designing publications, organizing parties and festivals, and
collaborating on art projects. Parties at the Bauhaus were
legendary and often elaborately themed, involving sets and
costumes that required expertise from the workshops.
“One eye sees,
the other feels.”
Paul Klee
In keeping with Gropius’s romantic, preindustrial vision for
modern arts education at the Bauhaus, the school’s structure
followed a medieval guild model of labor organization. The
majority of professors were deemed “masters,” while students
were known as “apprentices” or “journeymen,” with a distant
promise of graduating to the status of “junior master.” At
Gropius’s insistence, students at the Bauhaus comprised
a relatively diverse group in terms of age, gender, and
nationality. His ambition was nothing less than to forge a new
type of artist. A number of students educated at the Bauhaus
became leading masters and influential teachers at the school:
among them were Anni Albers and her husband Josef Albers,
Herbert Bayer, Marianne Brandt, Marcel Breuer, Xanti
Schawinsky, Joost Schmidt, and Gunta Stölzl.
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“My talent lies in the
expression of my life
and creative power
through light, colour
and form. As a painter
I can convey the
essence of life.”

“The enemy of photography is the
convention, the fixed rules
of ‘how to do.’ The salvation
of photography comes from
the experiment.”
László Moholy-Nagy
László Moholy-Nagy is arguably one of the greatest influences
on post-war art education in the United States. A modernist and
a restless experimentalist from the outset, the Hungarian-born
artist was shaped by Dadaism, Suprematism, Constructivism,
and debates about photography. When Walter Gropius invited
him to teach at the Bauhaus, in Dessau, Germany, he took
over the school’s crucial preliminary course, and gave it a
more practical, experimental, and technological bent. He later
delved into various fields, from commercial design to theater
set design, and also made films and worked as a magazine
art director. But his greatest legacy was the version of Bauhaus
teaching he brought to the United States, where he established
the highly influential Institute of Design in Chicago.
Moholy-Nagy played a leading role in launching the Bauhaus
Bücher series in 1924; it would go on to publish an iconic and
canonical range of artists’ books. His pioneering designs for the
series radically transformed thinking around book publishing,
which he had previously criticized for its “monotonous grey”
linearity. By contrast, Moholy-Nagy pioneered stylistically
unified branding, with element of the book, from typography
to layout to cover designs and binding, contributing to the
overall creative effect. Key to this approach was Moholy-
Nagy’s emphasis upon the “typographical process”, which
he described in 1925 as “based on the effectiveness of
visual relationships. Every age has its own visual forms
and, accordingly, its own typography; and the latter, being
a visual form, has to take account of the complex psychophysical
effects upon our organ of vision; the eye.”
Such ideas, and the typographic designs that they spawned,
were a fundamental influence on Jan Tschichold’s Die Neue
Typographie (“The New Typography”) (1928), a book that
became a bible for practicing graphic designers during the
modernist era. Moholy-Nagy’s book and lettering designs
also influenced Gyorgy Kepes, his assistant during the
late 1920s, who later founded the Center for Advanced
Visual Studies, promoting collaboration between the arts
and sciences, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Moholy-Nagy’s ideas have also played a notable role in
guiding the course digital design, influencing contemporary
software designers such as Ben Fry, Casey Reas, and
John Maeda.
1923
LÁSZLÓ MOHOLY-NAGY
Untitled
1927
LÁSZLÓ MOHOLY-NAGY
A 19
1926
LÁSZLÓ MOHOLY-NAGY
Fotogramm
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At the Bauhaus, all students in their first semester enrolled in
the compulsory, half-year Preliminary Course (Vorlehre or
Vorkurs), represented by the outermost ring of the diagram.
This course investigated what Bauhaus masters considered to
be the fundamentals of any artistic endeavor, whether applied
or fine.
Supervised at first by Johannes Itten, then jointly by László
Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers, and finally by Albers, the
course explored theories of color and form, principles of
composition, studies of materiality, exercises in life drawing,
and visual analysis. More specialized courses in theory led
by Paul Klee, Vassily Kandinsky, and others supplemented the
Preliminary Course. The various exercises students performed
in these courses represented an effort to promote a more
holistic education.
After the successful completion of the Preliminary Course,
students enrolled in specialized workshops devoted to specific
crafts such as ceramics, weaving, carpentry, printing, metal,
or stage design. Workshop-based education was certainly
no novelty in early 20th-century Germany, but in line with
Gropius’s postwar romantic vision, the medieval guild served
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1928-29
ALFRED EHRHARDT
1925
IMMEKE MITSCHERLICH-
SCHWOLLMANN
1928-29
BENITA KOCH-OTTE
GEORG MUCHE
Material exercises
in paper
Weaving sample for a wall
hanging
Single-family house at the
exhibition of the State Bauhaus
as the model for organizing these workshops. Students worked
as apprentices, dedicating years of practice to specific crafts,
and learned by designing and executing products following the
instruction of masters, both artisans and artists. The workshops
represented a form of practical education in which students
had the opportunity to apply the principles learned in the
Preliminary Course to the hands-on process of design.
After completing one of these specialized workshops, only
select students were to be admitted to the study of building. The
building was the locus where objects produced in the various
workshops (pottery, tapestries, stained glass, lamps, and the
like) were to be brought together. Building figured prominently
at the center of the Bauhaus curricular diagram. This ambition
however was not fully realized until the final years of the
Bauhaus; the school offered no formal courses in architecture
until 1927, before which students could only gain experience
by apprenticing in the private architectural office of Gropius
and Adolf Meyer.
The singularity of the circle suggests the holistic nature of a
Bauhaus education, in which diverse disciplinary backgrounds
were to come together in pursuit of a shared mission.
Bauhaus Woodcuts
Woodcuts occupied a central role at the early Bauhaus.
As a centuries-old printing technique, the woodcut came
to be associated with the Romanticism and expressionism
that coursed through the Bauhaus in its beginning phase.
The German expressionists—committed to the subjective,
emotional, and spiritual facets of design—revived and
celebrated this preindustrial form of art.
Form and Color; or, The Fundamentals
The Preliminary Course at the Bauhaus introduced all firstyear
students to what were considered the fundamental
principles of color, form, and material. Through lectures,
demonstrations, and exercises, they were to develop
familiarity with the “basic elements” of art and design,
including points, lines, and planes; triangles, squares, and
circles; and the primary colors. Teachers aimed to promote a
shared foundation of aesthetic knowledge among the student
body through these investigations.
Interaction of Color
In the Preliminary Course, students tested interactions among
two, three, or four colors. To encourage students to think of
color as a phenomenon independent of form, Johannes Itten
devised a system of colored cutouts that could be placed
side by side or on top of one another. His students placed
these amid other media to explore the spatial effects and
the changes to hue, value, or intensity brought about by
arranging and combining colors.
Material Studies
Students were expected to develop familiarity with a wide
variety of materials—including wood, glass, fiber, paper, and
metal—priming them for entry into specialized workshops.
Weaving
Although women were admitted to the Bauhaus in relatively
large numbers—in its first year, about half the enrolled
students were women—they did not share equal status
with their male peers. The majority of women students were
pressured to study weaving, rather than other disciplines
such as metal-working or architecture, despite
their objections.
Haus Am Horn and the New Architecture
The competition for the design of an experimental house
represented a unique opportunity to highlight new
directions in architecture at the Bauhaus. Turning away from
expressionism, which had characterized the architectural
work of the early Bauhaus, masters and students submitted
entries based on rationalist and functionalist ideas.
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