The Bauhaus

The Bauhaus

The Bauhaus, a german word meaning "house of building ",was a school founded in 1919 in Weimar, Germany by architect Walter Gropius. The school emerged out of late-19th-century desires to reunite the applied arts and manufacturing, and to reform education. These had given birth to several new schools of art and applied art throughout Germany, and it was out of two such schools that the new Bauhaus was born.

Gropius called for the school to show a new respect for craft and technique in all artistic media, and suggested a return to attitudes to art and craft once characteristic of the medieval age, before art and manufacturing had drifted far apart. Gropius envisioned the Bauhaus encompassing the totality of all artistic media, including fine art, industrial design, graphic design, typography, interior design and architecture. 

Lyonel Feininger
Cathedral
(woodcut, 1919.)

This woodcut by Lyonel Feininger was included by Walter Gropius in the Bauhaus's founding manifesto and programme in 1919. It shows a cathedral with a tower whose tip is surrounded by the three stars- standing for the three arts of painting, sculpture and architecture- with the craft and arts had already worked together on an equal basis even in the stonemasons' lodges of medieval cathedrals. 

The Bauhaus

The Bauhaus building in Dessau, Germany (1919-1925)
Artist: Walter Gropius

Gropius's complex for the Bauhaus at Dessau has come to be seen as a landmark in modern, functionalist design. Although the design seems strongly unified from above each element is clearly divided from the next, and on the ground it unfolds a wonderful succession of changing perspectives.

The Idea

The Bauhaus only existed for 14 years; from 1919 to 1933. Despite this, it became the 20th century's most important college of architecture, design and art. For political reasons, fresh starts had to be made repeatedly in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin, but under its three directors- Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe-  the college continued to develop further. The intention to rethink design from the buttom up and not to accept any traditional certainties not only opened the way to a fresh start in modern art, but also enabled the influence of the 'Bauhaus experiment' to continue right down to the present day.


The Building

This conceptual diagram showing the structure of teaching at the Bauhaus was developed by Walter Gropius in 1922. The programme places 'building' (Bau) at the centre of all the activities but a regular course in architecture was only introduced at the Bauhaus in 1927. Only the most talented students were admitted to the architecture course.

At the start of their studies, they received a year of basic training in the so-called preliminary course, in which they were able to experiment with colour, shape and materials with no specific goals. Depending on their individual suitability, this was followed by practical work in the workshops and accompanying disciplines. The students entered the workshops as 'apprentices' and were to sit their 'apprenticeship' exams within a given time period.

The original conceptual diagram

Education:

Educational courses with this type of structure were unprecedented and had to be completely newly developed by Gropius initially. The choice of teachers was all the more decisive for the development of the Bauhaus's viewpoint. Gropius succeeded in gainly the support of renowned avant-garde artists for the purpose. In Weimar, they carried out teaching as 'form masters' together with the 'work masters'- trained craftsmen. 

Beyond the preliminary course, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky , among others, supervised and supplemented the teaching work on form and colour theory, and Oscar Schlemmer taught the analysis and depiction of the human body. In addition, classes were taught in non-artistic disciplines such as mathematics and building materials.

Johannes Itten
Colour sphere in 7 light values and 12 tones.
1921. Lithograph on paper
Bauhaus- Archiv Berlin

Paul Klee

He is a giant of 20th-century art and one of the great creative innovators of the time. Witty, inventive, magical, his exquisite paintings resist easy classification. He is mentioned in the same breath as Matisse, Picasso and his Bauhaus contemporary Kandinsky. He cuts a radical figure in European modernism. His influence on abstraction can be seen in the works of Rothko, Miro and beyond. And yet,for an artist of such stature, there is still so much to discover about him.

Paul Klee
Cat and bird
1928.
Oil on canvas

Wassily Kandinsky

He was a Russian-born painter, wood-engraver, lithographer, teacher and theorist; pioneer of abstract art. He was born in Moscow. He studied law and economics at Moscow University; declined in 1896 at offer of a chair at the University of Dorpat and moved to Munich to study painting.

Kandinsky viewed music as the most transcendent form of non-objective art- musicians could evoke images in listeners' minds merely with sounds. He strove to produce similarly object-free, spiritually rich paintings that alluded to sounds and emotions through a unity of sensation.

"Kandinsky was trying to create the same effect on a viewer of his paintings as a beautiful piece of music has on a listener. When you listen to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, for example, you don’t see snow or swirling fall leaves, or a muddy spring garden after a rain storm. You feel the seasons happening but you don’t actually see them. This is what Kandinsky was trying to do in his paintings..."

Transverse Line
1923.

Composition VIII 
1923; Oil on canvas

Yellow, Red, Blue 
1925; Oil on canvas

Painting was, above all, deeply spiritual for Kandinsky. He sought to convey profound spirituality and the depth of human emotion through a universal visual language of abstract forms and colours that transcended cultural and physical boundaries.

Farbstudie Quadrate
1913.