MY MAGICAL ATTIC: BAUHAUS ARCHIVE PERMANENT EXHIBITION AT MUSEUM FUR GESTALTUNG

BAUHAUS ARCHIVE' PERMANENT EXHIBITION AT MUSEUM FUR GESTALTUNG

BAUHAUS ARCHIV / MUSEUM FUR GESTALTUNG: PROFILE TEXT

Berlin’s Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung researches and presents the history and influence of the Bauhaus (1919–1933), the 20th century’s most important school of architecture, design and art. It was founded in Darmstadt in 1960 by the art historian Hans Maria Wingler, with the support of Walter Gropius, the first director of the Bauhaus. Its goal has always been to provide a new home for the material legacy of the Bauhaus, which was scattered around the world in 1933. In 1979, after multiple relocations, it finally moved into the distinctive Berlin building designed by Gropius. The Bauhaus-Archiv has since continued its work as both a research facility and an innovative design museum holding the world’s largest collection related to the Bauhaus. In its permanent exhibition, the BauhausArchiv presents the visionary character of the Bauhaus as an avant-garde design school: it exhibits student works created in classes and in the workshops in the fields of architecture, furniture, ceramics, metalwork, photography, theatre and in the preliminary course as well as works of the renowned teachers Walter Gropius, Johannes Itten, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Vassily Kandinsky, Josef Albers, Oskar Schlemmer, László Moholy-Nagy and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The Bauhaus-Archiv’s rich holdings have grown continuously since its foundation – through purchases, but above all, through donations. Walter Gropius’s donation of his extensive private archive on the history of the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau still forms the indispensable core of the collection. Important groups of works by individual artists have entered the collection as bequests, donations or permanent loans – for example, a substantial part of the oeuvre of Georg Muche, the artistic estate of Lothar Schreyer, the painted oeuvre of Bauhaus student Hans Thiemann and the graphic design oeuvre of Herbert Bayer. In addition to historical topics related to the context of the Bauhaus, the Bauhaus-Archiv now devotes increasing attention to questions related to contemporary architecture and current developments in design. To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus’s founding in 2019, the Bauhaus-Archiv will be receiving a new museum building in the years to come.

Bauhaus Collection In an exhibition space of around 550 square metres, the permanent exhibition “The Bauhaus Collection” provides a glimpse into the holdings of the largest and most diverse collection related to the Bauhaus. The entire spectrum of the school’s activity can be seen: architecture, furniture, ceramics, metal objects, textiles, photography, advertising, painting, graphic art and theatre. One focus of the exhibition is on Bauhaus pedagogy. Alongside works by famous teachers, such as Walter Gropius, Johannes Itten, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Vassily Kandinsky, Josef Albers, Oskar Schlemmer, László Moholy-Nagy or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the exhibition also presents student works from the preliminary course and the workshops. Today, products designed by Bauhaus students, such as Marianne Brandt’s “Bauhausleuchte” (Bauhaus lamp) and Marcel Breuer’s “Wassily Sessel” (Vassily armchair) are considered classics of modern design.

BAUHAUS – ARCHIV / MUSEUM FUR GESTALTUNG: COLLECTION & ARCHIVE

The collection of the Bauhaus-Archiv is the world’s largest and most diverse collection related to the Bauhaus, its history and its influence. Supported by and with the approval of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus-Archiv began gathering its Bauhaus collection as early as 1961. It contains works by students and teachers. The holdings of the collection and archive can be grouped according to the main themes of “Collection of Graphic Art”, “Workshop Projects: Product Design and Industrial Design” as well as “Fine-Art Photography”, “Document Collection”, “Photo Archive” and the research library, with its focus on the Bauhaus. In the permanent exhibition “The Bauhaus Collection ─ Classic Modern Originals”, the Bauhaus-Archiv uses its museum space to exhibit essential key works from its collections.

THE COLLECTION OF GRAPHIC ART

The collection of graphic art comprises over 12,000 sheets, consisting of drawings, watercolours, other works on paper and prints by Bauhaus masters and students. These include the world’s only complete sequence of all of the cycles and portfolios of prints created by Lyonel Feininger, Vassily Kandinsky, Gerhard Marcks, László Moholy-Nagy, Georg Muche and Oskar Schlemmer during the Weimar period as well as each of the “Bauhaus Prints” series. Many artists are represented by examples of their work before or after their Bauhaus period, for example, Vassily Kandinsky through early monochrome woodcuts or Josef Albers and Georg Muche through individual sheets and series from the 1930s to the 1960s. The collection of graphic art also includes works of graphic design, such as posters and other printed matter, advertising designs, typographical designs and also a unique wealth of materials from every area of education at the Bauhaus: from the preliminary course of Johannes Itten, Georg Muche, László MoholyNagy and Josef Albers as well as from the courses of Vassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Joost Schmidt, Oskar Schlemmer and Lothar Schreyer. The prehistory of the Bauhaus is documented through drawings by Adolf Hölzel, studies by his student Lily Hildebrandt from his classes at the Stuttgart academy and by numerous works created between 1902 and 1912 by Maria Strakosch-Giesler, a student of Kandinsky in Munich. Works from the successor institutions, the New Bauhaus and the Ulmer Hochschule für Gestaltung, are also to be found in the collection of graphic works.

The Collection of Workshop Projects: Product Design and Industrial Design

THE COLLECTION OF WORKSHOP PROJECTS: PRODUCT & INDUSTRIAL DESIGN

The focus of the collection of workshop projects on the area of product design and industrial design offers a comprehensive look at product development at the Bauhaus. In addition to designs, realisations of products created at the Bauhaus are present in the form of unique objects, prototypes and examples from their industrial mass production. The extensive holdings of furniture, lamps, metalwork, ceramics and textiles include design classics, such as the well-known furniture of Marcel Breuer, the teapot of Marianne Brandt and the lamp of Wilhelm Wagenfeld.

THE ARCHITECTURAL COLLECTION

The architectural collection comprises around 14,000 sheets, accompanied by numerous architectural models. The most prominent piece is the original Bauhaus model of 1930. The core of the architectural collection is formed by 200 works from classes at the Bauhaus. Particularly for the period under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, these holdings cover every area of teaching – from technical instruction to the use of ground plans for training three-dimensional thinking to interior design. The architecture of Walter Gropius is represented comprehensively in the form of documentary photographs, which are also supplemented by a selection of drawings and blueprints. Particular emphasis is to be placed on the holdings related to the Fagus-Werk, the Bauhaus founder’s early factory design, which was added to the World Heritage List in 2011. A total of 700 blueprints from the Fagus-Werk archive as well as photo series by Albert RengerPatzsch, one of the main protagonists of the New Objectivity in photography, provide a detailed documentation of this early architectural work by Walter Gropius. In addition, the Bauhaus-Archiv has taken responsibility for the architectural estates of Wils Ebert, Helmut Heide, Gustav Hassenpflug, Fritz Kaldenbach, Karl Keller, Franz Singer, Hans Soeder, Philipp Tolziner, Pius Pahl and Gerhard Weber.

THE COLLECTION OF FINE ART PHOTOGRAPHY

The collection “Fine-Art Photography” comprises a total of around 6000 prints (including c.4000 vintage prints and 2000 modern prints) by 117 photographers from the Bauhaus, as well as around 1500 original negatives taken by Lucia Moholy, Herbert Schürmann and Eugen Batz. The heart of the collection is formed by fine-art photography from the 1920s and early 1930s by the Bauhaus teachers László MoholyNagy and Walter Peterhans. The collection’s spectrum encompasses experiment and snapshot, composition and portrait, still life and architectural photography. The largest group of works is formed by the estate of Lucia Moholy, featuring her documentary photographs of Bauhaus buildings and products. Photographic works by Herbert Beyer, Marianne Brandt, Erich Consemüller and Pius Pahl as well as by Lyonel, T. Lux and Andreas Feininger also form a part of the collection. The Bauhaus-Archiv also holds a collection – the only of its kind in Europe – of around 500 photographs related to the New Bauhaus, including prints by György Kepes, Nathan Lerner and Henry Holmes Smith.

THE DOCUMENT COLLECTION

The central task of the Bauhaus-Archiv is the collecting of “all documents related to the activity and the cultural intellectual heritage of the Bauhaus”. Letters, manuscripts and other written documents, but also printed texts, are gathered together in the collection of documents. Walter Gropius’s extensive private archive related to the history of the Bauhaus during the Weimar and Dessau periods forms the core of the collection of documents. The complete estates or portions of the estates of numerous Bauhaus students and staff, such as Georg Muche, Lucia Moholy or Adolf Behne and Bauhaus-Archiv founder Hans M. Wingler have been added to this, so that the archival holdings of the document collection has now expanded into a group of files stretching 140 metres in length. It contains materials dealing with the prehistory of the Bauhaus and its foundation, an extensive documentation of the political conflicts surrounding the school, a part of the minutes of the sessions of the Council of Masters from the years 1919–1923 as well as documents related to everyday life at the school. A collection of newspaper cuttings from the years 1917–1934 provides additional information regarding the history of the Bauhaus’s reception.

THE PHOTO ARCHIVE

With 65,000 photographs, the photo archive of the Bauhaus-Archiv forms a unique archive of images related to the history of the Bauhaus and the people, workshops and products involved with it. Consisting half of originals and half of reproductions, the photo archive material may be divided up into portrait photos, photographs of student works from classes and the workshops, the architecture and design of the Bauhaus as well as related directions. There are 4000 photographs documenting exclusively the person and work of Walter Gropius. There are also extensive holdings of photographic material related to the life and work of Bauhaus masters and students, such as Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Marianne Brandt, Marcel Breuer, Adolf Meyer, Hannes Meyer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, László Moholy-Nagy, Georg Muche, Oskar Schlemmer, Joost Schmidt, Franz Singer and Hans Thiemann.

THE LIBRARY

The research library of the Bauhaus-Archiv contains more than 33,000 items, including secondary literature on the Bauhaus, its context and also the artists, architects and designers connected with it. This includes secondary literature on 20th-century art, architecture, photography and design as well as a generous array of current architecture and design journals.

COMMERCIAL GRAPHICS

It was Moholy-Nagy who introduced the ideas of the New Typography to the Bauhaus starting in 1923. From then on, typography began to play a decisive role in the Bauhaus’s publicity work and in the development of an unmistakable look for the college. At the Bauhaus in Dessau, Moholy-Nagy’s student Herbert Bayer took over the workshop for typography and advertising that was then set up. Within a very short period, he was able to develop it into a professionally working studio for graphic design that increasingly received orders from outside the college. From 1928, his successor Joost Schmidt introduced a systematic course in type design and commercial graphic design, which he also extended to include the field of exhibition design. This led to experimental forms of presentation using architecture, sculpture, photography and typography, which were to decisively shape the image of the Bauhaus at travelling exhibitions and trade fairs.

http://www.bauhaus.de/en/ausstellungen/sammlung/209_gebrauchsgrafik/

JOOST SCHMIDT – DESSAU C. 1930

Letterpress

Dimensions: 23 x 23.5 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Jan Tschichold Collection, Gift of Philip Johnson

LYONEL FEININGER ( DESIGN ) / OTTO DORFNER ( PRODUCTION ),

BAUHAUS PRINTS. NEW EUROPEAN GRAPHICS. FIRST ISSUE:

MASTER OF THE STAATLICHE BAUHAUS IN WEIMAR 1921

Bauhaus Archive / Museum of Design, Berlin

Dimensions: 57,5 x 46,5 x 2 cm

Bonn 2015; Foto Markus Hawlik

JOOST SCHMIDT - POSTER FOR THE 1923 BAUHAUS EXHIBITION 1922 - 1923

Lithograph on Paper

Dimensions: 68.6 x 48.3 cm

Collection Merrill C. Berma

MARIANNE BRANDT – TEMPO – TEMPO, PROGRESS, CULTURE 1927

Cut-and-Pasted Newspaper Clippings With Ink

Dimensions: 52 x 39.8 cm

LASZLO MOHOLY NAGY – DUST COVER FOR LASZLO MOHOLY – NAGY

( THE NEW VISION, FROM MATERIAL TO ARCHITECTURE ) 1929

MOSES BAHELFER, BAUHAUS ADVERTISEMENT ‘’ BAUHAUS TAPETEN ‘’ NO: 5

Finished Artwork / Montage For Printing Plate Production, 1930

Class of Joost Schmidt, Advertising / Print Workshop
Estate Hannes Meyer, Archiv der Moderne – Klassik Stiftung Weimar

HERBERT BAYER – DESIGN FOR A NEWSPAPER STAND 1924

Tempera and Cut-and-Pasted Print Elements on Paper

Dimensions: 64.5 x 34.5 cm

Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

HERBERT BAYER – DESIGN FOR A CIGARETTE PAVILLION 1924

Ink, Tempera, Pencil, and Cut-and-Pasted Photomechanical

Elements on Cardboard 19

Dimensions: 50.5 x 38 cm

Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

HERBERT BAYER – DESIGN FOR A MULTIMEDIA BUILDING 1924

Gouache, Cut-and-Pasted Photomechanical Elements,

Charcoal, Ink, and Pencil on Paper

Dimensions: 54.6 x 46.8 cm

Harvard Art Museum, Busch-Reisinger Museum. Gift of the Artist

HERBERT BAYER - DESIGN FOR A CINEMA 1924-1925

Gouache, Cut & Pasted Photomechanical and Print Elements,

Ink, and Pencil on Paper Dimensions: 54.6 x 61 cm

Harvard Art Museum, Busch-Reisinger Museum. Gift of the Artist

FRIEDL DICKER (?) DRAFT OF A POSTER

" Werkstätten Bildender Kunst G.m.b.H. "

Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

HERBERT BAYER – KANDINSKY ZUM 60. GEBURTSTAG 1926

Letterpress and Gravure

Dimensions: 48.2 x 63.5 cm - 48.3 x 63.5 cm

Printer: Bauhausdruck

Credit: Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Alfred H. Barr, Jr.

OSKAR SCHLEMMER – TWO DESIGNS FOR

THE BAUHAUS SIGNET, 1922

Bauhaus Archive, Berlin

OSKAR SCHLEMMER – POSTER FOR UNREALIZED PERFORMANCE OF THE TRIADIC

BALLET AT THE LEIBNIZ – AKADEMIE, HANNOVER FEBRUARY 19 AND 26, 1924

Lithograph on Paper

Dimensions: 82.6 x 56.2 cm

Collection Merrill C. Berma

View of the New Presentation of the Bauhaus Collection

Bauhaus-Archiv

HERBERT BAYER - “ SECTION ALLEMANDE ‘’

POSTER FOR THE WERKBUND EXHIBITION IN PARIS 1930

Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Photo: Atelier Schneider © VG Bild-Kunst Bonn

JOOST SCHMIDT – OFFSET: BOOK & ADVERTISING ART NO: 7

SPECIAL ISSUE ON THE BAUHAUS 1926

Offset on Cardboard

Dimensions: 30.8 x 23.3 cm

Collection Merrill C. Berman

HERBERT BAYER ( COVER DESIGN ) LASZLO MOHOLY – NAGY ( TYPOGRAPHY ),

‘’ STAATLICHES BAUHAUS IN WEIMAR, 1919-1923"

Cover of the Bauhaus Exhibition Catalogue, 1923
Bauhaus Archive / Museum of Design, Berlin (4510)

Print in Red and Black

Dimensions: 25,5 x 26,0 cm

WALTER GROPIUS

‘’ We want to create the purely organic building, boldly emanating its inner laws, free of untruths or ornamentation.” (Walter Gropius)

Walter Gropius was the founder of the Bauhaus and remained committed to the institution that he invested in throughout his life. He was a Bauhaus impresario in the best possible sense, a combination of speaker and entrepreneur, a visionary manager who aimed to make art a social concern during the post-war upheaval. After his departure as the Bauhaus’s director, Gropius recommended his two successors: Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The conservation of the Bauhaus’s legacy after its forced closure is another of Gropius’s accomplishments. He was also able to continue his career in exile in America as an avant-garde architect.

A native of Berlin, Gropius came from an upper middle-class background. His great-uncle was the architect Martin Gropius, a student of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, whose best-known work was the Königliche Kunstgewerbemuseum (royal museum of applied art) in Berlin, which now bears his name. In 1908, after studying architecture in Munich and Berlin for four semesters, Gropius joined the office of the renowned architect and industrial designer Peter Behrens, who worked as a creative consultant for AEG. Other members of Behrens's practice included Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. Gropius became a member of the Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation) as early as 1910.

The same year, Gropius opened his own company. He designed furniture, wallpapers, objects for mass production, automobile bodies and even a diesel locomotive. In 1911, Gropius worked with Adolf Meyer on the design of the Fagus-Werk, a factory in the Lower Saxony town of Alfeld an der Leine. With its clear cubic form and transparent façade of steel and glass, this factory building is perceived to be a pioneering work of what later became known as modern architecture. For the 1914 exhibition of the Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation) in Cologne, Gropius and Adolf Meyer designed a prototype factory which was to become yet another classic example of modern architecture.

Gropius served on the Western front in WW I and experienced this war as a catastrophe. In 1918, he joined the November Group, which aimed to incorporate the impulses of the revolution in art. From 1919, Gropius was the head of the Work Council for Art, a radical group of architects, painters and sculptors. In addition, he contributed to the Gläserne Kette (crystal chain), a chain letter initiated by Bruno Taut that called for the "dissolution of the previous foundations" of architecture and the "disappearance of the personality" of the artist.

With the founding of the Bauhaus, Gropius was able to translate various ideas from the radical artists’ associations into reality. As the successor of the Belgian artist Henry van de Velde, he became the director of the Großherzoglich-Sächsische Kunstgewerbeschule (Grand Ducal Saxonian school of arts and crafts) in Weimar, which he renamed Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar. Gropius explained the idea of the Bauhaus in the founding Manifesto, a four-page booklet with the famous Cathedral woodcut by Lyonel Feininger on its cover. The school’s most innovative educational aspect was its dualistic approach to training in the workshops, which were codirected by a craftsman (master of works) and an artist (master of form). The crafts-based work was understood as the ideal unity of artistic design and material production. According to Gropius’s curriculum, education at the Bauhaus began with the obligatory preliminary course, continued in the workshops and culminated in the building. Sommerfeld House in Berlin is considered to be the first joint endeavour undertaken in the sense of the Bauhaus. It was designed by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer (1921/22), and it integrated furnishings made by the students.

For Gropius the Bauhaus was a laboratory of the arts where the traditional apprentice and master model was maintained, but where diverse disciplines were interconnected in a completely new way. The outcome of this approach was not established from the start but was to be discovered in the spirit of research and experimentation, which Gropius called “fundamental research” that was applied to all the disciplines and their products, from the high-rise to the tea infuser.

In Weimar itself, Gropius left very few traces as an architect and artist. In 1922, his controversial design for the monument Denkmal der Märzgefallenen was unveiled at Weimar’s main cemetery. Destroyed by the NSDAP, it was rebuilt after WW II. The director’s office of the Bauhaus, which was furnished by Gropius in 1923/24, was also reconstructed.

In 1923, Gropius initiated a change of course at the Bauhaus with a major exhibition under the motto "Kunst und Technik – Eine Neue Einheit" (art and technology – a new unity). The school now turned towards industrial methods of production. As a result, the highly influential master, Expressionist painter and first director of the preliminary course, Johannes Itten, left the Bauhaus. Gropius appointed the Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy as his successor.

With the politically motivated move to the industrial city of Dessau in1925, a new era began for the Bauhaus. During this period, which is seen as his best and most productive, Gropius designed not only the Bauhaus Building (opened in 1926) but was also intensively involved in the development of the large-scale residential building and the rationalisation of the construction process. The buildings created in Dessau included the Masters’ Houses (1925/26) that were built for the Bauhaus masters, the Dessau-Törten housing estate (1926–1928) and the Employment Office.

In 1928, Walter Gropius – unnerved by the quarrels in local politics about the Bauhaus – handed the post of director over to the Swiss architect and urbanist Hannes Meyer, whom Gropius had brought to the Bauhaus the previous year as the head of the newly founded architecture class. After moving to Berlin, Gropius dedicated himself completely to his architectural practice and the promotion of New Architecture. The most important completed buildings of this period include the Dammerstock housing estate in Karlsruhe (1928/29) and the Siemensstadt housing estate in Berlin (1929/30).

In 1934, Gropius emigrated to England and then on to the USA in 1937. He worked there as a professor for architecture at the Graduate School of Design of Harvard University. In 1938, he organised the exhibition Bauhaus 1919–1928 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York together with Herbert Bayer. From 1938 to 1941, Gropius maintained an office partnership with Marcel Breuer. He became an American citizen in 1944.

In 1946, Gropius founded the young architects’ association The Architects Collaborative (TAC), a manifestation of his life-long belief in the significance of teamwork, which he had already successfully introduced at the Bauhaus. One work produced by this office is the Graduate Center of Harvard University in Cambridge (1949/50).

During the last years of his life, Gropius was once again frequently active in Berlin. Among other projects, he built a nine-storey residential building in the Hansa district in 1957 within the scope of the Interbau exhibition. In 1964/65, Gropius designed plans for the Bauhaus Archive in Darmstadt. These were realised in a modified form in Berlin from 1976 to 1979 after Gropius’s death.

Even beyond his official term as the Bauhaus director from 1919 to 1928, Gropius was emphatically committed to the recognition and dissemination of the Bauhaus idea. When he died in 1969 in Boston, the Bauhaus was at least as famous as its founder.

http://bauhaus-online.de/en/atlas/personen/walter-gropius

ARCHITECTURE

From the very start, the teaching of architecture was regarded as the highest educational goal in the idea and programme for the Bauhaus. However, a separate architecture department was only established in 1927 under its second Director, Hannes Meyer. Until then, Gropius had mainly allowed his students to work on commissions in his own office. His aim was to have all of the teaching areas collaborating in the ‘building of the future’. By contrast, Meyer regarded previous Bauhaus work as a purely formal development whose products had been designed for bourgeois circles. He wanted to design things for broad sections of the population. The basis for the architectural training that was provided thus consisted of identifying users’ needs; artistic concerns were made subordinate to this. Finally, under the third Director, Mies van der Rohe, architecture became the predominant teaching area. Under the influence of Mies’s own work, aesthetic issues moved strongly to the fore. Ludwig Hilberseimer balanced this with exercises aimed at practical aspects. The three Directors of the Bauhaus – all of whom were major architects – thus each put their own personal stamp on the college’s teaching work. Consequently, there was never a standard ‘Bauhaus architecture’.

http://www.bauhaus.de/en/ausstellungen/sammlung/211_architektur/

WALTER GROPIUS & ADOLF MEYER ( ARCHITECTS )

HANS WAGNER ( PHOTOGRAPHER )

FAGUS – WERK FACTORY CA. 1911

Bauhaus Archive / Museum of Design, Berlin (4699)

BY HANNES MEYER

FARKAS MOLNÁR – PROJECT FOR A SINGLE FAMILY HOUSE ( THE RED CUBE ).

DESIGN FOR A MURAL: THE FABRICATOR / THE CONSUMER 1923

Gouache, Pencil, and Ink on Drawing Paper

Dimensions: 32.6 x 50.2 cm

Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Frankfurt

BAUHAUS DESSAU

View of the New Presentation of the Bauhaus Collection

Bauhaus-Archiv

WALTER GROPIUS ( DESIGN ) – HERBERT BAYER ( DRAWING ),
ISOMETRIC RENDERING OF THE DIRECTOR’S OFFICE IN BAUHAUS WEIMAR 1923

WALTER GROPIUS & ADOLF MEYER – CONTRIBUTION TO THE

COMPETITION FOR THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE OFFICE BUILDING 1922

LUDWIG MIES VAN DER ROHE – ENTRY ‘’ HONEYCOMB ‘’ FOR THE HIGH-RISE

TOWER AT FRIEDRICHSTRASSE STATION, IDEAS COMPETITION 1922

ALFRED ARNDT – ( MASTERS’ DOUBLE HOUSES, SEEN FROM BELOW )

COLOR SCHEME FOR THE EXTERIORS 1926

Ink and Tempera on Paper

Dimensions: 76 x 56 cm

LUCIA MOHOLY ( PHOTO ), WALTER GROPIUS ( ARCHITECT )

MASTERS’ HOUSES, DOUBLE HOUSE NORTWEST SIDE

( KANDINSKY – KLEE ) 1926

Bauhaus Archive, Berlin

JOSEF ALBERS – GRID PICTURE I; ALSO KNOWN AS GLASS

FRAGMENTS IN GRID PICTURE C. 1921

Glass, Wire, and Metal, in Metal Frame

Dimensions: 39 x 33.3 cm

The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Bethany, Conn

JOSEF ALBERS WALL DETAIL 1949-50

METALL WORKSHOPS

Sphere, circle and cross: this is one of the best-known works produced at the Bauhaus.

Marianne Brandt already created this tea infuser at the end of her first year of studies in the Metals Workshop. In programmatic terms, it is constructed from elementary shapes typical of the Weimar period: the body of the vessel consists of a hemisphere, and the handle is a segment of a circle. Instead of the traditional ringed base, it sits on a cross, which emphasizes the pot’s main axes and also gives it a certain quality of weightlessness.

The pot, only 7.5 cm high, thus looks like a sculptural implementation of compositions by László Moholy-Nagy, who headed the Metals Workshop at the Bauhaus from 1923 to 1928. His aim was to make the former ‘Gold-, Silver- and Coppersmiths’ Workshop’ more industrial and he was open to materials such as nickel and glass, which did not traditionally belong in the field. This made possible, for example, the creation of the legendary Bauhaus Lamp by Carl Jakob Jucker and Wilhelm Wagenfeld. Like several other products of the Weimar period, however, it was to remain an expensive hand-made item. In Dessau, the Metals Workshop then became a regular design laboratory for new lighting fixtures. After several lamp manufacturers had put the models into serial production, the Metals Workshop ultimately became one of the most productive and successful workshops at the Bauhaus.

http://www.bauhaus.de/en/ausstellungen/sammlung/206_metall/

MARIANNE BRANDT, TEA INFUSER (MT 49), 1924

Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Photo: Gunter Lepkowski © VG Bild-Kunst Bonn

MARIANNE BRANDT ( DESIGN ) – LUCIA MOHOLY ( PHOTO )

COFFEE & TEA SET 1924

Bauhaus Archive / Museum of Design, Berlin

PHOTOGRAPHY

In 1923, Moholy-Nagy provided the decisive impetus that led to the Bauhaus’s engagement with photography.

László Moholy-Nagy introduced the ‘New Seeing’ to the Bauhaus in Dessau. His photographs of the Dessau Bauhaus building, for example, are in no sense mechanical reproductions of reality. Instead, they approach it actively using unconventional and even daring perspectives – and thus define a new relationship between people and architecture. The progressive sense of life this expressed was quickly taken up by other Bauhaus photographers. Their photos reflect the life, utopianism and spirit of fresh departures of a new era. Not least through his photograms, collages and multiple-exposure shots, Moholy-Nagy inspired the Bauhaus members to a new way of looking that provided the basis for experimentally exploring and making use of the medium’s potential.

Before this, photography had only played a minor role. Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius used it mainly for purposes of documentation and publicity for the objects and architecture developed at the Bauhaus. Lucia Moholy became the official documentary photographer and despite the objectivity required she soon developed her own quite individual style of depiction. A separate photography course was only introduced in 1929, as a special department of the Typography and Advertising Workshop. It was headed by Walter Peterhans, who taught the students not only photographic theory and practice, but also how to see with precision. The shapes and textures of the arranged objects were now captured down to their last nuances using meticulous lighting and given an almost magical effect. This emphasis on technical perfection was owed not least to the development of new professional specialties in commercial and applied photography. It ended the experimental phase of photography at the Bauhaus, with institutionalized teaching taking its place.

http://www.bauhaus.de/en/ausstellungen/sammlung/212_fotografie/

KURT SCHWERDTFEGER, REFLECTING LIGHT GAMES, 1922 - 1923
Bauhaus University Weimar, Archiv der
Moderne (BA XI/9)

Photo: Fotoatelier Hüttich & Oemler, Weimar

EDMUND COLLEIN – EXTENSION TO THE PRELLERHAUS. FROM 9 YEARS BAUHAUS:

A CHRONICLE, A SET OF WORKS MADE FOR WALTER GROPIUS ON

HIS DEPARTURE FROM THE SCHOOL 1928

Cut-and-Pasted Photographs and Photomechanical Reproductions,

With and Written Stickers on Paper

Dimensions: 41.5 x 55 cm

EDMUND COLLEIN – EXTENSION TO THE PRELLERHAUS. FROM 9 YEARS BAUHAUS:

A CHRONICLE, A SET OF WORKS MADE FOR WALTER GROPIUS ON

HIS DEPARTURE FROM THE SCHOOL 1928 ( DETAIL )

HERBERT BAYER – IRON WINDING STAIR 1928

Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions: 35.6 x 24.4 cm

Credit: Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther

LASZLO MOHOLY NAGY – BERLIN, RADIO TOWER 1928

Gelatin silver print

Dimensions: 38.1 x 27.8 cm

Credit: Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther

HERBERT BAYER – LONELY METROPOLITAN 1932

Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions: Image: 26.8 x 34 cm, Frame: 47 x 57.2 cm

Classification: Photographs

Credit Line: Herbert Bayer Collection and Archive, Denver Art Museum,

Gift of BP Corporation

ELSA THIEMANN, FORKS C. 1930
Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

HEINZ LOEW ( CONSTRUCTION ) / EDMUND COLLEIN ( PHOTOGRAPHS ), FROM

LINE & CIRCLE ( ROD AND RING ) TO HYPERBOLOID AND SPHERE C.1930
Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Photo: Markus Hawlik
© Ursula Kirsten-Collein / Irmgard Loew

KURT KRANZ, BUTTON EYE 1970
Bauhaus Dessau Foundation

Photo: Uwe Jacobshagen
© Ingrid Kranz

KURT KRANZ – THE SINKING ONES 1931

Cut & Pasted Gelatin Silver Prints & Photomechanical Reproductions on Paper 19

Dimensions: 50 x 63 cm

Galerie Berinson, Berlin

JOOST SCHMIDT – COVER OF THE FUTURE BELONGS TO BAUHAUS WALLPAPER 1931

Letterpress on Paper ( With Cut-Outs )

Dimensions: 14.8 x 21 cm

Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

OSKAR SCHLEMMER

IRENE BAYER, ANDOR WEININGER DRESSED AS A CLOWN C.1927
Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

MARIANNE BRANDT – OUR UNNERVING CITY 1926

Cut-and-Pasted Newspaper Clippings on Gray Cardboard

Dimensions: 63.5 x 48.6 cm

Private collection, Chicago

HERBERT BAYER – HUMANLY IMPOSSIBLE 1932

Gelatin Silver Print

Dimensions: 38.9 x 29.3 cm

Credit: Thomas Walther Collection. Acquired through the generosity of Howard Stein

WALTER PETERHANS – OPHELIA

( STILL LIFE WITH LEMON SLICE, TULLE AND FEATHERS ) C. 1929

View of the New Presentation of the Bauhaus Collection

Bauhaus-Archiv, Photo: Hans Glave

LUCIA MOHOLY NAGY – UNTITLED ( LASZLO MOHOLY – NAGY ) 1925-1926

Gelatin Silver Print, Probably Printed 1928-30

Dimensions: 25.6 x 20 cm

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Ford Motor Company Collection,

Gift of Ford Motor Company and John C. Waddell

THEATRE

Oskar Schlemmer described his Triadic Ballet as a ‘party in form and colour’. Form, colour and abstraction began to define the way in which the human figure was depicted in the work of painter and sculptor Oskar Schlemmer from an early stage. The Triadic Ballet was his first major theatrical work, already created in Stuttgart in 1922 before his time at the Bauhaus. Here again, he reduced the human figure to basic geometric shapes: abstract costumes made of rigid, movement-inhibiting pieces determined the peculiar quality of the ‘ballet’. Schlemmer regarded the work as a form of ‘artistic metaphysical mathematics’. In three dance sequences, he intensified the drama from humorous and farcical to mystical and heroic qualities, without following any specific plot. Schlemmer’s Ballet thus became an anti-dance, a kind of ‘choreographic constructivism’ – and was extremely successful at its first performance at the Bauhaus in 1923.

http://www.bauhaus.de/en/ausstellungen/sammlung/214_buehne/

OSKAR SCHLEMMER – COSTUME DESIGNS FOR THE TRIADIC BALLET 1926

Ink, Gouache, Metallic Powder, and Pencil, With Adhered

Typewritten Elements on Paper, Mounted on Card

Dimensions: 38.6 x 53.7 cm

Harvard Art Museum, Busch-Reisinger Museum. Museum Purchase

OSKAR SCHLEMMER – GROUP PHOTO OF TRIADISCHES BALLETT 1927

OSKAR SCHLEMMER 1922

OSKAR SCHLEMMER – STUDY FOR ‘’ THE TRIADIC BALLET ‘’ C. 1924

Gouache, Ink, and Cut-and-Pasted Gelatin Silver Prints on Black Paper

Dimensions: 57.5 x 37.1 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Lily Auchincloss

EBERHARD SCHRAMMEN, MASCOT C. 1924,

Oak and Miscellaneous Exotic Woods, Turned, Coated in

Places With Colored and Gold Lacquer,

Dimensions: Height: 14-9/16

Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Photo: Gunter Lepkowski, © Estate Eberhard Schrammen

OSKAR SCHLEMMER – THE FIGURAL CABINET 1922

Watercolor, Pencil, and Ink on Tracing Paper

Dimensions: 30.8 x 45.1 cm

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Joan and Lester Avnet Collection

BAUHAUS ARCHIV - MUSEUM FUR GESTALTUNG

The building is the largest exhibition facility at the Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung, and was designed by the first Director of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius. Planning for it began in 1964 for a site in Darmstadt, but a modified version of it was then built in Berlin in 1976–1979. Gropius’s former employee Alex Cvijanovic carried out the replanning needed, along with Berlin architect Hans Bandel. Although the adaptation process proved to be difficult and time-consuming and was affected by political and financial problems, the building’s memorable silhouette with the shed roofs survived, along with the general ground plan arrangements designed by Gropius. The building was listed as a protected monument in 1997 and it is today one of Berlin’s landmarks.

The relative alteration in the status of the Bauhaus-Archiv in the centre of the city that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 led to new challenges. Rapidly increasing numbers of visitors are a sign of the tremendous – and international – interest in the institution, which only has 700 square metres of exhibition space available. The aim is to supplement the building with a new building in Klingelhöferstrasse in time for the centenary of the founding of the Bauhaus in 2019.

http://www.bauhaus.de/en/bauhaus-archiv/2_profil/6_gebaeude/

NEW BUILDING PROJECT

In 2019, the Federal Republic of Germany will be celebrating the centenary of the founding of the Bauhaus, the twentieth century’s most important college of architecture and design. To coincide with the Bauhaus anniversary, the Bauhaus-Archiv / Museum für Gestaltung in Berlin is to be given the spatial facilities it needs to meet the requirements of running a museum and archive in the 21st century. The existing building, designed by Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, is to be renovated in accordance with historic monument requirements and will be extended with the addition of a new building. The Bauhaus-Archiv/Museum für Gestaltung holds the world’s most extensive collection of materials on the history of the Bauhaus. The building, opened in 1979, has now become too small and is no longer able to do justice to the increased demands on a museum that also serves as an archive. Visitor numbers have doubled during the last 10 years; in 2014, a total of 115,000 people interested in the Bauhaus visited the building. In the future, the functions of the Bauhaus-Archiv/Museum für Gestaltung are to be distributed across two buildings. The intention is to use the existing building for the archive, while the annexe building will be used as the museum.

http://www.bauhaus.de/en/neubau/

MANIFESTO BY WALTER GROPIUS APRIL 1919

“The ultimate goal of all art is the building! The ornamentation of the building was once the main purpose of the visual arts, and they were considered indispensable parts of the great building. Today, they exist in complacent isolation, from which they can only be salvaged by the purposeful and cooperative endeavours of all artisans. Architects, painters and sculptors must learn a new way of seeing and understanding the composite character of the building, both as a totality and in terms of its parts. Their work will then re-imbue itself with the spirit of architecture, which it lost in salon art.

The art schools of old were incapable of producing this unity – and how could they, for art may not be taught. They must return to the workshop. This world of mere drawing and painting of draughtsmen and applied artists must at long last become a world that builds. When a young person who senses within himself a love for creative endeavour begins his career, as in the past, by learning a trade, the unproductive “artist” will no longer be condemned to the imperfect practice of art because his skill is now preserved in craftsmanship, where he may achieve excellence.

Architects, sculptors, painters – we all must return to craftsmanship! For there is no such thing as “art by profession”. There is no essential difference between the artist and the artisan. The artist is an exalted artisan. Merciful heaven, in rare moments of illumination beyond man’s will, may allow art to blossom from the work of his hand, but the foundations of proficiency are indispensable to every artist. This is the original source of creative design.

So let us therefore create a new guild of craftsmen, free of the divisive class pretensions that endeavoured to raise a prideful barrier between craftsmen and artists! Let us strive for, conceive and create the new building of the future that will unite every discipline, architecture and sculpture and painting, and which will one day rise heavenwards from the million hands of craftsmen as a clear symbol of a new belief to come."

http://www.bauhaus-online.de/en/atlas/das-bauhaus/idee/manifest

BAUHAUS ARCHIV - MUSEUM FUR GESTALTUNG

TEXTILES

It was mainly women who completed their training in the Textiles Workshop – partly because the Bauhaus Council of Masters reserved the few other workshop places for allegedly better-suited men. Gunta Stölzl headed the workshop starting in 1927, as the successor to Itten and Muche. She developed an eight-semester training course which from 1929 onwards could be completed with a Bauhaus Diploma. She divided the course work into two areas: ‘Developing Basic Materials for Interior Decoration (Types for Industry)’, and ‘Speculative Examination of Materials, Form, and Colour in Gobelin and Tapestry’. By contrast, Stölzl’s successors Lilly Reich and Otti Berger focused from 1931 onwards on stronger collaboration with industry. However, the three textile pattern-books published during the last two years of the Bauhaus came too late for profitable industrial manufacturing to be achieved.

http://www.bauhaus.de/en/ausstellungen/sammlung/207_textil/

GUNTA STOLZL RED GREEN SLIT TAPESTRY 1927-1928

ANNI ALBERS – PIANO CIVER OR TAPESTRY ( YELLOW )

WE 493/445, 1926 ( NEW WEAVING OF 1964)

Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Photo: Gunter Lepkowski © VG Bild-Kunst Bonn

View of the New Presentation of the Bauhaus Collection

Bauhaus-Archiv

ANNI ALBERS 1926-1964

OTTI BERGER ( TOUCH PANEL ) MADE FOR PRELIMINARY COURSE TAUGHT

BY LASZLO MOHOLY NAGY 1928

Threads and Board on Wire Backing With Loosely Attached

Multicolored Square Paper Cards

Dimensions: 14 x 57 cm

FURNITURE

By his own account, it was bicycle handlebars that inspired Breuer to create his tubular steel chair.

Marcel Breuer headed the Furniture Workshop at the Bauhaus from 1925 to 1928. During that time, he designed the first tubular steel chair in the history of design: the B3 chair (later also known as Wassily). Up to that time, steel tubing had mainly been used for hospital furniture. Breuer developed it into a ‘club chair’ for the living-room – not the kind of heavy, upholstered chair previously seen, but a light seat designed for industrial production. Although it was some time before industrial manufacturing of the tubular steel armchair followed and the later versions were welded and inserted, making them difficult to dismantle, its open construction reduced to only a few elements perfectly matched the Bauhaus’s functional aesthetic.

The Furniture Workshop was thus one of the first workshops to accept the need for standardization for the purposes of industrial production. After Breuer had left the Bauhaus, its character shifted more strongly under Hannes Meyer towards furniture that had been developed to production stage and towards multifunctional furniture items made of simple materials, such as Josef Pohl’s so-called ‘Bachelor’s Wardrobe’. ‘People’s necessities, not luxuries’ [‘Volksbedarf statt Luxusbedarf’] was now the motto, after the tubular steel furniture had become fashionable among intellectuals. Under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, finally, the workshop was attached to the Interior Finishing department – partly because the link between production operations and college work appeared contradictory to him. In fact, many of the famous classics of modernism that are today regarded as ‘Bauhaus models’ were created outside of college work. However, none of the workshops shaped the image of the Bauhaus as much as the Furniture Workshop did.

http://www.bauhaus.de/en/ausstellungen/sammlung/205_moebel/

GERRIT RIETVELD – RED BLUE CHAIR C. 1923

Painted Wood

Dimensions: 86.7 x 66 x 83.8 cm, Seat h. 33 cm

Credit: Gift of Philip Johnson

GERRIT RIETVELD – RED BLUE CHAIR C. 1923

In the Red Blue Chair, Rietveld manipulated rectilinear volumes and examined the interaction of vertical and horizontal planes, much as he did in his architecture. Although the chair was originally designed in 1918, its color scheme of primary colors (red, yellow, blue) plus black—so closely associated with the de Stijl group and its most famous theorist and practitioner Piet Mondrian—was applied to it around 1923. Hoping that much of his furniture would eventually be mass-produced rather than handcrafted, Rietveld aimed for simplicity in construction. The pieces of wood that comprise the Red Blue Chair are in the standard lumber sizes readily available at the time.

Rietveld believed there was a greater goal for the furniture designer than just physical comfort: the well-being and comfort of the spirit. Rietveld and his colleagues in the de Stijl art and architecture movement sought to create a utopia based on a harmonic human-made order, which they believed could renew Europe after the devastating turmoil of World War I. New forms, in their view, were essential to this rebuilding.

http://www.moma.org/collection/works/4044

MARCEL BREUER – WASSILY CHAIR / 1927 - 1928

Dimensions: 28-1/4 x 30-3/4 x 28"

The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Herbert Bayer

MARCEL BREUER – WASSILY CHAIR / 1927 - 1928

PETER KELER – WIEGE 1922

Weimar Classics Foundation

MARCEL BREUER – CHILDREN’S CHAIR, DESIGN 1924

Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Photo: Fotostudio Bartsch

MARCEL BREUER & GUNTA STÖLZL - "AFRICAN" OR "ROMANTIC" CHAIR 1921

Oak and Cherrywood Painted With Water-Soluble Color, and Brocade

of Gold, Hemp, Wool, Cotton, Silk, and Other Fabric Threads,

Interwoven by Various Techniques With Twined Hemp Ground

Dimensions: 179.4 x 65 x 67.1 cm

Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Acquired with Funds Provided by

Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung

JOSEF ALBERS - ARMCHAIR DESIGNED 1926

This Example Produced 1928 Solid Mahogany and Mahogany Veneer on Beech, Solid

Maple, Upholstery on Beech Frame, and Nickel-Plated Slotted Screws With Round Heads

Dimensions: 61.6 x 67.6 cm

JOSEF ALBERS SET OF STACKING TABLES C. 1927

Ash Veneer, Black Lacquer and Painted Glass Ranging From

Dimensions: 39.2 x 41.9 x 40 cm to 62.6 x 60.1 x 40.3 cm

JOSEF ALBERS - ARMCHAIR DESIGNED 1926

View of the New Presentation of the Bauhaus Collection

Bauhaus-Archiv, Photo: Hans Glave

BARCELONA CHAIR 1929 BY LUDWIG MIES VAN DER ROHE

ZIG ZAG CHAIR BY GERRIT RIETVELD

CERAMICS

The Ceramics Workshop only existed during the Weimar period. Located 30 km (18 miles) away from the Bauhaus in the little town of Dornburg, it was still being set up when Bogler started his training there together with Otto Lindig in 1920. Lindig’s work in particular shows an engagement with sculptural form that is typical for this early period. Max Krehan trained the students in craft aspects, Gerhard Marcks was responsible for their artistic training and encouraged his students to treat the individual components of the vessels in a free and combinatory way. This delight in experimentation had a formative influence on them; after the workshop was closed in 1925, inspiration from Dornburg continued to influence the potters who had been trained there. The workshop, which only existed for five years, thus became a nucleus for the development of twentieth-century ceramics.

http://www.bauhaus.de/en/ausstellungen/sammlung/208_keramik/

THEODOR BOGLER – COMBINATION TEAPOT

WITH BRAIDED METAL HANDLE (L6) 1923

GERHARD MARCKS – STOVE TILE WITH

A PORTRAIT OF OTTO LINDIG CA. 1921

Weimar Classics Foundation

HANNES MEYER

‘’ Building is just organisation: social, technical, economic and physical organisation.”

Hannes Meyer

Hannes Meyer was one of the most important architects of New Architecture movement of the 1920s. During his brief term in office as the second Bauhaus director, he gave the institution new impulses that had a lasting influence on important aspects of the Bauhaus’s reception and animated the topical debates. His theory, which emphasised the social aspects of design, was widely criticised and poorly received.

Hannes Meyer, the son of an architect, began his architectural career in 1905 with training as a mason and construction draughtsman in Basel. He also attended construction courses at the vocational school there. This was followed by sojourns in Berlin, staying with the architects Albert Fröhlich and Johann Emil Schaudt. He then studied housing construction in the English town of Bath. In 1916, he became the office manager for the Munich architect Georg Metzendorf, for whom he worked on the planning of the Krupp Margarethenhöhe housing estate in Essen.

From 1919, Hannes Meyer headed his own architecture office in Basel. Based on his plans, the Freidorf communal housing estate near Muttenz was built from 1919 to 1921. In 1924, he joined the Basel group associated with the magazine ABC Beiträge zum Bauen ( ABC contributions to building). Mart Stam, El Lissitzky and Hans Schmidt also belonged to this group. Together with Hans Wittwer, with whom he later built the ADGB school ( Federal School for the German Trade Unions ) in Bernau near Berlin, he experimented in 1926/27 with constructivist forms and functionalist methods. These also formed the basis for their competition designs for the Petersschule ( St. Peter’s school ) in Basel and the League of Nations Building in Geneva, neither of which was actually built.

In 1927, Hannes Meyer arrived at the Bauhaus Dessau with his business partner Hans Wittwer and assumed a post as director of the newly established building department. On 1st April 1928, Walter Gropius appointed him to be his successor as the director of the Bauhaus. Despite reaching a broad conceptual consensus – for both of them, building meant the “ organisation of life processes ” – Hannes Meyer moved away from artistic intuition towards building theory. He separated the sciences from the arts and introduced new subjects related to technology, natural science and the humanities. He also reorganised the workshops to meet the requirements of industry and an egalitarian social ideal. An important goal for Meyer was to “ curtail the influence of the artist ”. Starting in the winter semester of 1927/28, the school offered free painting classes. The Bauhaus now aspired to two educational objectives: to educate the production or construction engineer and the artist. Instead of Gropius’s “exploration of the principles of design”, Meyer called on the students to base their designs strictly on the given requirements and to study the “life processes” of the future users. He promoted the expansion of the workshops on a cooperative basis and set up vertical brigades that united the students of various academic years in the implementation of projects such as the ADGB school building. The curriculum now included photography ( in a photography workshop which was part of the advertising department ) and lessons in urban planning.

For Hannes Meyer, building, as the design of the human environment, was “based on society”. The goal, the “ harmonious organisation of our society ”, was therefore to be achieved through “ life-supporting design ”. Meyer represented the standpoint that the Bauhaus had abandoned its idea of designing “ for the people ”: most of the Bauhaus products were already expensive and therefore reserved for an exclusive group of buyers. As a result, Meyer‘s new slogan was: “ The people’s needs instead of the need for luxury! ”

In his urban development plans, Hannes Meyer was committed to the cooperative movement and called himself a Marxist. From 1928 to 1930, he built the school building for the ADGB in Bernau near Berlin and the Nolden House in the Eifel region in 1928. From 1929 to 1930, he extended the Dessau-Törten housing estate designed by Gropius with the Laubenganghäuser ( Balcony Access Houses ).

Meyer’s continued critique of the direction in which the Bauhaus had developed caused increasing tensions with Walter Gropius, who had lost nothing of his power base even after his resignation. In addition, the Bauhaus’s students became increasingly politicised and radicalised as the communist influence grew. Because Meyer did not prohibit these tendencies in his role as director, Gropius – together with the Lord Mayor of Dessau, Fritz Hesse, and Bauhaus teachers such as Wassily Kandinsky – ultimately pleaded to have Meyers fired in order to protect the school from political repercussions. On 1st August 1930, Meyer was dismissed summarily by the city of Dessau due to “ Communist machinations ”. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who had also been recommended by Gropius, became his successor as director.

As early as 1930, Meyer emigrated to the Soviet Union with a group of former Bauhaus students. In the same year, he taught at WASI, an academy for architecture and civil engineering, in Moscow. In the following years, he also acted as an advisor for urban development projects at Giprogor, the Russian Institute for Urban and Investment Development. From 1932, he participated in the Standardgor Project and was the director of the scientific committee for residential and public buildings at the academy of architecture founded in 1934. Among other things, Hannes Meyer designed plans for universities and academies, for the development of “ Greater Moscow ” and for settlements in the Far East. On lecture tours in Europe, which took him to Germany, Czechoslovakia, Sweden, Switzerland and other countries, he reported on urban development and architectural projects in the Soviet Union and discussed what he believed to be the great perspectives that were opening up there for architects. Hannes Meyer actively participated in the discourse that began in 1929 on the suppression of the “ bourgeoisie ” concept in architecture and revised some of his radical theoretical approaches, coming more into line with the concept of socialist realism. In the course of the Stalinist purges, to which some of the Bauhaus’s members also fell victim, Meyer returned to Switzerland in 1936. In 1937, the cooperative children’s holiday home Mümliswil was built under his direction.

In 1939, Hannes Meyer was appointed by the Mexican government as the director of the newly founded Institute for Urban Development and Planning at the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico City. For political reasons, Hannes Meyer was dismissed from this post in 1941. Hannes Meyer designed plans for residential homes and developments, for hospital developments and schools. He supported working groups of artists such as the Taler de Grafica Popular (TGP), organised exhibitions and dedicated himself to the few building contracts that he acquired.

In 1949, he returned to Europe. His hopes of participating in the reconstruction of the war-torn cities were dashed, and he returned to his homeland of Switzerland, where he was unable to realise any further projects.

Hannes Meyer, who is also referred to as the “ unknown Bauhaus director ”, was always too Communist for some and too bourgeois for others. Only in retrospect does it become clear that he probably had a stronger influence on the Bauhaus than Gropius may have wanted to believe.

Literature:
Merten, Britta: Der Architekt Hannes Meyer und sein Beitrag zum Bauhaus. Ein Vergleich mit Walter Gropius und Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2008;
Verein Baudenkmal Bundesschule Bernau e.V. (Hg.): Weltkulturerbe vor den Toren Berlins. Hannes Meyer (1889-1954), Bernau 2004.

http://bauhaus-online.de/en/atlas/personen/hannes-meyer

SCULPTURE

This is the only stone sculpture that has survived from the sculpture workshop. Otto Werner’s work has the programmatic title Construction Sculpture: its blocky structure with a complex spatial layering of individual cubic shapes is borrowed from the New Architecture advocated by the Bauhaus and others. At the same time, Werner’s abstract sculpture also suggests associations with a human figure. The models for it were sculptures and reliefs by Oskar Schlemmer that work with overlays of architectural and figurative elements.

Schlemmer succeeded Johannes Itten as Form Master in the sculpture workshops for wood and stone in 1922. In the following period, the two workshops departed from their programmatic focus on architecture. Due to a lack of actual commissions from the field of architectural sculpture, free sculptural works were increasingly produced. When the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, a reorientation took place; in the ‘Sculpture Workshop’ established in 1925 under Joost Schmidt, elementary training in sculpture was given that had parallels in the teaching work of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. The aim was to ‘arouse, develop and intensify the spatial imagination, conscious experience of spatial sense perceptions and implementation of spatial ideas’, as one of the students, Heinz Loew, described it. Practical applications were available in the areas of stage design, model-making and exhibition architecture.

http://www.bauhaus.de/en/ausstellungen/sammlung/80_skulptur/

OSKAR SCHLEMMER, FREE SCULPTURE G, DESIGN 1921– 1923, CAST 1963

Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Photo: Gunter Lepkowski

View of the New Presentation of the Bauhaus Collection

Bauhaus-Archiv

OSCAR SCHLEMMER – ARCHITECTURAL SCULPTURE R, 1919

OSKAR SCHLEMMER & JOSEF HARTWIG - GROTESK I - 1923

Walnut and Ivory, With Metal Shaft

Dimensions: 56 x 23.5 x 10 cm

Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin

ILSE FEHLING, DESIGN OF A FIGURINE FOR THE MARIONETTE PLAY

‘’ FIVE WANDERERS BETWEEN THE WORLDS ), 1922
Bauhaus-Archive / Museum of Design, Berlin

OTTO WERNER – ARCHITECTURAL SCULPTURE 1922

Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

TEACHING

During the Bauhaus’s teaching work, a very wide variety of pieces were thus produced that approached the subject of design in new and independent ways. The aim of the courses was to produce a universal designer who would be able to work creatively in architecture, craft work or industry. Courses given by artists such as Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee supplemented the Preliminary Course. In ‘Analytic Drawing’ and in Kandinsky’s courses on colour, the students addressed questions of composition, abstraction and colour; with Klee, they engaged with colour, line and form. From the very start, the majority of the students also did exercises in painting and drawing. Kandinsky regarded free artistic analysis, particularly in painting, as acting as a ‘force helping to organize’ students on their way to becoming designers. The extent to which the students were free to choose their own means of artistic expression is evident from the astonishing stylistic breadth of the works produced.

http://www.bauhaus.de/en/ausstellungen/sammlung/204_unterricht/

BALANCE STUDY FROM LASZLO MOHOLY NAGY’S

PRELIMINARY COURSE, UM 1924 ( REPLICA 1967 )

LOTHAR SCHREYER OR STUDENT FROM HIS CLASS, BAUHAUS WEIMAR CURRICULUM FOR WINTER SEMESTER OF 1921- 1922
Bauhaus Archive / Museum of Design, Berlin (9077)

Aquarell, Tempera und Tusche, Uber Bleistiftvorzeichnung,

Dimensions: 16,5 x 33 cm, halbkreisförmig

PAUL KLEE COLOUR CHART 1931

EXERCISE FROM PAUL KLEE’S COLOUR CLASS 1925

Karl Peter Röhl Foundation, Weimar

MOSES MIRKIN ( DESIGN ), ALFRED ARNDT ( RECONSTRUCTION ),

CONTRAST STUDY IN VARIOUS MATERIALS 1920, RECONSTRUCTION 1967

WALTER GROPIUS, SCHEMA ZUM AUFBAU DER LEHRE AM BAUHAUS 1922,

VEROFFENTLICHT IN: STAATLICHES BAUHAUS WEIMAR, 1919-1923
Bauhaus Archive / Museum of Design, Berlin

ALFRED ARNDT, COLOUR CIRCLE FROM GERTRUD GRUNOW’S COURSE, CA. 1921

Water Colour, Tusche, Pencil and Silver Paper Assembled on Brown Hand-Made Paper

Dimensions: 52,6 x 45,5 cm
Bauhaus Archive / Museum of Design, Berlin

PAINTING

It was no accident that Walter Gropius appointed artists as lecturers at the Bauhaus: he regarded the creative potential of avant-garde art as a basis for living, forward-looking work at his new college. He hoped through this to ‘stimulate the students from two sides … from the artistic side, on the one hand, and from the craft side on the other’. The artists thus worked as so-called ‘form masters’ in the workshops, which they were in charge of along with the ‘work masters’ – trained crafts specialists. In addition, they were able on their own initiative to explore new ways of teaching the foundations of art. They were responsible for giving the preliminary course – as did Johannes Itten, George Muche and László Moholy-Nagy – or developed their own individual course topics and teaching methods, as did Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Oskar Schlemmer. The courses also influenced their own artistic work. Pure painting classes were only introduced during the late Dessau period; in Weimar and in the early years in Dessau, the Bauhaus wanted to finally leave behind that type of academic teaching structure and follow new, more integrated paths in art training.

http://www.bauhaus.de/en/ausstellungen/sammlung/79_malerei_grafik/

JOHANNES ITTEN, COLOUR SPHERE IN 7 LIGHT VALUES AND 12 TONES IN:
BRUNO ADLER, UTOPIA. DOKUMENTE DER WIRKLICHKEIT, WEIMAR 1921
Bauhaus Archive / Museum of Design, Berlin (10741)

Lithograph on Cardboard

Dimensions: 47,3 x 32,2 cm

PAUL KLEE – SOLUTION ‘’EE’’ FOR THE BIRTHDAY TASK,

FROM THE PORTFOLIO FOR WALTER GROPIUS 1924

PETER KELER – DE STIJL 1, 1922

Weimar Classics Foundation

WASSILY KANDINSKY, KLEINE WELTEN, 1922
Bauhaus Archive / Museum of Design, Berlin (258/1-2)

WASSILY KANDINSKY – YELLOW RED BLUE, 1925

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 127.0 × 200.0 cm

WASSILY KANDINSKY - UNTITLED

( FROM THE PORTFOLIO FOR WALTER GROPIUS ) 1924

WASSILY KANDINSKY – COMPOSITION 8,1923

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 140 x 201 cm

Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, Gift

WASSILY KANDINSKY, BLACK RELATIONSHIP 1924
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Drawings (341.1949)

Watercolour and Ink on Paper

Dimensions: 36.9 x 36.2 xm / 14 1/2 x 14 1/4"

WASSILY KANDINSKY, GESPANNT IM WINKEL 1930
Kunstmuseum Bern, Othmar Huber Foundation

Oil on Cardboard

Dimensions: 48,5 x 53,5 cm

KURT KRANZ, GROUP OF FOUR, BLACK & WHITE 1968
Bauhaus Dessau Foundation

KURT KRANZ - UNTITLED PICTURE SERIES

( PROJECT FOR AN ABSTRACT COLOR FILM ) 1930

32 Drawings in Watercolor, Gouache, and Ink on Paper, Mounted on Canvas

Credits: Kunsthalle Bielefeld

KURT KRANZ, OSTINATO OR RHYTHMIC ORDER, 1957
Bauhaus Dessau Foundation

OSCAR SCHLEMMER – BAUHAUS STAIRWAY, 1932

Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: 162.3 x 114.3 cm

Credit: Gift of Philip Johnson

ALFREDO BORTOLUZZI – LA PALUCCA 1935

BAUHAUS – ARCHIV BERLIN

LASZLO MOHOLY NAGY – UNTITLED

( FROM THE PORTFOLIO FOR WALTER GROPIUS ) 1924

KATJA ROSE – COLOUR WHEEL WITH GRADATIONS OF BLACK AND WHITE

( Colour Exercises From the Bauhaus Dessau ), 1932

Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin,

FRANZ SCALA – THE DREAM 1919

Oil on Burlap

Dimensions: 100 x 190 cm

PAUL KLEE, DIE HEILIGE VOM INNERN LICHT, 1921
Bauhaus Archive / Museum of Design, Berlin

PAUL KLEE – SCHERZO WITH THIRTEEN, 1922

Oil Transfer Drawing, Watercolor, Ink, and Pencil on Paper on Board

Dimensions: 27.9 x 35.9 cm

During his tenure at the Bauhaus, Klee explored distinctive ways of image–making, including transfer drawings. This work was executed by tracing the lines of a pencil drawing through a black-inked surface onto another clean sheet of paper. The clean sheet received the outline of the drawing in black as well as additional smudges of excess pigment, to which Klee then directly added motifs in watercolor and ink. The arching and angled arrows, before which whimsical figures appear to dance, indicate motion and spatial depth. The reference to music, a mainstay in Klee's life and in his Bauhaus activities, is underscored by the word "scherzo," referring to a vigorous and playful composition, in the work's title.

http://www.moma.org/collection/works/34652?locale=en

LUDWIG MIES VAN DER ROHE

“Architecture epitomises the human being’s spatial confrontation with his environment; it expresses how he asserts himself in it and how he manages to master it.”

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

The leading German avant-garde architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was the third and last Bauhaus director. Appointed by the founding director of the school, Walter Gropius, he replaced the previous director Hannes Meyer, who was dismissed for political reasons in1930. Both the school and the city of Dessau had hoped that Mies van der Rohe’s authority would have a calming influence on the school’s radicalised student body. However, because of the balance of power in Dessau, which was dominated by the National Socialists, even Mies van der Rohe was unable to maintain the school’s location. He attempted to continue the school’s teaching activities in Berlin until its enforced closure in 1932.

Like Walter Gropius before him, who was the dominant German avant-garde architect when appointed as the founding director of the Bauhaus in 1919, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was the leading architect in Germany when he became the third director of the Bauhaus in 1930. A year earlier, his architectural designs for the spectacular Barcelona Pavilion successfully represented the achievements of the Weimar Republic at the World Exhibition in the Spanish metropolis. He did not need the school in order to make a name for himself or to win commissions. Instead, Mies van der Rohe took on his first academic teaching post at the Bauhaus. He had been recommended, just like his predecessor Hannes Meyer, by Walter Gropius, who had retired from his directorial post in 1928. After Meyer’s dismissal by the city of Dessau, which Gropius had backed to prevent further Communist radicalisation among the Bauhaus’s students, the members of the Bauhaus masters’ council and Dessau’s municipal council believed that a person of Mies van der Rohe’s authority would have a stabilising effect on the school.

Mies was born in Aachen to a Catholic family of stonemasons. After completing an apprenticeship as a bricklayer, he was quickly recommended to various architecture offices due to his extraordinary drawing talent. He worked for the prestigious architects John Martens and Bruno Paul in Berlin before starting work with the architect and AEG designer Peter Behrens in 1908. Here, he met Walter Gropius, likewise an employee, for the first time. Mies had already built his first house, the art nouveau-influenced Riehl House in Potsdam-Babelsberg, one year before. In 1911, he built the Perls’ House in Berlin-Zehlendorf. The Villa Urbig, which he constructed in 1917 in the neoclassic Schinkel style, is now known as the Churchill Villa. These first buildings tended to follow more conventional role models.

In autumn of 1915, Mies was conscripted into the army and commanded to serve in various construction units in Frankfurt am Main, Berlin and Eastern Europe. In early 1919, he returned to Berlin. With the revolution of November 1918, some artists had come together in Berlin to discuss their concepts of modern art and wanted to stimulate the public’s interest with exhibitions. They founded the so-called November Group and organised meetings on a regular basis where they discussed and played music. These evenings were known as the November Group Evenings. Mies van der Rohe joined the group in 1921, and until 1925, he organised the group’s architectural entries for the annual Große Berliner Kunstausstellung (great Berlin art exhibition).

In 1921, Mies van der Rohe also participated in a competition for a high-rise office building on Friedrichstraße in Berlin. His unusual – and promptly rejected – design for the block was probably intended as a programmatic study, which he presented to the public at this opportunity. From the current perspective, the design is visionary because, for first time, all of the main floor space was designed for flexible use and the façade was completely glazed. It is the first example of Mies van der Rohe’s “skin-and-bones” architecture that was to dominate his later designs.

In 1922, Mies changed his last name with the addition of “van der” and the maiden name of his mother to “Mies van der Rohe”.

In 1923, Mies van der Rohe constructed his first building using the modern formal vocabulary: The Ryder House in Wiesbaden is a cubic residence with light-coloured plaster and a flat roof, which comes close to the Bauhaus in terms of style. His most extensive project to date followed in 1927 when Mies realised four multi-family dwellings on the Afrikanische Straße in Berlin-Wedding. Here, he used prefabricated standard components to lower construction costs and, with the open grouping of the buildings, attempted to ensure good illumination and ventilation for the apartments. As a member of the Association of German Architects (BDA) Mies van der Rohe founded the progressive and thoroughly controversial collective, Der Ring, in 1924. That same year, he was invited to join the Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation). Two years later, he was appointed as its vice president. In this function, he directed the Werkbund’s exhibition Die Wohnung (the flat) held in Stuttgart in 1927, which resulted, among other projects, in the Weißenhof Estate. At this juncture, Le Corbusier, who in collaboration with his brother had designed two buildings for the estate, invited Mies van der Rohe to the founding congress of CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne). A separate part of the exhibition was displayed in Stuttgart’s city centre and dealt with modern furnishings. This was curated by the interior designer Lilly Reich.

In mid-1928, Mies van der Rohe and Reich were commissioned as artistic directors of the German section of the World Exhibition in Barcelona. This was probably mainly due to the great success of the Werkbund exhibition in Stuttgart. Here too, they jointly designed a number of exhibition areas. Mies van der Rohe also designed an official reception building for the exhibition – the Barcelona Pavilion. The Barcelona Pavilion, which was demolished after the 1929 World Exhibition, was not reconstructed until 1986.

In late 1928, Mies van der Rohe began to work on the design for theTugendhat House in the Czech city of Brno, which was completed in 1930. In 2001, it became a designated UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site as an outstanding major work of modern architecture in the International Style. Although Mies van der Rohe had realised his ideal of “less is more” here, this “less” was in fact a luxury. Alongside the exorbitant original construction costs of 1930, just as the impact of the world economic crisis was starting to be felt, the most recent restoration of this “little” world heritage site consumed more than 3.5 million euros. In the same year, Mies van der Rohe also built the Lange House in Krefeld and the neighbouring Esters House.

In 1930, Mies van der Rohe became the director of the Bauhaus Dessau and began his academic teaching activities. In his brief period at the Bauhaus, Mies van der Rohe was compelled to make more and more concessions to the political circumstances: Pressured by the risk of closure, the curriculum became more conventional, the experimental work was reduced, the workshops were combined and the preliminary course was eliminated. The duration of the studies was shortened and the tuition fees increased. The students’ studios remained closed and the Bauhaus GmbH was dissolved.

The Bauhaus Dessau was closed in 1932 by a newly elected city council with a National Socialist majority. After complex negotiations in relation to the dissolution of the city of Dessau’s financial obligations towards the Bauhaus and its personnel – including the accrued revenues for licensing contracts such as those with the Kandem lamp company and the Rasch wallpaper factory – Mies van der Rohe attempted to continue to lead the school as a private institute, based in an empty telephone factory in Berlin-Steglitz. The former School of Design now called itself the "Freies Lehr- und Forschungsinstitut" (independent institute of teaching and research). However, the increasing repressions of the new National Socialist government ultimately caused the institute to capitulate. The National Socialists were unwilling to tolerate the Bauhaus because of its “Bolshevist orientation”; above all however, they generally rejected the Bauhaus’s cultural concept. After a search of the premises, the Bauhaus was closed in April 1933. In July, the masters’ council headed by Mies van der Rohe decided not to reopen the school under the conditions outlined by the National Socialists, due to the many and sometimes politically desperate compromises of the past years. On 10th August 1933, the Bauhaus was dissolved.

The last residence designed by Mies van der Rohe in Germany at the time was completed in the year that the Bauhaus closed: the Lemke House in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, which is now known as Mies van der Rohe House. Like many of his Bauhaus colleagues, Mies van der Rohe emigrated to the United States.

Mies van der Rohe settled permanently in the United States in 1938. He became an American citizen in 1944 and continued his academic teaching activities at the Armour Institute. He also invited two former Bauhaus colleagues to join his faculty: Walter Peterhans from New York, who developed the seminar for visual training, and Ludwig Hilberseimer, who emigrated from Germany and took over the field of urban development.

A retrospective of Mies van der Rohe‘s work was shown as early as 1947 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. From 1948, he designed the Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago. In 1951, he built the world-famous Farnsworth House. Mies van der Rohe received the commission to design his first high-rise office building, the Seagram Building in New York of 1958, three years later. It is also considered to be one of his masterpieces.

In the early 1960s, Mies van der Rohe received an offer from the senate of West Berlin to design the New National Gallery, part of the Kulturforum (culture forum) on Kemperplatz. It was completed according to his designs in 1968.

Mies van der Rohe died in Chicago in 1969. The political circumstances in early 1930s Germany made it impossible for him to save the Bauhaus. Both Meyer’s course of political confrontation and Mies’s of occasionally currying favour with the National Socialist had little chance of success. Ultimately, Mies van der Rohe remained faithful to his aesthetics. Not for him, to reconcile building to meet political and social requirements and his own concept of architecture as the art of building.

Literature:
Weber, Nicholas Fox: The Bauhaus group. Six masters of modernism, New York: Knopf, 2009;
Reuter, Helmut: Mies und das neue Wohnen. Räume, Möbel, Fotografie, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008;
Noack, Wita; Specker, Heidi: Konzentrat der Moderne. Das Landhaus Lemke von Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Wohnhaus, Baudenkmal und Kunsthaus, München: Munstverlag, 2008;
Müller, Ulrich: Raum, Bewegung und Zeit im Werk von Walter Gropius und Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag 2004;
Riley, Terence; Bergdoll, Barry (Hg.): Mies in Berlin, München, London, New York 2001;
Brüning, Ute (Hg.): Das A und O des Bauhauses. Bauhauswerbung, Schriftbilder, Drucksachen, Ausstellungsdesign, Ausstellungskatalog, Leipzig: Ed. Leipzig, 1995.

http://bauhaus-online.de/en/atlas/personen/ludwig-mies-van-der-rohe
You may visit to read Barcelona Pavilion design by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to click below link from my blog archive.
http://mymagicalattic.blogspot.com.tr/2016/01/barcelona-pavilion-design-by-ludwig.html

BAUHAUS 1919–1933

1919

Walter Gropius becomes Director of the former Grand-Ducal Saxon College of Fine Arts [Grossherzoglich Sächsische Hochschule für bildende Kunst] in Weimar. He unites it formally with the College of Applied Art [Kunstgewerbeschule], which had already been dissolved in 1915, and gives the institution the new name ‘State Bauhaus in Weimar’ [Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar]. The official date of its foundation is 1 April 1919. The Manifesto – in which Gropius announces his programme with all the emotionalism accompanying the sense of fresh departures after the end of the First World War – is published the same month.
In the text of the Manifesto, Gropius does not demand a new style or a new form of art, but much more fundamentally a reform of artistic work. Artistic work is to return to its foundations and first premises, which he sees as lying in craft work – regarded as the treatment of the material – as the foundation of all the arts. The relevance of the social purpose of craft work for art is also noted; it is now given a role in the social context of labour. Since only craft work, rather than art, is capable of being taught, the Bauhaus theory is to be based on craft training in workshops. The ideal of a working community of all the arts corresponds to the idea of the unified art work, the reuniting of all the arts and crafts disciplines – sculpture, painting, applied arts and crafts – to establish a new art of architecture.
Although the goals are utopian, Gropius’s programme involves a return to aspects of general validity, general appeal and the requirements of practical life. Overall, he is setting out a claim to be carrying out cultural reform. In the same year, Gropius appoints three artists as Bauhaus teachers: painter Lyonel Feininger, sculptor Gerhard Marcks and painter and art teacher Johannes Itten. The faculty also continues to include four professors from the former art college. Art teaching is initially carried out in the individual teachers’ classes, with craft training taking place in the workshops – in the first semester only consisting of the gold-silver-copper works, the bookbinding workshop, the weaving workshop and the graphic printing workshop. In addition, individual architectural courses are held; an architecture department is first established in 1927.

1920

George Muche is appointed as a master in October. Additional workshops open during the year: the workshop for woodcarving and stone sculpture and the workshop for decorative painting (later mural painting), and the carpentry workshop; the pottery workshop is set up in Dornburg/Saale. At this period, training at the Bauhaus is equivalent to a craft apprenticeship, concluding with an examination by the chamber of trades.
To create a closer connection between the arts and crafts, each workshop has been headed since the winter semester by a craftsman as ‘work master’ and an artist as ‘form master’. Lyonel Feininger is responsible for the printing workshop and Gerhard Marcks for the pottery; all of the other workshops are initially headed by Johannes Itten and George Muche.
An obligatory probationary semester under Johannes Itten becomes what is known as the ‘preliminary course’ [Vorkurs]. The subject of this art-based preliminary apprenticeship is the elementary conditions for any design: the material, ways of shaping and presenting it, and construction. The preliminary course is used to explore the personality and creativity of each student and to establish equivalent prerequisites for their further training. Exercises with Itten in particular – such as studies of rhythm, formal contrasts and light contrasts – determine the formal language used in Bauhaus products up to 1922. Itten teaches the preliminary course, which is to become a defining element in the Bauhaus’s teaching work, up to the spring of 1923, with Muche taking his place during the summer.
In Weimar, the Bauhaus encounters initial public hostility. The attacks are ideologically motivated, but are also triggered by artistic issues. The conflicts are conducted in political meetings, in the press and pamphlets, and finally in Thuringia’s state parliament. As the Bauhaus is a state-owned college dependent on parliamentary approval of grants, its existence is constantly threatened by these quarrels and by changes in the political majority in the state parliament.

1921

Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer are appointed at the start of the year, followed in the autumn by Lothar Schreyer, who heads the new theatre department. In March, the directorships of the various workshops are reassigned: Walter Gropius takes over carpentry, Schlemmer sculpture, Georg Muche weaving, and Klee bookbinding.
Gropius and Adolf Meyer build the Expressionist Sommerfeld House in Berlin. An attempt is made here for the first time to implement the unification of the arts in architecture. The workshops for woodcarving, mural painting, glass painting, carpentry, weaving and metalworking are involved in the finishing and completion work, as well as in the interior decoration of the building.
In the summer, Johannes Itten visits the Mazdaznan Conference in Leipzig. Through him and Muche, this eastern-oriented, mystical religious teaching gains considerable influence on some of the students – while also exacerbating internal conflicts at the college.
Theo van Doesburg, a member of the Dutch art group De Stijl, stays in Weimar from April 1921 to November 1922, with a few breaks. In the lectures and courses he gives, which are also attended by Bauhaus students, he opposes the Bauhaus’s Expressionist and craft-oriented approach. He advocates his own new concept of constructivist design that takes a positive view of technology. Although van Doesburg represents an opposite pole to the Bauhaus in Weimar, he influences the college’s turn towards industrial design in 1922 and provides inspiration for its formal language up to 1924.

1922

From the beginning of the year, Walter Gropius starts to reassess his ideas about the Bauhaus’s aims. An engagement with industry and its implications for design move into the foreground. During the summer, disputes over this arise with Johannes Itten, the central figure in the early Bauhaus, who rejects it and gradually withdraws.
In April, the first public exhibition with works by the journeymen and apprentices is held, and in July an architectural exhibition by Gropius and Adolf Meyer. In addition, a Bauhaus building society is founded. Wassily Kandinsky is appointed as a teacher, assigned to the workshop for mural painting.
During this period, weaving and pottery are the most important workshops and the only ones making any appreciable contribution to the college’s finances by selling their work. Workshop products that receive approval are from now on signed with a stamp.
In September, Theo van Doesburg is the director of the Dadaist and Constructivist congress in Weimar, with participants also including Kurt Schwitters, Hans Arp, Hans Richter and the later Bauhaus teacher Lászlo Moholy-Nagy. The first performance of Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet is given in Stuttgart the same month.

1923

In February, an exhibition with works by Johannes Ittens and the Bauhaus workshops opens in the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Zurich. Johannes Itten leaves Weimar in March and is replaced by the Constructivist artist László Moholy-Nagy, who becomes the head of the metals workshop and teaches in the preliminary course starting in the autumn. Oskar Schlemmer takes over the theatre department following the departure of Lothar Schreyer.
The Bauhaus takes part in the autumn trade fair in Leipzig for the first time, with weaving, ceramics and metalwork. It is only during this year that workshop production starts up – although the economic situation, and particularly inflation, which reaches its peak during the autumn, make work difficult.
In February, preparations start for the Bauhaus exhibition in August and September – enabling the college to give its first large-scale account of itself. Works from the workshops and classes are shown, along with free art by the masters and an exhibition of international architecture. The Haus am Horn in Weimar, the college’s first independent architectural project, is built, with interior decoration provided by the workshops. In August, the ‘Bauhaus week’ is held, with stage events, concerts and lectures. The college attracts attention throughout Germany through the exhibition.
Walter Gropius formulates a new approach under the motto ‘art and technology – a new unity’, recognizing industry as the defining force of the age. An engagement with industry and machine production becomes a prerequisite for all the rest of the Bauhaus’s work and defines the way it is understood down to the present day.
Since the winter semester, the preliminary course has covered handicrafts with Josef Albers in the first semester and in the second semester a course on ‘Material and Space’ by László Moholy-Nagy, an analysis and design course on ‘Colour’ with Wassily Kandinsky, and a design course on ‘Form’ with Paul Klee.

1924

The elections to the state parliament in Thuringia in February lead to a non-socialist majority, and the Social-Democratic government sympathetic to the Bauhaus is replaced. In September, the new government serves notice on the employment contracts for the Bauhaus masters ‘solicitously’, terminating them in April 1925. In November, only a minority on the parliament’s budgetary committee – consisting of the Communist Party (KPD), Social-Democratic Party (SPD) and German Democratic party (DDP) – votes to approve the college’s grants. These manoeuvres, which are explained on financial grounds but actually politically motivated, make continued work impossible. On 26 December, the masters therefore declare that the Bauhaus is to be closed on 1 April 1925.
A ‘Friends of the Bauhaus’ group is founded to provide moral and practical support for the college. Its board includes Marc Chagall, Albert Einstein and Gerhart Hauptmann, among others.

1925

Negotiations on options for continuing the college are held at the beginning of the year with several cities, including Frankfurt and Dessau. Several of the masters are involved in negotiations regarding other work. Former Bauhaus students such as Wilhelm Wagenfeld, Otto Lindig and Erich Dieckmann stay on as teachers at the successor institution, the ‘Weimar State Architectural College’ under Otto Bartning.
In March, the Dessau Municipal Council decides to take over the Bauhaus as a city college, on the initiative of the mayor, Fritz Hesse. Teaching at the Bauhaus in Dessau starts at the beginning of April. All of the form masters apart from Gerhard Marcks move to Dessau; however, many of the masters and students hesitate and only arrive during the course of the summer. Several former students take over the workshops as ‘young masters’: Herbert Bayer heads the workshop for printing and advertising and Marcel Breuer is in charge of the carpentry workshop. There are also workshops for metalworking, weaving, mural painting, sculpture and theatre. The pottery, woodcarving and sculpture workshops are not reestablished in Dessau. Walter Gropius announces a new programme in which the importance of industry and science become predominant for design. He declares that the task for the Bauhaus is a ‘contemporary development for housing’ that is to range from ‘simple domestic equipment to a complete residence’. Gropius requires ‘systematic experimental work in theory and practice – in the formal, technological and economic fields’. The workshops are described as ‘laboratories’ for manufacturing models for industry. Starting in June, the first series of ‘Bauhaus books’ is published, including works by Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian.
The company Bauhaus Ltd. is founded in November for commercial marketing of the products.

1926

In October, the state government of Saxony-Anhalt recognizes the Bauhaus’s college status and the Bauhaus masters are designated as professors. The Bauhaus starts using the subtitle ‘College of Design’ and the curriculum represents a course of study leading to the award of the Bauhaus Diploma.
The opening ceremony for the new college building in Dessau, designed by Walter Gropius and equipped by the Bauhaus workshops, is held on 4 December, with more than 1000 guests. With its spectacular new buildings – in addition to the college building, residences for the Bauhaus masters and the Dessau-Törten estate are also built – the Bauhaus rises to international fame during this period. This is encouraged by Gropius through publications and numerous lectures given all over Germany on the New Architecture and the Bauhaus. The buildings in Dessau continue to shape the concept of Bauhaus design right down to the present day.
The first issue of the journal bauhaus is published to coincide with the official opening; it appears quarterly up to 1929 and again in 1931.

1927

An architecture department opens in April, with Hannes Meyer appointed as its head. Free painting classes are initiated with Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, for the first time providing a purely artistic training course.
The politicization of the students increases during the year. In July, Georg Muche leaves the Bauhaus and Gunta Stölzl takes over the weaving workshop from him.

1928

Walter Gropius resigns as Director in April in order to work as an architect in Berlin. Along with him, Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer and Marcel Breuer also leave the college.
At Gropius’s suggestion, Hannes Mayer becomes the new Director. Meyer supports a more academic and scientific approach to work and training. Design is to be regarded as an objective process and based on rationally comprehensible findings. Meyer criticizes the Bauhaus’s previous work as formalistic and requires that all aesthetic considerations should be excluded. This type of design is now to have a stronger social basis (‘people’s needs instead of luxury items’), regarded as ‘appropriate to life’ [lebensrichtig].
A travelling exhibition on ‘Young Bauhaus Painters’ is opened in Halle and later seen in Braunschweig, Erfurt and Krefeld.
Two lamp factories start serial production of Bauhaus light models. Serial production also follows for designs from the weaving workshop, which like all of the Bauhaus products were previously only manufactured in the college’s own workshops. The Bauhaus now has 166 students, and the Friends association has 460 members.

1929

The bauhaus-wanderschau (Bauhaus Travelling Exhibition) is shown in the Gewerbemuseum in Basle in April and May and thereafter in Breslau, Mannheim and Zurich. The exhibition provides a representative survey of work at the Bauhaus under Hannes Meyer.
The roofing ceremony for the Trades Union College (Bundesschule) in Bernau, near Berlin, is held in May. All of the workshops have been involved in this, the most important architectural project under Hannes Meyer as Director.
In July, the metalworking workshop, carpentry workshop and mural painting workshop are combined to form the Finishing and Completion workshop, headed by Alfred Arndt. The aim is to achieve greater subordination of all of the workshops to the architectural department. The Bauhaus theatre tours Germany and Switzerland with Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus dances.
Schlemmer leaves Dessau in November and the official theatre department is closed. A photography department is established under photographer Walter Peterhans. Ludwig Hilberseimer, an architect and urban planner, is appointed to the architecture department.

1930

The Bauhaus wallpaper, the college’s most successful and lucrative product, comes onto the market at the beginning of the year.
In the spring, Walter Gropius, Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer and László Moholy-Nagy design the German section for the Paris exhibition of the Société des Artistics Décorateurs Français. The students become increasingly politicized. The Director, Hannes Meyer, is dismissed by the city of Dessau due to his Communist sympathies. Through mediation by Gropius, the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is appointed as director in April and takes up his post in the autumn. Under Mies van der Rohe, the courses are structured into the five departments of Architecture, Finishing and Completion, Weaving, Photography, and Fine Arts. The course of study is made completely academic and shortened to five semesters. Architectural training increases in importance and is strongly oriented towards aesthetic issues, following the treatment of technical architectural issues. The importance of the workshops and thus of industrial design work declines.
Mies van der Rohe attempts to keep the college out of public political debates through an emphatically unpolitical style. He implements this unpolitical approach internally by removing from the college any students who support Hannes Meyer.

1931

In April, Paul Klee takes up an appointment to the Academy in Dusseldorf and leaves the Bauhaus; Gunta Stölzl leaves in October. Municipal elections are held in Dessau in November and the Nazi party becomes the strongest party. One of its major election pledges had been cancellation of grants to the Bauhaus and the demolition of the Bauhaus buildings.

1932

The interior designer Lilly Reich is appointed at the start of the year as head of the Finishing and Completion Department. Political disputes at the college intensify.
On 22 August, the Nazi party’s motion to discontinue teaching work at the Bauhaus from 1 October is accepted by the municipal council by a majority of 20 against five votes from the Communist party and the Mayor, Hesse. The members of the SPD, who had previously provided decisive political support for the Bauhaus, abstain from the vote.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe decides to continue the college as a private institution in Berlin, made possible through licence income, among other sources of finance. A building in the Steglitz district of Berlin is rented starting in October and converted for college use. In the winter semester, the Bauhaus has 114 students. The teachers still include Wassily Kandinsky, Josef Albers, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Lilly Reich and Walter Peterhans.

1933

On 11 April, the start of the summer semester, the Bauhaus building in Berlin is searched by the police and sealed off. Thirty-two students are temporarily detained. There is considerable uncertainty regarding the future of the college, which is also in financial difficulties. On 20 July, the conference of teaching staff takes the decision to close the Bauhaus.
In a letter from the Gestapo dated 21 July, any reopening of the Bauhaus is made dependent on several conditions. Wassily Kandinsky and Ludwig Hilberseimer must be replaced by teachers ‘with a basis in the National Socialist ideology’ and a new curriculum must be established that satisfies the ‘requirements of the new state in its inner structure’.
In the subsequent years, the best-known Bauhaus teachers emigrate, including Josef Albers (1933, USA), Wassily Kandinsky (1933, France), Paul Klee (1933, Switzerland), Walter Gropius (1934 Britain; 1937, USA), László Moholy-Nagy (1934, Netherlands; 1935, Britain; 1937, USA), Marcel Breuer (1935, Britain; 1937, USA), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1937, USA), Herbert Bayer (1938, USA) and Walter Peterhans (1938, USA).

http://www.bauhaus.de/en/das_bauhaus/48_1919_1933/

BAUHAUS: IDEA

The Bauhaus only existed for 14 years: from 1919 to 1933. Despite this, it became the twentieth 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 bottom 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.

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 three stars – standing for the three arts of painting, sculpture and architecture – with the rays from them interlaced symbolically. All of the crafts and arts had already worked together on an equal basis even in the stonemasons’ lodges of medieval cathedrals. At the Bauhaus, the cathedral now stood for the total work of art that was to combine architecture, craft and art into an ideal unity. The Bauhaus was thus aiming to reunite the arts that had previously been separated in the academies in order to arrive at contemporary forms of art and architecture. As in the reform movements that had preceded the Bauhaus, what mattered was to find a response to industrialization and its effects. The artistic avant-garde that gathered at the Bauhaus wanted to become a force capable of changing society and hoped to form a modern type of human being and environment. In a transdisciplinary community of work, the ‘building of the future’ – and thus also the future itself – was to be conceived and created. This programmatic goal for the college was encapsulated almost like a slogan in the name ‘bauhaus’ (building–house). The challenge was how to turn these grand ideas for the future into a real educational course.

Despite the fact that goals and reality never quite coincided at the Bauhaus, the manifold influences to which the experiment gave rise have continued to the present day. Even more than the details of the solutions produced, what continues to be fascinating today is the exemplary attitude and the will to rethink things from the ground up. In this way, the Bauhaus, which only existed for 14 years, became the model for reform efforts in its period – and it continues to attract attention even today. ‘You can’t achieve that kind of resonance with either organization or propaganda,’ said Mies van der Rohe, the third and last Director of the Bauhaus. ‘Only an idea has the power to spread so widely.’

http://www.bauhaus.de/en/das_bauhaus/44_idee/

LIFE AT BAUHAUS

During the fourteen years of its existence, the Bauhaus was threatened, contested and persecuted again and again. It was closed for political reasons no fewer than three times. Threats to its existence due to external hostility led to strong internal solidarity. Thus the Bauhaus members achieved the breakthrough to a new era not only through the quality of their collaboration, but also through the life they shared at the Bauhaus.

The 1919 manifesto of the Bauhaus written by its founder, Walter Gropius, already announced as firm components of the programme: ‘Theatre, lectures, poetry, music, costume parties. Establishing amusing ceremonials at these get-togethers.’ There was also the fact that they lived and ate together, with recreational activities and sports, for which the Bauhaus building in Dessau provided many opportunities. The students recorded their life together in numerous photographs. Sport shots in front of the Bauhaus’s modern architecture with its bright balconies and window surfaces reflect an embrace of a modern lifestyle that included the whole person – body, mind and soul.

At the famous Bauhaus parties, teachers and students gave free rein to their creative talents and enjoyment of design. Weeks were spent on organizing and designing lantern parties, dragon parties, Christmas parties and also motto parties such as the ‘Beard, Nose and Heart Party’ or the ‘Metallic Party’. Almost all of the workshops were involved in implementing them. The parties promoted contact between the college and the public, as well as a common spirit and the development of the ‘play instinct’. Inspired by Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Oskar Schlemmer recognized that play was the force that made creativity possible in the first place, precisely through non-purposeful activity. He planned the large public parties and also used them as a kind of experimental stage for the theatre workshop that he directed. While the parties held during the Weimar period still had something of the spirit of the nature-loving ‘Wandervogel’ rambling club, in Dessau they became cultural events. The dancing was now no longer done to the accordion, but to the jazz sounds of the Bauhaus Band, which soon rose to fame outside of the college as well.

The Bauhaus’s continuing reputation is thus due not least to a comprehensive approach in which modernity and progressiveness were experimented with in many different areas of life. After the closure of the Bauhaus under pressure from the Nazis, the emigré Bauhaus members took this attitude to life with them all over the world.

http://www.bauhaus.de/en/das_bauhaus/46_leben_am_bauhaus/

TEACHING AT THE BAUHAUS

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.

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 viewpoints. Gropius succeeded in gaining the support of renowned avant-garde artists for the purpose. In Weimar, they carried out the teaching as ‘form masters’, together with the ‘work masters’ – trained craftsmen.

To begin with, almost all of the workshops, like the preliminary course, were formatively influenced by Johannes Itten. Instead of getting the students to copy from models, as was still done in the traditional academies of art, he encouraged them to produce their own creative designs based on their own subjective perceptions. In the preliminary course, he taught the foundations of materials properties, composition, and colour theory. After Itten’s departure, the preliminary course was divided between László Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers. Moholy-Nagy shifted the emphasis from artistic issues to technical ones and developed exercises on construction, balance and materials. Albers was responsible for familiarizing the students with craft techniques and appropriate use of the most important materials.

Beyond the preliminary course, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, among others, supervised and supplemented the teaching work on form and colour theory, and Oskar 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.

Almost all of the masters moved to Dessau along with the college. Former students took over the direction of the workshops, as young masters: Marcel Breuer headed the carpentry workshop, Herbert Bayer the printing and advertising workshop, Hinnerk Scheper the workshop for mural painting, Joost Schmidt the sculpture workshop and Gunta Stölzl the weaving workshop. In addition to the training, the declared goal was now ‘to carry out practical experimental work, particularly for house construction and interior decoration, as well as to develop model types for industry and crafts specialists’. Technical and formal experiments were carried out in the workshops on a broad basis in order to develop prototypes for industrial manufacturing and make it possible for broad strata of purchasers to buy qualitatively high-standard but affordable goods. The theoretical teaching was placed on a broader basis and engineering, psychology, business economics and other subjects were included in the teaching programme. The masters were now called professors, and the students received a Bauhaus diploma.

Under the third Director, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the Bauhaus ultimately developed into a kind of college of technology for architecture. Mies van der Rohe reduced the structure and importance of work in the workshops. The art and workshop department now mainly served as groundwork and orientation for developing a more up-to-date form of architecture that used contemporary structures and materials.

http://www.bauhaus.de/en/das_bauhaus/45_unterricht/

PROGRAMME

‘Together, we are intending, conceiving and creating the new building of the future …’ Walter Gropius’s founding manifesto is shaped by an educational vision even more than by its architectural and craft vision. The history of the Bauhaus and the development of its programme did not follow a smooth course. Changes in management and among the teachers, as well as artistic and political influences from outside, led to constant changes in the college. One of the decisive qualities that the Bauhaus possessed was an ability to see diversions or even unsuccessful experiments as potentially necessary lessons and to derive corrections in its course from them.

The programme of the Bauhaus was decisively shaped by its three Directors. At the time of its founding in 1919, Walter Gropius linked the elimination of the divide between free and applied art that was the aim of the new college with an Expressionistically influenced ‘human education programme’. Artists and crafts specialists collaborated in both teaching and production work. But the greater value attached to craft work alone was not sufficient in the longer term to counter the reality of an increasingly technologized environment. In 1923, the Bauhaus responded by introducing the guiding principle of ‘Art and technology – a new unity’. The opportunities provided by industrial manufacturing were now to be exploited more strongly in order to achieve functional and aesthetically satisfactory design. The Bauhaus workshops developed models that were intended for mass production – from lamps to residential buildings.

Starting in 1928, the college’s social aims intensified under Hannes Meyer; the solution was now summarized as ‘people’s necessities, not luxuries’ [‘Volksbedarf statt Luxusbedarf’]. Using cost-saving industrial mass production, products were to be made affordable for broad social strata. For Meyer, meeting people’s basic needs took clear priority over artistic considerations. He therefore required a more academic and scientific approach to education. When the students under his direction became more and more politicized, Meyer was accused of having a Communist orientation and was dismissed by the City of Dessau. His successor, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, placed the emphasis on the aesthetic side of architecture starting from 1930, neglecting its social and political aspects. The preliminary course was abolished and the importance of the workshops declined. Many of the students oriented themselves artistically towards the model of Mies van der Rohe.

http://www.bauhaus.de/en/das_bauhaus/610_programm/

BAUHAUS: AFTER 1933

The Bauhaus was forced to close down in 1933 due to pressure from the Nazis. However, its ideas continued to spread all over the world along with the emigrating Bauhaus members – to the USA, Switzerland, Russia, Israel and many other countries.

In the USA, Josef Albers became a respected art teacher at Black Mountain College (Asheville, North Carolina), which at times regarded itself as a successor to the Bauhaus. In 1937, László Moholy-Nagy founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago, which took up the educational programme developed in Weimar and Dessau by Walter Gropius and developed it further. Photography now played a more important part than it had earlier. The methodology of the New Bauhaus was adopted and modified by many other American colleges. This played a role in pushing back the Beaux Arts tradition that had predominated in the USA up to that time. In addition, the emigré former Bauhaus Directors Walter Gropius, Professor at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Director of the Department of Architecture at the Armour Institute in Chicago, contributed to the further spread of Bauhaus thought in their work and teaching.

In West Germany, the Bauhaus idea of linking the arts and crafts was initially continued after the Second World War at crafts colleges such as those in Krefeld, Cologne and Kassel. From 1955, the College of Design in Ulm arrived on the scene with a claim to be working in the spirit of the Bauhaus. The goal was ‘to improve the quality, form and usefulness of consumer goods that are manufactured in Germany’. Although the college later tried to distance itself from the Bauhaus model by developing contours of its own, its beginnings under its first Rector, former Bauhaus student Max Bill, were clearly marked by the Bauhaus. The college in Ulm became the internationally most important college of design after the Bauhaus, and its products represented German design for many decades.

In East Germany, an initial attempt to revive the Bauhaus in Dessau failed one year after the end of the war. The college was politically unwelcome in the early period of the GDR, and a rapprochement with it only took place in 1976 with the reconstruction of the Dessau Bauhaus building in accordance with its historic monument status. A start was made on establishing a historical collection on the Bauhaus, and the Bauhaus theatre was revived. Ten years later, the GDR celebrated the reopening of the Bauhaus as a ‘Centre for Design’, under the aegis of the East German Construction Ministry. The fall of Communism in 1989 ended this chapter of the Bauhaus’s history.

Some elements of the Bauhaus teaching method – particularly the preliminary course – are still being used at college level. The Bauhaus’s influence continues to be seen above all in its fundamental ideas and methods, even more than in specific forms and products.

http://www.bauhaus.de/en/das_bauhaus/81_nach_1933/

PAGES

January 11, 2016

BAUHAUS ARCHIVE PERMANENT EXHIBITION AT MUSEUM FUR GESTALTUNG