Bauhaus

The Bauhaus was a German art school which opened in 1919 and ran until 1933. The school was only open for fourteen years and graduated fewer than 500 students, but it revolutionized the ways in which we think of artistic production, and it achieved legendary status as a pedagogical system for the arts. The Bauhaus collapsed the divide between fine art and craft, and sought to break down the systems which privileged painting and sculpture over any other form of design. The educational system at the Bauhaus, designed by its founder and leader Walter Gropius, provided students with a six-month foundational course in a broad range of design, which introduced the principles of production in various craft and media, after which students would take workshop courses in woodworking, furniture design, textiles, typography, stained glass, metalworking, photography, light fixtures, and many other areas of design in addition to painting and sculpture.

The Bauhaus approach to production was distinctly modern, emphasizing the mass producibility of objects through an economic use of material, and advocating for simple design in which form is based on function. For Gropius and the Bauhaus professors, art was found in the design of an object or building, not in the ornamental paintings which decorated it. Gropius invited leading figures of the avant-garde to instruct at the Bauhaus, including Joseph Albers, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Marcel Brauer, László Moholy-Nagy, among many others, who solidified the excellence and experimentation of the school. During the fourteen years of its existence, the Bauhaus transfigured the educational system that had dominated the west for many previous centuries, from the classical academic system, to the collapse of high art into design, under an increasingly hostile governing body.

The professors and students of the Bauhaus worked in a wide range of media and aesthetics. The school’s approach had an underlying interest in simplicity, clean lines, and ease of use and production, resulting in iconic new forms of everyday objects, architecture, and sculpture. The Bauhaus embraced new technologies of photography and film, which produced some of the most experimental forms and objects of the avant-garde; László Moholy-Nagy’s photograms and light space modulators questioned the means of documenting space, movement, and light, indelibly impacting the intellectual approach to the cinematic apparatus across Europe. Typography was an avenue through which the Bauhaus made pioneering innovations, inventing new sans-serif fonts for an efficient, highly legible, and simplified new form of written language.

The Bauhaus continues to inform artistic educational systems today not only because of its huge paradigm shifts and successful re construction of the general approach to the arts, but also because following the rise to power of the Nazis and the disbanding of the school, many Bauhaus professors made their way to America, where they continued teaching with the same general foundational ideas that have impacted American art schools and programs. Gropius and Breuer taught at Harvard, Moholy-Nagy went to Chicago where he set up the New Bauhaus, and Josef Albers taught at the Yale Art School. The Bauhaus functions as the groundwork for the aesthetics and practical approaches of twentieth and twenty-first century design. IKEA, contemporary logos, iPhones, and many everyday objects of the twenty first century have their basis in the ideas which came from the Bauhaus.