The Bauhaus school redefined artistic creativity and manufacturing, fine and applied art, and lead Gropius, Klee, Albers, Breuer+ to functional, iconic designs.
Bauhaus Movement Overview | TheArtStory The Art Story Movements Artists Timelines Ideas The Art Story Artists Movements Ideas Blog About us Donate Contact Us Ways to support us About The Art Story a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Org Movements BauhausBauhausStarted: 1919 Ended: 1933 Bauhaus SummaryKey IdeasKey Artists Important Art Red Balloon (1922)Yellow-Red-Blue (1925)Club Chair (Model B3) (The Wassily Chair) (1925)Universal Bayer (1925)Bauhaus building in Dessau, Germany (1919-25)Photogram (1926)Wall Hanging (1926)Model No. MT 49 (1927)Light Prop for an Electric Stage (Light Space Modulator) (1930)Homage to the Square: Dissolving/Vanishing (1951)History and Ideas Beginnings Concepts, Styles, and Trends The Bauhaus Teaching Curriculum The Bauhaus Faculty The Bauhaus in Dessau Later Developments Useful ResourcesSimilar Art and Related Pages "If today's arts love the machine, technology and organization, if they aspire to precision and reject anything vague and dreamy, this implies an instinctive repudiation of chaos and a longing to find the form appropriate to our times." 1 of 5 "The ultimate aim of all artistic activity is building! ... Architects, sculptors, painters, we must all get back to craft! ... The artist is a heightened manifestation of the craftsman. ... Let us form ... a new guild of craftsmen without the class divisions that set out to raise an arrogant barrier between craftsmen and artists! ... Let us together create the new building of the future which will be all in one: architecture and sculpture and painting." 2 of 5 "Designing is not a profession but an attitude. Design has many connotations. It is the organization of materials and processes in the most productive way, in a harmonious balance of all elements necessary for a certain function. It is the integration of technological, social, and economical requirements, biological necessities, and the psychological effects of materials, shape, color, volume and space. Thinking in relationships." 3 of 5 "I consider morals and aesthetics one and the same, for they cover only one impulse, one drive inherent in our consciousness - to bring our life and all our actions into a satisfactory relationship with the events of the world as our consciousness wants it to be, in harmony with our life and according to the laws of consciousness itself." 4 of 5 "Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space." 5 of 5 Mies van der Rohe Summary of BauhausThe Bauhaus was arguably the single most influential modernist art school of the 20th century. Its approach to teaching, and to the relationship between art, society, and technology, had a major impact both in Europe and in the United States long after its closure under Nazi pressure in 1933. The Bauhaus was influenced by 19th and early-20th-century artistic directions such as the Arts and Crafts movement, as well as Art Nouveau and its many international incarnations, including the Jugendstil and Vienna Secession. All of these movements sought to level the distinction between the fine and applied arts, and to reunite creativity and manufacturing; their legacy was reflected in the romantic medievalism of the Bauhaus ethos during its early years, when it fashioned itself as a kind of craftsmen's guild. But by the mid-1920s this vision had given way to a stress on uniting art and industrial design, and it was this which underpinned the Bauhaus's most original and important achievements. The school is also renowned for its extraordinary faculty, who subsequently led the development of modern art - and modern thought - throughout Europe and the United States. Key Ideas & Accomplishments The origins of the Bauhaus lie in the late 19th century, in anxieties about the soullessness of modern manufacturing, and fears about art's loss of social relevance. The Bauhaus aimed to reunite fine art and functional design, creating practical objects with the soul of artworks.Although the Bauhaus abandoned many aspects of traditional fine-arts education, it was deeply concerned with intellectual and theoretical approaches to its subject. Various aspects of artistic and design pedagogy were fused, and the hierarchy of the arts which had stood in place during the Renaissance was levelled out: the practical crafts - architecture and interior design, textiles and woodwork - were placed on a par with fine arts such as sculpture and painting.Given the equal stress it placed on fine art and functional craft, it is no surprise that many of the Bauhaus's most influential and lasting achievements were in fields other than painting and sculpture. The furniture and utensil designs of Marcel Breuer, Marianne Brandt, and others paved the way for the stylish minimalism of the 1950s-60s, while architects such as Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe were acknowledged as the forerunners of the similarly slick International Style that is so important in architecture to this day.The stress on experiment and problem-solving which characterized the Bauhaus's approach to teaching has proved to be enormously influential on contemporary art education. It has led to the rethinking of the "fine arts" as the "visual arts", and to a reconceptualization of the artistic process as more akin to a research science than to a humanities subject such as literature or history.Key Artists Walter Gropius Overview, Artworks, and Biography László Moholy-Nagy Overview, Artworks, and Biography Paul Klee Overview, Artworks, and Biography Wassily Kandinsky Overview, Artworks, and Biography Josef Albers Overview, Artworks, and Biography Marcel Breuer Overview, Artworks, and Biography Lyonel Feininger Overview, Artworks, and Biography Anni Albers Overview, Artworks, and Biography Theo van Doesburg Overview, Artworks, and Biography Naum Gabo Overview, Artworks, and Biography Oskar Schlemmer Overview, Artworks, and Biography Johannes Itten Overview, Artworks, and Biography Overview of BauhausIn his early career Walter Gropius worked for an international conglomerate designing everything from architectural and industrial projects to office lighting and stationery - this led him to envision a total design ethos, employing "a new guild of craftsmen," that he later embodied in founding the Bauhaus.Beginnings and DevelopmentConcepts, Trends, & Related TopicsLater Developments and Legacy Artworks and Artists of Bauhaus Progression of Art1922Red BalloonArtist: Paul Klee Paul Klee was one of the most talented and enigmatic artists to be associated with the Bauhaus, a visionary whose work combined stunning formal innovation with a curious kind of primordial innocence. In this canvas from 1922, delicate, translucent geometric shapes - squares, rectangles and domes - are picked out in gradations of primary color. A single red circle floats in the upper center, revealing itself, on inspection, to be the titular hot-air balloon. This illustrative flourish exemplifies Klee's whimsical, associative use of the geometric compositional arrangements for which the Bauhaus became famous. In the artist's unique idiom, emphasis shifts restlessly between the abstract and the figurative, between narrative association and esoteric symbolism. The glowing shapes, reminiscent of stained glass, are placed asymmetrically to create a visual rhythm, conducted by vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines, that seems both ordered and spontaneous. Born in Switzerland in 1879, Klee had been associated with various Expressionist and modernist groupings in Northern Europe during the 1900s and 1910s, including Der Blaue Reiter group, before taking up a post at the Bauhaus in 1921, teaching mural painting, stained glass, bookbinding, and various other subjects. He published his art lectures in his Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch (Pedagogical Sketchbooks) (1925) in the Bauhausbücher series. Famously beginning with the line "[a]n active line on a walk, moving freely, without goal," this work became hugely influential, establishing, as the critic Mark Hudson puts it, "[Klee's] reputation as one of the great theorists of modern art...[as] he attempted to analyze every last permutation of his wandering lines." For Klee, the line, developing from a single point, was an autonomous agent, spontaneous, which through its movement forged the development of the plane. This metaphor for the germination of compositional form became a fundamental tenet of Bauhaus design philosophy, influencing many of Klee's contemporaries, including Anni Albers and Klee's lifelong friend Wassily Kandinsky. Klee's presence at the Bauhaus from 1921 until his resignation in 1931 gives the lie to stereotypes of the institution as overly preoccupied with rationality and dry, formal methods. Klee's work - both sophisticated and primitive, figurative and otherworldly - had a noted impact on later artists in America and Europe, including Jackson Pollock, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Nolan, Norman Lewis, and William Baziotes. As Clement Greenburg wrote in 1957, "[a]lmost everybody, whether aware or not, was learning from Klee." Oil on chalk-primed gauze, mounted on board, - The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York 1925Yellow-Red-BlueArtist: Wassily Kandinsky This complex work is built up around three key visual areas, dominated by yellow, red, and blue shapes respectively. These in turn form two overall zones of visual attention, one on the right-hand side of the canvas, formed from the interlocking red cross and blue circle, and one around the yellow rectangle to the left, embossed against a deeper shade of ochre. Variance in visual weight and positioning in space is implied by effects of color and shading, as the buoyancy of the yellow contrasts with the darker red tones, deepening further into purple and blue. A meshwork of straight and curvilinear interact across the canvas, as if playing out the battle of energies established between the different primary colors. Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866, and had settled in Germany before the close of the 19th century, becoming a key figure in the development of Northern-European Expressionism over the following years; his 1903 painting Der Blaue Reiter was the inspiration for the Expressionist art group of that name. Following a six-year spell in Soviet Russia bookending the revolution (1914-20), Kandinsky returned to Germany and began teaching at the Bauhaus in 1922, by which time his work had moved towards a purer form of abstraction. As a tutor on the preliminary course, he introduced his students to the analysis of primary colors and the nature of their interaction. In 1923, hoping to establish an underlying qualitative relationship between particular shapes and colors, he developed a questionnaire in which participants were asked to fill in a triangle, square, and circle the most appropriate primary color. The resulting yellow triangle, red square, and blue circle became a classic Bauhaus motif, one which Kandinsky explored and subverted in this famous work, transforming it into a lyrical evocation of the relationship between visual and musical expression. The same ideas informed his famous text Point and Line to Plane (1926) influenced by new research on Gestalt psychology, a key discussion-topic at the Bauhaus at this time. Kandinsky was interested in how certain combinations of color, line and tone might have innate spiritual and psychological effects, which were in turn connected to certain musical motifs. As the art historian Annagret Hoberg notes, however, the connotations of this painting extend beyond this, taking in more figurative realms: "[the] two centers...conjure anthropological associations. While in the yellow field one might see a human profile due to the structure of the lines and circles, the intertwining of red and blue form with the black diagonal is reminiscent of the theme of the battle between Saint George and the dragon" It is perhaps these more human associations which explain the iconic status of Kandinsky's abstract paintings in modern art history: as Hoberg notes, Yellow-Red-Blue "exerted an influence on later modernism, including, for example, Barnett Newman's series Who's Afraid of Yellow, Red and Blue (1966-69)." Oil on canvas - Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France 1925Club Chair (Model B3) (The Wassily Chair)Artist: Marcel Breuer Marcel Breuer's classic Model B3 chair is a revolutionary take on the classic upholstered 'club chair' of the nineteenth century drawing room, a sleek amalgamation of curving, overlapping stainless steel tubes, with taut rectangular fabric panels floating like geometric forms in space. The artist himself described the chair as "my most extreme work . . . the least artistic, the most logical, the least 'cozy' and the most mechanical." But it was also his most influential, exemplifying the groundbreaking developments in functional design that were marking out the Bauhaus by the mid-1920s. Lightweight, easily moved, and easily mass-produced, it met all the requirements of the school's design philosophy, its components arranged with a clarity that made its structure and purpose immediately legible. Born in Hungary in 1902, Breuer was amongst the youngest members of the original Bauhaus generation. Leaving his home-town of Pécs at the age of eighteen, he enrolled at Gropius's revolutionary new school in 1920, becoming one of its first students. Singled out as a prodigy, he was placed in charge of the woodwork shop, and after a sojourn in Paris returned to the Bauhaus as a teacher in 1925. A committed cyclist, Breuer saw the bicycle as the paragon of modern design, and was fascinated by his bicycle's curved handlebars, made of a new kind of tubular steel developed by the Mannesmann manufacturing company. He realized that the same material, which could be bent without breaking, might be used in furniture design: the 'club chair' is in part the result of this moment of inspiration. In order to produce his furniture on a large scale, Breuer started the company Standard Möbel in 1927. The colloquial name for the chair honors the painter Wassily Kandinsky, who admired the piece when he first saw it in Breuer's studio. As the art historian Seamus Payne notes, Breur's was "the first ever chair to feature a bent-steel frame...it marked the beginning of a new era in modern furniture with a design that maintains a progressive look even today." After World War II the Italian firm Gavina began producing the chair, ensuring its longstanding influence on design history, and marketing it as the "Wassily Chair." In 1968 the American company Knoll bought out Gavina and began manufacturing the Model B3, which, as a result, can still be purchased today. Chrome-plated steel, canvas upholstery - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Artwork Images 1925Universal BayerArtist: Herbert Bayer Herbert Bayer's Universal Bayer typeface, a classic of International Style typography, employs a minimal geometric design of the sans-serif type favored by the Bauhaus. At the same time, the simplicity of the design reflects Bayer's interest in enhanced legibility, generating a large amount of negative space between characters, in contrast to the cramped calligraphic scripts of traditional German typography. Describing typography as "human speech translated into what can be read," Bayer wanted written language to have the clarity of speech, and used only lower-case letters for this design since there was no phonetic distinction between upper and lower case. Each character has the same width, meaning that the letters represent interchangeable spaces on the page. The type was therefore extremely easy to work with and could be adapted to typewriter keyboards and typesetting machines. These aspects of the design perfectly sum up the Bauhaus emphasis on functionality and mass producibility. Like Breuer, Bayer was one of the younger members of the Bauhaus's golden generation, born in Austria in 1900. He initially trained as an architect, and in the late 1910s was part of the Darmstadt Artist's Colony, falling under the influence of that group's Jugendstil or Art Nouveau principles, as well as its emphasis on the idea of the 'total work of art'. However, in 1920 Bayer became intrigued by Gropius's new endeavor, and in 1921 enrolled at the school, studying under Kandinsky, Klee, and Moholy-Nagy. Returning as a teacher in 1925, he was named the Bauhaus's director of advertising and printing during the Dessau phase. He developed the Universal Bayer typeface after Gropius commissioned him to create a typeface which could be used in all Bauhaus publications. At this time, German printers still generally favored Fraktur, a dramatic Gothic typeface designed in the 16th century for Albrecht Dürer's Triumphal Arch (1526) woodcut. By stripping out the ornamentation of German script, Bayer expressed the spirit of a new cultural movement that rejected backwards-looking nationalism and embraced cosmopolitan modernity, a movement spearheaded by the Bauhaus, and later snuffed out by the Nazis. His design was also intended to work within a classic Bauhaus compositional concept, wherein letters were arranged in diagonals lines thrusting upwards across the page, wrapping around objects and picked out in strong colors. Bayer's typeface was never cast in metal, but its influence has been widespread and longstanding. As well as standing at the forefront of developments in International Style typography across the 1920s-50s, influencing the Architype Bayer and Architype Schwitters typefaces amongst others, it is also the inspiration for Google's Product Sans, and for Bayer Next, a typeface designed by Sascha Lobe for the Bauhaus-Archiv Museum in Berlin in 2014. Typeface 1919-25Bauhaus building in Dessau, GermanyArtist: Walter Gropius This iconic building, with its spare rectangular shape, glass-curtain walls, and distinctive vertical logo extending up one side, encapsulates the spirit of Bauhaus architecture, and predicts many of the developments that would emerge out of it in the years to come. As the architectural critic Lee F. Mindel wrote, Gropius's "innovative use...of industrial sash, glass curtain walls, and an asymmetrical pinwheel design forged an unforgettable path in the development of what we now call modernism and the International Style." Born into a culturally and politically well-connected family in Berlin in 1883, Walter Gropius was a decorated war-veteran and avowed patriot, whose advocacy of modernist design principles would see him hounded from his home-country by the Nazis. Like fellow giants of modern architecture such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, he worked in his youth for the influential proto-modernist architect Peter Behrens, and in 1913 published an article on "The Development of Industrial Building", featuring pictures of utilitarian structures such as grain-elevators, which would become a classic statement of the 'form-follows-function' philosophy of modernist design and building. In forming the Bauhaus in 1919 from two existing schools - the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts and Weimar Academy of Fine Art - he redefined the Arts and Crafts aesthetic for the twentieth century. However, the famous headquarters above was created for the school's relocation to Dessau in 1925. The project was funded by the city council, which also provided the land for the site. At that time, the Bauhaus was seen as a vital part of the culture of Dessau, which was then in the process of reinventing itself as a modern industrial center. Amongst the innovative features of the building are the new relationship it establishes between the viewer and the overall architectural space: the three wings, separated according to their functions, are adjoined asymmetrically, with no central view, so that the building can only be experienced by circumambulating it. The use of glass walls on recessed beams, meanwhile, not only cr… truncated (25,055 more characters in archive)