THE H&A GUIDE TO BAUHAUS
We celebrate the centenary year of Bauhaus: one of the 20th century’s most in uential design movements
The Bauhaus school founded by Walter Gropius in 1919 lasted for just 14 years, yet its in uence was far- reaching. As the design movement celebrates its centenary this year, Alice Hancock discovers there’s a great deal more to Bauhaus than monochrome and concrete…
n 1978, Alan Powers, a British academic and 20th- century design specialist, visited the Massachuse!s home of the German architect Walter Gropius. Gropius was the founder of Bauhaus, the 20th century’s most renowned design school. This home – designed by Gropius in 1937 a "er he had escaped Nazi Germany – used the local tradition of white-painted timber building, although it had wide windows and a #at roof.
Powers was following in the footsteps of his father, an architect, who had visited Gropius in the same house in 1939, in quite a di $erent spirit. Then, it represented the future, but by 1978, Bauhaus was widely discredited.
The Gropius house embodies Bauhaus as we think of it: a style de% ned by straight lines, concrete and tubular steel. The ideas of simplicity and abstraction that the school pioneered have today become
so ubiquitous that we take them for granted. This year marks the centenary of Bauhaus. In Germany alone, three new museums are being built and a dedicated organisation, Bauhaus100 (bauhaus100.de) will oversee events worldwide. Bauhaus means ‘ building’ (bau) ‘ house’ (haus). It was the product of two schools brought together by Gropius in Weimar in 1919: the Grand-Ducal Saxon College of Fine Arts and the College of Applied Art.
‘ It was a strange pause-for-thought moment where artists reacted strongly against the First World War,’ says Alan, who argues that Germany, crippled by its war debts and out of love with its political class, needed something new.
Bauhaus’ Mission Statement
Gropius’ vision was of a school that united the arts ‘under the wings of great architecture’, according to a !yer that he wrote at the time. In its early years, it was in !uenced both by German expressionism, seen in the woodcut of a cathedral by Lyonel Feininger on the cover of the school’s early manifesto, and the Arts and Cra "s movement in Britain. ‘ The Bauhaus strives to reunite arts and cra "s,’ read the manifesto, ‘sculpture, painting, applied art and handicra "s.’
Initially, the school was housed at Weimar, where it received support from the liberal local government. But as conservative factions increased their power, the school came to be viewed with suspicion (‘as a bunch of hippies,’ says Skandium founder Magnus Englund) and in 1925 it moved to Dessau, thanks to Gropius’ courting of the local authorities there.
In Dessau, Gropius – who reputedly could not draw and paid students to ! nish his dra "s – created a purposebuilt school. It contained workshops, studio space and accommodation in a then-futuristic, industrial complex – with ‘Bauhaus’ emblazoned down one side (pictured on page 97).
These were the years when Bauhaus came into its own. The artist Paul Klee, who taught at the Bauhaus school, described it as ‘a community to which each one of us gave what we had’. The concept of art and living as a uni !ed whole came to fruition in theatre productions and parties, as well as in the workshops. For one fancy dress party, Gropius came as rival modernist architect Le Corbusier. At another, everyone dressed in metal.
In 1927, the Bauhaus opened its ! rst architecture course – something not done until then due to a lack of money for projects and because of Gropius’ vision of architecture as a culmination of all arts rather than an end in itself.
The following year, Gropius retired from the school, handing over the directorship to Swiss architect Hannes Meyer, a radical functionalist who had li#le time for aesthetics. The designers Marcel Breuer and Herbert Bayer both resigned. In 1930, Meyer was forced out by the Dessau government, which took against his perceived Communist tendencies, and the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe took charge.
Through no fault of Mies, however, the school soon closed. Under the Nazis, products of the Bauhaus were viewed as degenerate and the school was vili !ed. In 1932 it was moved to a disused telephone factory in Berlin but it was raided by the SS in 1933 and Mies chose to shut it down.
The Bauhaus ethos, so disliked by the Nazis, is well illustrated by an anecdote from a class led by the Hungarian painter, László MoholyNagy. He asked his students to make something from a piece of paper one day. Of the resulting origami birds and $owers, Moholy-Nagy singled out only one: a greetings card. This, he said, used the paper’s qualities and structure to their best advantage to create something that could only be made from paper.
Stories such as this – apocryphal or not – popularised the idea of Bauhaus style as one of stark lines and industry. Yet despite such emphasis on purpose, few of the school’s designs were mass-produced during its existence and its output was far more varied. When, in 1925, the school did found a company with the intention of marketing its products commercially, it was the colourful wallpapers and textiles that sold best.
A World of Colour
‘ I hate the phrase Bauhaus style,’ says Magnus Englund, who also founded the Isokon Gallery, which exists in the modernist !ats in Hampstead that Gropius "rst moved to when he escaped to Britain in 1934. ‘ What people are saying when they say Bauhaus style is white houses and steel furniture,’ he adds. ‘ It is so much more than that. They don’t realise about the colour. Think of Paul Klee or Josef Albers. They are known for their colour theory.’
Yet pieces that are today synonymous with Bauhaus – Marianne Brandt’s silver tea set, Marcel Breuer’s Wassily chair (inspired by the handlebars of his bicycle) and Wilhelm Wagenfeld’s WG24 table lamp – all conform to a monochrome, geometric aesthetic. Integrity, says Magnus, is what the school pioneered. ‘ It’s abstract, which today is not that strange. It was provocative in that it was without ornamentation. That’s not easy. You can hide mistakes with decoration. Simplicity is hard,’ he says.
But more than its aesthetics, it was its approach that set Bauhaus apart. ‘ The Bauhaus had a big e!ect on arts education and the way that subsequent art schools have been structured,’ says Johanna Agerman Ross, curator of Twentieth Century and Contemporary Furniture and Product Design at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Key to the Bauhaus curriculum was the preliminary course. Initially overseen by the Swiss painter Johannes I"en, it gave students an introductory education in shape, form, texture and colour theory, and has been much copied in the form of today’s art college foundation course. This is thanks to the far-reaching in #uence of Bauhaus teachers a $er the school in Germany was dissolved. In 1938, Mies became director of the architecture department at the Armour Institute of Technology in Chicago where MoholyNagy founded a new Bauhaus school in the city. Meanwhile Josef and Anni Albers taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina.
Student Michiko Yamawaki took Bauhaus ideas as far as Japan, where the New Architecture and Design College in Ginza became known as the Japanese Bauhaus. Even the National Institute of Design in India used the Bauhaus model when designing its curriculum in the 1960s.
Pioneering Women
The centenary has not only provided occasion for a reappraisal of the Bauhaus style, but also its lesser known characters, notably women. Until silversmith Marianne Brandt was admi"ed to the metal workshop, women were con % ned to the textile and wallpaper courses, and the short-lived po"ery studio, which produced the in #uential ceramicist Marguerite Wildenhain.
The work of artists such as Anni Albers, who pioneered modern textile design (and who Paul Smith cites as a muse) and Gunta Stölzl, the Bauhaus’ only female master, have been overshadowed by big-name male peers. Ironically, it is Brandt who achieved the highest price for a Bauhaus piece at auction. While the only Bauhaus artist to have a dedicated show in the centenary year is Anni Albers, whose work is at Tate Modern until 27th January.