The History of BauhausWALTER GROPIUS, THE

FOUNDER AND THE FIRST DIRECTOR OF BAUHAUS SCHOOL IN WEIMAR,

GERMANY

BAUHAUS IN PHASE 3 BERLIN,

GERMANY

BAUHAUS IN PHASE 2 DESSAU,

GERMANY

BAUHAUS IN PHASE 1 WEIMAR,

GERMANY

THE BAUHAUS

The Bauhaus began with an utopian definition: "The building of the future" was to combine all the arts in ideal unity.This required a new type of artist beyond academic specialisation, for whom the Bauhaus would offer adequate education.

The Bauhaus Curriculum & Concept

BAUHAUS SCHOOL IN

CHESS SET BY JOSEF HARTWIG

MENAGERIE BY HARIS THIEMANN

Students at the Bauhaus took a six-month preliminary course that involved painting and elementary experiments with form, before graduating to three years of workshop training by two masters: one artist, one craftsman. They studied architecture in theory and in practice, working on the actual construction of buildings. The creative scope of the curriculum attracted an extraordinary galaxy of teaching staff.

Bauhaus school attempted to integrate the artist and the craftsman, to bridge the gap between art and industry. Architecture was the supreme art form.

The basic pattern constitution in Bauhaus study:

BASIC COURSES IN BAUHAUS SCHOOL

PHOTO OF A DEPARTMENT STORE BY EDUARD LUDWIG

ART & GRAPHIC DESIGN

The Bauhaus was the first model of the modern art school. The Bauhaus curriculum combined theoretic education and practical training in the educational workshops. It drew inspiration from the ideals of the revolutionary art movements and design experiments of the early 20th century.

Marc Chagall, Self-Portrait with

His Wife, 1922, from the fourth

portfolio entitled Italienische und

Russische Künstler, etching and

drypoint, 17.3 x 14.5 cm, Bauhaus-

Archiv Berlin

Fernand Léger, Le déjeuner (The

Lunch), 1921, planned for inclusion

in the second portfolio entitled

Französische Künstler, lithograph,

21.2 x 28.3 cm, Bauhaus-Archiv

Berlin

Max Beckmann, Ringkampf

(Wrestling Match), 1921, from the

fifth portfolio entitled Deutsche

Künstler, drypoint, 20.7 x 14.5 cm,

Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Wassily Kandinsky, Komposition

(Composition), 1922, from the

fourth portfolio entitled Italie-

nische und Russische Künstler,

colored lithograph, 27.6 x 23.9 cm,

Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

the present, we have called upon all of the most important painters and printmakers of

Europe for a collective action. In five periodically appearing portfolios, we want to dem-

onstrate what is essential to them, and hence also the full range of today’s painting, its

spiritual height, and its ethical breadth. We are o!ering the German public a work that

has never been o!ered before in this form at a reasonable price. This has only become

possible through the willingness of each artist to make a sacrifice. And these are no mere

leftovers, but unique works. This is because the contributors know how much is at stake

for us, and that we are not attracted by business but by a profit that should set the Bau-

haus aglow.”The hopes and expectations concerning the Bauhaus prints were high. Perhaps the

euphoria of the beginning led to an underestimation of the potential problems. Indeed, it

soon became clear that the enterprise could not be realized either in the planned form

or in the original timeframe. Even if all the portfolios carry the year 1921 on the title page,

the project eventually ran on until the end of 1924. Profits also remained below expecta-

tions. At the height of inflation, the costs of producing these lavish portfolios could hardly

be calculated, let alone selling them at a profit. The Potsdam publishers Müller & Co.,

who took over distribution, complained about sluggish sales and subscribers angered by

the constant delays.Four of the planned five portfolios eventually appeared. Among these, the first with

works by the Bauhaus masters as well as the third and the fifth portfolios dedicated to

German contemporaries created the least di"culties. Considerably more complicated

was the production of the other two; and it is not without a certain irony that the main

problems began for the New European Graphics with the portfolios of the European

neighbors. According to the original concept, the second portfolio should be reserved for

the artists of the “Romanic” countries, the fourth those of the “Slavic” countries. How-

ever, the fourth portfolio, which eventually appeared at the beginning of 1924, brought

together a surprising constellation of Italian and Russian artists, while the second—ulti-

mately never completed—portfolio was supposed to have been entirely given over to

painters from France.Ideally, this legendary French portfolio would have contained works by Georges Braque,

Othon Coubine, Robert Delaunay, André Derain, Albert Gleizes, Juan Gris, Charles-

Édouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier), Fernand Léger, Jacques Lipchitz, Louis Marcoussis,

Henri Matisse, Amédée Ozenfant, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Léopold Survage, and

others, thereby o!ering an impressive panorama of new artistic tendencies in France.

At the same time, it would have formed an essential counterweight to the German art-

ists, who were ultimately disproportionally represented in the New European Graphics.

Production was repeatedly delayed because of di"culties contacting the French artists for

political and bureaucratic reasons. By the fall of 1924, four of the artists—Coubine, Léger,

Marcoussis, and Survage—had already submitted works. The last e!orts to finally com-

plete the portfolio were abandoned with the closure of the Weimar Bauhaus.

What were the selection criteria for the edition? Which names would represent the new

in European art? The participation of the Bauhaus masters was self-evident. Just as

self- evident was the inclusion of figures such as Picasso, Delaunay, Matisse, or Chagall,

without whom a collection of this ambition could not be taken seriously. The same

applied to artists such as Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckmann, or Kurt Schwitters,

The Artists of Our Time New European Graphics Klaus Weber

With the edition of Bauhaus Prints, the Bauhaus began, in its third year, an undertaking

that was as ambitious as it was unusual. With the title New European Graphics, this edition

was designed to o!er a comprehensive view of contemporary European art, presented in

an exemplary way in the medium of printmaking. At the same time, it was intended to

serve the profile of the Bauhaus as part of an international network of the avant-garde.

The “sixty important artists of Germany, Russia, France, Italy, representing the new spirit”

mentioned in a circular letter in the fall of 1921, were all asked to contribute a graphic

work to the Bauhaus in order to show, “how the artists of our time support the ideas of the

Bauhaus and are prepared to make a sacrifice for our cause through the gift of a work.”

The propagandistic role of this undertaking was underlined in the prospectus to the

edition: “For the many, who are still not acquainted, or have not been able to become

acquainted with the work of the Bauhaus, this edition should provide an introduction.”

Accordingly, the series was inaugurated with a portfolio of the artists currently teach-

ing at the Bauhaus: Lyonel Feininger, Johannes Itten, Paul Klee, Gerhard Marcks, Georg

Muche, Oskar Schlemmer, and Lothar Schreyer. The achievements of the Bauhaus

workshops were also to be demonstrated—here represented by the printing workshop

supervised by Lyonel Feininger and the lithographer Carl Zaubitzer as well as Otto Dorf-

ner’s bookbinding workshop. Feininger took over the organization of the project. He thus

became responsible for the supervision of the printing of all the lithographs, etchings,

woodcuts, and linocuts, each in an edition of one hundred and ten, as well as the design of

the portfolios, from the cover paper to the design. According to Feininger, he did this “for

the honor of our cause.”

Not unimportantly, the sale of the portfolios was also supposed to provide cash for the

school’s chronically empty co!ers: printmaking as a form of self-help. As Gropius wrote

in a first draft for the text of the prospectus: “Since we can expect nothing from the

administrators, profiteers, and parasites of materialism, we must help ourselves. . . . For

86

87

Prof. Dr. Barry Bergdoll, an art historian, is a professor at Colum-bia University and Chief Curator for Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

YEAR OF EXECUTION: 1922MATERIAL: wood, colored, rope weave on a frameFORMAT: 91.7 x 91.7 x 98 cm LOANED BY: Klassik Stiftung Weimar, N 24/36PHOTO: Hartwig Klappert, 2008

Cradle Peter Keler

LiteratureBehne 1922–23.

Behrendt 1923.

Berg 1922.

Berlin 1988b.

Marx/Weber 2003.

Mies van der Rohe 1922.

Neumann 1992.

Neumann 1995.

New York 2001.

Gropius’s design for the Chicago Tribune Tower was exhibited facing Mies’s tower. In his dynamic piling of units based on the forms and dimensions of the famous “Chicago window”—an A-B-A arrangement in which a large central fixed panel for light and a broad view was flanked by two operable sash windows for air—Gropius’s tower seemed the pragmatist next to Mies’s study of the skyscraper primarily as a problem of a unified form for a whole new scale of urban building. As Max Berg, that other great master of large-scale e!ects born of heroic form giving to modern technology—notably in his vast concrete-domed Jahrhunderthalle at Breslau—was one of the few commentators to have seized on this aspect of Mies’s work when he singled out Mies’s entry to the Friedrich-strasse competition in concluding his article in Bauwelt in May of 1922: “In this design, designer Mies van der Rohe of Berlin strives for the greatest simplicity under the watch-word: ‘honeycomb.’ But the floor plan does not correspond to the diverse and changing needs of a commercial building. If the entire structure was to serve as a department store, then the depth of the rooms could be regarded as justified—all the more so since the exte-rior walls, wholly dissolved in glass, allow light to penetrate to greater depths. The design exercises a powerful appeal and can be regarded as an interesting and fruitful attempt to master the formal problems of the high-rise.” With his prominent place in the 1923 exhibi-tion at Weimar, following on his prominence two years running in the Grosse Berliner Kunst ausstellung, Mies had emerged from obscurity. In 1928, he would shun the sugges-tion of taking the reins of the Bauhaus, but in 1930 he arrived in Dessau to direct the third and last phase of the school where art and architecture had entered new dialogues.

118

Contrast study with diverse material by Moses Mirkin

The Encounter by Johannes Itten

Komposition by Wassily Kandinsky

Cradle by Peter Keler

Design for the Multimedia Trade Fair Stand of a Toothpaste Producer by Herbert Bayer

ARCHITECTURE IN BAUHAUS

THE BAUHAUS STYLE WAS MARKED BY THE ABSENCE OF ORNAMENTATION AND BY HARMONY BETWEEN THE FUNCTION OF A BUILDING AND ITS DESIGN.

DESIGN INNOVATIONS-THE RADICALLY SIMPLIFIED FORMS, THE RATIONALITY AND FUNCTIONALITY, AND THE IDEA THAT MASS-PRODUCTION-WERE ALREADY DEVELOPED IN GERMANY BEFORE THE BAUHAUS WAS FOUNDED.

1. FUNCTIONALISM

GERMANY, POST-WWI - DUE TO A HOUSING CRISIS ARCHITECTS WANTED TO BUILD AS MANY COST-EFFECTIVE HOUSES AS POSSIBLE AS A RESPONSE.

2. MINIMUM-DWELLING

IN TERMS OF MINIMUM FLOORSPACE, DENSITY, FRESH AIR, ACCESS TO GREEN SPACE, ACCESS TO TRANSIT AND OTHER RESIDENTIAL ISSUES.

INTERIOR & INDUSTRY DESIGN

WALTER GROPIUS WAS GREATLY AFFECTED BY THE HORRORS OF WWI AND WANTED TO CREATE

A SCHOOL WHERE INDUSTRIAL METHODS WERE USED NOT USED

FOR DESTRUCTIVE WARS BUT FOR THE

BETTERMENT OF SOCIAL CONDITIONS.

Bauhaus Pottery for Industrial Product Development by Hubert

KittelWalter Gropius, director’s office

Table Lamp design by Wilhelm Wagenfeld

A Bauhaus styled living room in Barcelona designed by Jeff Wall

Wardrobe on Rollers for Bachelor by Josef Pohl

Bauhaus promoted the idea that artful objects should be partnered with technology to create livable solutions to living spaces.

Simply put, Bauhaus design offers practical, durable, inexpensive, yet aesthetically pleasing designs. To most, Bauhaus may mean a modernistic approach to architecture, but the concepts of Bauhaus can be use to provide easy solutions for making your home fully functional while retaining the unique aspects of you.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Chairs at Margate 1935

At first, practical fields of type

application were restricted to

small, miscellaneous printed

matters. With the appointment

of Moholy-Nagy in 1923, came

the ideas of "New

Typography" to the Bauhaus.

He considered typography to be

primarily a communications

medium, and was concerned

with the "clarity of the

message in its most

emphatic form".

Photography & Typography

EXAMPLE OF BAUHAUS TYPOGRAPHY

SELF PORTRAIT BY HERBERT BAYER

A CURRENT COSMETIC SHOP USING BAUHAUS

TYPOGRAPHY

LEAFLET DESIGN BY LASZLO MOHOLY-NAGY

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Chairs at Margate 1935

GILL SANS SERIES CREATED BY ERIC GILL, A STUDENT FROM BAUHAUS SCHOOL

A photomontage titled “Hands Act”