The Story of the Bauhaus: The Art and Design School That Changed Everything

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Moholy-Nagy also created sculptures such as his kinetic light and motion machines called “light modulators,” and abstract, geometrical paintings. Oskar Schlemmer

Showcasing the school's female architects, photographers, painters, designers, and sculptors, the book includes prolific figures such as Anni Albers, as well as lesser known artists like Helene Borner, who headed up the school's textile workshop. Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy arrived at the school in 1923 to teach preliminary classes and run a metal workshop, but his real passion was for photography. Joseph Albers is best known during his time in the Bauhaus school for his glass pictures in 1928, which utilized glass fragments. His process consisted of sandblasting the glass, painting it in thin layers and baking in a kiln to create a glowing surface. His most famous work of the Bauhaus era is a glass painting from 1928, City. The Staatliches Bauhaus continues to be one of the most influential schools in design, architecture, and craft. Paul Klee joined the school’s faculty in 1920, bringing with him a fascination with the art and artistic processes of non-Western cultures and children that he melded with a geometric, often scientific approach to abstract painting. His tenure at Bauhaus saw him create works that are lauded for their poetry and humor, as with his 1922 painting, Dance, Monster, to My Soft Song!

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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 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. The typography workshop, while not initially a priority of the Bauhaus, became increasingly important under figures like Moholy-Nagy and the graphic designer Herbert Bayer ( 2001.392). At the Bauhaus, typography was conceived as both an empirical means of communication and an artistic expression, with visual clarity stressed above all. Concurrently, typography became increasingly connected to corporate identity and advertising. The promotional materials prepared for the Bauhaus at the workshop, with their use of sans serif typefaces and the incorporation of photography as a key graphic element, served as visual symbols of the avant-garde institution. This elegant and innovative teapot uses the interplay of geometric forms as the basis for a distinctively modern design, with its hemispheric body centered on crossbars and topped by a flat circular lid. The handle, a half-circle of ebony, and the cylindrical knop, are also made of ebony, and contrast vertically with the horizontal plane of the body, a juxtaposition complemented by the contrast in materials and colors. As the art curator Christian Witt-Dörring puts it, "[e]ach individual part - lid, handle, spout and base - can be clearly read. Brandt then put all of them together again by creating an abstract sculpture, which, at the same time, is a teapot. The flat and spherical shapes harmonize perfectly."

MIT Press Direct is a distinctive collection of influential MIT Press books curated for scholars and libraries worldwide. The Pan Am building in New York, designed by Gropius in the 1960s, was seen by many as a ‘monolithic mistake’. Photograph: F Roy Kemp/Getty Images Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866, and had settled in Germany before the close of the 19 th 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. Enjoy diving into the remarkable history, design theories, and political intricacies of the Bauhaus world, and get ready to embark on an unforgettable journey.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."

For design theory enthusiasts, The ABC’s of Bauhaus: The Bauhaus and Design Theory”by Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller is a good option. This canvas, one of hundreds created as part of Albers's vast Homage to the Square project, contains several squares, declining in size and oriented toward the lower edge of the pictorial frame. The red of the central square is, perhaps, only apparently red, as the viewer's perception of it is influenced by the hues of the outer squares: an example of what the artist called "the interaction of color". As Albers put it in his influential 1963 book of that name, "[i]f one says 'Red' (the name of a color) and there are 50 people listening, it can be expected that there will be 50 reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different." Due to the interaction of the color and the placement of squares within squares, the image can also paradoxically appear to both advance and recede, subverting the two-dimensional pictorial plane. Covering everything from the Weimar Republic to Gropius' departure as director, the recently-revised book now also includes a chapter discussing the movement's impact on Russia. The faculty flatly refused to work with the Nazis, and rather than cooperate with them, the school was closed in 1933 by the faculty’s vote.Daily updates on the latest design and architecture vacancies advertised on Dezeen Jobs. Plus occasional news. Dezeen Jobs Weekly In 1925, the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau, where Gropius designed a new building to house the school. This building contained many features that later became hallmarks of modernist architecture, including steel-frame construction, a glass curtain wall, and an asymmetrical, pinwheel plan, throughout which Gropius distributed studio, classroom, and administrative space for maximum efficiency and spatial logic.

The updated version of the book contains around 250 new images with new captions, updated biographies of key people from the Bauhaus alongside bibliographies of their work and a new foreword. Wilk, Christopher, ed. Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914–1939. Exhibition catalogue. London: V&A Publications, 2006. Additional Essays by Alexandra Griffith Winton During his tenure at Bauhaus, Kandinsky’s work became more focused on abstract shapes and lines, as displayed in his 1923 painting Composition VIII. Kandinsky remained with the school until its closing. László Moholy-Nagy The textile workshop, especially under the direction of designer and weaver Gunta Stölzl (1897–1983), created abstract textiles suitable for use in Bauhaus environments. Students studied color theory and design as well as the technical aspects of weaving. Stölzl encouraged experimentation with unorthodox materials, including cellophane, fiberglass, and metal. Fabrics from the weaving workshop were commercially successful, providing vital and much needed funds to the Bauhaus. The studio’s textiles, along with architectural wall painting, adorned the interiors of Bauhaus buildings, providing polychromatic yet abstract visual interest to these somewhat severe spaces. While the weaving studio was primarily comprised of women, this was in part due to the fact that they were discouraged from participating in other areas. The workshop trained a number of prominent textile artists, including Anni Albers (1899–1994), who continued to create and write about modernist textiles throughout her life. MIT Press began publishing journals in 1970 with the first volumes of Linguistic Inquiry and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Today we publish over 30 titles in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and technology.Moholy-Nagy onace stated that "to be a user of machines is to be of the spirit of this century." After he became the director of the Bauhaus's preliminary course in 1923, these ideas played a leading role in the school's development along the rationalist, Constructivist lines for which it is now remembered. He felt that the Bauhaus's early emphasis on Gesamtkunstwerk or the total work of art - influenced by the Expressionist philosophy of Itten - should be redirected toward an ideal of Gesamtwerk, a total work, which he identified with life's biological unity. Artistic experience was not to be partitioned off from life, but was to take its place as an integrated aspect of a broader, embodied perceptual process. Light Prop for an Electric Stage exemplifies this philosophy: Moholy-Nagy felt that its use of motion and time-bound light-patterns - dependent upon the viewer to create their own unique, narrative experience of the work - would transform his audience from passive recipients into active participants within an immersive creative environment. From 1925 to 1930, Gropius and Moholy-Nagy were responsible for the publication of 14 Bauhaus books. Supported in the practical aspects of publishing by Lucia Moholy, the aim of the project was to depict the challenges and accomplishments of the Bauhaus. In addition, monographic texts by both German and international authors were to awaken an understanding for the diverse currents of the avant-garde movement. The cabinetmaking workshop was one of the most popular at the Bauhaus. Under the direction of Marcel Breuer ( 1983.366) from 1924 to 1928, this studio reconceived the very essence of furniture, often seeking to dematerialize conventional forms such as chairs to their minimal existence. Breuer theorized that eventually chairs would become obsolete, replaced by supportive columns or air. Inspired by the extruded steel tubes of his bicycle, he experimented with metal furniture, ultimately creating lightweight, mass-producible metal chairs. Some of these chairs were deployed in the theater of the Dessau building.