Bauhaus
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History The school was founded by Walter Gropius at the conservative city of Weimar in 1919 as a merger of the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts and the Weimar Academy of Fine Arts.
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Artists The design innovations commonly associated with Gropius and the Bauhaus -- the radically simplified forms, the rationality and functionality, and the idea that mass-production was reconcilable with the individual artistic spirit -- were already partly developed in Germany before the Bauhaus was founded.
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Architecture The paradox of the early Bauhaus was that, although its manifesto proclaimed that the ultimate aim of all creative activity was building, the school wouldn’t offer classes in architecture until 1927.
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Index Kyle Skunta Introduction to Typography Course No. 23201 Fall Semester 2007
Bauhaus Timeline 19 0 7
1919
Deutscher Werkbund in Munich
Bauhaus Founded in Weimar
Werkbund Exhibition Model 1914
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193 2 Bauhaus Founded in Berlin
Bauhaus Founded in Dessau
Nazi’s Close Bauhaus 19 3 3
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n 1907, artists and industrialists founded the Deutscher Werkbund in
which in his eyes were timely, but without expression - combining glass
Munich, aimed at improving Germany’s economy by “enhancing craft
stairwells with monumental building volumes of Egyptian inspiration.
work”. The young architect Walter Gropius soon became one of the
leading figures in the Werkbund. In line with the ideas of his teacher,
with the founding of the Bauhaus in Weimar. Not only had he turned
In 1919, Gropius succeeded in enforcing his art school reform
Peter Behrens, he considered industrial building to be the most important
central ideas of the Werkbund concerning art school reform into reality,
contemporary form of architecture. For the Fagus-Werk in Alfeld/Leine,
he had also captured the spirit of change of a young generation willing
which he began in 1911 together with his partner, Adolf Meyer, he
to rebuild a bankrupt post-World War I Germany. The name Bauhaus
realized a façade with storey-high steel windows, a motif which was
seemed to fulfill these expectations, and the expressionist style of Lyonel
to become an icon of industrial architecture. In 1914, he erected a
Feininger’s cathedral on the front of the Bauhaus manifesto, which
model factory for the Werkbund exhibition, in search of an expressive
invited participation in this adventure, came across as modern and
and inspired language for building materials such as iron and glass -
future-oriented.
history
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Herbert Bayer; Walter Gropius, BAUHAUS 1919-1928.
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Joost Schmidt: Poster for the Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar, Color lithograph (1923)
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he Bauhaus was never an art school in the traditional sense. “Art alone cannot be taught” is the credo postulated in the Bauhaus Mani-
festo of 1919. Goal of the course was to form a universal designer able to work with equal creativity in the fields of architecture, handcrafts, or industry. It was the basic principle of Walter Gropius to “fecundate the students from two sides, both in the arts and in the crafts”. He considered intuition to be just as indispensable as rational analysis and solid craft abilities. The creative potential of Avant-garde art was for him the basis for a lively, future-oriented work at his new school.
Artists Wassily Kandinsky
1866 - 1944
Walter Adolph Gropius
1883 - 1969
Herbert Bayer
1900 - 1985
Joost Schmidt
1893 - 1948
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T
Bauhaus
he first masters appointed to the Bauhaus were artists. “Countless
subordinated to functional and technological considerations, while the
ideas produced by modern painting once it shed its old constraints
output of fine arts was greater than ever. The visionary unity of art and
now lie fallow, awaiting their implementation in the trades,” Walter
design in a modern, more humane society began to crack.
Gropius wrote in 1923. Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and other Bauhaus
artists had departed from the traditional concept of images, turning to
Kallai, remarked that the Bauhaus displayed an objectivity shaped by
abstraction in the years leading up to World War I, and started to
stereotype mass production and determined entirely by considerations
analyze the laws of artistic design with new theories and doctrines of art.
of utility and construction, on the one hand, and a metaphysical
Many of their works made a highly organized impression, contrasting
attitude born of dreams, visions, pure inner commitment or paradoxical
sharply with a contemporary reality that was perceived as chaotic.
wizardry, on the other. The fine art produced at the Bauhaus ranged
The initial years at the Bauhaus in particular witnessed
from late expressionism and abstraction to figurative, concrete socially
heated controversies about the value of art and its place in the general
critical and surrealist works. There is no trace of any Bauhaus-specific
order of things and the school’s training programme. The controversy
style. This holds true for the works of masters like Johannes Itten, Wassily
reached a new stage with the introduction of free painting classes in the
Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer, who were famous painters
winter semester of 1927/28. The workshops were being increasingly
even at that time, and also for the students’ artistic output.
In the late 1920s, the editor of the magazine “bauhaus”, Ernst
(Top-Left) Walter Kandinsky: Joyful Arising, color lithograph (1923) (Top-Center) Paul Klee: Sheets from the portfolio for Walter Gropius, Tempera on primed cardboard (Top-Right) Lucia Moholy: Bauhaus building Dessau, Balcony of the studio house, Vintage print (1926) Herbert Bayer: Staatliches Bauhaus, Weimar, Book-printed halftone, photographs, and lithograph (1923)
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Bauhaus Buildings The Bauhaus Building
1919
Glass Blocks — Gropius House
1937
The Bauhaus Archive
1979
architecture T
he ultimate aim of all creative activity is a building! The decoration of buildings was once the noblest function of fine arts, and fine arts
were indispensable to great architecture. Today they exist in complacent isolation, and can only be rescued by the conscious co-operation and collaboration of all craftsmen. Architects, painters, and sculptors must once again come to know and comprehend the composite character of a building, both as an entity and in terms of its various parts. Then their work will be filled with that true architectonic spirit which, as “salon art”, it has lost.
The old art schools were unable to produce this unity; and
how, indeed, should they have done so, since art cannot be taught?
Schools must return to the workshop. The world of the pattern-designer
and applied artist, consisting only of drawing and painting must become
For there is no such thing as “professional art”. There is no essential
Architects, painters, sculptors, we must all return to crafts!
once again a world in which things are built. If the young person who
difference between the artist and the craftsman. The artist is an exalted
rejoices in creative activity now begins his career as in the older days
craftsman. By the grace of Heaven and in rare moments of inspiration
by learning a craft, then the unproductive “artist” will no longer be
which transcend the will, art may unconsciously blossom from the labour
condemned to inadequate artistry, for his skills will be preserved for the
of his hand, but a base in handicrafts is essential to every artist. It is
crafts in which he can achieve great things.
there that the original source of creativity lies.
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Sources: Benedikt Taschen, Bauhaus 1919-1933. The Bauhaus Archive Museum fur Gestaltung. 1990. http://www.bauhaus.de Magdalena Droste, Peter Hahn, Karsten Hintz, B채rbel Mees, Klaus Weber, Chris Wolsdorff, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin http://www.bauhaus-dessau.de/ Bauhaus Dessau Foundation Prof. Dr. Omar Akbar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus Jim Hood, May 2005.