The Bauhaus Art into Industry

Bauhaus was a design, architecture, and applied arts school in Germany in the early 1900s. It is possibly the most influential modern art school of the 20th century. It was a relatively short-lived institution based in Weimar from 1919 to 1925, Dessau from 1926 to 1932, and Berlin for a few months before the Nazis shut it down in 1933.

The school was founded by pioneering architect Walter Gropius. He combined the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts with the Weimar Academy of Arts to create Bauhaus. Gropius’ vision for Bauhaus was to create an alliance between art and technical craftsmanship by hosting workshops that demonstrated various art forms and craftsmanship and how they could be applied to each other.

This sentiment was not new. As we saw earlier with The Arts and Crafts movement and the belief that industrialisation had abandoned both quality and unique, individual style in favour of cheap and quick production. To combat this, they sought to combine artistic design with high-quality handicrafts while maintaining their functional purpose.

Morris believed in art for art’s sake and asserted that everyday objects could and should be beautiful. While agreeing with bridging the gap between art and craftsmanship, Bauhaus disagreed with Morris’ fixation on beautiful things created by individual artists. Art, Gropius believed, should serve a social role as well as an aesthetic one.

Bauhaus was forward-thinking. They knew machine production was the way of the future, a future that should reflect the modernisation of society after the horrors of World War 1, and that they could commandeer it into mass-producing beautiful yet functional objects for people on a larger, more affordable scale. It was time to move from Expressionism to objectivity. The Machine Age was an opportunity, not a curse.

Bauhaus was a unique institution. It respected woodwork, metalwork, stained glass, typography, textiles, and furniture design just as much as fine art, oil and watercolour painting, and sketches.

In the school’s early days, Gropius wrote: “We must not start with mediocrity. It is our duty to enlist powerful, famous personalities wherever possible, even if we do not yet fully understand them”. So, to execute his vision, Gropius invited many influential avant-garde artists and craftsmen to teach at Bauhaus. These “masters” – Bauhaus did not use the word “teachers” – included choreographer Oskar Schlemmerand, Hungarian multimedia artist László Moholy-Nagy, and Expressionist painter Lyonel Feininger, and the innovators of abstract art, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky.

The school attracted extraordinary students too. For centuries, art students had to attend prestigious neo-classical academies where art was about historical representation, and most students were highly-educated young men from wellto-do families. The students at Bauhaus, however, were keen to abandon tradition. Their ages varied from seventeen to their mid-40s (the school attracted numerous war veterans). Their social and educational backgrounds were mixed; one-third of the students were women, including industrial designer Marianne Brandt and textile artist Anni Albers, both of whom would become masters.

A vital characteristic of the masters’ teaching was their preoccupation with theoretical and intellectual approaches to the study of art. Their emphasis on problemsolving and experimentation conceptualised art as a subject that could be approached scientifically, thus granting it more respect. The workshops were usually taught by two masters – an artist and an expert craftsman – so theory and technical processes were equally important.

Students at Bauhaus were required to take a variety of workshops which Gropius had visualised as a wheel of concentric rings. The outer ring was the six-month preliminary basic course, the vorkurs, introduced by Swiss artist Johannes Itten. Before advancing to more specific workshops, students first had to understand the fundamental aspects of art and design, including colour theory and materials. When they progressed to specialised workshops, students were taught to see practical objects such as furniture and light fixtures worthy of an artistic approach. “Truth to materials” was one of their central beliefs, so ornamentation and the disguising of supporting materials like metal were discouraged, while the clean, honest simplicity of modernity was welcomed. Bauhaus’s textile and metalworking workshops were exceedingly popular. The textile artists created abstract designs that decorated the building. The metalworkers successfully developed models for items such as tableware and lighting fixtures for mass production, many of which were used in and around the building.

The designs often featured geometric designs with clean lines, abstract shapes, balanced forms, and no more decoration than was necessary. Their aesthetic was brutal but elegant. Paintings, especially those taught by Kandinsky and Klee, frequently included flat planes with overlapping shapes to create an abstract dimensionality. Bauhaus typography was visually clarifying and was approached as a pragmatic form of communication; their style influenced modern corporate and industry advertising. Furniture and architecture tended to have rectangular or curved features, and much of Bauhaus’s furniture incorporated modern-looking chrome metal. Once their style was established, the school embraced the motto “art into industry”.