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

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MIT Press Direct is a distinctive collection of influential MIT Press books curated for scholars and libraries worldwide. Albers was appointed to the teaching staff in 1923 before he had even completed his courses at the school. He began in the glass painting workshop and taught furniture design, drawing and lettering. 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.

The new introduction focuses on the centenary, and claims that 100 years later, Bauhaus continues to inspire the work of designers in a wide range of fields, as well as teaching methods. It says that the “holistic, often utopian aspiration to reform all aspects of life” seen at the Bauhaus school “has lost none of its fascination today”. 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-NagyGropius stepped down as director of the Bauhaus in 1928, succeeded by the architect Hannes Meyer (1889–1954). Meyer maintained the emphasis on mass-producible design and eliminated parts of the curriculum he felt were overly formalist in nature. Additionally, he stressed the social function of architecture and design, favoring concern for the public good rather than private luxury. Advertising and photography continued to gain prominence under his leadership. From the Publisher. Nicholas Fox Weber, for thirty-four years head of the Albers Foundation, spent many years with Anni and Josef Albers, the only husband-and-wife artistic pair at the Bauhaus (she was a textile artist; he was a professor and an artist, in glass, metal, wood, and photography). The Alberses told him their own stories and described life at the Bauhaus with their fellow artists and teachers, Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, as well as with these figures' lesser-known wives and girlfriends. 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! As we approach the Bauhaus centennial, this is a defining account of its energy and rigor, not only as a trailblazing movement in modernism but also as a paradigm of art education, where creative expression and cutting-edge ideas led to simultaneously functional and beautiful creations. Featured artists include Josef Albers, Marianne Brandt, Walter Gropius, Gertrud Grunow, Paul Klee, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Lilly Reich.

The Bauhaus style of architecture featured rigid angles of glass, masonry and steel, together creating patterns and resulting in buildings that some historians characterize as looking as if no human had a hand in their creation. These austere aesthetics favored function and mass production, and were influential in the worldwide redesign of everyday buildings that did not hint at any class structure or hierarchy. This book is made in collaboration with the Bauhaus-Archiv/Museum für Gestaltung in Berlin, the world’s largest collection on the history of the Bauhaus. Some 550 illustrations including architectural plans, studies, photographs, sketches, and models record not only the realized works but also the leading principles and personalities of this idealistic creative community through its three successive locations in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin. From informal shots of group gymnastics to drawings guided by Paul Klee, from extensive architectural plans to an infinitely sleek ashtray by Marianne Brandt, the collection brims with the colors, materials, and geometries that made up the Bauhaus vision of a “total” work of art.In 1928, Swiss architect Hannes Mayer took over from Gropius, but his tenure was a troubled one, with student-teacher ratios becoming a big problem for the school and various disputes with Communist students and anti-Communist faculty members. He was dismissed in 1930. This being the centenary year of the Bauhaus, there is a rush of books relating to it. Taschen has brought out a typically sumptuous compendium of the archive, called simply Bauhaus 1919-1933, by the art historian Magdalena Droste. Isokon and the Bauhaus in Britain, by Leyla Daybelge and Magnus Englund, describes the Hampstead hive of artistic intelligentsia where the Gropiuses sheltered when they left Germany. Henry van der Velde: The Artist As Designer, by Richard Hollis, resurrects the exceptional architect who created the Weimar art schools from which the Bauhaus grew. 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. 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.

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. 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." Metalworking was another popular workshop at the Bauhaus and, along with the cabinetmaking studio, was the most successful in developing design prototypes for mass production. In this studio, designers such as Marianne Brandt ( 2000.63a–c), Wilhelm Wagenfeld ( 1986.412.1–16), and Christian Dell (1893–1974) created beautiful, modern items such as lighting fixtures and tableware. Occasionally, these objects were used in the Bauhaus campus itself; light fixtures designed in the metalwork shop illuminated the Bauhaus building and some faculty housing. Brandt was the first woman to attend the metalworking studio, and replaced László Moholy-Nagy ( 1987.1100.158) as studio director in 1928. Many of her designs became iconic expressions of the Bauhaus aesthetic. Her sculptural and geometric silver and ebony teapot ( 2000.63a–c), while never mass-produced, reflects both the influence of her mentor, Moholy-Nagy, and the Bauhaus emphasis on industrial forms. It was designed with careful attention to functionality and ease of use, from the nondrip spout to the heat-resistant ebony handle. Forgács forgoes examining the architecture or design products to emerge from the Bauhaus, and instead looks at the political climate surrounding the school during its most prolific period. My aim in writing was to tell the history of the school as an institution,” she says. “What was the pedagogy? How did it change and what are the underlying aims?”

Following their immersion in Bauhaus theory, students entered specialized workshops, which included metalworking, cabinetmaking, weaving, pottery, typography, and wall painting. Although Gropius’ initial aim was a unification of the arts through craft, aspects of this approach proved financially impractical. While maintaining the emphasis on craft, he repositioned the goals of the Bauhaus in 1923, stressing the importance of designing for mass production. It was at this time that the school adopted the slogan “Art into Industry.”