Bauhaus Art Guide: The Legacy of the Bauhaus School

Also known as Staatliches Bauhaus, Bauhaus was a German school of design and subsequent art movement in the early twentieth century that married fine art and functionality in the visual arts, decorative arts, and architecture. The modern design aesthetics of the Bauhaus school include minimalistic, functional designs, and experimenting with shape.

Architect Walter Gropius founded the Staatliches Bauhaus in 1919 in Weimar, Germany. Gropius taught his students to eliminate the distinction between the so-called ‘fine’ arts and ‘applied’ arts, viewing fine artists and craftsmen as equal. The professors at the Bauhaus school taught their students to prioritize the elements of design above all else and bring creativity back to manufacturing.

Here is a brief overview of the history of the Bauhaus school of art.

• Weimar era beginnings (1919–1925): When the Weimar-based art schools of Grand-Ducal Saxon Academy of Fine Art and the Grand Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts merged, and needed a new architecture department in 1919, Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus school. The educational objective was to combine an architectural school, academy of fine arts, and craft school under one roof. In addition to painting and sculpture, students would also take classes in metalwork, cabinetmaking, weaving, pottery, and typography. In its heyday, the school’s faculty included prominent avant-garde artists like modernist painters like Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Josef Albers, and the photographer Lazlo Maholy-Nagy. In 1925, the school lost funding from the local conservative government and was forced to relocate.
• Bauhaus Dessau (1925–1932): In 1925, the school moved its headquarters to Dessau, Germany, where architect Hannes Meyer took over as architectural director for the school. Meyer’s efficient and cost-effective designs led Bauhaus Dessau to turn its first profit, but he alienated many of the previous faculty and became so polarizing that the mayor of Dessau fired him in 1930. Unwilling to run the school himself, Walter Gropius hired modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to take over the architecture program. The Nazi party gained control of Dessau in 1932 and cut the school’s funding, precipitating a move to Berlin.
• Move to Berlin (1932–1933): Mies and other architecture students rehabilitated a defunct factory building in Berlin to serve as the main Bauhaus building, where it was run for ten months without political interference. The power of the Nazi party and Adolf Hitler was a constant stressor on the school’s existence, with the party decrying the modernist aesthetics as “un-German” “cosmopolitan modernism” After a brief, involuntary closure by the Gestapo in 1933, the school reopened for a short period of time before Mies closed it for good.
• Bauhaus teachers in America: Following the Nazi regime in Germany, many Bauhaus artists emigrated to the United States to places like New York and Chicago. Illustrators like Anni and Josef Albers both taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. The geometric style Bauhaus influenced mid-century modern architecture, which became a dominant influence in twentieth-century architecture.

The Bauhaus style can be thought of as a modernization of the arts and crafts movement, which rejected mass production and focused on craftsmanship, creativity, and quality in fine arts, decorative arts, and architecture. Here are a few characteristics of Bauhaus art.

1. 1. Functional: The designs created at the Bauhaus school emphasized the function of the object, the simplicity of forms, and a lack of extraneous ornamentation or decoration. Bauhaus style made objects that may appear minimalistic, but are artfully crafted and functional.
2. 2. Emphasis on design: The Bauhaus curriculum blurred the lines between aesthetic disciplines—from painting to furniture design. Students were required to take courses in textile design, metalworking, pottery, typography, furniture making, painting, sculpture, and interior design, in an effort to understand the elements of design and artistry from every angle.
3. 3. Avant-garde: The art created at the Bauhaus was in line with trends in abstraction and avant-garde art movements happening concurrently in Europe—like Art Deco and Dada—because of the influence of the working artist faculty.
4. 4. Playing with shape: Bauhaus works are typically characterized by a mixture of overlapping or stacked geometric shapes.
5. 5. Color theory: The students of the Bauhaus school studied color theory, giving them the ability to mix and match colors to create a pleasing atmosphere that was creative, but not overwhelming.

Here are four of the most notable Bauhaus artists.

1. 1. Oskar Schlemmer: Oskar Schlemmer was sculptor, painter, and designer known for his minimalistic, geometric style. Schlemmer taught painting at the Bauhaus school and even designed their emblem—a black and white rendering of a geometric profile of a face. Bauhaus Staircase—his most famous painting—depicts students climbing a color-blocked staircase in the Bauhaus school, and hangs in the Museum of Modern Art.
2. 2. Wassily Kandinsky: Painter Wassily Kandinsky was the leader of the influential Die Blaue Reiter German art collective, which was of a group of four artists who expressed spiritual truths through art. Kandinksy’s work in the late 1920s and 1930s—including the shape and line-driven Red, Yellow, Blue—are some of the first western abstract paintings. He taught painting at the Bauhaus school between 1922–1933.
3. 3. Paul Klee: Painter Paul Klee was also a member of Die Blaue Reiter along with Kandinsky, and taught in the Bauhaus school from 1921 to 1932. His paintings are characterized by bright colors, often playing an arrangement of geometric shapes to create a greater, more cohesive image. For instance, his painting Senecio combines a series of triangles, rectangles, and shapes to create an almost Cubist-looking face.
4. 4. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was a Hungarian artist who taught painting and photography at the Bauhaus. His paintings integrate simple shapes—like rectangles, lines, and circles—in designs that play with the elements of art, like color, form, and light. His series Konstruktionen. Kestenermappe is a collection of lithographs that experiment with intersecting planes through floating, overlapping shapes.

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