The
Bauhaus was a German school of art
that encompassed crafts, design and architecture (aerial
view of The Bauhaus). As an artistic movement it coincided with the years of the
Weimar Republic,
1919-1933.
While
traditional schools of art in the Wilhelmine era were conservative and
generally hostile to the work of the avant-garde, the Bauhaus was in
the vanguard of innovation in every aspect of art from teaching techniques
to productions and exhibitions.
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Photo: Artists of The Bauhaus,
Germany. 1926.
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In many respects the Bauhaus artists
were the antithesis of the artists of social criticism in that they
sought to adapt art forms to modern life. The architect, Walter Gropius,
founded
the movement in Weimar; by 1923 it had its first major exhibition and
between 1923 and 1928, the Bauhaus flourished. In 1925 Gropius had
moved the school to Dessau.
"Let us therefore create a new guild of craftsmen without the class-distinctions
that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsmen and artists!" --Walter
Gropius, Bauhaus Manifesto
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Photo: Walter
Gropius,
architect and founder of The Bauhaus, 1883-1969. In 1919 he
was made director of the Council of the Arts in Berlin.
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“The ultimate aim
of all visual arts,” exclaimed Gropius in 1919, “is
the complete building!” He distinguished current efforts
of integrating the arts with previous “salon” art that
kept arts, crafts, architecture and fine arts segregated. “There
is no essential difference between the artist and the craftsman,” Gropius
continued. “Let
us create a new guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions
that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist! Together
let us desire, conceive, and create a new structure of the future,
which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting into
one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the ha
nds of
a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.”
As
quoted in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, p. 435 |
Sarah Miller of the Harvard Busch-Reisinger Museum aptly sums up the
scope of work conducted by the Bauhaus and its impact on modern art,
architecture and design.
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Photo: 03/31/1938-Chicago,
IL: Chicago Bauhaus School—in the former home of Marshall
Field. Dr. Walter Gropius (lt) and
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy on the famous circular staircase with students.
©Bettmann/CORBIS
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The
Bauhaus was first and foremost an art school, albeit of a new
and interdisciplinary
kind.
All students started with a “preliminary course” aimed
at unlearning academic conventions of depiction and fostering a
creativity based on the essentials of shape, color, and the physical
properties
of various materials. It was not a class for mastering any particular
medium, technique, or genre, but rather a class for learning to
think outside old definitions and rules of art. After passing the
preliminary
course, students joined a workshop such as pottery, printing, weaving,
furniture/cabinet making, metalwork, theatre, typography, or wall
painting. In this way, Gropius hoped to train a new generation
of artist-designers who would be immersed in the practical and
theoretical
work of building the environment, shaping everyday life, and modernizing
the consciousness of an entire society.
In 1923, the year of the Bauhaus’s first major public exhibition
and also the year in which the Hungarian artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
joined the faculty, the school’s tone shifted significantly.
The primacy of “building” and the ethic of social participation
remained, but were joined by a new motto: “Art and Technology—A
New Unity.” (Gropius joined by Moholy-Nagy, drove this controversial
change; some of the early faculty adapted, but several left or
were forced out.) From 1923to 1928—the Weimar Republic’s
most stable and prosperous years—the Bauhaus solidified itself
as a “laboratory of modernity” and achieved most of
its lasting legacy, in both design and pedagogy. Emphasis shifted
away from Expressionist mysticism and handcraft to new ideals;collaboration
with industries of mass production; use of modern industrial materials
and technologies; and faith in the capacities of design and technology
to shape an egalitarian, humane, and progressive society. According
to the Bauhaus, the new obligation of artists, builders, and designers
was to put technology to socially responsible, constructive uses
and to create new forms that embraced and embodied “the machine
age.” In so doing they hoped to impress upon others the ideal
of participation in creating a total culture—not merely a
politics—of modern democracy.
Sarah Miller, From Modern Art to “Degenerate” Art:
German Culture, Politics and the Avant-Garde, 1910-1933 (A Guide
to Teaching, Busch-Reisinger Museum Harvard Museum Art Museums,
2002), p. 74.
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From 1920 to 1931, Paul Klee taught at the Bauhaus both in Weimar and
Dessau. He produced a series of
lectures and essays which remain among the most important contributions
to art theory in the 20th Century. Although he was a prominent instructor
and prolific artist, during his years of teaching at The Bauhaus, German
society did not appreciate his work Felix Klee describes the reaction
of the German people: "At
the Bauhaus we were completely isolated from the rest of the world; even
if from
1923
on,
people would come to see our exhibitions, it was mainly to poke fun at
them....[Klee] had only a small circle of enthusiastic followers, those
who could understand him. Not everyone could." From Pædagogisches
skizzenbuch (Pedagogical Sketch-Book) 1944, by Paul Klee.
The Bauhaus shared a similar interest with the Blue Riders regarding
the thinking of Weimar's
left-wing intellectuals including the transcendentalists,
but ultimately devoted themselves to German idealist metaphysics. Paul
Klee's art embodied the ideals and hope of German metaphysics in sharp
contrast to the realities of the devestation caused by World War 1. According
to art critic Robert
Hughes:
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Photo:Paul
Klee in his
studio
at the Weimar Bauhaus.
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Painting:1919,
by Paul Klee.
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Transcendentalism
was the common interest of the painters who formed the Expressionist
group known as Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in 1910. It was
also a deep-set part of Bauhaus thought and practice, for nothing
could be further from the truth than the idea that the Bauhaus
represented some kind of logic opposed to the world-transforming
aspirations of Expressionism. When Kandinsky taught at the Bauhaus,
so did a Swiss artist named Paul Klee. And though Klee was not
a Theosophist he was, like Kandinsky, devoted to an ideal of painting
that stemmed from German idealist metaphysics.
The monument of Klee's
obsession with this metaphysics was a singular book, The
Thinking Eye, written during his teaching years at the Bauhaus
- one of the
most detailed manuals on the "science" of design ever written, conceived
in terms of an all embracing theory of visual "equivalents" for spiritual
states which, in its knotty elaboration, rivalled Kandinsky's. Klee tended
to see the world as a model, a kind of orrery run up by the cosmic clockmaker
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a Swiss God - to demonstrate spiritual truth. This helps account for the toylike
character of his fantasies; if the world had no final reality, it could be
represented with the freest, most schematic wit, and this Klee set out to do.
Hence his reputation
as a petit-maître...
There was a clear link between some of Klee's
plant motifs and the images of plankton, diatoms, seeds, and
micro-organisms that
German scientific photographers were making at the same time. In
such paintings, Klee tried to give back to art a symbol that must
have seemed lost forever in the nightmarish violence of World War
I and the social unrest that followed. This was the Paradise-Garden,
one of the central images of religious romanticism - the metaphor
of Creation itself, with all species growing peaceably together
under the eye of natural (or divine) order."
- From Robert Hughes, "The Shock of the New" (Knopf;
Revised edition); August 13, 1991.
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Photo: Bauhaus School in
Chicago. Marshall Field's former mansion serves as the Bauhaus,
a university of practical arts, Chicago, Illinois.
©Bettmann/CORBIS
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The immediate successor to the Bauhaus that was dissolved in 1933 under
National Socialist pressure was The New Bauhaus, founded in Chicago
in 1937 by La'szlo' Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946). The New Bauhaus later became
the School of Design, which in 1944 became the Institute of Design
in
Chicago. |
