The Bauhaus is founded

Walter Gropius founds the Bauhaus school, where art, craft and industry are to be united. The school moves to Dessau and closes in 1933 under pressure from the Nazis.

The Bauhaus’s teachers and students spread modernism across the world, not least in the United States.

Germany in 1919 was a country in crisis after its defeat in the First World War, but also full of hopes for a fresh start in the new republic. Even before the war, the Deutscher Werkbund had brought together architects, artists and industrialists around the idea that industrial products should be both well made and beautiful. Walter Gropius, together with Adolf Meyer, had built the Fagus Factory, a factory with glazed corners that pointed to the future. When the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde left the school of arts and crafts in Weimar, he recommended Gropius, who merged it with the art academy to form a new school. The Bauhaus manifesto was illustrated with Lyonel Feininger’s woodcut of a cathedral, an image of all the arts working together.

Teaching began with a preliminary course on form, material and colour, led by Johannes Itten and later by László Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers. The students then worked in workshops for wood, metal, weaving, ceramics and printing, under both an artist and a master craftsman. The teachers included Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. When a right-wing government in Thuringia cut off its funding, the school moved in 1925 to the industrial town of Dessau, where Gropius designed a new school building with a workshop wing with an entire wall of glass. There Marcel Breuer designed tubular steel chairs and Marianne Brandt lamps for industrial production. After Gropius, the school was led by Hannes Meyer and finally by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

When the Nazis came to power, the Bauhaus, which they regarded as culturally Bolshevik, was forced to close in 1933. The teachers were scattered across the world. Gropius and Breuer taught at Harvard, Mies van der Rohe in Chicago, Moholy-Nagy founded a New Bauhaus in Chicago and Albers taught at Black Mountain College. In Tel Aviv, Bauhaus-trained architects built an entire White City. In this way the school, which existed for only fourteen years, became one of the most influential of the 20th century. In Sweden a closely related idea was promoted by the Swedish Society of Crafts and Design, where Gregor Paulsson, in the same year the Bauhaus was founded, published the pamphlet “Vackrare vardagsvara” (More Beautiful Everyday Things). The Bauhaus buildings in Weimar and Dessau are now World Heritage Sites.