The Bauhaus and modernism
A school in Weimar and Dessau where art, craft and industry were to meet – and where tubular steel furniture, lamps and typefaces got their modern form.
The Bauhaus was founded in Weimar in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius, by merging the town's art academy and school of arts and crafts. The programme was that all the arts should gather around building. Students first took a preliminary course in which they explored material, form and colour, and then worked in workshops for metal, wood, weaving, ceramics, wall painting and printing, each led by both a master craftsman and an artist.
In the first years the school was marked by Expressionism and handcraft. Around 1923 Gropius changed course with the slogan art and technology – a new unity. The workshops were to make prototypes for industry. Wilhelm Wagenfeld's table lamp, Marianne Brandt's teapots and Marcel Breuer's tubular steel armchair came out of that shift.
The school moved in 1925 to Dessau, to a building designed by Gropius, and in 1932 to Berlin, where it closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazis. Teachers and students scattered across the world and took the ideas to the United States, Britain, Israel and the Nordic countries. At the same time De Stijl in the Netherlands and Le Corbusier in France worked on similar questions.