BAUHAUS

(1919-1932)

Founded in Weimar in 1919, the Bauhaus rallied masters and students who sought to
reverse the split between art and production by returning to the crafts as the foundation
of all artistic activity and developing exemplary designs for objects and spaces that
were to form part of a more human future society. Following intense internal debate, in
1923 the Bauhaus turned its attention to industry under its founder and first director
Walter Gropius (18831969). The major exhibition which opened in 1923, reflecting
the revised principle of art and technology as a new unity, spanned the full spectrum of
Bauhaus work. The Haus Am Horn provided a glimpse of a residential building of the
future.

In 1924 funding for the Bauhaus was cut so drastically at the instigation of conservative
forces that it had to seek a new home. The Bauhaus moved to Dessau at a time of rising
economic fortunes, becoming the municipally funded School of Design. Almost all
masters moved with it. Former students became junior masters in charge of the
workshops. Famous works of art and architecture and influential designs were produced
in Dessau in the years from 1926 to 1932.
Walter Gropius resigned as director on 1st April 1928 under the pressure of constant
struggles for the Bauhaus survival. He was succeeded by the Swiss architect Hannes
Meyer (18891954) whose work sought to shape a harmonious society. Cost-cutting
industrial mass production was to make products affordable for the masses. Despite his
successes, Hannes Meyers Marxist convictions became a problem for the city council
amidst the political turbulence of Germany in 1929, and the following year he was
removed from his post.
Under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (18861969) the Bauhaus developed from 1930
into a technical school of architecture with subsidiary art and workshop departments.
After the Nazis became the biggest party in Dessau at the elections, the Bauhaus was
forced to move in September 1932. It moved to Berlin but only lasted for a short time
longer. The Bauhaus dissolved itself under pressure from the Nazis in 1933.
(www.bauhaus-dessau.de/bauhaus-1919-19333.html)
Bauhaus in Dessau
The Dessau phase of the Bauhaus is characterised by the consolidation of its orientation
towards the new unity of art and technology, which was initiated in Weimar in 1923. In
Dessau, the Staatliches Bauhaus became the Hochschule fr Gestaltung (school of
design). In a departure from craftsmanship, there were now professors and students in
place of masters, journeymen and apprentices. In the aspiring industrial city of Dessau,

the Bauhaus found the ideal environment for the design of models for industrial mass
production.
Starting with the famousBauhaus Building designed by the private architecture office
of its founding director Walter Gropius in cooperation with the Bauhaus workshops and
opened in 1926 , the majority of the products and buildings that still define the image
of the Bauhaus today were created in Dessau.
Important advocates for the Bauhaus in Dessau included the free-spirited aviation
pioneer and inventor Hugo Junkers, the citys liberal mayor Fritz Hesse and the State
Conservator Ludwig Grote. These not only looked to Bauhaus for solutions to the
shortage of affordable housing for workers in industrial regions but also anticipated
innovative cultural impulses for the city.
From 1926, the former Staatliches Bauhaus was officially called Bauhaus
Hochschule fr Gestaltung (Bauhaus School of Design). Instead of the customary
journeymans certificate of the Weimar period, graduates received a diploma and the
masters were appointed as professors. The artistic subjects were pushed aside in favour
of courses orientated towards industrial design. While Ittens students, who typically
had shorn heads, still wore voluminous cloaks in the Weimar phase, the clothing in the
Dessau phase was extremely modern: The men wore close-fitting suits, and the women
cut their hair in a bob and wore trousers or knee-length skirts.
However, mistrust and resentment were also evident in Dessau. The lack of affordable
living space due to the high costs for the experimental Dessau-Trten estate angered the
middle classes in Dessau in the same way that the libertarian lifestyle at the Bauhaus
sparked aversion.
(www.bauhaus-dessau.de/dessau-period-1925-1932.html)

Walter Gropius (1883- 1969)

Walter Gropius was drafted August 1914 and served as a sergeant and then as a
lieutenant in the signal corps in the First World War. He survived being both buried
under rubble and dead bodies, and shot out of the sky with a dead pilot. He was
awarded the Iron Cross twice. Gropius then, like his father and his great-uncle Martin
Gropius before him, became an architect. Gropius could not draw, and was dependent
on collaborators and partner-interpreters throughout his career. In school he hired an
assistant to complete his homework for him.
In 1908, after studying architecture in Munich and Berlin for four semesters, Gropius
joined the office of the renowned architect and industrial designer Peter Behrens, one
of the first members of the utilitarian school. His fellow employees at this time
included Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Dietrich Marcks.

In 1910 Gropius left the firm of Behrens and together with fellow employee Adolf
Meyer established a practice in Berlin. Together they share credit for one of the seminal
modernist buildings created during this period: the Faguswrek in Alfeld-an-der-Leine,
Germany, a shoe last factory. Although Gropius and Meyer only designed the facade,
the glass curtain walls of this building demonstrated both the modernist principle that
form reflects function and Gropius's concern with providing healthful conditions for the
working class. With its clear cubic form and transparent faade of steel and glass, this
factory building is perceived to be a pioneering work of what later became known as
modern architecture.

In 1913, Gropius published an article about "The Development of Industrial Buildings,"

which included about a dozen photographs of factories and grain elevators in North
America. A very influential text, this article had a strong influence on other European
modernists, including Le Corbusier and Erich Mendelsohn, both of whom reprinted
Gropius's grain elevator pictures between 1920 and 1930
Gropius's career was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Called up
immediately as a reservist, Gropius served as a sergeant major at the Western front
during the war years, and was wounded and almost killed. Gropius was awarded an Iron
Cross (when it still meant something, he confided to his friend Chester Nagel) while
fighting for four years for Germany on the Western Front
In 1918, he joined the November Group, which aimed to incorporate the impulses of
the revolution in art. From 1919, Gropius was the head of the Work Council for Art, a
radical group of architects, painters and sculptors. In addition, he contributed to the
Glserne Kette (crystal chain), a chain letter initiated by Bruno Taut that called for
the "dissolution of the previous foundations" of architecture and the "disappearance of
the personality" of the artist.
Bauhaus times for Mr. Gropius
Henry van de Velde, the master of the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts in
Weimar was asked to step down in 1915 due to his Belgian nationality. His
recommendation for Gropius to succeed him led eventually to Gropius's appointment as
master of the school in 1919.
It was this academy which Gropius transformed into the world famous Bauhaus,
attracting a faculty that included Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, Josef Albers, Herbert
Bayer, Lszl Moholy-Nagy, Otto Bartning and Wassily Kandinsky.

Gropius explained the idea of the Bauhaus in the founding Manifesto, a four-page
booklet with the famous Cathedral woodcut by Lyonel Feininger on its cover. The
schools most innovative educational aspect was its dualistic approach to training in the
workshops, which were codirected by a craftsman (master of works) and an artist
(master of form). The crafts-based work was understood as the ideal unity of artistic
design and material production. According to Gropiuss curriculum, education at the
Bauhaus began with the obligatory preliminary course, continued in the workshops and
culminated in the building.

Manifesto of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar

April 1919
The ultimate goal of all art is the building! The ornamentation of the building was
once the main purpose of the visual arts, and they were considered indispensable parts
of the great building. Today, they exist in complacent isolation, from which they can
only be salvaged by the purposeful and cooperative endeavours of all artisans.
Architects, painters and sculptors must learn a new way of seeing and understanding
the composite character of the building, both as a totality and in terms of its parts.
Their work will then re-imbue itself with the spirit of architecture, which it lost in
salon art.
The art schools of old were incapable of producing this unity and how could they,
for art may not be taught. They must return to the workshop. This world of mere
drawing and painting of draughtsmen and applied artists must at long last become a
world that builds. When a young person who senses within himself a love for creative
endeavour begins his career, as in the past, by learning a trade, the unproductive
artist will no longer be condemned to the imperfect practice of art because his skill
is now preserved in craftsmanship, where he may achieve excellence.
Architects, sculptors, painters we all must return to craftsmanship! For there is no
such thing as art by profession. There is no essential difference between the artist
and the artisan. The artist is an exalted artisan. Merciful heaven, in rare moments of
illumination beyond mans will, may allow art to blossom from the work of his hand,

but the foundations of proficiency are indispensable to every artist. This is the original
source of creative design.
So let us therefore create a new guild of craftsmen, free of the divisive class
pretensions that endeavoured to raise a prideful barrier between craftsmen and artists!
Let us strive for, conceive and create the new building of the future that will unite
every discipline, architecture and sculpture and painting, and which will one day rise
heavenwards from the million hands of craftsmen as a clear symbol of a new belief to
come."

Sommerfeld House in Berlin is considered to be the first joint endeavour undertaken

in the sense of the Bauhaus. It was designed by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer
(1921/22), and it integrated furnishings made by the students

In 1923, Gropius initiated a change of course at the Bauhaus with a major exhibition
under the motto "Kunst und Technik Eine Neue Einheit" (art and technology a new
unity). The school now turned towards industrial methods of production. As a result, the
highly influential master, Expressionist painter and first director of the preliminary
course, Johannes Itten, left the Bauhaus. Gropius appointed the Hungarian artist
Lszl Moholy-Nagy as his successor.
With the politically motivated move to the industrial city of Dessau in 1925, a new era
began for the Bauhaus. During this period, which is seen as his best and most
productive, Gropius designed not only the Bauhaus Building (opened in 1926) but was
also intensively involved in the development of the large-scale residential building and
the rationalisation of the construction process. The buildings created in Dessau included
the Masters Houses (1925/26) that were built for the Bauhaus masters, the DessauTrten housing estate (19261928) and the Employment Office.

Commissioned by the
municiaplity of Dessau
and built from 1926 to
1928, the Trten Estate
was conceived within
the framework of the

Reichsheimstttengesetz (State Home Law), which meant that the houses were owned
by the residents from the outset. With the suburban estate, the Bauhaus sought a
practical solution to the problem of building affordable housing for the masses. Gropius
designed an estate of terraced houses with kitchen gardens measuring between 350 and
400 m2, to grow vegetables and practice small-scale animal husbandry, thus supporting
self-sufficiency. The cubes, put back-to-back, form semidetached houses, and are
combined in groups of from four to twelve units. The faades are divided by vertical
and horizontal rows of windows; the interiors are painted in light tones. The furniture
designed specifically for the project in the Bauhaus workshops found no buyers. The
construction of the houses was the result of the need to economise: the load bearing
walls are made of prefabricated and inexpensive hollow slag-concrete blocks; the
ceilings with reinforced concrete joists. Shortly after completion, defects in design and
construction became evident and residents and owners soon began to make numerous
alterations. The first changes, chiefly to reposition too-high windows, were carried out
in 1934, initially according to a consistent plan. Today therefore, little of the original
homogeneity of the estate remains.

Gropiuss employment office is

distinguished by the same goal of
rationalisation taken by the
economy. He planned two parts
defined by their functions and
designed a long, two-storey
administration block and a
protruding one-storey circular
building with a glazed shed roof for
the public. A traditional cubiclebased office structure would not
cope with the large number of visitors. This meant choosing a ground plan that would
permit the public to be channelled, thereby allowing the job-seeking process to proceed
smoothly. Separated according to sex and profession, there were five entrances for the
job-seeking men and women, behind each of which lay sectors organised along similar
lines. Faced with yellow tiles, the steel skeleton is, due to its unusual ground plan, a
highly interesting example of functional architecture.
In 1928, Walter Gropius unnerved by the quarrels in local politics about the Bauhaus
handed the post of director over to the Swiss architect and urbanist Hannes Meyer,
whom Gropius had brought to the Bauhaus the previous year as the head of the newly
founded architecture class. In 1934, Gropius emigrated to England and then on to the
USA in 1937. In 1938, he organised the exhibition Bauhaus 19191928 at the Museum
of Modern Art in New York together with Herbert Bayer. n 1946, Gropius founded the
young architects association The Architects Collaborative (TAC), a manifestation of his
life-long belief in the significance of teamwork, which he had already successfully
introduced at the Bauhaus. When he died in 1969 in Boston, the Bauhaus was at least as
famous as its founder.
(http://bauhaus-online.de/en/atlas/personen/walter-gropius)
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Gropius)

Wassily Kandinsky (1866- 1944)

Wassily Wasilyevich Kandinsky was born on December, 16th (4), 1866 in Moscow, in a
well-to-do family of a businessman in a good cultural environment. In 1871 the family
moved to Odessa where his father ran his tea factory. There, alongside with attending a
classical gymnasium (grammar school), the boy learned to play the piano and the cello
and took to drawing with a coach. "I remember that drawing and a little bit later
painting lifted me out of the reality", he wrote later. In Kandinsky's works of his
childhood period we can find rather specific color combinations, which he explained by
the fact that "each color lives by its mysterious life".

In Russia Kandinsky was in the vein of the post revolutionary cultural and political
development. From 1918 till 1921 he cooperated with ISO of Narkompros (People's
Committee of Education) in the field of art training and museum reform. 1919 and 1921
he published six big articles. As Chairman of the State Purchasing Commission at the
Museum Bureau of the ISO Department of Narkompros he participated in founding
twenty two provincial museums. But Kandinsky renders the biggest influence as a
teacher of the Moscow Svomas (Free Workshops), and then Vkhutemas. Being its
Professor since October, 1918, he designed a special curriculum based on the analysis
of color and form, developing the ideas stated in On the Spiritual in Art. Then,
participating in the foundation and management of the Moscow Institute of Artistic
Culture (Inkhuk) he designed a curriculum for it, based on his theory. However, his
opinion differed from the opinion of the Board of the Institute. Kandinsky's opponents Rodchenko, Stepanova and Popova - are for the exact analysis of materials, for their
constructive arrangement and setting. Any display of irrationality in creative process

was emphatically denied. Kandinsky, in his turn, vigorously opposed the Constructivist
opponents: "Just because an artist uses 'abstract' methods, it does not mean that he is
an 'abstract' artist. It doesn't even mean that he is an artist. Just as there are enough
dead triangles (be they white or green), there are just as many dead roosters, dead
horses or dead guitars. One can just as easily be a "realist academic" as an "abstract
academic". A form without content is not a hand, just an empty glove full of air". The
unceasing attacks of his colleagues-artists considering his works as " mutilated spiritism
" (Punin) were a determinative for Kandinsky to leave Moscow in December, 1921. The
pressure of socialist ideology upon the art, which led eventually to appearance of
socialist realism, began after 1922. Kandinskii's pictures for many years are put away
from the Soviet museums.
Study for circles on black,
1921

Bauhaus Era
After returning to Germany, Kandinsky accepts an invitation of Walter Gropius, the
founder of the well-known Bauhaus (the Higher school of construction and art
designing) and he and Nina moved to Weimar where Kandinsky headed a fresco
workshop. He again taught and developed the ideas. They dealt, first of all, with the
deep analytical studying of separate elements of a picture, which resulted into "Point
and Line to Plane" in 1926. Kandinsky also worked much and experimented with
color, applying his analytical foundation and the conclusions in his teaching.
Kandinsky's works again underwent changes: individual geometrical elements
increasingly entered the foreground, his palette was sated with cold color harmonies
which, at times, are perceived as a dissonance, the circle is used differently, as a
sensual symbol of perfect form. "Composition VIII", 1923 is the main work of the
Weimar period. Alongside with conceptual works, at this time he created Small
Worlds rich in fantasy for Propilei Publishing House and some chamber, "intimate"
pictures, such as "Small Dream in Red", 1925. Also Kandinsky lectured and exhibited
in the USA, having established together with with Feininger, Javlenskii, and Klee
"Blue Four".
In 1925, due to the right wing parties' attacks Bauhaus in Weimar was closed. The
second period of Bauhaus in Dessau began in quite favorable conditions: Kandinsky

and other artists conducted some free classes of painting where they, besides teaching,
could paint freely. "Yellow-Red-Blue", 1925, is one of the significant works
describing a stage of "cold romanticism" in Kandinsky's painting. "A circle, which I
use recently so often, could not be called otherwise but romantic. And the present day
romanticism is essentially deeper, more beautiful, more substantial and more salutary
- it is a piece of ice, in which fire is burning. And if people feel only cold and do not
feel fire - so much the worse for them..." In Dessau Kandinsky with a new force was
carried away with romantic ideas of "Gesamtkunstwerk" (an idea of synthesis of arts
in one work). These ideas were embodied in Yellow Sound and in graphic support of
Mussorgskii's Pictures to the Exhibition.
Kandinsky's painting of the last years in Bauhaus was penetrated with ease and
strange humour, which again would be shown in his late Parisian works, For example,
his picture "Capricious", 1930, can be possibly referred to them, it evokes some
cosmically Egyptian associations and is filled with fantastic symbolical images in the
spirit of Paul Glue, the artist with whom Kandinsky made friends at that time. About
1931 national socialists started a large scale campaign against Bauhaus, which led to
its closing in 1932. Kandinsky with his wife emigrated to France where they took up
their residence in a new house in the Parisian suburb Neuilly-sur-Seine. Between 1926
and 1933 Kandinsky painted 159 oils and 300 water colors. Many of them,
unfortunately, have been lost after Nazis declared Kandinsky's and many other artists'
paintings to be "degenerate" (one of them - Marc Chagall).

Capricious
(www.wassilykandinsky.net)

Jan Despo


(1903 1992), 30
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