1919-2019 100TH ANNIVERSARY

OF THE BAUHAUS

THE CENTENNIAL OF THE BAUHAUS

Walter Gropius (1883-1969)

The Bauhaus centennial will be one of the most important cultural events in Germany of 2019. Plans include a large opening festival, an international research and exhibition project and three new Bauhaus museums. A Bauhaus network created especially for the anniversary will be organizing the 2019 program that involves the German states that are key Bauhaus locations — Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia and Berlin — as well as 10 other German states. Under the slogan "Thinking the world anew," Bauhaus exhibitions and projects are to show how relevant the school still is for the present and the future. In the U.S. the Bauhaus Centennial is being celebrated at Harvard University. The Bauhaus and Harvard is on view at the Harvard Art Museums through July 28, 2019. This expansive exhibition features works by major artists, including student exercises, design objects, photography, textiles, typography, paintings and archival materials. For more information -www.harvardartmuseums.org

Herbert Bayer, graphic designer

The school incorporated art, architecture, and distinctive furniture that would become known as Bauhaus style. These early designers were revolutionary in their experimental designs, which had a simplicity, harmonious geometry and industrial-like practicality; the idea was that high design should be cheap enough to be uitilised by the masses. Mass production was the aim and the schools slogan and its core raison d'etre became Art into Industry.

Walter Gropius 1883-1969

The Bauhaus, founded in 1919 by the architect, Walter Gropius (1883-1969), in Weimar, Germany began with a utopian mission; it was to be “the building of the future... combine architecture, sculpture and painting in a single form ... to one day rise toward the heavens from the hands of a million workers as the crystalline symbol of a new and coming faith.” His concept (based in part on the De Stijl movement of the Netherlands), like that of William Morris, was to teach that all arts had their roots in handicrafts thus removing any distinction between fine arts and applied arts. The school insisted on using only primary colors; red, blue and yellow for the vast majority of their artistic works. This color palette, coupled with very simple geometric shapes, led to a distinctive look for the Bauhaus style.

THE BAUHAUS

BAUHAUS ARCHITECTURE

There are a number of characteristics to the Bauhaus/International Style of architecture: 1) It shuns ornamentation and favors functionality 2) Uses asymmetry and regularity versus symmetry 3) It grasps architecture in terms of space versus mass Bauhaus buildings are usually cubic, favor right angles, (although some feature rounded corners and balconies); they have smooth facades and an open floor plan. Bauhaus architecture, whose founding father was Walter Gropius, developed in Germany in the 1920s and later in the U.S., in the 1930s. The American form of this architectural style was dubbed the International Style after Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and other leaders of Bauhaus migrated to the U.S., with the Nazi’s growing influence. The Bauhaus school in Dessau was closed on April 11th, 1933, by the police, at the insistence of the National Socialist government.

Walter Gropius 1883-1969

Purists assert that Bauhaus architecture can only refer to buildings in Germany and anything else should be termed International Style – while others use the terms interchangeably. The term International Style was really adopted after the publication of a book that coincided with a 1932 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The book, by historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock and architect Philip Johnson, was called, The International Style. The teachings at the Bauhaus school of design, which functioned from 1919 to 1933 (first in Weimar and later in Dessau), were greatly influenced by the machine age. The school's aim was to fuse all the arts under the concept of design. The school had 700 students and was known for requiring its students to forget everything they had learned to date. Gropius engaged some of the best artists of the day, Paul Klee, Vassily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger, and Oscar Schlemmer to teach at the school. Influential Bauhaus architects were Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Hannes Meyer and Le Corbusier.

Herbert Bayer was both a student and a teacher at the Bauhaus and worked in a wide range of fields including paint ing, sculpture, typography, advertising and architecture. In his early years as a student he studied painting with Kandinsky, but in just a short while he was teaching one of the Bauhaus' first classes on typography. The amount of work that he created before he was 28 was more notable than most designers entire careers of work. He spent time teaching at the Bauhaus, working as an Art Director for the Container Corporation and as an architect in both Germany and America. He developed a sans-serif alphabet of lowercase letters titled "Universal".

Herbert Bayer 1900-1985

GRAPHIC ARTS

Carl Ernst Hinkefuss was a popular Bauhaus illustrator known for modernist graphic design work that integrated art with commercial values. He did a great deal of advertising design for Hamburg Amerika oceanliners. In 1929, Hinkefuss published, Mein Vogel Paradies (My Bird Paradise), a tie-bound modern block book for children featuring stunning color lithographs depicting abstracted forms of birds reduced to their fundamental forms, accompanied by verse about each individual bird, both text (printed in silver ink) and images printed on black paper. A two-page introduction by Hinkefuss encourages children to create their own pictures based upon his simple designs.

Carl Ernst Hinkefuss 1903-1970

The Barcelona chair is a chair designed by LUDWIG MIES van der ROHR and LILLY REICH. It was originally designed for the German Pavilion, that country's entry for the International Exposition of 1929, which was hosted by Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. It is interesting to note that Mies did not fully develop any contemporary furniture successfully before or after his collaboration with Reich. Although many architects and furniture designers of the Bauhaus era were intent on providing well-designed homes and manufactured furnishings for the "common man, the Barcelona chair was an exception. The form is thought to be extrapolated from Roman folding chairs known as the Curule chair – upholstered stools used by Roman aristocracy. According to Knoll Inc., despite its industrial appearance the Barcelona chair requires much hand craftsmanship.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich

Marcel Breuer 1902-1981

Marcel Breuer's revolutionary chair (above) is one he designed while still a student. He was an architect and designer, one of the most-influential exponents of the International Style; he was concerned with applying new forms and uses to newly developed technology and materials in order to create an art expressive of an industrial age.

BAUHAUS DESIGN

Although classic Bauhaus colours tended to be neutral - most often chromium, black and white, brown and grey; occasionally bright, primary colours would be used. Unlike traditional cabinet makers, the Bauhaus designers were prepared to experiment with innovative materials - commonly their furniture included combinations of steel, wood, leather, plywood and woven textiles. Design-wise, the studio artists turned away from anything overly fussy and pretentious - they wanted clean, modern lines uncluttered by stylistic affectations. The school was influenced by Modernism, which had begun in the 1880's as a rejection of tradition and many of the values it encompassed. They virtually reinvented furniture design and produced functional, clean-lined shapes that seemed impossibly modern. The idea was to break a chair down to its most minimal form and Marcel Breuer predicted that eventually the chair would dissappear altogether:

Marcel Breuer Nested Tables

Bauhaus Design cont.

Albers enrolled as a student at the Weimar Bauhaus in 1920. Although Albers had studied painting, it was as a maker of stained glass that he joined the faculty of the Bauhaus in 1922, approaching his chosen medium as a component of architecture and as a stand-alone art form. The director Walter Gropius, asked him in 1923 to teach in the preliminary course 'Werklehre' of the department of design to introduce newcomers to the principles of handicrafts. In 1925, Albers was promoted to professor. At this time, he married Anni Albers who was a student there. His work included designing furniture and working with glass. As a younger art teacher, he was teaching at the Bauhaus among artists who included Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee. The so-called form master, Klee taught the formal aspects in the glass workshops where Albers was the crafts master; they cooperated for several years.

In 1920, Walter Gropius appointed Klee to the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar. He became the director of the bookbinding workshop in 1921, of the metal workshop in 1922 and of the glass painting workshop from 1922–1923 to 1925. From 1921 to 1924–1925 in Weimar, Klee taught classes in elemental design theory as part of the preliminary course. The first Klee exhibition was organised in New York in 1924. That same year, Klee and the artists Alexej Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky and Lyonel Feininger co-founded the group Die Blauen Vier (The Blue Four). One year later, the Vavin-Raspail gallery in Paris organised the first French exhibition of Klee’s work. In 1925, Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook was the second volume in the series of Bauhaus Books published by the Bauhaus.

Paul Klee 1879-1940 Puppet and Painting

Josef Albers 1888-1976

MAJOR BAUHAUS ARTISTS

Gertrud Arndt, photographer and weaver

WOMEN OF THE BAUHAUS

The Bauhaus School is celebrated and renowned for its liberty, free-thinking and opportunity; however female students did not enjoy the same recognition and estimation as their male counterparts. While male students such as Paul Klee, Kandinsky and Mies van der Rohe were celebrated - female Bauhaus academics were overlooked within the school; hampering their studies and careers. Bauhaus translates as “house of construction” and although more women than men applied on its foundation in 1919 they were sidelined into more traditional courses such as weaving, a practice that contradicted the schools apparent liberal agenda. While classes were not segregated, sexism did exist within the academy, hindering female talent and expression. Women could be radical, once they were willing to accept a conventional course of study.

During her years at the Bauhaus, Brandt became one of Germany’s most celebrated industrial designers. In 1928, Brandt became head of the metal department. During the same year, she developed one of the most commercially successful objects to come out of the school: the best-selling Kandem bedside table lamp. After leaving the Bauhaus in 1929, Brandt became director of the design department for the metalware company Ruppelwerk Metallwarenfabrik GmbH.

Alma Siedhoff-Buscher 1899-1944

Siedhoff-Buscher was one of the Bauhaus’s few women to switch from weaving to the male-dominated wood-sculpture department. There, she invented a number of successful toy and furniture designs, including her “small ship-building game,” which remains in production today. The game manifested Bauhaus’s central tenets: its 22 blocks, forged in primary colors, could be constructed into the shape of a boat, but could also be rearranged to allow for creative experimentation. The toy could also be easily reproduced. Her most pioneering work proved to be the interior she designed for a children’s room at “Haus am Horn,” a home designed by Bauhaus members that exemplified the movement’s aesthetic. She filled it with modular, washable white furniture. She designed each piece to “grow” with the child. In 1944 Siedhoff-Buscher was the victim of a bombing raid in Buchschlag near Frankfurt am Main.

Marianne Brandt 1893 - 1983

Anni Albers 1899-1994 Textile and graphic artist

Anni Albers was a German textile artist and printmaker. She is, after the British weaver Sir Peter Collingwood, perhaps the best known textile artist of the 20th century. At the Bauhaus she began her first year under Georg Muche. Women were barred from certain disciplines taught at the school and during her second year, unable to get into a glass workshop with future husband Josef Albers, Albers deferred reluctantly to weaving, the only workshop available to her. With her instructor Gunta Stölzl, however, Albers soon learned to appreciate the challenges of tactile construction and began producing geometric designs.

Gunta Stölzl 1897 - 1983 Textile Artist

Gunta was a German textile artist who played a fundamental role in the development of the Bauhaus school's weaving workshop. As the Bauhaus' only female master she created enormous change within the weaving department as it transitioned from individual pictorial works to modern industrial designs. Her textile work is thought to typify the distinctive style of Bauhaus textiles. She joined the Bauhaus as a student in 1920, became a junior master in 1927 and a full master the next year. She was dismissed for political reasons in 1931, two years before the Bauhaus closed under pressure from the Nazis.

Berger was one of the most creative members of the weaving workshop, with a more expressive and conceptual approach than that of many of her contemporaries. After Stölzl abdicated her seat as head of the department in 1931, Berger assumed the position and established her own curriculum, but remained there only until 1932, when she set out on her own. Berger went on to open her own textile atelier in Berlin, and began the process of applying for a visa, with the goal of relocating to the U.S. There, she planned to join Moholy-Nagy’s New Bauhaus school in Chicago and escape Hitler’s regime (she was Jewish), but her application stalled. While waiting for approval, she returned to Croatia, where she was arrested by the Nazis and taken to Auschwitz. She died there in 1944, but her fabrics live on in collections from the Met to the Art Institute of Chicago.

Otti Berger 1898 - 1944 Textile Artist

Marianne Brandt Help! Liberate Women!

Photo-Montage 1926

Oskar Schlemmer 1888-1943

BAUHAUS THEATRE

Oskar Schlemmer was a German painter, sculptor, designer and choreographer associated with the Bauhaus school. In 1923 he was hired as Master of Form at the Bauhaus theatre workshop, after working some time at the workshop of sculpture. His most famous work is "Triadisches Ballett," in which the actors are transfigured from the normal to geometrical shapes. Also in Slat Dance and Treppenwitz, the performers' costumes make them into living sculpture, as if part of the scenery. Schlemmer was banned from working as an artist for his non-conformist style by the Nazi regime in 1930 and he died of melancholia in 1943.

Bauhaus / Triadic Ballet performed in 1922 Costumes by Oskar Schlemmer

Due to the repressive political measures of the National Socialists and the drastic cutbacks in funding, only a limited amount of work was possible during the Bauhaus’s last phase in Berlin. After the premises were searched and the classrooms sealed by the police and the SA, the paramilitary branch of the NSDAP, in April 1933, regular teaching activities were no longer possible. Instead, the brief and dramatic Berlin phase led many professors and students to move elsewhere in Germany or to emigrate. After the dissolution of the Bauhaus in Berlin, many of those who taught and studied at the Bauhaus emigrated contributing greatly to the global dissemination of the Bauhaus concept.

THE END OF BAUHAUS IN GERMANY

DAY PRESS 2019

This book was created on an iPad using the Book Creator app. It is a small tribute to the Bauhaus. The information used in this book is a compilation from various sources and shows just a sampling of the various arts and artists of the Bauhaus. Margaret Suchland