Bauhaus

Bauhaus

The Bauhaus movement is a very famous German art movement that happened across 14 years, 1919 until 1933. Bauhaus was actually a design school. Responsible for teaching design in many forms, such as, furniture, architecture, art and many others. What made this school stand out though was how it taught. One of its main principles of design was to design with the idea of mass production, because up until then this had never been done before, so was very revolutionary. The name Bauhaus is actually an inversion of Hausbau which in Germen roughly translates to House Design.

The school was situated in Weimar and was created by Walter Gropius. The schools philosophies were extremely controversial for the time and frowned upon by the very right winged people of Weimar. So the school was moved to Dessau in 1925. It remained here until 1932 when the city was taken over by the Nazi party, the school them escaped to Berlin. It was only a year later that the Nazi Party surrounded the school in Berlin and arrested 32 of the students who unfortunately ended up in Nazi concentration camps.

It was due to the work of students and teachers who fled Germany and continued to develop the art style.

Notable Artists of the Bauhaus movement are:

Marcel Breuer

Lyonel Feininger

Paul Klee

Josef Albers

Marcel Breuer

Born 21/05/1902, Marcel Breuer become a student and a teacher at the Bauhaus school in Germany. During the war he fled to London and joined Gropius (Gropius formed the Bauhaus school). He was one of the most famous designers in Europe by this stage, made famous for his invention of tubular steel furniture, one big residence, two apartment houses and some shop interiors.

From London he and Gropius revolutionised American house design while teaching a whole generation of soon-to-be architects, not to mention famous ones. He and Gropius then went their own ways and Breuer expanded into institutional buildings. He designed the UNESCO Headquarters mission in Paris in 1952. Other famous buildings that he designed are, New Yorks Whitney Museum, and IBM’s La Gaude Laboratory.

Lyonel Feininger

Feiniger was the child of two American musicians and naturally at the beginning of his life learnt and studied music in particular the violin. It wasn’t until 1887 when he moved to Germany that he became interested in art. Feininger attended multiple schools in Germany and begun to get a name for himself by doing cartoons in various German newspapers.

In 1918 he meet Walter Gropius who appointed him as a Master and the then newly formed Bauhaus school. He was widely responsible for the teachings of wood cut-outs as he had devoted 6 months to the medium in 1918. He remained a teacher for the school for most of its 14 years with fleeting visits to surrounding European country’s.

It wasn’t until he had left Berlin in 1933 and then returned in 1936 that he became depressed about the political and cultural climate of Germany under the Nazi rule. So he accepted an invitation to teach at the Mills College in California. Feininger lived in America for the rest of his life.

Feininger was remembered for hid abstract seascapes and urban scenes. He generally used light hearted subject matter and had also had a strong interest in Germanic Woodcutting.

Paul Klee

Borne in Switzerland, Klee went to Germany to study fine arts in Munich. He developed a very distinct style heavily influenced by art done by young children and other artist like Van Gogh and Matisse. He used watercolours a lot and concentrated in nature and man maid buildings and machines as subjects.

In 1921 till 1931 he was a teacher at the Bauhaus where he wrote The Thinking Eye known to be one of the most detailed books on the science of design. Klee thought of the world as a place that could be unrealistic hence his toy like style and his beliefs that the world could be represented in the freest style and with wit. He set out to portray the world this way.

Josef Albers

Josef Albers started out as a teacher in general studies. After he studied art he returned to elementary school as an art teacher. While teaching he developed as a figure artist and printmaker. He decided to leave teaching and enrolled as a student and the Bauhaus school in 1922. He worked with stained glass and sandblasted glass primarily but also designed furniture, household objects and typeface. He also had a strong interest in photography. It was in 1925 that he became the first student from Bauhaus to be asked to become a master at the school. By the time the school closed he had become one of Bauhaus’s most famous artists.

After getting married Josef moved to America where he explored abstract painting and had multiple jobs in American colleges. He was the first living solo artist to be honoured at the Metropolitan Museum if Art in New York.

Having looked at and researched the Bauhaus movement and the above artists I now have a good idea of what Bauhaus is about and believe I can create a poster incorporating one of Jenny’s truisms.