Bauhaus Design

The German art and design school, The Bauhaus, was one of the most influential modernist art schools, one of whose approach to teaching and understanding art’s relationship to technology and society had a major impact in United States and Europe, long after it closed.

The motivation behind the creation of the Bauhaus lay in anxieties about the soullessness of manufacturing in the 19th century, and in fears about art’s loss of purpose in society. Emerged in the mid 1920, the Bauhaus was shaped by the late 19th and early 20th movements and trends, which had sought to level the distinction between applied and fine arts and to reunite manufacturing and creativity. This fact is reflected in the romantic medievalism of the school’s early years,

The Gropius’s Bauhaus attracted the fabulously talented faculties, the creators of the school’s program. Many of the most influential designers of the twenty century taught or studied there: Marcel Breuer in furniture, Bayer in graphics, Gropius and Mies van der Rohe in architecture, Anni Albers and Gunta Stӧlzl in textiles, Oskar Schlemmer in theater design, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in film; working alongside them were great artists Josef Alberts, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky.

There were political problems from the beginning. Women students protested against being confined to the weaving and ceramics workshops; locals objected to the students’ bohemian habits, and more seriously, the Weimar Nazis saw the Bauhaus as a fertile ground for Bolshevism, despite Gropius’s ban on political activities. But, his biggest problem was the growing power of Johannes Itten, who was one of the teachers. As a member of the Mazdaznan sect, Ittan shaved his head, wore flowing robes and suggested breathing exercises and strict vegetarianism to the students, whom he taught to approach art instinctively and

Its components are arranged with a clarity that makes its structure immediately legible. The designer constructed the chair using recently developed seamless-steel bent tubing that could endure physical tension without faltering. Although Wassily Kandinsky was interested in geometric abstraction at the time he was teaching at the Bauhaus, this piece came to be popularly associated with him decades later, and by accident when it was promoted as the Wassily Chair by an Italian