My knowledge of the Bauhaus prior to my recent visit to the MoMA was incredibly limited–I was vaguely familiar with it relative to some connections to IKEA and how they had “Bauhaus inspired” design/ethos (which I’ll discuss more in the next post), but further from that I was very much in the dark. My experience at the Bauhaus exhibit was incredible–I went twice, feeling like I must have missed things the first round. Totally and completely awe-inspiring. And I still feel like I’m only scratching the surface of truly understanding what this school/icon/movement meant to all of us, especially those of us in the advertising/design world. As a part one of a two part post, I’ll quickly overview the history of the Bauhaus and follow up with a perspective of what this can mean to us today and beyond.
The Bauhaus (1919-1933) was one of the very first colleges of design, coming out of the merger of the Weimar Academy of Arts and the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts. While the name lends itself to architecture (the term Bauhaus as an inversion of ‘Hausbau’ – house construction), founded by architect Walter Groupius, it was created on the premise of being able to create “total” work of art-art, architecture, graphic design, interior/industrial design, typography. At its heart, Bauhaus aimed to find the intersection of the aesthetics of great design and the mass commercial demands of the industrialized world.
Bauhaus is typically broken into three key stages, which are consistent with the three German cities it resided in. Weimar (1919-1925), Dessau (1925-30) and Berlin (1930-33). Weimar period saw the rise of the thought “Art and Technology: A new unity” (Groupius, director 1923) as the Dessau period forged forward, the notion of rebirth in knowledge “we are seeing the world through completely different eyes”. The final period was met with the avant garde movement in the Berlin arts scene, juxtaposed against the mounting feelings of nationalism as the Nazi regime ultimately closed the Bauhaus in 1933.
Now this was no run of the mill “art school”-quite the contrary. Fine artists such as masters like Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer were faculty (can you imagine a color theory class with Paul Klee and Kandinsky? Well, if you were at Bauhaus in 1923, they would have been teaching!) While they never outwardly rejected the ideals of Expressionism that had dominated the fine art scene-director Groupius felt a new period of history had begun with the end of the war and he wanted to create a new architectural style to reflect this new era. His style in architecture and consumer goods was to be functional, cheap and consistent with mass production (is this starting to sound familiar?)
The next post will talk more about the impact of this astounding movement…
I encourage you to learn more and explore the fabulous site MoMA has put together for the exhibit if you can’t make it to NYC to see it in person.
http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2009/bauhaus/Main.html#
Images via: Moma.org,
