What Was The Bauhaus

The Bauhaus was first and foremost an art school, albeit of a new and interdisciplinary kind. All students started with a “preliminary course” aimed at unlearning academic conventions of depiction and fostering a creativity based on the essentials of shape, color, and the physical properties of various materials. It was not a class for mastering any particular medium, technique, or genre, but rather a class for learning to think outside old definitions and rules of art.

After passing the preliminary course, students joined a workshop such as pottery, printing, weaving, furniture/cabinet making, metalwork, theatre, typography, or wall painting. In this way, [Bauhaus founder Walter] Gropius hoped to train a new generation of artist-designers who would be immersed in the practical and theoretical work of building the environment, shaping everyday life, and modernizing the consciousness of an entire society.

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In 1923, the year of the Bauhaus’s first major public exhibition and also the year in which the Hungarian artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy joined the faculty, the school’s tone shifted significantly. The primacy of “building” and the ethic of social participation remained, but were joined by a new motto: “Art and Technology — A New Unity.” (Gropius, joined by Moholy-Nagy, drove this controversial change; some of the early faculty adapted, but several left or were forced out.)

From 1923 to 1928 — the Weimar Republic’s most stable and prosperous years — the Bauhaus solidified itself as a “laboratory of modernity” and achieved most of its lasting legacy, in both design and pedagogy. Emphasis shifted away from Expressionist mysticism and handcraft to new ideals; collaboration with industries of mass production; use of modern industrial materials and technologies; and faith in the capacities of design and technology to shape an egalitarian, humane, and progressive society.

According to the Bauhaus, the new obligation of artists, builders, and designers was to put technology to socially responsible, constructive uses and to create new forms that embraced and embodied “the machine age.” In so doing they hoped to impress upon others the ideal of participation in creating a total culture — not merely a politics — of modern democracy.

~ Sarah Miller of Harvard University’s Busch-Reisinger Museum