Bauhaus

RELATED TERMS: Hochschule für Gestaltung; Black Mountain College; Gesamtkunstwerk

The Bauhaus, a revolutionary art and design school, opened in 1919 under the architect Walter Gropius (1883–1969). He remained director until 1928. In all, there were three directors of the Bauhaus, all of them architects. After Gropius, Hannes Meyer (1889–1954) held the directorship between 1928 and 1930 and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) led the school for its last three years. Gunter Metken (1994) notes that Hannes Meyer radically changed the course set by his predecessor, Gropius. Due to his social commitment and keen awareness of the contemporaneous crisis, Meyer established the Bauhaus as a centre for social, industrial and housing design, rather than an institution for the aesthetic education of an elite.

Its predecessors were the institute to the Grand Ducal Saxon Art Academy and the Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts. The latter closed at the outbreak of the First World War (Forgacs, 1995).

The Bauhaus moved twice during its relatively short existence. Founded in Weimar, it relocated to Dessau in 1926 and then to Berlin in 1932. These changes of location evidence a prolonged struggle with sceptical and conservative authorities. After the start of World War 2, artists and instructors at the Bauhaus fled to the United States and brought the Bauhaus ideas to the universities of America. The influences of the Bauhaus guided American art and design education for many years and, in some respects, they still do. American art education has been steeped in the Bauhaus practices. Educators today are re-evaluating these ideas to see if they are still valid as teaching methods in the twenty-first century.

Gropius intended the school to unify and renew the arts, based on a concept of Gesamtkustwerk, the total work of art or total design, which would serve a new architecture and enable new forms of social life.  His focus was on a marriage between art and industry. This Gesamtkunstwerk ideal shaped the structure of the institution and the trajectory of its development. 

The Bauhaus legacy is twofold: as a laboratory for the artistic avant-garde; and as the birthplace of modernist design. Indeed, the name ‘Bauhaus’ has practically become a synonym for modernism (Siebenbrodt, Wall and Weber, 2009). The modern movement promoted the idea that the arts, design and architecture might catalyse progressive social change. 

Although this ambition was shaped by diverse intellectual and political influences, one important reference point was the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, the ‘total work of art’. 

This concept, though it plays a key role in the theory and practice of modernist avant-gardes, is notoriously difficult to define. In outline, it suggests both the blurring of boundaries between art and life and the synthesis of different arts into a unified style or collective project. 

The precise term was first used by Richard Wagner in the middle of the nineteenth century, though it conveys an enthusiasm for cultural renewal that emerged along with Romanticism in the early nineteenth century (Roberts, 2011). 

As Lutz Koepnick (2016, p.274) puts it: 

The dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk … figured as a decisive switchboard of various modernist agendas and self-definitions. It illuminates how modernism, by negotiating the dialectics of art and technology, of the aesthetic and the political, of high art and modern mass culture, aspired to couple artistic experimentation to social reform and to reshape the present in the name of a different future.

The aspiration toward total design has been criticised for its elitism, its complicity with consumerism and … its megalomania and proximity to totalitarian ideology (Tafuri, 1976; Baudrillard, 1981; Foster, 2002; Roberts, 2011; Tonkinwise, 2014). 

The Gesamtkunstwerk meant not only creating a new unity of the arts, but also breaking up the prevailing beliefs about art, and it was abstraction that made this possible. 

References

Aicher, O. (2015) Analogous and digital. Berlin, DE: Ernst and Sohn.

Charnley, K. (2020) ‘Art, design and modernity: the Bauhaus and beyond’, Open Arts Journal, (9), pp. 43–56. doi: 10.5456/issn.2050-3679/2020w04.

Forgacs, E. (1995) The Bauhaus idea and Bauhaus politics. Translated by J. Bakti. Budapest: Central European University Press.

Metken, G. (1994) ‘We draw no strength from the people’: artists, solitude, community, in Keith Hartley et al. eds. The Romantic spirit in German art 1790-1990. London: South Bank Centre; Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland; and Munich: Octagon Verlag, pp.106-114.

Siebenbrodt, M., Wall, J. and Weber, K. (2009) Bauhaus: a conceptual model. Ostfildern, DE: Hatje Cantz.

Staunton, N. W. (2016) The Bauhaus and American Art Education, Mrs. Staunton’s Art Room. Available at: http://nicolestaunton.weebly.com/uploads/4/5/3/5/45357857/nsbauhauspaper.pdf (Accessed: 21 July 2017).