Bauhaus

Subtle colour nuances and binding variations made for the optical and haptic appeal of this textile work

Today, the Bauhaus is embedded in the public consciousness;

edded in the publ

Now, almost a century after its foundation, it is still current.

Thus, members of the Hannes Meyer camp were displaced into Stalin’s camps and murdered. Meyer himself, who had also fallen into political disfavour, eventually returned to Switzerland in 1936.

Kandinsky loved to show up as an antenna. Itten came as an amorphous monster, Feininger as two right-angled triangles. Moholy-Nagy as a segment perforated by a cross, Gropius as Le Corbusier, Muche as an unkempt apostle and Klee as the song of the blue tree...[52]

In Weimar there were two dominant groups. The supporters of the Mazdaznan philosophy of life propagated by Johannes Itten were concerned with a “physical and spiritual cleansing”. They saw their path to self-knowledge in meditation. A special breathing technique, vegetarian food, a shaved head and wide habit-like clothing designed by Itten were some of their outer signs. The constructivists of the KURI group, on the other hand, preferred everything related to the world of technology. They appeared in suits and with exactly the same short hairstyle.

There were, however, no equal rights for women, despite the relatively high proportion of female students, particularly during the Weimar years. Women were predominantly directed towards work in the weaving workshop. Only through extraordinary achievements and perseverance and against manifold difficulties were Marianne Brandt, Gunta Stölzl and Alma Siedhoff-Buscher, for example, able to be successful as autonomous designers for some time.

From 1919 to 1933, 1,287 students from twenty-nine countries passed through the Bauhaus.

Walter Gropius had left Germany earlier for England, together with Marcel Breuer. From there, he transferred to the Harvard Graduate School of Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1937. Hannes Meyer, who had gone to the USSR after his discharge as Bauhaus director, later worked in Switzerland for some time, as well as in Mexico. Wassily Kandinsky emigrated to Paris as early as 1933. Paul Klee returned to his hometown of Berne the same year. Also in 1933, Josef Albers went to the USA and became one of the first Bauhaus teachers to teach at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. László Moholy-Nagy became head of the “New Bauhaus” in Chicago in 1937, where several Bauhaus graduates worked in the years following. Lyonel Feininger, too, emigrated in 1937 to the USA with Herbert Bayer, while Johannes Itten was drawn to Zurich in 1939.