Bauhaus

Bauhaus is an art movement of the 1919–1933 period. The gallery holds 60 works in this movement, including works by Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and I. Rice Pereira. Browse Bauhaus paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

The Bauhaus was a German school of art, craft, and design founded by the architect Walter Gropius in Weimar on 1 April 1919, in the unsettled aftermath of the First World War and the birth of the Weimar Republic. Its founding manifesto, illustrated with Lyonel Feininger's woodcut of a crystalline cathedral, called for tearing down the barrier between the fine and the applied arts and uniting all creative disciplines under "the building of the future." Against a backdrop of economic crisis and industrial modernization, Gropius sought to reconcile handcraft with mass production and to train a new kind of artist-craftsman. Political pressure forced the school to relocate from Weimar (1919–1925) to Dessau (1925–1932), where Gropius designed its iconic glass-and-steel home, and finally to Berlin, where it was shuttered under Nazi pressure in 1933.

Teaching began with a celebrated six-month preliminary course (Vorkurs)—led successively by Johannes Itten, László Moholy-Nagy, and Josef Albers—that grounded every student in color, form, and material before they entered specialized workshops in metal, weaving, cabinetmaking, typography, wall painting, and stagecraft. Each workshop paired a "Form Master" with a craftsman. The mature Bauhaus aesthetic that emerged—geometric clarity, primary colors, sans-serif typography, tubular-steel furniture, and the credo that form follows function—shaped products from Marcel Breuer's "Wassily" chair to Marianne Brandt's metalwork and Wilhelm Wagenfeld's table lamp.

The faculty included some of modernism's greatest painters. Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee taught compulsory theory seminars on color and form, Lyonel Feininger led graphic arts, Oskar Schlemmer directed the theatre workshop and devised the "Triadic Ballet," and Moholy-Nagy advanced photography and constructivist design. Klee's Weimar- and Dessau-era output—including works held here such as Temple Gardens, May Picture, and Ghost Chamber with the Tall Door—translated his playful, color-theoretical investigations into paint.

Though open only fourteen years, the Bauhaus became the most influential design school of the twentieth century. It absorbed the geometric abstraction of Dutch De Stijl and Russian Constructivism, and its diaspora—Gropius and Breuer to Harvard, Mies van der Rohe and Moholy-Nagy to Chicago, Albers to Black Mountain and Yale—carried its principles into American architecture, the International Style, and modern graphic and industrial design worldwide.