A Pursuit of Gesamtkunstwerk

The Bauhaus, 1919-1933

 In 1915, an architect named Walter Gropius became headmaster of the Grand Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts which he later combined with the Weimar Academy of Fine Arts and from their pioneered a new kind of art school and a new art movement called the Bauhaus. The curriculum would include all art media, fine art, typography, graphic design, woodworking, pottery, and textiles. One of the school’s main objectives was to teach through practical workshops where students could learn skills and techniques that would help them create beautiful pieces that would benefit society. Alexandra Bannister wrote, “The teaching programme aimed to develop its students as well as provide technical skills, combining the disciplines of art, craft, and technology into a Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art).” [1] Gropius wrote in the Bauhaus manifesto:

Architects, sculptors, painters, we all must return to the crafts! For there is no such thing as ‘art by profession.’ There is no essential difference between the artist and the craftsman. The artist is an exalted craftsman… So let us then create a new guild of craftsmen, free of the divisive class pretensions that attempted to raise an arrogant barrier between craftsmen and artists! [2]

Once admitted to the school, students were required to start with some preliminary courses where they studied color theory, composition, material studies, and visual analysis. The class was taught by Johannes Itten (1888-1967) until he left the Bauhaus in 1923, and he was replaced by László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) and Josef Albers (1888-1976). After the preliminary course, students took intermediary courses which took place in the various workshops. In these courses, students were able to apply what they had learned about color, composition, and materials and apply them to projects in the workshop. While the Bauhaus as a school and art movement have a reputation of being very progressive, sexism still existed, particularly when it came to students choosing which workshop they wanted to apprentice in. Women were often coerced to apprentice in the weaving workshop whether they had any interest in textiles or not. Few women managed to apprentice in a workshop other than weaving.

At the very center of the curriculum, building, as in architecture. The word Bauhaus translates to “house of building.” It was intended that once students had completed their time in the workshop they would go on to study architecture. The building was the space that would contain everything in constructed in the workshops. However’s Gropius’s ideas of diminishing lines between artist and artisan, art and craft, and so on were considered too socialist by many people in Weimar who held on to more traditional ideas. This resulted in Gropius having to deal with a lot of political pressure and for that reason architecture did not become a realized part of the curriculum until 1927 after the Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925.

The Dessau period of the Bauhaus was its most prolific. In 1926 the school building Gropius had designed and built opened with much celebration and is considered an icon of modern architecture. Many of the designs that the Bauhaus has become known for were created at the school in Dessau. Despite its success, the political criticism didn’t just go away and Gropius had grown weary. In 1928, Gropius announced that he was stepping down, and the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer ( ) became the new man in charge. Meyer was a well known Marxist and helped the students develop German Trade Unions. which only worsened the political climate and he was dismissed just two years later by the Dessau City Council for “communist practices”. He was replaced by the German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969).

Mies van der Rohe tried to rebrand the Bauhaus by removing its political ideas that went against German nationalist traditions that the Nazi Party promoted and favored. But when the Nazi Party was elected into power in Dessau, the city council passed a resolution in 1932 forcing the school to close. Mies van der Rohe relocated and opened the school in Berlin as a private institution but once the Nazi’s gained power nationally the school was closed for good in 1933.