If lightweight, durable steel could bend to make a mass-produced bicycle, Breuer thought, it could certainly bend to fashion furniture.īack at the workshop, he designed the Wassily chair, reducing the traditionally plush club chair to its most basic outline in tubular steel and waxed canvas strips. Around the same time, in 1925, he bought his first bicycle and had an aha! moment while admiring its curved handlebars.

In his popular cabinet-making course, Breuer taught his students to whittle down design to its absolute essence. The majority were men, and the approximately one-third of women in the group were encouraged to adopt female-coded mediums such as ceramics and textiles.Ī few Bauhaus alumni-such as geometric painter Josef Albers, textile artist Anni Albers, typographer Herbert Bayer, designer Marcel Breuer, and industrial designer Marianne Brandt-were invited to stay on as masters, often assuming leadership of the very workshop where they first learned their craft.īreuer belonged to the first crop of Bauhaus students and directed the carpentry workshop after graduating. Because the school opened at the end of World War I, the first class was a mixed group of war veterans between the ages of 17 and 40, all eager for a fresh start. The Bauhaus also attracted a different kind of student, one ready to abandon tradition and adopt its community-minded spirit.

“It is our duty to enlist powerful, famous personalities wherever possible, even if we do not yet fully understand them.” “We must not start with mediocrity,” Gropius wrote in a letter during the earliest days of the Bauhaus. The faculty unified personalities such as the early abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky and fantastical colorist Paul Klee the choreographer Oskar Schlemmer and multimedia Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy and the angular Expressionist painter Lyonel Feininger alongside the minimalist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The school was exceptional in that many of its instructors were already leaders in modern art circles. Gropius had grand ideas for the Bauhaus and invited some big-name artists to execute his educational vision. The Bauhaus was like an über-designed version of IKEA, churning out items for everyday use that were nonetheless fit to populate the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Useless ornamentation was rejected in favor of designs that followed an object’s function many items created in the Bauhaus workshops are characterized by clean lines, an innovative use of materials, and an affectionate embrace of technology befitting a modern lifestyle. Students were encouraged to accept utilitarian objects-such as light fixtures, teapots, and chairs-as projects worthy of artists, and to tackle the challenge of creating good design for mass production. “Together let us conceive and create the new building of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will rise one day toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.”īauhäusler, as a result, were ambidextrous in art and craft, just as adept at conceiving their sleek designs as they were executing them. “Let us create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsmen and artist,” Gropius avowed.

More than a clearly defined visual style, Bauhaus was a conceptual approach, encapsulated in a manifesto Gropius wrote at the time of the German academy’s founding in Weimar, in 1919. The moniker was short for Gro- pius, and also a lighthearted jab at the intense fervor with which their utopian leader guided them in a new direction that collapsed the barrier between fine arts and craft, while also adapting artists to the machine age. The members of the Bauhaus coined a nickname for architect Walter Gropius, the idealistic founder and longtime director of their avant-garde school: Pius.

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