Happy birthday, Bauhaus!

The Bauhaus movement is 90 years old today. (Expect a flood of reissues of design classics.)


It is regarded as the pre-eminent cultural phenomenon in the history of 20th century design.

In 1919 the architecht Walter Gropius established his academy in Weimar ... and nearly a century later the art, furniture and architecture this movement inspired still looks fresh and young.

The school moved to Dessau in 1925, then to Berlin in 1932. It was closed by the Nazi regime in 1933, and many of its teachers went to the USA ,Israel, and Britain (Gropius lived in the Isokon project in London - another manifestation of the modernist zeitgeist - for a few years).

"The changes of venue and leadership resulted in a constant shifting of focus, technique, instructors, and politics," says Wikipedia.

Gropius aimed "to create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist." Some of the basic principles were industrial design (improving the design of machine-made projects), rational functionality, the acceptance of modernist design into everyday life...and avant-garde teaching practices - that caused art education to take a completely new direction.

Teachers at the school included Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Johannes Itten, Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy, Joseph Albers (and his wife Anni), Marcel Breuer.

Finding out about Bauhaus is the holiday homework for my art course.