BAUHAUS

                

Bauhaus

(1919 - 1933)

   The Bauhaus is one of the first colleges of design. It came into being from the merger of the Weimar Academy of Arts and the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts. It was founded by Walter Gropius in 1919 and was closed in 1933 by the Nazis.

   The Bauhaus holds a place of its own in the culture and visual art history of 20th century. This outstanding school affirmed innovative training methods and also created a place of production and a focus of international debate. It brought together a number of the most outstanding contemporary architects and artists. The Bauhaus stood almost alone in attempt to achieve reconciliation between the aesthetics of design and the more commercial demands of industrial mass production.

   The teaching program was organized in the form of workshops to produce works that were both aesthetically pleasing and useful. The creed of this program asserted that the modernization process could be mastered by means of design. As a result, in 1923 the Bauhaus turned it attention to industry. The first major Bauhaus exhibition which was opened in 1923 reflected the revised principle of art and technology a new unity spanned the full spectrum of Bauhaus work. It was Art and Technology, a New Unity, which was also the name of the workshop in which the art was created.

   The Nazi Party and other fascist political groups had opposed the Bauhaus throughout the 1920s. They considered it a front for communists, especially because many Russian artists were involved with it. Gropius was succeeded in turn by Hannes Meyer and then Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. School was moved first from Weimar to Dessau, from Dessau again to Berlin, and was closed on the orders of the Nazi regime in 1933.

   The Bauhaus had a major impact on art and architecture trends in western Europe and the United States in the decades following its demise, as many of the artists involved fled or were exiled by the Nazi regime.