The Bauhaus — the school of art, architecture, and design founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919, moved to Dessau in 1925, and closed under Nazi pressure in Berlin in 1933 — was the most influential art school of the twentieth century and arguably the single most important institutional source of modern design. Its fourteen years of existence produced an approach to art education, a set of design principles, and a roster of faculty (Klee, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy, Albers, Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, Anni Albers, Marianne Brandt) whose influence extends through architecture, graphic design, industrial design, typography, and art education to the present.
The Bauhaus was not a style, though it became one. It was an educational program built on two propositions: that art and craft should be reunited (an idea inherited from William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement); and that the forms of modern life — buildings, furniture, textiles, typography, household objects — should be designed with the same seriousness and formal rigor that had previously been reserved for painting and sculpture. The school's dispersal after 1933 — its faculty scattered by the Nazi regime to the United States, England, and elsewhere — spread its influence worldwide and ensured that Bauhaus ideas became the default assumptions of mid-century modern design.
Annotated bibliography
The school and its history
Frank Whitford, Bauhaus (1984) — the best single-volume introduction: concise, well-illustrated, and balanced between the art, the architecture, the design, and the institutional politics.
Magdalena Droste, Bauhaus: 1919–1933 (2002) — the standard art-historical survey; comprehensive and richly illustrated.
Nicholas Fox Weber, The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism (2009) — a group biography of Gropius, Klee, Kandinsky, Albers (Josef and Anni), and Mies van der Rohe. Good on the personalities and on what it was like to teach and study there.
Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House (1981) — Wolfe's polemical attack on the Bauhaus legacy in American architecture. Entertaining, unfair, and useful as a document of the backlash.
The founders and faculty
Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus (1935) — Gropius's own account of the school's aims and methods, written in English after his emigration. Short and programmatic.
Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925) — Klee's teaching notes from his Bauhaus courses, published as a Bauhaus book. A compressed, idiosyncratic theory of visual form — point, line, plane, color, rhythm — from one of the century's greatest painters.
Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane (1926) — Kandinsky's systematic analysis of the elements of abstract form, based on his Bauhaus teaching. More systematic than Klee, less intuitive.
László Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision (1928; rev. 1947) and Vision in Motion (1947) — Moholy-Nagy's articulation of the Bauhaus approach to art education: the integration of art, technology, and industry; the emphasis on experimentation with materials and media; the rejection of the boundary between fine art and applied art. Vision in Motion was written at the Institute of Design in Chicago (the "New Bauhaus"), which Moholy-Nagy founded in 1937.
Josef Albers, Interaction of Color (1963) — Albers's teaching method for color theory, developed at the Bauhaus and refined over decades at Black Mountain College and Yale. The most influential art-education text of the twentieth century. Albers demonstrated that color is always relational — the same color looks different depending on what surrounds it — and built an entire pedagogy around that insight.
The precedents
William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement — Morris's insistence that the applied arts (furniture, textiles, wallpaper, typography) deserved the same seriousness as the fine arts, and that industrial capitalism had destroyed the dignity of craft labor, was the Bauhaus's most important intellectual inheritance. The Bauhaus accepted Morris's diagnosis but rejected his medievalism: the task was not to return to handcraft but to bring art and industry together.
Peter Behrens and the Deutscher Werkbund — Behrens (who employed Gropius, Mies, and Le Corbusier in his studio) and the Werkbund (founded 1907) pioneered the idea of industrial design as a discipline. The Bauhaus inherited their project and institutionalized it.
The diaspora and legacy
Josef Albers at Black Mountain College (1933–1949) and Yale (1950–1958) — Albers brought Bauhaus pedagogy to the United States and trained a generation of American artists (Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Ruth Asawa, Ray Johnson). Black Mountain College, though it lasted only twenty-four years, was the American institution closest in spirit to the Bauhaus.
László Moholy-Nagy and the Institute of Design, Chicago (1937–1946) — Moholy-Nagy's attempt to replant the Bauhaus in America. The school, later absorbed into the Illinois Institute of Technology, emphasized the integration of art, science, and technology.
Mies van der Rohe and the Illinois Institute of Technology (1938–1958) — Mies, the last director of the Bauhaus, built IIT's campus and trained a generation of architects in the "less is more" ethos. Crown Hall (1956) is the purest architectural statement of Bauhaus principles in America.
Anni Albers, On Weaving (1965) — Anni Albers studied and taught weaving at the Bauhaus and continued at Black Mountain College. Her textiles are among the most important works to come out of the Bauhaus, and On Weaving is both a technical manual and a theory of textile as art.
The critique and reassessment
Hal Foster et al., Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (2004) — the standard art-historical textbook; places the Bauhaus in the broader context of modernism and its legacies.
Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design (2016) — an argument that design (in the Bauhaus sense — the deliberate shaping of the human environment) has become the defining activity of the modern species, with consequences the Bauhaus founders did not anticipate.
The Bauhaus centenary exhibitions (2019) — the hundredth anniversary produced major exhibitions and catalogs at the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, and the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, along with reassessments of the school's legacy, including its limited engagement with women faculty and its blind spots about colonialism and race.