Masters of the Bauhaus: Shaping Modernism’s Legacy

Walter Gropius – 15-Piece Coffee Service “Gropius – TAC’, 1969. Sold for €220 EUR via Quittenbaum Kunstauktionen GmbH
(March 2024).

Discovering the Bauhaus

Gropius’s idea was to bridge the gap between craftsmanship and the fine arts, and the Bauhaus taught students both theory and applied crafts, so that pupils were capable of creating objects that were both functional and aesthetically pleasing. In the school manifesto, Gropius stated that “the Bauhaus strives to reunite arts and crafts – sculpture, painting, applied art, and handicrafts – as the permanent elements of a new architecture”.

The school’s craft-based curriculum was based on workshops – everything from carpentry and metalwork to stained glass, wall painting and weaving – were taught by two collaborators: an artist (referred to as the Form Master), who focused on theory, along with a craftsman, who shared techniques and technical processes.

Wassily Kandinsky – Weisser Klang (White Sound). Sold for $8,930,500 USD via Sotheby’s (November 2011).

Some of the outstanding names associated with the Bauhaus are Paul Klee, who taught stained glass and painting; Wassily Kandinsky, who taught wall painting and Marcel Breuer, who himself graduated from the Bauhaus in 1924 and taught furniture-making. When the school moved to Dessau, Gropius designed its building and faculty housing, which remain some of his best-known work. Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe eventually became the school’s director in 1930 and relocated it to Berlin. The Nazi regime forced the school to close in 1933 and many of its teachers and pupils fled to the United States.

Bauhaus painter, graphic artist and teacher László Moholy-Nagy founded the Institute of Design in Chicago in 1937, while Gropius became chairman of the Harvard School of Architecture. Mies van der Rohe moved to Chicago as head of the department of architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and went on to design its new campus.

One of the enduring influences of the Bauhaus was the idea that functional and beautiful objects can and should be made for mass production by bringing art and industry together. Many of the designs that came from the Bauhaus, from tableware and lamps to chairs, are still with us today – sought out by vintage collectors or reproduced by furniture companies. Their streamlined and modern forms mean that they continue to resonate to this day. Examples of the enduring designs that came from the Bauhaus are the Wassily Chair by Marcel Breuer; the Barcelona Chair by Mies van der Rohe and the modernist textile patterns of Anni Albers.

Walter Gropius, photographed by Julius Kurt. Sold for €1,200 EUR via Nosbüsch & Stucke GmbH (May 2024).

Key Figures of the Bauhaus

Walter Gropius

Gropius, who was born in Berlin in 1883, was a pioneer of modern architecture and the founder of the Bauhaus. He was a proponent of the modernist idea that form should follow function and believed that architecture and design could play an important role in social reform. In the course of his career, he experimented with innovative building techniques such as prefabrication and new materials such as reinforced concrete. Many of his architectural projects can be recognized through their cubic design, flat roofs and vast tracts of glass that merged interior and exterior spaces. He moved to the US in 1937 and was soon appointed the Director of the Department of Architecture at Harvard. He founded The Architects Collaborative, which became one of the most successful firms working in postwar modernist architecture.

Wassily Kandinsky portrait.

Wassily Kandinsky

The renowned Russian abstract painter Kandinsky spent his life in Russia, Germany and France. At the Bauhaus, he lectured on color theory and form, and led the mural workshop. When the school moved from Weimar to Dessau he began to teach a class in painting. Geometric shapes began to appear more frequently in Kandinsky’s work while he was at the Bauhaus, perhaps influenced by the rise in industry and developments in technology. After the school was shuttered, he left for Paris, where he lived out his days in the suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine.

A Wassily Chair by Marcel Breuer. Auction passed (Est: $1,000 NZD – $1,500 NZD) via Webb’s – Specialist Auctioneers (April 2024).

Marcel Breuer

Breuer was born in Hungary in 1902. He was an influential architect and designer and an advocate of the International Style, fuelled by the development of new building technologies that employed iron, steel, reinforced concrete, and glass. He studied and then taught at the Bauhaus. In 1925, inspired by the design of bicycle handlebars and the techniques of local plumbers, he designed a tubular metal chair, known as the Wassily Chair, which became synonymous with a new way of thinking about design and industry. Breuer moved to New York in 1946 where he worked on many large commissions. He died in 1981.

Josef Albers

Josef Albers – Homage to the Square (Edition Keller I). Sold for €87,500 EUR via Grisebach (December 2020).

Anni Albers – GR I. Sold for $6,500 USD via Swann Auction Galleries (June 2023).

Albers was a German teacher and artist who came to study at the Bauhaus and soon became a master there himself. He worked in carpentry, metalwork, glass, photography, and graphic design. He and his wife Anni were invited to America, where he taught at the new Black Mountain College in North Carolina until he moved to Yale where he became head of the Department of Design. Both Josef and Anni were awarded various honorary degrees, and in 1971 Josef became the first living artist to have a solo retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Anni Albers

Annelise “Anni” Elsa Frieda Fleischmann was born in 1899 in Berlin. When she applied to the Bauhaus, she was only allowed to enrol into the weaving workshop; it became her life’s work and she was constantly inspired by art, architecture and design, making small-scale pictorial weavings as well as large wall hangings, andtextiles that she designed for mass production. She spent her life experimenting with materials and weaving techniques. She and her husband Josef Albers escaped Nazi Germany and moved to the US, where they both continued to practise. 

Paul Klee

Ruehende Schiffe by Paul Klee, 1927. Public domain image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Swiss-born German artist Klee was influenced by expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. He travelled to Italy, Tunisia and Egypt, where light had a great impact on his ideas around color. He taught at the Bauhaus from 1921 to 1931 as a form master in the bookbinding, stained glass, and mural painting workshops. He also created advertising material for the Bauhaus and its exhibitions. Klee was a prolific artist and taught at the Düsseldorf Academy from 1931 until 1933 but was fired after the Nazis came to power. He and his family left for Switzerland where he died in 1940.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe – A Barcelona Chair and Ottoman for Knoll Studio, 21st Century. Sold for $4,762 USD via John Moran Auctioneers (February 2024).

The name of German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is synonymous with modernism and the International Style of architecture. In Berlin, he worked among artists and craftsmen who envisaged new forms of expression for the machine age. He developed his ideas around steel-and-glass construction that he would go on to realise in the US on a grand scale. Apart from architecture, he also designed furniture, such as the cantilevered steel Barcelona Chair, which is now a classic of 20th-century furniture design. He served as the final director of the Bauhaus. After he arrived in the US, he became the director of the School of Architecture at Chicago’s Armour Institute (the Illinois Institute of Technology). He received many commissions after the Second World War, particularly high-rise buildings that were conceived as steel skeletons wrapped in glass.

László Moholy-Nagy – Fourteen Photos, 1920s, Prints 1979. Auction Passed (Est: €6,000 EUR – €9,000 EUR) via Schneider-Henn (June 2024).

László Moholy-Nagy

Born in 1895 in Austria-Hungary, Moholy-Nagy was an artist and educator who believed that art held the potential to transform society and that art and technology were interrelated. He created abstract works and experimented with cameraless photographs. From 1923 to 1928, Moholy-Nagy taught at the Bauhaus and created typography for the school. In 1937, he left for Chicago to become the director of the New Bauhaus: American School of Design (renamed the School of Design in 1939 and later the Institute of Design; today it is part of the Illinois Institute of Technology). He continued to pursue his artistic vision in various mediums and exhibited widely until his death in 1946.

Oskar Schlemmer – Bauhaus Exhibition Poster 1923. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Oskar Schlemmer

German-born Schlemmer was a true polymath: painter, sculptor, stage and costume designer and choreographer. At the Bauhaus he ran the mural-painting and sculpture departments before taking over the stagecraft workshop, where he created a series of Bauhaus Dances. He was also a professor at the prestigious Berlin Academy before being forced out by the Nazi regime, which denounced his work as degenerate. Schlemmer was not successful at obtaining a visa to the US for himself and his family and died in “internal exile” in 1943. His avant-garde dance and performance creations have had a lasting influence on contemporary dance.

Gunta Stölzl – Design for a Jacquard Wall Hanging: 5 Choirs, 1928. Sold for €11,430 EUR
via Grisebach (May 2024).

Gunta Stölzl

Stölzl was a prominent German textile artist who was central in the development of the Bauhaus school’s weaving workshop, which became extremely successful under her direction. She joined the Bauhaus as a student in 1919 and became one of the few female teachers there, and the first to hold the title of Master. She became the school’s weaving director in 1925 when it relocated from Weimar to Dessau and expanded the department to increase its weaving and dyeing facilities. She pushed the boundaries of textile art, experimenting with materials, colors and abstract forms and elevated the practise to an art form. After the Bauhaus, she lived and worked in Switzerland.

The Enduring Legacy of Bauhaus in Contemporary Culture

Although the Bauhaus existed for a mere 14 years, its modernist legacy can be felt to this day. Many of its key figures found their way to the US during the Second World War, where their work and teaching influenced generations of architects and designers. Gropius is credited with the introduction of modernist architecture to the United States through his teaching at Harvard. Josef and Anni Albers taught at Black Mountain College, and later Josef taught at Yale. Moholy-Nagy established the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937. Mies van der Rohe taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology and designed its campus; his architecture and its legacy continues to influence the landscape of American cities to this day.

What’s more, the school’s innovative curriculum and experimental teaching methods influenced the way art, design and architecture is often taught today by nurturing an artistic community with a collaborative approach to learning. The influence of the Bauhaus can be seen in everything from domestic utensils and furniture to textiles and buildings.