Art Term

Bauhaus

Bauhaus was a revolutionary school of art, architecture and design established by Walter Gropius at Weimar in Germany in 1919

Lucia Moholy
Bauhaus Building, Dessau (1925–6)
Tate

© Estate of Lucia Moholy / DACS 2023

The Bauhaus teaching method replaced the traditional pupil-teacher relationship with the idea of a community of artists working together. Its aim was to bring art back into contact with everyday life, and architecture, performing arts, design and applied arts were therefore given as much weight as fine art. The name is a combination of the German words for building (bau) and house (haus) and may have been intended to evoke the idea of a guild or fraternity working to build a new society. Teachers included Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers.

The Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925–6 where Gropius created a new building for the school. In 1932 it moved to Berlin where it was closed in 1933 by the Nazis.

Its influence was immense, especially in the USA, where many artists moved before and during the Second World War.

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bauhaus photography

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THE NEW BAUHAUS & BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE

In 1933, after the closure of the Bauhaus by the Nazis, Josef and Anni Albers took the Bauhaus methods to Black Mountain College in North Carolina and in then 1950 to the Department of Design at Yale University in Connecticut.

László Moholy-Nagy left Europe in 1937, after an invitation to begin a new school of art and design in Chicago, first called The New Bauhaus and later renamed the Institute of Design. Aiming to train ‘the perfect designer’, perhaps the most important of the departments was the photography department under the direction of Harry Callahan. Bringing principles from the original Bauhaus, it continued to see the camera and photography as a medium distinct from others, and turned its gaze onto the growing cityscapes of America, capturing and using its architecture as a structural device.

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Related terms and concepts

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  • Black Mountain College

    Black Mountain College was a highly influential college founded at Black Mountain, North Carolina, USA, in 1933 where teaching was experimental and committed to an interdisciplinary approach

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    The New Vision was a photography movement which developed in the 1920s directly related to the principles of the Bauhaus

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Explore this term

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  • Haus Schlehstud, where Peter Fischli grew up in Meilen, Switzerland, designed and built by his father Hans

    My house, Bauhaus

    Peter Fischli

    Peter Fischli grew up in a Bauhaus home designed by his father Hans Fischli, an artist and architect who had studied in Dessau. He talks to us exclusively about his early years surrounded by the spirit of the Bauhaus; ‘I was fascinated by the way he led his life…He often painted at night, listening to jazz records…At the weekend, students, fellow artists and teachers would come and have parties…I was spellbound.’

  • Josef Albers and Eva Hesse, Yale University, c.1958

    Josef Albers, Eva Hesse, and the Imperative of Teaching

    Jeffrey Saletnik

    This paper examines affinities between the Bauhaus-indebted instructional methods and practices of Josef Albers and the sculpture of Eva Hesse, his student at Yale University. The author argues that pedagogy affects artistic practice, or that the means or process through which artists are educated contributes to how they approach their work.

  • Cover of Josef Albers' Interaction of Color, first published in 1963

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    Victor Moscoso , Gabriel Orozco and Robert Mangold

    Joseph Albers was one of the finest art teachers of the twentieth century. Victor Moscoso remembers him both as a showman and a master, whose colour classes ‘drove everyone crazy,’ Robert Mangold and Gabriel Orozco admire his work

  • Goethe's symmetric colour wheel, 1809

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  • Oskar Fischinger working in his studio in Los Angeles c.1942

    Where abstraction and comics collide

    Esther Leslie

    Oskar Fischinger's animated films that were partly influenced by the poetic abstraction of Kandinsky's paintings were among the first to mix high art and mass culture.

SELECTED ARTISTS IN THE COLLECTION

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SELECTED ARTWORKS IN THE COLLECTION

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Bauhaus at Tate

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