The Bauhaus masters on the roof of the Bauhaus building in Dessau. From the left: Josef Albers, Hinnerk Scheper, Georg Muche, László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, Joost Schmidt, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Vassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Gunta Stölzl and Oskar Schlemmer.
“The ultimate aim of all visual arts is the complete building”, Walter Gropius in the introduction to the Bauhaus manifesto.
For anyone interested in the history of design, the exhibition ‘L’Esprit du Bauhaus’ at the Musée des Arts Decoratifs is an absolute must-see. With over 900 works on view (furniture, objects, textiles, drawings and maquettes), the exhibition traces the ideology and development from 1919-1933 of the Bauhaus, the most important school of art, architecture and design of the 20th century. The exhibition is beautifully presented and clearly leads you through in a chronological pattern, explaining the development of the ideology from Early Modernism in Germany, developments in Vienna, the Bauhaus in Weimar and then Dessau, and on towards the school’s eventual dissolution in Berlin in 1933. It terminates with a wonderful tribute to the international legacy of the ideology and far-reaching influence of the Bauhaus on the next generation of designers (more below).
Early Modernism in Germany. Deutsche Workbund, founded in 1907 in Munich by Herman Muthesius, admired mechanized production and the industrial aesthetic.
Founded in 1919 in Weimar in the interwar period following Germany’s defeat in WWI, Bauhaus director Walter Gropius’s aim was to create a universal environment in which the students and professors could work as part of a communal effort – artists alongside ceramicists, craftsmen, metalworkers and eventually manufacturers – to build a new world. This ideology was loosely inspired by the communities created by Medieval Guilds. The school’s mission was to revolutionize the way people think with the emergence of a new society and to do away with the boundaries between artistic disciplines by combining the fine and applied arts in its teaching program, far from the dogmatism of the 20th century Avant Garde movements. In this utopian world of communal living, the teachers and students lived together so that artistic practice and collaboration was continuous. There were workshops for metalwork, stained glass, ceramics, wall painting, photography and woodwork among others, and eventually in 1930 architecture.
Stained glass window, Josef Albers, 1921. Created in the Bauhaus Stained Glass Workshop.
Metal and woodwork workshops
(Left to right) Militaire chaise, 1929 and Red-Blue chair 1918 by Gerrit Rietvelt; Lattenstuhl chair, 1923 by Marcel Breuer
Reclinable chair, 1928, Marcel Breuer


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