Word: schools
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Over time the Bauhaus faculty would include some enduring names in 20th century art and design, including Josef and Anni Albers, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. They were all in their different ways ardent modernists, but in its first years the school was caught in a contradiction: a romance with individual craftsmanship at odds with the modernist ideal of mass production. Even the name Bauhaus (House for Building) carried echoes of Bauhütten, the shared lodgings of the medieval craftsmen who built the great cathedrals. As for the painters connected to the Bauhaus, whatever systems and principles Klee and Kandinsky...
...when Gropius and Alma finally divorced, the exhausted architect was more than ready to turn the page. He had been invited years earlier to form an arts academy out of two existing schools in Weimar, the charming, tradition-minded little city where Goethe had lived. But very little about the school Gropius had in mind would be traditional. Instead of teaching students to imitate great works of the past, the Bauhaus entry course explored fundamentals like the material properties of wood and metal or how colors and forms operated within an image. Instead of focusing on painting and sculpture...
...amplified by Johannes Itten, the unlikely man Gropius first picked to teach the entry course. A vegetarian, Zoroastrian and state-of-the-art bohemian, Itten knew more about yoga than he did about factory floors. In the years when he set the tone for much of what the school produced, the would-be school of industrial art could seem more like a hippie craft shop. A product of the Bauhaus could be a hand-thrown pot or a funky hand-carved chair...
...turning point came in 1923, when Gropius dismissed Itten and replaced him with the resolutely modern Hungarian Constructivist László Moholy-Nagy. In the same year, the school mounted an exhibition with the no-nonsense title "Art and Technology--A New Unity." The painter Oskar Schlemmer announced the back-on-track Bauhaus ethic in a polemic that was only partly tongue in cheek: "Death to the past, to moonlight, and to the soul...
...something poignant in that picture about the yearning for a universe of reason and order that those right angles symbolized at a time when Germany was gradually going insane. By the mid-1920s, the Bauhaus was under steady pressure from the conservative government of Thuringia, which funded the school but regarded it as a left-wing, bohemian swindle. When the provincial legislature stopped paying faculty salaries in 1925, the Bauhaus relocated to the more welcoming industrial city of Dessau, where it eventually occupied its famously forward-looking new building designed by Gropius. But a few years later, he stepped down...