The Story of the Bauhaus: The Art and Design School That Changed Everything

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Forgács forgoes examining the architecture or design products to emerge from the Bauhaus, and instead looks at the political climate surrounding the school during its most prolific period. The hardcover publication has 100 colour images that each show how the structures look now in a modern urban setting, and the way they interact with the Israeli city's dazzling natural light. In this extraordinary group biography, Weber brilliantly brings to life the pioneering art school in Germany's Weimar and Dessau in the 1920s and early 1930s, and captures the spirit and flair with which these Bauhaus geniuses lived, as well as their consuming goal of making art and architecture. This iconic building, with its spare rectangular shape, glass-curtain walls, and distinctive vertical logo extending up one side, encapsulates the spirit of Bauhaus architecture, and predicts many of the developments that would emerge out of it in the years to come. As the architectural critic Lee F. Mindel wrote, Gropius's "innovative use...of industrial sash, glass curtain walls, and an asymmetrical pinwheel design forged an unforgettable path in the development of what we now call modernism and the International Style." The Weimar school founded by architect Walter Gropius in 1919 was inspired by Expressionist art and the work of architect Frank Lloyd Wright and designer William Morris. Its creators believed in bringing artists and craftspeople together for a utopian purpose.

As we approach the Bauhaus centennial, this is a defining account of its energy and rigor, not only as a trailblazing movement in modernism but also as a paradigm of art education, where creative expression and cutting-edge ideas led to simultaneously functional and beautiful creations. Featured artists include Josef Albers, Marianne Brandt, Walter Gropius, Gertrud Grunow, Paul Klee, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Lilly Reich.

In 1925, the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau, where Gropius designed a new building to house the school. This building contained many features that later became hallmarks of modernist architecture, including steel-frame construction, a glass curtain wall, and an asymmetrical, pinwheel plan, throughout which Gropius distributed studio, classroom, and administrative space for maximum efficiency and spatial logic. News about our Dezeen Awards China programme, including entry deadlines and announcements. Plus occasional updates. Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy arrived at the school in 1923 to teach preliminary classes and run a metal workshop, but his real passion was for photography.

Comprised of over 120 colour images, this book sees photographer Hans Engels capture the surviving Bauhaus buildings in European cities like Barcelona, Prague, Budapest, and Vienna. The textile workshop, especially under the direction of designer and weaver Gunta Stölzl (1897–1983), created abstract textiles suitable for use in Bauhaus environments. Students studied color theory and design as well as the technical aspects of weaving. Stölzl encouraged experimentation with unorthodox materials, including cellophane, fiberglass, and metal. Fabrics from the weaving workshop were commercially successful, providing vital and much needed funds to the Bauhaus. The studio’s textiles, along with architectural wall painting, adorned the interiors of Bauhaus buildings, providing polychromatic yet abstract visual interest to these somewhat severe spaces. While the weaving studio was primarily comprised of women, this was in part due to the fact that they were discouraged from participating in other areas. The workshop trained a number of prominent textile artists, including Anni Albers (1899–1994), who continued to create and write about modernist textiles throughout her life.

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Soon after Gropius arrived in the US, he urged Breuer to follow him across the pond: “It’s fantastic here! Don’t tell the English but we are ecstatic that we have escaped the land of fog and of psychological nightmares… Here people are open and free and I believe you would have a very broad field here.” In the US, Breuer and Gropius briefly formed a business partnership, co-designing the Alan I W Frank House of 1939-1940 in Pittsburgh. Oskar Schlemmer taught at the school from 1920 to 1929, specializing in design, sculpture and murals, but preferring to pursue theater. He was appointed the school’s director of theater activities in 1923 and created an experimental theater workshop in 1925. Gropius at home with his second wife, Ise, in 1950. Photograph: Ann Rosener/The Life Images Collection/Getty Images Moholy-Nagy was known for darkroom experimentation, utilizing photograms and exploring light to create abstract elements through distortion, shadow and skewed lines, similar to the works of Man Ray though conceived separately from them.

Under the leadership of Gropius, the Bauhaus movement made no special distinction between the applied and fine arts. Painting, typography, architecture, textile design, furniture-making, theater design, stained glass, woodworking, metalworking—these all found a place there. The new introduction focuses on the centenary, and claims that 100 years later, Bauhaus continues to inspire the work of designers in a wide range of fields, as well as teaching methods. It says that the “holistic, often utopian aspiration to reform all aspects of life” seen at the Bauhaus school “has lost none of its fascination today”. Klee left the Bauhaus in 1931 and died in 1940. Surrealist painters Joan Miró and Andre Masson credit Klee as a major influence on their work. Wassily Kandinsky Looking beyond his role as the founder of the school, the book explores how Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe pioneered the International Style architectural movement.

This being the centenary year of the Bauhaus, there is a rush of books relating to it. Taschen has brought out a typically sumptuous compendium of the archive, called simply Bauhaus 1919-1933, by the art historian Magdalena Droste. Isokon and the Bauhaus in Britain, by Leyla Daybelge and Magnus Englund, describes the Hampstead hive of artistic intelligentsia where the Gropiuses sheltered when they left Germany. Henry van der Velde: The Artist As Designer, by Richard Hollis, resurrects the exceptional architect who created the Weimar art schools from which the Bauhaus grew.

Lastly, Architecture and Politics in Germany: 1918-1945 by Barbara Miller Lane is the right choice if you want to explore the political context behind Bauhaus. For those after some wider reading on Bauhaus, this photography book takes readers to Cape Cod, where Walter Gropius and his wife Ise hosted several of the movement's masters like Marcel Breuer, László Moholy-Nagy, and Bayer during the summer of 1937. MIT Press Direct is a distinctive collection of influential MIT Press books curated for scholars and libraries worldwide.My aim in writing was to tell the history of the school as an institution,” she says. “What was the pedagogy? How did it change and what are the underlying aims?” His wife Annie Albers studied weaving at the Bauhaus, a choice due to her frailty (caused by Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease). Often mentioned as the most important textile artist of the 20th century, her efforts entered the realm of abstract art with her wall hangings—she even created new textiles.