Bauhaus
After World War I, the nation state of Germany under the direction of architect Walter Gropius created a "consulting art center for industry and the trades" (Bayer 12). Called Bauhaus, "house for building," the school combined the role of artisans and craftspeople and included everything from architecture to theater to typography. When the school was forced to close during the Nazi regime in 1932, many of its artists moved to the United States to find freedom to pursue their own artistic expression. Here, Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe among others, helped to spread the Bauhaus ideology. Gropius consulted with educator John A. Rice, who opened Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Based on John Dewey's principles of progressive education, the school became home of many of the most progressive and innovative artists. Josef and Anni Albers, also from Bauhaus, combined Rice's progressive educational theories with their own disciplined approach to teaching art and created an entirely new approach to learning. Despite the struggles and challenges that occur whenever educators, artists and innovators work together, Black Mountain became a monument to which colleges can aspire.
Established in Weimar in 1919, the Bauhaus' philosophy largely stressed the integration of modern design principles with their industrial implementation. As the first director of the organization, Walter Gropius stated about the difference between this school and previous schools: "The tool of the spirit of yesterday was the 'academy.' It shut off the artist from the world of industry and handicraft, and thus brought about his complete isolation from the community." However, in earlier "vital epochs," the artist enriched all the community's arts and crafts because he had a part in its vocational life and gained through practice "as much adeptness and understanding as any other artist who began at the bottom and worked his way up." (Harrison & Wood 339).The Bauhaus would once again end the isolation of artists and make them a part of industry and handicraft.
The credo of Bauhaus was to "strive to coordinate all creative effort, to achieve, in a new architecture, the unification of all training in art and design" (Harrison & Wood 340). The ultimate, if distant, goal of the Bauhaus, said Gropius, was "the collective work of art -- the Building -- in which no barriers exist between the structural and the decorative arts." The curriculum included both practical and theoretical studies "to release the creative powers of the student, to help him grasp the physical nature of materials and the basic laws of design." Bauhaus avoided concentration on any stylistic approach to break down earlier preconceptions and biases. As a result, "The Bauhaus did more than any other organization, either in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries to reconcile man and his man-made environment" (Naylor 7). Noted Gropius at its opening:
Let us create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinction which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist. Together, let us conceive and create the new building of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers, like the crystal symbol of a new faith. (Harrison & Wood 340)
Gropius enlisted the support of avant garde artists such as Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy to stimulate the creative process. He believed, with their help, he could breathe life into the dead product of a machine. However, the Bauhaus was involved in political intrigue on many different levels from the time of its opening to its closure. There were continual conflicts between the institution, state and city parliament funding agents and eventually between Bauhaus and the Nazi Party. In 1923, for example, the Bauhaus held "Art and Technics: A New Unity," a huge exhibition of art and objects in Bauhaus buildings or the newly built model house. Although the international reaction was very positive, local critics were hostile (Etlin 291). As with earlier exhibitions, Bauhaus was called a "Spartacist-Bolshevist" institution with un-German influences. Gropius said these charges were "nationalistic and anti-Semetic slander."
In 1924, the proto-Nazi groups in parliament refused to refund the school and it moved to the industrial city of Dessau. Once again, there was local opposition and Gropius was asked to resign. After a couple of more directors left and Nazi majority was gained in the Dessau town council, funding for the Bauhaus was completely terminated in 1932 and the school's buildings were turned into a Nazi training camp.
Although it had such a rough history, Bauhaus...
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