Bauhaus Knowledge in a Nutshell: FAQs About the Bauhaus

The Bauhaus was a school. Walter Gropius founded it in 1919 with the aim of training a new generation of designers and architects. To this end, students were taught in various workshops after completing the so-called preliminary course. The number and focus of the workshops, as well as the supplementary educational programme, changed repeatedly during the 14 years of the Bauhaus’s existence.

You can find out more about the Bauhaus here.

There is no official document recording the founding of the Bauhaus. The word Bauhaus appears for the first time in Walter Gropius’s employment contract as director of the Bauhaus, which he signed on 12 April 1919.

The Bauhaus in Berlin – at that point, a privately run school – was sealed off on 11 April 1933 after being searched by the Nazis. In the early summer, Director Ludwig Mies van der Rohe received permission to reopen the school on the condition that he dismiss Jewish and politically undesirable members of the teaching staff. The remaining staff would be required to join the Nazi Party. At almost the same time, their salaries, which had previously been paid by the city of Dessau, were terminated. Due to these financial and political difficulties, Mies van der Rohe closed the school on 19 July 1933.

The Bauhaus was founded in Weimar in April 1919 by Walter Gropius. After the Thuringian government drastically cut funding in 1925, the Bauhaus moved to Dessau in April 1925. In September 1932, the school was forced to close there, as well, when the Nazis took control of the local council. The Bauhaus then moved to Berlin, where it was permanently disbanded in July 1933.

Teaching staff at the Bauhaus were referred to as masters; a distinction was made between form masters, who led the workshops artistically (and included famous artists such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Johannes Itten), and craft masters, who taught craft and technical skills. With the move to Dessau in 1925, the title “young master” was introduced for former students of the school. When the Bauhaus was designated a university of design in 1926, its teaching staff were given the title of professor.

Bauhaus is not a style. The school itself, as well as the works created by its members, were very diverse. Therefore, the Bauhaus cannot be identified through individual colours or stylistic features.

There are no Bauhaus colours and shapes. However, students, particularly in the classes taught by Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, intensively explored the effects of colours and shapes. Wassily Kandinsky conducted a survey among students to find out which of the primary colours red, blue and yellow they would associate with the basic shapes triangle, square and circle. The results were very ambiguous.

The BeBA (Research centre for biographies of former Bauhaus members) at the University of Erfurt has made its comprehensive database available online (only in German): https://bauhaus.community/

Founded in 1919, the Bauhaus attracted numerous female students who, like their male counterparts, first completed the preliminary course before continuing their training in the various workshops. Female students usually received a recommendation to study weaving, but a few were also accepted into other workshops based on their own requests. Many of them created unique works that still shape our image of modernism today. Nevertheless, the achievements of female members of the Bauhaus – at that time and in the later reception of the Bauhaus – have not been appreciated to the same extent as those of their male colleagues. For example, with the exception of Gunta Stölzl, Gertrud Grunow, Marianne Brandt and Lilly Reich, the teaching staff were almost exclusively male. When looking at the situation of women at the Bauhaus from today’s perspective, it is important to remember that the Bauhaus masters were all born in the 19th century and shaped by a patriarchal society. Measured against the conditions of that time, women at the Bauhaus were able to live and work more freely than at other institutions.