The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (41 page)

Bauhaus
.

A school of art and design founded by Walter
Gropius
in Weimar in 1919 and closed by the Nazis in 1933; although it had such a short life it was the most famous art school of the 20th cent., playing key roles in establishing the relationship between design and industrial techniques and in breaking down the hierarchy that had previously divided ‘fine’ from ‘applied’ arts. The Bauhaus was created when Gropius was appointed head of two art schools in Weimar in 1919 and united them in one; they were the Kunstgewerbeschule (Arts and Crafts School) and the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst (Institute of Fine Arts). He gave his new school the name Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar (Weimar State ‘Building House’), coining himself the word ‘Bauhaus’ (an inversion of ‘Hausbau’—house construction). His prospectus formulated three main aims for the school: first, to unite the arts so that painters, sculptors, and craftsmen could in future embark on co-operative projects, combining all their skills harmoniously; secondly, to raise the status of the crafts to that enjoyed by the fine arts; and thirdly, to establish ‘constant contact with the leaders of the crafts and industries of the country’ (an important factor if the school were to survive in a country that was in economic chaos after the war).
All students had to take a six-month ‘Preliminary Course’ (
Vorkurs
) in which they studied the principles of form and colour, were acquainted with various materials, and were encouraged to develop their creativity. After that they moved on to workshop training in the field of their choice. Gropius brought together a remarkable collection of teachers at the Bauhaus. The first head of the preliminary course was Johannes
Itten
, and when he left in 1923 he was succeeded by László
Moholy-Nagy
, who replaced Itten's rather metaphysical approach with an austerely rational one. The other teachers included some illustrious painters, most notably
Kandinsky
and
Klee
. Several students went on to become teachers at the school, notably Josef
Albers
. In 1924 the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, where it was housed in a group of new buildings designed by Gropius . The school had been involved in architectural commissions from the beginning, but it was only in 1927 that an architectural department was established, with the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer (1889–1954) as its first professor. When Gropius resigned in 1928 to devote himself to his own practice he named Meyer as his successor. It was an unpopular choice with the staff, as Meyer was a Marxist and instituted a sociological approach that changed the whole tone of the school, with politics occupying an important place in the curriculum. In 1930 Meyer was forced to resign and was replaced by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969), one of the greatest architects of the 20th cent. Mies tried to rid the Bauhaus of its political associations and thereby make it a less easy target for its right-wing opponents, but in 1932 the Dessau parliament closed the school. In an attempt to keep it alive Mies rented a disused factory in Berlin and reopened the Bauhaus there as a private enterprise, but it was closed by the Nazis in April 1933, soon after Hitler assumed power. In its last few years the Bauhaus was dominated by architecture, but it produced a great range of goods, with many of them (furniture, textiles, and electric light fittings in particular) being adopted for large-scale manufacture. They were highly varied in appearance, but the style that is generally thought typical of the Bauhaus was severe, geometric, and undecorated. The Bauhaus published a journal (
Bauhaus
, 1926–31) and a series of books, and its ideas were spread also by the emigration of many of its teachers before and during the Second World War. It has had an enormous influence on art education in the Western world and on visual creativity in general: ‘The look of the modern environment is unthinkable without it. It left an indelible mark on activities as varied as photography and newspaper design … [and] achieved a language of design liberated from the historicism of the previous hundred years’ (Frank Whitford,
Bauhaus
, 1984). After the Second World War Dessau became part of East Germany and the Bauhaus buildings were left derelict. In 1976 the school was faithfully restored for the 50th anniversary of its opening in Dessau, and after the reunification of Germany in 1990 it was reopened as a design institution.

 
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(1889–1955).
German abstract painter. Unlike most significant German painters of his time, he stood outside the ambit of
Expressionism
and is regarded as the most ‘European’ in spirit of his contemporaries. Between 1911 and 1914 he had several stays in Paris (sometimes in company with his close friend Oskar
Schlemmer
) and his early work was influenced by
Cubism
. After military service in the First World War, he began to develop a personal style in a series (1919–23) of
Mauerbilder
(wall paintings), so called because he added sand, putty, etc., to his pigments to give a textured effect. In the mid-1920s his work became more figurative in a manner recalling
Léger
and the
Purists
(he met Léger,
Le Corbusier
, and
Ozenfant
when he revisited Paris in 1924), and his work met with considerable acclaim in France. In 1928 he was appointed Professor of Typography at the Städel School in Frankfurt, but in 1933 he was dismissed by the Nazis, who declared his work
degenerate
. From then until the end of the Second World War he worked in obscurity in Stuttgart. During this time his painting became freer, with suggestions of primitive imagery, creating a kind of abstract
Surrealism
. His interest in imagery from the subconscious was described in his book
Das Unbekannte in der Kunst
(The Unknown in Art), written in 1943–4 and published in 1947. After the war Baumeister became a hero to a younger generation of German abstract artists. From 1946 until his death he was a professor at the Stuttgart Academy.

 
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(1804–67).
English engraver and printer. In 1835 he patented a method of making colour prints using oil colours, and around the middle of the century ‘Baxter prints’ enjoyed a great vogue, making coloured reproductions of paintings widely available. Baxter licensed other firms to employ the process and did not himself profit greatly from the invention, which was eventually supplanted by cheap coloured
lithographs
.

 
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Bayes , Gilbert
.

See
NEW SCULPTURE
.

 
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