Bauhaus: The School of Modernism

In 1932, the Bauhaus was forced to move once again as a result of political pressure, as had also been the case in Weimar in 1925. The third and last director after Hannes Meyer – architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe – kept the Bauhaus running as a private institution until 1933 in a former telephone factory in Berlin's Steglitz district.

The Bauhaus was closely associated with the heated political situation and turbulent history of the Weimar Republic. The end of this Republic and the start of the Nazi dictatorship in Germany in many ways marked the end of the Bauhaus.

On July 20, 1933, the Bauhaus was forced to close in the face of Nazi reprisals. Following this, most of the students and teachers who had been involved with possibly the most famous and influential school of modernism had to assimilate, go into hiding, or emigrate. Many former members of the Bauhaus took the ideas of the institution with them to almost every corner of the globe.

However, the Bauhaus had international links right from the start and was already world-famous early on. The emigration of its members greatly increased the school's international status and its global influence.

Influences from all over the world

The Bauhaus incorporated significant influences from international scenes, both in terms of the teaching program and the buildings, as well as in the lives of teachers and students. The founder Walter Gropius, for instance, aligned the school with certain traditions, and incorporated suggestions from English artists John Ruskin and William Morris when developing the teaching program. The combination of arts and crafts in the movement founded by Morris played an important role in the first years of the Bauhaus in particular.

Nearly 1,300 students attended the Bauhaus even though it only existed for 14 years. These included many international students, as noted in the Bauhaus journal when it published an insight into the backgrounds of its students in 1929: "140 are of German origin and 30 are from abroad, including eight Swiss, four Polish, three Czechs, three Russians, two Americans, two Latvians, two Hungarians, one German-Austrian, one Dutch, one Turkish, one Persian, one Palestinian, one stateless, with 119 male, and 51 female students."

Yet the teachers also came from a wide range of different countries and provided their own influences to enhance life at the Bauhaus. They included the painters Lyonel Feininger from New York and Wassily Kandinsky from Russia, the second Bauhaus director and architect Hannes Meyer from Switzerland, the visual artist László Moholy-Nagy from Hungary, and his wife, photographer Lucia Moholy from Prague, and the architect Mart Stam from the Netherlands.

Today, the Bauhaus building in Dessau is a World Heritage site and is a place where a wide range of different people, interests, and influences from all over the world are brought together, just as they were between 1926 and 1932. Together with the master houses nearby on the campus, the school building was where Bauhaus members revolutionized life, learning, and working together. The building is an expression of the teaching program and a modern way of life.

It provides an indication of what the Bauhaus was as a school, i.e. an important hub in the international network of modern art. In addition to students and teachers, the Bauhaus played host to many visitors from all over the world. They include composer Béla Bartók, French artist Marcel Duchamp, American collector Samuel R. Guggenheim, and Indian musician Murshid Inayat Kahn. The list might not be endless, but it would be a very long one!

The Bauhaus was also visible on the world stage in its early years. Even before the school's first major exhibition in Weimar in 1923, the Bauhaus sent 250 works by teachers and students to an exhibition in Kolkata in 1922.

The Bauhaus buildings in Dessau also illustrate the institution's international connection. The glass surfaces of the famous workshop wing in the Bauhaus building were not installed floor by floor, but using a grid system that "hung" as a whole on the roof of the building like a curtain – hence the established international term "curtain wall." Just like the design for the entrances to the building, the boundary-expanding effect and the framework structure also makes reference to Gropius' preoccupation with Japanese interior design, in this case with its transparent sliding walls (called shoji).