The Power of Color and Form at Bauhaus

To find answers to world-changing questions, schools like to form working groups. And the Bauhaus was no exception. The question the working group formed by masters and students in the early years set out to explore was …

… which of the three colours yellow, red and blue best matches the circle, the triangle and the square?

After hours and hours of discussions the answer they came up with was …

The colour for the triangle is yellow. Because yellow is combative and aggressive and stands for the mind and thought.

The colour for the square is red. Because red is static, heavy, sluggish.

The colour for the circle is blue. Because blue is relaxing and at the same time in motion, so it stands for the “mind animated within itself”.

But as if that wasn’t enough, the temperament of each colour was applied to human character as well, and so people’s favourite colours could be explained.

Something like – do you feel triangle or are you circle already?

She complained about the stressful piecework regime in the weaving workshop …

… and even spun intrigues against weaving master Gunta Stölzl.

In 1933 she opened the Grete Reichardt hand weaving shop in Erfurt, and five years later a former fellow student built her a house – not with a flat roof and lots of glass the way it was taught at the Bauhaus, but according to Reichardt’s very own wishes. It turned out to be a boring, conventional house with a pointed roof (there it is again, that triangle!) ...

… and looked a bit like this one here that after the war crowned the foundations of the bombed-out Gropius master’s house in Dessau.

Not just Reichardt’s house concealed any reference to the Bauhaus. For years its resident did too.

Her attitude to the avant-garde school in Dessau is probably best expressed in this carpet, which she wove in 1977 from designs made in 1929.

And what do we see here?

The triangle is blue, the circle is yellow ...

Read more about Bauhaus Textiles