The Bauhaus Movement (1919–1933)
The German art and design school that united fine art, craft, and industrial technology, defining modernist design and spreading worldwide after its closure by the Nazi regime.
Timeline
Founding in Weimar
Architect Walter Gropius founded the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar, merging the Grand-Ducal art academy and school of arts and crafts. Its founding manifesto called for the reunion of art and craft and the "building of the future" after the devastation of World War I.
Location: Weimar, Germany
The Vorkurs and the Masters
The school introduced the Vorkurs, a compulsory foundation course teaching form, color, and materials, taught first by Johannes Itten and later by László Moholy-Nagy. Painters Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky taught alongside craftsmen as "masters of form," an education model that art schools worldwide later copied.
Location: Weimar, Germany
The First Bauhaus Exhibition
The school's first public exhibition, Bauhaus Week, drew thousands and presented the experimental Haus am Horn model house. The slogan "Art and Technology — A New Unity" marked the school's shift toward designing for industrial production.
Location: Weimar, Germany
Expelled from Weimar
A new conservative state government cut funding, forcing the school to leave Weimar under nationalist pressure that labeled it "un-German." The city of Dessau, governed by a socialist majority, invited the Bauhaus and financed a new campus.
Location: Weimar, Germany
The Dessau Building Opens
Gropius's new Bauhaus building opened, its glass curtain walls, asymmetric wings, and workshops visible from the street becoming the school's architectural statement. The same era produced Marcel Breuer's tubular-steel chairs and Herbert Bayer's graphic design, commercial designs that still define modernism.
Location: Dessau, Germany
Hannes Meyer's Directorship
Gropius stepped down and Swiss architect Hannes Meyer became director, steering the school toward function, science, and affordable mass housing. Meyer brought in major commissions, including the ADGB trade union school in Bernau, but his Marxist politics drew growing hostility from Dessau's conservative opponents.
Location: Dessau, Germany
Meyer Dismissed, Mies Takes Over
Under political pressure, Meyer was dismissed amid accusations over communist student activity, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe became the third and final director. Mies depoliticized the school and tightened its structure, but hostility from the rising Nazi movement continued.
Location: Dessau, Germany
Closure in Dessau and the Berlin End
The Dessau city council, now with a Nazi majority, terminated the school's contracts. Mies moved it to Berlin as a private institute, but on July 20, 1933, with the Gestapo searching the premises, the masters voted to dissolve the Bauhaus themselves.
Location: Dessau, Germany
The Diaspora Spreads Modernism
Persecution drove the Bauhaus masters abroad: Gropius and Breuer to Harvard, Mies van der Rohe to Chicago, Josef and Anni Albers to Black Mountain College and Yale, and Moholy-Nagy to found the New Bauhaus in Chicago. Their teaching and buildings made the school's idiom the dominant language of postwar architecture and design.
Location: United States and worldwide
Centenary and Legacy
The Bauhaus centenary was marked by museums in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin and by global exhibitions. Its vocabulary — geometric forms, functional clarity, sans-serif typography — remains embedded in everyday objects, logos, and buildings, and the Dessau and Weimar campuses became UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 1996.
Location: Germany