The Period That Led to the Bauhaus Was Very Much

The period that led to the Bauhaus was very much influenced by approaches to education reform and by the pre-war arts and crafts movement, especially the progressive education movement and the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art). Henry van de Velde in Weimar in 1902 founded the Arts and Crafts Seminar and was the director of the School of applied arts from 1907 to 1915. The school played a significant role in the early history of the Bauhaus. Gropius had been already proposed as his successor by van der Velde in 1915.Under Henry van de Velde, the school workshops had already taken the transitional step from craftsmanship techniques to industrial technology in 1910. The discussions at the works council for art, where German intellectuals, architects and artists came together in the autumn of 1918, had another decisive influence on the pioneering programme of the Bauhaus. One work group including Walter Gropius discussed the far- reaching reform of the educational system. In the spring of 1919, it developed a mutual concept paper that served as a basis for Gropius’s concept. The artist William Morris was the founder and leader of a reform movement that aspired to counter the cultural damage caused by industrialization. Starting in 1861, he revived historic handicraft techniques in his workshops and used them to produce high quality goods such as fabrics, carpets, glass paintings, furniture and everyday objects. The wave of reform was reached to German Later, Where the industrialization had achieved a new quality in that time. Germany also recognized that well-designed industrial products represented a significant economic factor. Through analysis of British educational system, German artists and intellectuals found it was necessary to reform arts and crafts of school in German and applied arts is the most important task now. Shortly after, Walter Gropius found the Weimar State Bauhaus with the goal of overcoming division between the artisan and the artist in 1919. The employees of the Bauhaus wanted to eliminate social differences through their creative work. On 1st of April 1919. Walter Gropius became the director of the former Grand-Ducal Saxon College of Fine Arts Art School in Weimar. He united it formally with the College of Applied Art, and named it the State Bauhaus in Weimar. The school represented the spirit of awakening. Gropius then appointed as masters at the Bauhaus Weimar included Gerhard Marcks, Lyonel Feininger, Johannes Itten, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky and László Moholy-Nagy. In his manifesto and programme for the Weimar State Bauhaus, Walter Gropius called for a new beginning for building culture. Art should once again serve a social role, and there should no longer be a division between the crafts-based disciplines. Instead of academic theory, the Bauhaus relied on a pluralistic educational concept, on creative methods and the individual development of the students’ artistic talents. Based on the manifesto and programme, the Bauhaus masters developed a new type of teaching programme based on the preliminary course developed by the Johannes Itten, the famous theory of Paul Klee and Kandinsky and practical training in the workshops. The ultimate goal of the educational programme was collaborative work on a representative building, the ‘Synthesis of the art’, as Gropius called it, to which all the Bauhaus workshops were to contribute. Training in the workshops was preceded by the preliminary course, a trial semester where the personal skills of the students were tested and the foundations of craftsmanship and design were taught. The workshops were the core of the Bauhaus Weimar. In 1923, Walter Gropius initiated a decisive change of direction at the Bauhaus Weimar. Theo van Doesburg, a Dutch artist, member of the group De Stijl, served as a catalyst for this development, but finally this was not accepted at the Bauhaus. Between 1919 and 1923, the state government generally promoted Gropius’s plans. With the right wing party won the election. The budget for the Bauhaus was cut and the teachers’ contracts cancelled as March 1925. Then Gropius and masters resigned in December. After then Bauhaus moved to Dessau in 1925. Surprisingly, following the politically motivated closure of the Bauhaus in Weimar, the change of location to Dessau did not result in a crisis in the school. Starting with the famous Bauhaus Building designed by Walter Gropius, the majority of the products and buildings that still define the image of the Bauhaus today were created in Dessau. As an architect who had already made a reputation for himself in 1911 with the celebrated glass building for the Fagus-Werk shoe factory, Gropius was warmly welcomed by Dessau citizens. Fortunately, the Weimar masters Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, Georg Muche and Oskar Schlemmer followed Gropius to Dessau and moved into the Masters’ Houses that he had designed. It is so important for Bauhaus. From 1926, the former Weimar State Bauhaus was officially called Bauhaus – School of Design. The masters were appointed as professors. A year later, on Gropius’s recommendation, the director’s post was handed over to the Swiss architect and urbanist Hannes Meyer, previously the head of the architectural department established at the Bauhaus in 1927.But, in 1930, he was dismissed by the city council for supposed ‘communist practices’. With Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1930, the Bauhaus acquired its last and least politically minded director. The school’s orientation towards architecture grew under his direction. however, there was also an increasing lack of socio-political reference. The students were most affected by the ban on any type of political activity and the discontinuation of production lines. Just one year after Mies van der Rohe took office, The city decided to close the Bauhaus in Dessau on September 1932. The relocation of the school with all its equipment to an old telephone factory in Berlin, which was organised by Mies van der Rohe, was just a brief interlude that preceded its final closure on 20th July 1933. Due to the repressive political measures of the National Socialists and the drastic cutbacks in funding, only a limited amount of work was possible during the Bauhaus’s last phase in Berlin. With regular teaching activities were no longer possible, Finally It had been dissolved in April 1933. Instead, the brief and dramatic Berlin phase led many professors and students to move elsewhere in Germany or to emigrate. The move to Berlin was organized by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who was the third Bauhaus director from 1930. In October 1931, the Bauhaus masters and students resumed their work in an abandoned telephone factory in Berlin. However, After being searched by polices, 32 students were arrested. These were unacceptable to Mies van der Rohe, the teaching staff dissolved the Bauhaus on 20th July 1933. After the dissolution of the Bauhaus in Berlin, a large number of those who taught and studied at the Bauhaus emigrated and contributed greatly to the global dissemination of the Bauhaus concept. One of the distinctive features of the Bauhaus is that it integrated a diverse range of international trends and was required to reinvent itself in consistently new contexts due to its forced relocation. Perhaps the most intensive communication and propagation of the ideas coming from the Bauhaus happened through the teachers and students even before its closure in 1933. Europe Gerhard Marcks, for example, went to the Burg Giebichenstein school of applied art in Halle in 1925. Oskar Schlemmer taught at the academy in Breslau from 1929 and Paul Klee at the art academy in Dusseldorf as of 1932. The Weimar architectural academy, the direct successor of the Bauhaus, employed former students and masters of the Bauhaus such as Ernst Neufert, Erich Dieckmann and Wilhelm Wagenfeld as teachers. In 1926, the former Bauhaus member Sándor Bortnyik founded the ‘Mühely’ (workshop) also known as the ‘Hungarian Bauhaus’, etc. USA With the emigration of many members of the Bauhaus, the Bauhaus idea was transplanted into other cultural circles and under the new conditions, the contents and forms of expression changed. Josef and Anni Albers, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer emigrated to the USA. In 1937, the New Bauhaus was founded in Chicago by Lászlo Moholy- Nagy. Walter Gropius and above all Ludwig Mies van der Rohe became the most important and influential architects in the USA. Many ideas from Ford‘s rationalisation principles, the lifestyles associated with jazz, steel-frame constructions and the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright had already been influential at the Bauhaus and beyond in the 1920s, under the title of ‘Americanism’. Not only that, the spirit of Bauhaus around the world now is affecting almost every aspect of human life and will continuing to be passed down by its successors. Training began with the preliminary course ,where new experimental educational methods were applied to acquaint students with the use of materials and the basic principles of design.In three different periods, three different masters are mainly responsible for teaching,including: 1. Johannes Itten’s preliminary course, 1919–1923. 2. László Moholy-Nagy’s preliminary course, 1923–1928. 3. Josef Albers’s preliminary course, 1928–1933. 1.At the Weimar State Bauhaus, he devised a contemporary method of teaching based on insights gained from the progressive educational movement and the artistic avant-garde. Itten encouraged his students to explore their own subjective feelings and to bring creativity to design. His course was divided into three sections: studies of nature and materials including colour and form theory, analyses of the old masters and life drawing. 2.In 1923, the Hungarian Constructivist László Moholy-Nagy joined the Bauhaus Weimar as the youngest master of form.Moholy-Nagy adopted Itten’s teaching method in the preliminary course by asking students to carry out independent studies of material.

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