The Bauhaus

 

“The ultimate aim of all artistic activity is building! … Architects, sculptors, painters, we must all get back to craft! … The artist is a heightened manifestation of the craftsman. … Let us form … a new guild of craftsmen without the class divisions that set out to raise an arrogant barrier between craftsmen and artists! … Let us together create the new building of the future which will be all in one: architecture and sculpture and painting.”
– Walter Gropius 1919

 

 

Walter Gropius was the founder of the Bauhaus movement, he was born in Berlin on May 18th 1883.

The Bauhaus was the most influential modernist art school of the 20th century, its approach to teaching, and understanding art’s relationship to society and technology, had a major impact both in Europe and the United States long after it closed.

• The motivations behind the creation of the Bauhaus lay in the 19th century, in anxieties about the soullessness of manufacturing and its products, and in fears about art’s loss of purpose in society. Creativity and manufacturing were drifting apart, and the Bauhaus aimed to unite them once again, rejuvenating design for everyday life.

• Although the Bauhaus abandoned much of the ethos of the old academic tradition of fine art education, it maintained a stress on intellectual and theoretical pursuits, and linked these to an emphasis on practical skills, crafts and techniques that was more reminiscent of the medieval guild system. Fine art and craft were brought together with the goal of problem-solving for a modern, industrial society. In so doing, the Bauhaus effectively leveled the old hierarchy of the arts, placing craft on a par with fine arts such as sculpture and painting, and paving the way for many of the ideas that have inspired artists in the late 20th century.

• The stress on experiment and problem-solving at the Bauhaus has proved enormously influential for the approaches to education in the arts. It has led to the ‘fine arts’ being rethought as the ‘visual arts’, and art considered less as an adjunct of the humanities, like literature or history, and more as a kind of research science.

My thoughts on the Bauhaus and its final goals and objectives remind me of Ikea, which is kind of funny as they clearly stated that they had fears about art’s loss of purpose in society, yet their final goals tend to be directed at practicality where furniture, building etc are stripped to minimal and devoid of emotion.