Bauhaus is the common term for the Staatliches Bauhaus, an art and architecture school in Germany that operated from 1919 to 1933, and for its approach to design that it publicized and taught. The most natural meaning for its name (related to the German verb for “build”) is Architecture House. Bauhaus style became one of the most influential currents in Modernist architecture, and one of the most important currents of the New Objectivity.

The Bauhaus art school had a profound influence upon subsequent developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design and typography.

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The Bauhaus art school existed in three German cities (Weimar from 1919 to 1925, Dessau from 1925 to 1932, Berlin from 1932 to 1933), under three different architect-directors (Walter Gropius from 1919 to 1927, Hannes Meyer from 1928 to 1930, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1930 to 1933). The changes of venue and leadership resulted in a constant shifting of focus, technique, instructors, and politics. When the school moved from Weimar to Dessau, for instance, although it had been an important revenue source, the pottery shop was discontinued. When Mies took over the school in 1930, he transformed it into a private school, and would not allow any supporters of Hannes Meyer to attend it.

László Moholy-Nagy revived the school for a single year in Chicago as the New Bauhaus.

Political context

The foundation of the Bauhaus occurred at a time of crisis and turmoil in Europe as a whole and particularly in Germany. Its establishment resulted from a confluence of a diverse set of political, social, educational and artistic development in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

The conservative modernisation of the German Empire during the 1870s had maintained power in the hands of the aristocracy. It also necessitated militarism and imperialism to maintain stability and economic growth. By 1912 the rise of the leftist SPD had galvanized political positions with notions of international solidarity and socialism set against imperialist nationalism. World War I ensued from 1914–18.

In 1917 in the midst of the carnage of the First World War, workers and soldier Soviets seized power in Russia. Inspired by the Russian workers and soldier Soviets, similar German communist factions—most notably The Spartacist League—were formed, who sought a similar revolution for Germany. The following year, the death throes of the war provoked the German Revolution, with the SPD securing the abdication of the Kaiser and the formation of a revolutionary government. On 1 January 1919, the Spartacist League attempted to take control of Berlin, an action that was brutally suppressed by the combined forces of the SPD, the remnants of the German Army, and right-wing paramilitary groups.

Elections were held on the January 19, and the Weimar Republic was established. Communist revolution was still a tangible prospect for many; indeed, a Soviet republic was declared in Munich, before its suppression by the right wing Freikorps and regular army. Sporadic fighting continued to flare up around the country.

Bauhaus and German modernism

The design innovations commonly associated with Gropius and the Bauhaus — the radically simplified forms, the rationality and functionality, and the idea that mass-production was reconcilable with the individual artistic spirit — were already partly developed in Germany before the Bauhaus was founded.

The German national designers’ organization Deutscher Werkbund was formed in 1907 by Hermann Muthesius to harness the new potentials of mass production, with a mind towards preserving Germany’s economic competitiveness with England. In its first seven years, the Werkbund came to be regarded as the authoritative body on questions of design in Germany, and was copied in other countries. Many fundamental questions of craftsmanship vs. mass production, the relationship of usefulness and beauty, the practical purpose of formal beauty in a commonplace object, and whether or not a single proper form could exist, were argued out among its 1870 members (by 1914).

Beginning in June 1907, Peter Behrens’ pioneering industrial design work for the German electrical company AEG successfully integrated art and mass production on a large scale. He designed consumer products, standardized parts, created clean-lined designs for the company’s graphics, developed a consistent corporate identity, built the modernist landmark AEG Turbine Factory, and made full use of newly developed materials such as poured concrete and exposed steel. Behrens was a founding member of the Werkbund, and both Walter Gropius and Adolf Meier worked for him in this period.

The Bauhaus was founded in 1919, the same year as the Weimar Constitution, and at a time when the German Zeitgeist turned from emotional Expressionism to the matter-of-fact New Objectivity. An entire group of working architects, including Erich Mendelsohn, Bruno Taut and Hans Poelzig, turned away from fanciful experimentation, and turned toward rational, functional, sometimes standardized building.

Beyond the Bauhaus, many other significant German-speaking architects in the 1920s responded to the same aesthetic issues and material possibilities as the school. They also responded to the promise of a ‘minimal dwelling’ written into the Constitution. Ernst May, Bruno Taut, and Martin Wagner, among others, built large housing blocks in Frankfurt and Berlin. The acceptance of modernist design into everyday life was the subject of publicity campaigns, well-attended public exhibitions like the Weissenhof Estate, films, and sometimes fierce public debate.

The entire movement of German architectural modernism was known as Neues Bauen.

History of the Bauhaus

Weimar

The school was founded by Walter Gropius at the conservative city of Weimer in 1919 as a merger of the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts and the Weimar Academy of Fine Arts. His opening manifesto proclaimed “to create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist”.

Most of the contents of the pre-war Weimar workshops had been sold during World War I. The early intention was for the Bauhaus to be a combined architecture school, crafts school, and academy of the arts. Much internal and external conflict followed.

Gropius argued that a new period of history had begun with the end of the war. He wanted to create a new architectural style to reflect this new era. His style in architecture and consumer goods was to be functional, cheap and consistent with mass production. To these ends, Gropius wanted to reunite art and craft to arrive at high-end functional products with artistic pretensions. The Bauhaus issued a magazine called “Bauhaus” and a series of books called “Bauhausbücher”. Since the country lacked the quantity of raw materials that the United States and Great Britain had, they had to rely on the proficiency of its skilled labor force and ability to export innovative and high quality goods. Therefore designers were needed and so was a new type of art education. The school’s philosophy basically stated that the artist should be trained to work with the industry.

Thuringian Parliamentary support for the school came from the Social Democratic party. In February 1924, the Social Democrats lost control of the state parliament to the nationalists. the Ministry of Education place the staff on six-month contracts and cut the school’s funding in half. they had already been looking for alternative sources of funding. Together with the Council of Masters he announced the closure of the Bauhaus from the end of March 1925.

After the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, a school of industrial design with teachers and staff less antagonistic to the conservative political regime remained in Weimar. This school was eventually known as the Technical University of Architecture and Civil Engineering, and in 1996 changed its name to Bauhaus University Weimar.

Dessau

The Dessau years saw a remarkable change in direction for the school. According to Elaine Hoffman, Gropius had approached the Dutch architect Mart Stam to run the newly-founded architecture program, and when Stam declined the position, Gropius turned to Stam’s friend and colleague in the ABC group, Hannes Meyer. Gropius would come to regret this decision.

The charismatic Meyer rose to director when Gropius resigned in February 1928, and Meyer brought the Bauhaus its two most significant building commissions, both of which still exist: five apartment buildings in the city of Dessau, and the headquarters of the Federal School of the German Trade Unions (ADGB) in Bernau. Meyer favored measurements and calculations in his presentations to clients, along with the use of off-the-shelf architectural components to reduce costs, and this approach proved attractive to potential clients. The school turned its first profit under his leadership in 1929.

But Meyer also generated a great deal of conflict. As a radical functionalist, he had no patience with the aesthetic program, and forced the resignations of Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, and other longtime instructors. As a vocal Communist, he encouraged the formation of a Communist student organization. In the increasingly dangerous political atmosphere, this became a threat to the existence of the Dessau school, and to the personal safety of anyone involved. Meyer was also compromised by a sexual scandal involving one of his students, and Gropius fired him in 1930.

Berlin

Although neither the Nazi Party nor Hitler himself had a cohesive architectural ‘policy’ in the 1930s, Nazi writers like Wilhelm Frick and Alfred Rosenberg had labelled the Bauhaus “un-German” and criticized its modernist styles, deliberately generating public controversy over issues like flat roofs. Increasingly through the early 1930s, they characterized the Bauhaus as a front for Communists, Russian, and social liberals. Indeed, second director Hannes Meyer was an avowed Communist, and he and a number of loyal students moved to the Soviet Union in 1930.

Under political pressure the Bauhaus was closed on the orders of the Nazi regime on April 11 1933. The closure, and the response of Mies van der Rohe, is fully documented in Elaine Hochman’s Architects of Fortune.

Architectural Output

The paradox of the early Bauhaus was that, although its manifesto proclaimed that the ultimate aim of all creative activity was building, the school wouldn’t offer classes in architecture until 1927. The single most profitable tangible product of the Bauhaus was its wallpaper. pic needed

During the years under Gropius (1919–1927), he and his partner Adolf Meyer observed no real distinction between the output of his architectural office and the school. So the built output of Bauhaus architecture in these years is the output of Gropius: the Sommerfeld house in Berlin, the Otte house in Berlin, the Auerbach house in Jena, and the competition design for the Chicago Tribune Tower, which brought the school much attention. The definitive 1926 Bauhaus building in Dessau is also attributed to Gropius. Apart from contributions to the 1923 Haus am Horn, student work architectural amounted to unbuilt projects, interior finishes, and craft work like cabinets, chairs and pottery.

In the next two years under the outspoken Swiss Communist architect Hannes Meyer, the architectural focus shifted away from aesthetics and towards functionality. But there were major commissions: one by the city of Dessau for five tightly designed “Laubenganghäuser” (apartment buildings with balcony access), which are still in use today, and another for the headquarters of the Federal School of the German Trade Unions (ADGB) in Bernau bei Berlin. Meyer’s approach was to research users’ needs and scientifically develop the design solution.

And then Mies van der Rohe repudiated Meyer’s politics, his supporters, and his architectural approach. As opposed to Gropius’ “study of essentials”, and Meyer’s research into user requirements, Mies advocated a “spatial implementation of intellectual decisions”, which effectively meant an adoption of his own aesthetics. Neither Mies nor his Bauhaus students saw any projects built during the 1930s.

The popular conception of the Bauhaus as the source of extensive Weimar-era working housing is not accurate. Two projects, the apartment building project in Dessau and the Törten row housing also in Dessau fall in that category, but developing worker housing was not the first priority of Gropius nor Mies. It was the Bauhaus contemporaries Bruno Taut, Hans Poelzig and particularly Ernst May, as the city architects of Berlin, Dresden and Frankfurt respectively, who are rightfully credited with the thousands of socially progressive housing units built in Weimar Germany. In Taut’s case, the housing may still be seen in SW Berlin, is still occupied, and can be reached by going easily from the Metro Stop Onkel Tom’s Hutte.

Impact

The Bauhaus had a major impact on art and architecture trends in Western Europe, the United States and Israel (particularly in White City, Tel Aviv) in the decades following its demise, as many of the artists involved fled, or were exiled, by the Nazi regime. Tel Aviv, in fact, has been to named by the UN, to the list of world heritage sites, due to its abundance of Bauhaus architecture.

Gropius, Breuer, and Moholy-Nagy re-assembled in England during the mid 1930s to live and work in the Isokon project before the war caught up to them. Both Gropius and Breuer went to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and worked together before their professional split in 1941. The Harvard School was enormously influential in America in the late 1940s and early 1950s, producing such students as Philip Johnson, I.M. Pei, Lawrence Halprin and Paul Rudolph, among many others.

In the late 1930s, Mies van der Rohe re-settled in Chicago, enjoyed the sponsorship of the influential Philip Johnson, and became one of the pre-eminent architects in the world. Moholy-Nagy also went to Chicago and founded the New Bauhaus school under the sponsorship of industrialist and philanthropist Walter Paepcke. Printmaker and painter Werner Drewes was also largely responsible for bringing the Bauhaus aesthetic to America and taught at both Columbia University and Washington University in St. Louis. Herbert Bayer, sponsored by Paepcke, moved to Aspen, Colorado in support of Paepcke’s Aspen projects.

One of the main objectives of the Bauhaus was to unify art, craft, and technology. The machine was considered a positive element, and therefore industrial and product design were important components. Vorkurs (“initial” or “preliminary course”) was taught; this is the modern day Basic Design course that has become one of the key foundational courses offered in architectural and design schools across the globe. There was no teaching of history in the school because everything was supposed to be designed and created according to first principles rather than by following precedent.

One of the most important contributions of the Bauhaus is in the field of modern furniture design. The world famous and ubiquitous Cantilever chair by Dutch designer Mart Stam, using the tensile properties of steel, and the Wassily Chair designed by Marcel Breuer are two examples.

The physical plant at Dessau survived the War and was operated as a design school with some architectural facilities by the Communist German Democratic Republic. This included live stage productions in the Bauhaus theater under the name of Bauhausbühne (“Bauhaus Stage”). After German reunification, a reorganized school continued in the same building, with no essential continuity with the Bauhaus under Gropius in the early 1920s [1].

In 1999 Bauhaus-Dessau College started to organize postgraduate programs with participants from all over the world. This effort has been supported by the Bauhaus-Dessau Foundation which was founded in 1994 as a public institution.

American art schools have also rediscovered the Bauhaus school. The Master Craftsman Program at Florida State University bases its artistic philosophy on Bauhaus theory and practice.

Many outstanding artists of their time were lecturers at Bauhaus:

• Anni Albers
• Josef Albers
• Marianne Brandt
• Marcel Breuer
• Avgust ?ernigoj
• Lyonel Feininger
• Naum Gabo
• Ludwig Hilberseimer
• Johannes Itten
• Wassily Kandinsky
• Paul Klee
• Gerhard Marcks
• László Moholy-Nagy
• Piet Mondrian
• Georg Muche
• Hinnerk Scheper
• Oskar Schlemmer
• Joost Schmidt
• Lothar Schreyer
• Naum Slutzky
• Wolfgang Tumpel
• Gunta Stölzl
• Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

References

Article found in Wikipedia. Images found in Wikimedia Commons.

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The term “minimalist” can also refer to anything which is spare, stripped to its essentials, or providing only the outline of structure, independent of the particular art movement, and “minimalism” the tendency to reduce to fundamentals. It is sometimes applied to groups or individuals practicing asceticism and the reduction of physical possessions and needs to a minimum.

Musical minimalism

In classical music of the last 35 years, the term minimalism is sometimes applied to music which displays some or all of the following features: repetition (often of short musical phrases, with minimal variations over long periods of time) or stasis (often in the form of drones and long tones); emphasis on consonant harmony; a steady pulse. Minimalist music can sometimes sound similar to different forms of techno-electronic music (e.g. chill out), as well as the texture-based compositions of composers such as Gyorgy Ligeti; it is often the case that the end result is similar, but the approach is not.

The term minimalism, endowed independently by composer-critics Michael Nyman and Tom Johnson, has been controversial, but was in wide use by the mid-1970s. The application of a visual art term to music has been protested; however, not only do minimalist sculpture and music share a certain spare simplicity of means and an aversion to ornamental detail, but many of the early minimalist concerts happened in connection with exhibits of minimalist art by Sol LeWitt and others. Several composers associated with minimalism have disavowed the term, notably Glass, who has reportedly said, “That word should be stamped out!!”.

Minimalist design

The term minimalism is also used to describe a trend in design and architecture where in the subject is reduced to its necessary elements. Minimalist design has been highly influenced by Japanese traditional design and architecture.

Architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe adopted the motto “Less is more” to describe his aesthetic tactics of flattening and emphasizing the building’s frame, eliminating interior walls and adopting an open plan, and reducing the structure to a strong, transparent, elegant skin. Designer Buckminster Fuller adopted a similar saying, “Doing more with less”, but his concerns were more oriented towards technology and engineering than aesthetics.

Contemporary architects working in this tradition include John Pawson, Eduardo Souto de Moura, Tadao Ando, Yoshio Tanaguchi, Peter Zumthor, Vincent Van Duysen, Claudio Silvestrin, Michael Gabellini, and Richard Gluckman.

Minimalism in visual art

Minimalism in visual art, sometimes referred to as “ABC Art,” emerged in New York in the 1960s. It is regarded as a reaction against the painterly forms of Abstract Expressionism. As artist and critic Thomas Lawson noted in his 1977 catalog essay Last Exit: Painting, minimalism did not reject Clement Greenberg’s claims about Modernist Painting’s reduction to surface and materials so much as take his claims literally. Minimalism was the result, even though the term “minimalism” was not generally embraced by the artists associated with it, and many practitioners of art designated minimalist by critics did not identify it as a movement as-such.

In contrast to the Abstract Expressionists, Minimalists were influenced by composer John Cage. They very explicitly stated that their art was not self-expression, in complete opposition to the previous decade’s Abstract Expressionists. Very soon they created a minimal style, whose features included: rectangular and cubic forms purged of all metaphor, equality of parts, repetition, neutral surfaces, industrial materials, all of which leads to immediate visual impact.

The first art specifically associated with Minimalism was Frank Stella, whose “stripe” paintings provided the first of the reductive works that would follow as “minimalism.” Minimalist sculpture is greatly focused on the materials used.

The origins of Minimalism are in the geometric abstractions of pre-World War II painters in the Bauhaus, Russian Constructivists and the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncu§i (whose work was a major influence on the Minimalism of Robert Morris).The Russian Constructivists proclaiming the distillation was in order to create a universal language of art which the masses were meant to understand. It may have also supported the rapid industrialization planned for the massive country. Brâncu§i’s work was much more of a search for the purity of the form and thus paved the way for the abstractions that were to come, such as minimalism.

This style was heavily criticised. It was called futile, mechanistic, mandarin, elitist, circular, pedantic and authoritarian. Some critics thought they were dealing with outright fraud. The most notable critique of Minimalism was produced by Michael Fried, a greenbergian critic, who objected to the work on the basis of its “theatricality”: that Minimalist work, especially sculpture, was based on an engagement with the physicality of the spectator transforming the act of viewing the work into a spectace.

Other Minimalist artists include: Carl Andre, Larry Bell, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, John McCracken, Robert Smithson, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Serra, Tony Smith, Robert Smithson, Frank Stella and Anne Truitt.

Ad Reinhardt summed up the style in these terms:

‘The more stuff in it, the busier the work of art, the worse it is. More is less. Less is more. The eye is a menace to clear sight. The laying bare of oneself is obscene. Art begins with the getting rid of nature.’

Also notable are the post-minimalists, including Hannah Wilke, Martin Puryear and Joel Shapiro. The hallmark of post-minimalism is the often distinct references to objects without direct representation.

Literary minimalism

Literary minimalism is characterized by an economy with words and a focus on surface description. Minimalist authors eschew adverbs and prefer allowing context to dictate meaning. Readers are expected to take an active role in the creation of a story, to “choose sides” based on oblique hints and innuendo, rather than reacting to directions from the author. The characters in minimalist stories and novels tend to be unexceptional; they’re average people who sell pool supplies or coach second tier athletic teams, not famous detectives or the fabulously wealthy. Generally, the short stories are “slice of life” stories.

Some 1940s-era crime fiction of writers such as James M. Cain and Jim Thompson adopted a stripped-down, matter-of-fact prose style to considerable effect; some classifiy this prose style as minimalism.

Another strand of literary minimalism arose in response to the meta-fiction trend of the 1960s and early 1970s (John Barth, Coover, and William H. Gass). These writers were also spare with prose and kept a psychological distance from their subject matter.

Minimalist authors include the following: Raymond Carver, Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis, Ernest Hemingway, Amy Hemp, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tobias Wolff, Grace Paley, Sandra Cisneros, Mary Robison, Frederick Barthelme, and Alicia Erian.

The Irish author Samuel Beckett is also known for his minimalistic plays and prose.

Minimalism in Film

Minimalism also exists within the realm of filmmaking. Minimalist filmmakers tend to reduce their works to the bare essentials, both in terms of mis-en-scène, narrative, and filmic construction. Long takes, static frames, distinct framing/composition, as well as stories dealing with more internal narratives are common place.

Minimalist films are usually found mainly within the arthouse sector of filmmaking, as the techniques used can sometimes be considered too jarring for a mainstream audience. This though, is not always the case.

Paradigm examples of minimalist films are Andy Warhol’s Sleep (1963) and Empire (1964), both of which are extended-duration (5 and 8 hours respectively), real-time single-continuous-shot films. The difficulty, however, of terming Warhol’s films minimalist is their length, which is extravagant. And, as their length is their most significant feature, it often precludes them from the minimalist canon. More recently, Gus van Sant’s Gerry (2002) could be termed minimalist, due to its absence of dialog and scenic variety, and only the barest narrative. Other films which some have called minimalist include Last Life in the Universe, 3 Iron, and Invisible Waves.

Article found in Wikipedia.