3.3.3: The Bauhaus Design

Introduction to Fine Arts - Visual

Introduction

by Dr. Lisa Floryshak

To understand how we arrived at our intellectual insights into art and design in the 21^st century, we need to look back to the research and promotion surrounding art and design done a century ago. The Industrial Revolution sparked a renaissance. At this time, there is an emergence of the middle class, and the idea that even commoners could own houses and the material goods that would fill that lifestyle. This included household décor, fine art, and exquisite fashion.

 In 1919, German architect Walter Gropius set forth a radical new concept that Art and Design should be unified under one umbrella. This prompted the beginning of the Bauhaus Craft Guild, a utopian organization that combined fine art, architecture, and craft into one single expression. The result was artists and artisans who used aesthetics as part of the design process. The Bauhaus curriculum combined arts and education, immersing students in material and color studies, as well as more formal studies in aesthetics. Artists such as Paul Klee, Vasily Kandinshky, and Joseph Albers took part in this initial instruction. The workshops included formal training in metalworking, furniture, weaving, pottery, typography and mural painting. It also included a writers’ studio, training designers’ how to promote art and design. The goal was to meet the demands of this newfound renaissance by designing for mass production.

Resource:

Winton: Alexandria Griffith. “The Bauhaus, 1919-1933,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Bauhaus [www.metmuseum.org], accessed February 13, 2026.

The Bauhaus, an introduction

by Dr. Charles Cramer and Dr. Kim Grant

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Left: Marianne Brandt, Kandem Bedside Table Lamp, 1928, lacquered steel, 23.5 x 18.4 cm (MoMA(opens in new window)). Right: Marcel Breuer, Chair (model B33), 1927-28, chrome-plated tubular steel with steel-thread seat and back, 83.7 x 49 x 64.5 cm (MoMA(opens in new window)). via SmartHistory.

The Bauhaus was an art and design school in Germany whose importance is astonishing given its very brief and tenuous existence. The desk lamp and chair illustrated here are so familiar and so simple that they don’t seem to have required a designer, but they were as radical in their time as they are commonplace now, and their apparent simplicity was the result of a thoughtful and meticulous design education and design process that remains a model today.

During its fourteen years of existence the Bauhaus was forced to change location three times and was ultimately closed as a result of political pressure from the Nazi party. Founded by Walter Gropius in 1919, the school originally had three aims: to abolish the “arrogant” distinction between artist and craftsperson by recognizing the knowledge and skills common to both; to mobilize all arts and crafts towards the creation of total design environments; and, to foster links between the school and local manufacturers.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Diagram of the Bauhaus curriculum (image: SuperManu(opens in new window), CC BY-SA 3.0) via Smarthistory.

Art education and the “Vorkurs” (preliminary course)

The Bauhaus program of study is diagrammed above as a circle. Students began in the outer ring with the half-year Vorkurs or preliminary course (later expanded to a full year) before moving into one of several workshops to concentrate on a specific medium such as ceramics, woodworking, weaving, metalworking, and so on. Once they had achieved a degree of proficiency in their chosen medium all students converged again in Bau (building), to construct total environments, designing everything from the architecture to the furniture, carpets, dishes, and flatware.

The Vorkurs, which taught skills common to all areas of art and design, was one enduring innovation of the Bauhaus. Today’s art students will recognize in the Vorkurs the progenitor of their first-year 2-D Design and 3-D Design “foundations” courses. The original head of the Vorkurs was a charismatic Swiss art teacher named Johannes Itten, a follower of Mazdaznan (related to the ancient Persian religion Zoroastrianism) who wore monk-like clothing and encouraged students to meditate, do breathing exercises, and eat a vegetarian diet as aids to creativity.

Projects assigned in the Vorkurs were free-form and generally without practical application.  They were intended to develop students’ perception, creativity, and understanding of materials. For one typical project Itten collected disparate materials such as wool, rope, and wood shavings.

The students had to feel these sequences of textures with their fingertips, their eyes closed.  After a short while their sense of touch improved dramatically. I then asked them to make texture montages of contrasting materials. Fantastic structures were produced and their effects were completely novel at the time.Johannes Itten, Design and Form: The Basic Course at the Bauhaus and Later (London: Thames & Hudson, 1975), p. 34

Experimental constructions

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Moses Mirkin, Contrast study in various materials, 1920, photo of the original work as it appeared in the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition catalog, via SmartHistory.

Very few of these Vorkurs projects have survived as they were only intended to be exercises. The work above is described in the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition catalog as a “combined contrast effect: material contrast (glass, wood, iron), contrast of expressive forms (jagged-smooth); rhythmic contrast.” In addition to demonstrating these formal contrasts, its purpose was to understand the nature and potential of different materials.

For example, the wood is left rough and unfinished in order to demonstrate its grain, texture, and color variations. Similarly, the saw blade shows the dull sheen of its surface and has been curled into a spiral to demonstrate the flexibility of metal. The rust on the saw blade’s surface and the knots and splits in the wood are not sanded or polished; instead, they are featured as qualities of those materials that need to be understood by the design students who will be working with them.

From craft to industry

The early Bauhaus concentrated primarily on hand-made crafts, but it soon became evident that, in order to survive, the school needed to reorient its goals toward industrial production. Bauhaus headmaster Walter Gropius asserted in the keynote address for the school exhibition of 1923, “The Bauhaus believes the machine to be our modern medium of design and seeks to come to terms with it.” [1]

Itten, whose spiritual and expressionist orientation did not fit with these aims, was replaced by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and later Josef Albers, as head of the Vorkurs. The traditional medieval titles from craft workshops initially used in the Bauhaus, where instructors were called “Masters” and students were called “Apprentices” or “Journeymen,” were replaced by the more modern titles of professor and student.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Lyonel Feininger, Cathedral, cover for Program of the State Bauhaus in Weimar, 1919, woodcut, 41 x 31 cm (MoMA); right: Herbert Bayer, Bauhaus Exhibition poster, 1923, lithograph, 15 x 10 cm (MoMA). via SmartHistory.

The reorientation toward the modern machine age is most obvious in products designedby the Bauhaus for mass production, but it is also visible in the graphic branding of the Bauhaus itself. In 1919, the founding manifesto of the Bauhaus was published with a cover by Lyonel Feininger(opens in new window) that featured a cathedral crowned by three radiant stars. Both the medieval subject and the woodcut technique are deliberately old-fashioned, reflecting the guild structure of the school itself and its emphasis on hand making and personal expression.

By contrast, the poster designed for the 1923 exhibition is a lithograph, a more modern printmaking technology. It uses only rational geometric shapes and the primary colors red and blue, along with black and the white of the paper. Dotted lines and arcs made by a compass reinforce the overall sense of precise, mechanical execution, very different from the uneven, expressive marks of Feininger’s print. Even the letter forms reinforce the impression of clean, rationalized modernity: sans-serif, upright, and with a consistent (monoline) weight. Such “modern” typefaces are very familiar today, but were quite different from the medieval blackletter or gothic typeface that was common in Germany until the 1940s.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Walter Gropius, Shop Wing, Bauhaus building, Dessau, 1925-26 (via SmartHistory)

The Bauhaus is dead … long live the Bauhaus

In 1925, the Bauhaus was forced to flee from its original location in Weimar, Germany. The right-wing nationalists who came to power in the region saw the school as a hotbed of foreigners sympathetic to Communism. The school lasted only seven years in its next location, Dessau, before being forced to move to Berlin. When the Nazi party came to national power under Chancellor Adolf Hitler in 1933 the Bauhaus closed for good.

Despite its relatively brief existence, the Bauhaus had an enormous influence on our contemporary visual environment. Fleeing Nazi Germany, its professors disseminated the school’s curriculum and ideals across the United States. Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius went on to teach at the Harvard School of Design, along with furniture designer Marcel Breuer(opens in new window). Vorkurs instructors Moholy-Nagy(opens in new window) and Josef Albers(opens in new window) also continued their influential teaching careers: Moholy-Nagy at the New Bauhaus in Chicago and Josef Albers at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and Yale University in New Haven, CT.

Generations of art and design students have absorbed their instruction not only directly, in foundation courses that adopt the aims and sometimes sometimes even exact projects of the Bauhaus Vorkurs, but also by osmosis, living in dorms, sitting in chairs, and using desk lamps that are the direct descendants of Bauhaus designs.

Footnotes

[1] Cited in William J. R. Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900 (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996), p. 193.

Bibliography

Bauhaus: Building the New Artist at the Getty Research Institute(opens in new window)

Magdalena Droste.  Bauhaus: 1919-1933 (Köln: Taschen, 2006).

Elaine S. Hochman. Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism (New York: Fromm International, 1997).

Frank Whitford. Bauhaus (New York and London: Thames and Hudson, 1984).

Important fundamentals

The Bauhaus and Bau(opens in new window)

The Bauhaus: Marianne Brandt(opens in new window)

The Bauhaus: Marcel Breuer(opens in new window)

Cite this page

Cite this page as: Dr. Charles Cramer and Dr. Kim Grant, "The Bauhaus, an introduction," in Smarthistory, September 28, 2019, accessed February 16, 2026, The Bauhaus An Introduction [smarthistory.org].

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The Bauhaus: Marcel Breuer

by Dr. Charles Cramer and Dr. Kim Grant

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Walter Gropius, Shop Wing, Bauhaus building, Dessau, 1925-26 (via SmartHistory)

The Bauhaus(opens in new window) was an art and design school founded in Germany in 1919. In its early years, the Bauhaus concentrated primarily on hand-made crafts, but it soon became evident that, in order to survive, the school needed to reorient its goals toward industrial production. It therefore underwent a major overhaul in the early 1920s to shift its orientation toward mechanical production. Four chairs by Bauhaus student—and later professor—Marcel Breuer encapsulate the famous design school’s history and changing philosophy in a nutshell.

An Expressionist chair

Made when he was still a student, Breuer’s painted African Chair (opens in new window)exemplifies the early, expressionist phase of Bauhaus design. In keeping with the Arts and Crafts creed that hand making is superior to machine making, the carved wood in African Chair is left unplaned to retain a hand-hewn look. Gunta Stölzl, a fellow student in the Bauhaus textile workshop, used the chair frame itself as a loom, weaving the brightly colored geometric patterns of the seat back in place to complete the highly expressive and individualistic piece of furniture.

As its name suggests, African Chair participates in a primitivist aesthetic that was widespread among those seeking an antidote to the ills of urban and industrial life. African art, in particular, inspired many early twentieth-century European modernists, although often, as here in Breuer’s chair, that inspiration is vaguely evocative rather than referring to any specific African cultural tradition.

Coming to terms with industry

Breuer produced African Chair under the tutelage of Johannes Itten, the master of the Bauhaus carpentry workshop. The year after it was produced, the Bauhaus turned away from the expressionist aesthetic promoted by Itten and embraced a machine aesthetic. A major influence on this shift was De Stijl(opens in new window) co-founder Theo van Doesburg, who came to Germany in 1921 to offer courses on De Stijl principles of design that were attended by many Bauhaus students.

Van Doesburg’s teaching drove the final wedge between two competing schools of thought at the Bauhaus: one, led by Itten, that embraced individualistic, hand-making, spiritual, and expressionist aims; and the other that thought the school should be oriented toward impersonal, rational, industrial manufacture. Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius originally hoped the school could find a middle path, but in a 1922 memorandum he declared that

the world of forms which emerged from and in company with the machine asserts itself … Some Bauhaus students worship a misunderstood “return to nature” à la Rousseau; they want to shoot with bow and arrow rather than with a rifle. But then why not throw stones and go about naked?Cited in Frank Whitford, Bauhaus (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984), p. 120.

Gropius persuaded Itten to resign in 1923, and in his keynote address for the Bauhaus exhibition of that year, declared, “The Bauhaus believes the machine to be our modern medium of design and seeks to come to terms with it.”[1]

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Gerrit Rietveld, Red Blue Chair, 1918-23, painted wood, 86.7 x 66 x 83.8 cm, (MoMA(opens in new window)), via SmartHistory

Learning from De Stijl

In practice, this meant adopting a cleaner, more rational geometric aesthetic similar to De Stijl’s reduction of design to its basic elements: horizontal and vertical lines; the primary colors red, yellow, and blue; and the values black and white. Gerrit Rietveld’s Red Blue Chair is a prime example of De Stijl design(opens in new window); all the structural members are oriented on a perfect grid, meeting at 90 degree angles in what are still called “Rietveld Joints.” Only the seat and back are inclined at an angle, because it would be very uncomfortable to sit in a perfectly vertical chair. The chair was originally stained beechwood, but in 1923 Rietveld painted it the iconic primary colors of De Stijl.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Marcel Breuer, Armchair, 1922, Stained oak and hand-woven wool, 94.6 x 55.9 x 57.2 cm (MoMA(opens in new window)), via SmartHistory

Breuer’s armchair, designed a year after his African Chair, shows the clear influence of De Stijl. The structural framework is composed entirely of straight horizontal and vertical members meeting at perfect right angles. Like Rietveld, Breuer recognizes the need for some compromise with perfect geometric rationalism where the chair interfaces with the organic human body. The design is softened with a fabric seat that slopes down toward the back, and two slightly offset bands that cradle the lower back and just below the shoulder blades. Although the joinery (mortise-and-tenon, with some lap joints) would be somewhat time-consuming, the wood stock is of an even thickness and width throughout and joins meet exclusively at right angles, making the chair relatively easy to mass produce.

Turning to tubular steel

After he graduated, Breuer left the Bauhaus briefly in 1924 to work in Paris, but when the school moved to Dessau he returned to become head of the carpentry workshop. Ironically, at that time he changed materials and began producing furniture using an unabashedly industrial material: tubular steel rather than wood. Breuer’s switch to tube steel was prompted by his admiration for the frame of a bicycle he bought to ride around Dessau. Extruded from a mold, the seamless tubes could be produced in any length needed, then bent around forms into any desired shape. A plumber taught Breuer how to weld the tubes together, and with the Bauhaus weaving workshop to make the fabric, all of the parts came together for what would become Breuer’s signature style.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Marcel Breuer, The B3 “Wassily” Armchair, 1925, chrome-plated steel, canvas upholstery, 76.8 × 76.8 × 67.9 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art(opens in new window)) via SmartHistory

Although it looks complex, Breuer’s first version of the tube steel chair has a simple geometric basis worthy of De Stijl. The arms and legs form the armature of a cube, while the seat and back suggest a second cube nested within, tilted backwards at an ergonomic angle that almost appears to float. As with Breuer’s earlier wood slat chair, within the rigid, rationalized geometric armature, the parts that interface with the human body are made of soft fabric. This is not only ergonomic, it gives an interesting contrast between hard and soft, flexible and rigid, shiny and matte that seems to have come right out of the Bauhaus Vorkurs(opens in new window) exercises.

A design classic

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Marcel Breuer, Chair (model B33), 1927-28, chrome-plated tubular steel with steel-thread seat and back, 83.7 x 49 x 64.5 cm (MoMA(opens in new window)), via Smarthistory

Breuer continued to refine the design, and the B33 version of the tube steel chair surprisingly has no back legs. Taking advantage of the strength of the steel, the seat is cantilevered off its front legs (a cantilever occurs when a beam or plane projects beyond its vertical support). There was some dispute about who was responsible for the first cantilevered tubular steel chair. Dutch architect Mart Stam was demonstrably the first to make one, but Breuer claimed he did so after a visit to his studio, during which Breuer showed Stam his ideas for a chair based on a tubular steel table turned on its side.

Breuer had used cantilevers in his furniture design as early as 1922: notice that the arms of his wooden armchair are cantilevered and not supported in front. The cantilevered seat marks the logical conclusion of the tube-steel chair, and is widely acknowledged as a masterpiece of design. The use of a cantilever achieves several things at once. First, it allows the chair to be made of seemingly one single, continuous length of tubing, with just twelve right-angle bends, although cross braces were frequently welded beneath the seat for added rigidity.  This considerably simplifies the manufacturing process in comparison to the much more complicated, multi-part, multi-weld Wassily armchair above.

Second, the cantilever takes advantage of the flexibility of the metal; when someone sits in it, the chair has a slight spring. This not only acts as a shock absorber while sitting (and provides a slight boost when standing up), it also allows the chair to maintain a rigidly rational horizontal-and-vertical form when empty, but provides a slight recline when it is occupied — simultaneously fulfilling the Bauhaus principles of geometric rationalism and ergonomic functionalism(opens in new window).

Footnotes

[1] Cited in William J. R. Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900 (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996), p. 193.

Bibliography

Bauhaus: Building the New Artist at the Getty Research Institute(opens in new window)

Read more about primitivism in modern art(opens in new window)

Sigrid Wortmann Wellige,  Women’s Work: Textile art from the Bauhaus (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993).

Frank Whitford, Bauhaus (New York and London: Thames and Hudson, 1984).

Christopher Wilk, Marcel Breuer: Furniture and Interiors(opens in new window) (New York: MoMA, 1981).

Important fundamentals

The Bauhaus, an Introduction(opens in new window)

The Bauhaus and Bau(opens in new window)

The Bauhaus: Marianne Brandt(opens in new window)

Cite this page

Cite this page as: Dr. Charles Cramer and Dr. Kim Grant, "The Bauhaus: Marcel Breuer," in Smarthistory, September 28, 2019, accessed February 16, 2026, The Bauhaus [smarthistory.org].