Art at the Bauhaus
The first masters appointed to the Bauhaus were artists. “Countless ideas produced by modern painting once it shed its old constraints now lie fallow, awaiting their implementation in the trades,” Walter Gropius wrote in 1923. Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and other Bauhaus artists had departed from the traditional concept of images, turning to abstraction in the years leading up to World War I, and started to analyse the laws of artistic design with new theories and doctrines of art. Many of their works made a highly organised impression, contrasting sharply with a contemporary reality that was perceived as chaotic.
The initial years at the Bauhaus in particular witnessed heated controversies about the value of art and its place in the general order of things and the school’s training programme. Wassily Kandinsky responded in the first issue of the Bauhaus magazine in 1926, alluding to the pivotal role of the basic design course taught by the fine artists: “Painting is seen as one of the organising forces.”
The controversy reached a new stage with the introduction of free painting classes in the winter semester of 1927/28. The workshops were being increasingly subordinated to functional and technological considerations, while the output of fine arts was greater than ever. The visionary unity of art and design in a modern, more humane society began to crack. In the late 1920s, the editor of the magazine "bauhaus", Ernst Kallai, remarked that the Bauhaus displayed an objectivity shaped by stereotype mass production and determined entirely by considerations of utility and construction, on the one hand, and a metaphysical attitude born of dreams, visions, pure inner commitment or paradoxical wizardry, on the other.
The fine art produced at the Bauhaus ranged from late expressionism and abstraction to figurative, concrete socially critical and surrealist works. There is no trace of any Bauhaus-specific style. This holds true for the works of masters like Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer, who were famous painters even at that time, and also for the students’ artistic output.
The Bauhaus stage, run by Oskar Schlemmer, played a special role. The study of the relations between man and space formed the starting point for experiments drawing on the elementary theatrical components of space, form, colour, light, movement, sound and language. The products of the “experimental stage for dancers, actors and directors” in the late 1920s included the “Bauhaus dances” in which the human form was reduced to an ideal type using masks and jerseys. Sociocritical plays developed after Schlemmer‘s departure in 1929 were no more than a passing episode.
