In a fleeting 14-year period between two world wars, Germany’s Bauhaus school of art and design changed the face of modernity. With utopian ideals for the future, the school developed a pioneering fusion of fine art, craftsmanship, and technology which they applied across artistic media and practices, from film to theater, sculpture to ceramics.
This book is made in collaboration with the Bauhaus-Archiv/Museum für Gestaltung in Berlin, the world’s largest collection on the history of the Bauhaus. Documents, studies, photographs, sketches, plans, and models record not only the realized works but also the leading principles and personalities of this idealistic creative communitythrough its three successive locations in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin. From informal shots of group gymnastics to drawings from a class taught by Paul Klee, from extensive architectural plans to an infinitely sleek ashtray by Marianne Brandt, the collection pulsates with the colors, materials, and geometries that made up the Bauhaus vision of a “total” work of art.
As we approach the school’s centenary, this is a defining account of its energy and rigor, not only as a trailblazing movement in modernism but also as a paradigm of art education, where creative expression and cutting-edge ideas led to simultaneously functional and beautiful creations. Featured artists include Josef Albers, Marianne Brandt, Walter Gropius, Gertrud Grunow, Paul Klee, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Lilly Reich.
The author
Magdalena Droste studied art history and literature in Aachen and Marburg. She has worked at the Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin since 1980 and is professor of art history at the BTU Cottbus since 1997. Droste has contributed to numerous exhibitions and publications on Bauhaus artists, besides writing a number of essays on the furniture and textile workshops at the Bauhaus and on arts and crafts as a women’s profession.b
