ABSTRACT

One of the noticeable tics in Bauhaus scholarship has been the obsessive categorization of the school’s institutional history according to changes in its leadership, teaching staff, and program. There are competing accounts of the three stages, or the five stages, or sometimes the eight stages of Bauhaus development, each with detailed argumentation and supporting evidence.1 The cue for this art historical fetish for organizing, writing and rewriting the Bauhaus might be traced to the school itself, which from the outset trumpeted its own organizational and pedagogical structure, and then almost immediately proceeded to alter it in a continuous series of programmatic shifts and key personnel changes.