Corporate Identity

The history of the Bauhaus has often been told and is easily accessible elsewhere. ¹ Reviews emphasize the role of the art school, oscillating between reform and avant-garde; it was the first art school to be reformed after the First World War, having resumed teaching in the new Republic in 1919. The leading figure was architect Walter Gropius, who was appointed director on April 12 and soon converted the traditional institution into a unique collaboration of artists and craftsmen under one roof. He first appointed Johannes Itten, Lyonel Feininger, and Gerhard Marcks, to be followed later by Goerg Muche and, representing the most prominent Bauhaus staff, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky, and László Moholy-Nagy. These artists gave rise to the public perception of the Bauhaus as a cradle of the avant-garde in the twentieth century; however, it was not the individual brilliance of the Bauhaus masters but their mutual contribution to an ultimate goal that made the school singular in its time. Despite a hostile local public at all three of the Bauhaus locations—Weimar, Thuringia (1919–1925); Dessau, Saxony-Anhalt (1925–1932); and Berlin (1932–1933)—it proved successful, in different ways, in uniting art and technology: first in an expressionist period and then in constructivist and functionalist movements. ²