'Bauhaus Beginnings' at the Getty Research Institute

The 'Bauhaus Beginnings' exhibition will open on June 11th at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. It will showcase more than 250 objects including woodcut prints, drawings, collages, photography, textile samples, artists' books, student notebooks, masters' teaching aids and notes, letters, and ephemera from the school's founding and early years.

Image courtesy of the Getty Research Institute.

The 'Bauhaus Beginnings' exhibition at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles will revisit the early work of the most influential art and design school of the 20th centrury. Drawn primarily from the Institute’s collections, Bauhaus Beginnings considers the school’s early dedication to spiritual expression and its development of a curriculum based on the elements deemed fundamental to all forms of artistic practice.

The exhibition also explores the Preliminary Course at the Bauhaus which introduced all first-year students to what were considered the fundamental principles of color, form, and material. Artists featured in the exhibition include teachers at the school as well as students.

To coincide with Bauhaus Beginnings, the Getty Research Institute will also present an online exhibition, Building the New Artist, which further explores the school’s history, theoretical underpinnings, and novel pedagogy.

Description of project by Getty Research Institute

The Bauhaus is widely regarded as the most influential school of art and design of the 20th century. Marking the 100th anniversary of the school’s opening, Bauhaus Beginnings on view at the Getty Research Institute from June 11 through October 13, 2019 examines the founding principles of the landmark institution.

“For a century the Bauhaus has widely inspired modern design, architecture and art as well as the ways these disciplines are taught. However, the story of Bauhaus is not just the story of its teachers or most famous students. At the Getty Research Institute our archives are rich in rare prints, drawings, photographs, and other materials from some of the most famous artists to work at Bauhaus as well as students whose work, while lesser known, is extremely compelling and sometimes astonishing. Because of the breadth of our special collections we are able to offer a never-before-seen side of the Bauhaus along with more familiar images.”

Mary Miller, director of the Getty Research Institute.

The Bauhaus was a German school of art and design whose brief yet highly influential existence rendered it a key site in the development of a new modern vision for arts education. Established in 1919 after the end of World War I, the Bauhaus sought to erode distinctions between crafts and the fine arts through a program of study centered on theory and practical experience.

Drawn primarily from the Getty Research Institute’s collections, Bauhaus Beginnings, considers the school’s early dedication to spiritual expression and its development of a curriculum based on the elements deemed fundamental to all forms of artistic practice. The exhibition presents more than 250 objects including woodcut prints, drawings, collages, photography, textile samples, artists’ books, student notebooks, masters’ teaching aids and notes, letters, and ephemera from the school’s founding and early years.

Artists featured in the exhibition include teachers at the school such as Lyonel Feininger (American, 1871–1956), Walter Gropius (German, 1883–1969), Johannes Itten (Swiss, 1888–1967), Vassily Kandinsky (Russian, 1866–1944), Paul Klee (Swiss, 1879–1940), Gerhard Marcks (German, 1889–1981), László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian, 1895–1946), and Oskar Schlemmer (German, 1888–1943). Also included is student work by artists such as Erich Comeriner (German, 1907–1978), Friedl Dicker (Austrian, 1898–1944), Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack (German, 1893–1965), Erich Mrozek (German, 1910–1993), and Margarete Willers (German, 1883–1977). The work of students who later became Bauhaus masters, including Josef Albers (German-American, 1888–1976), Herbert Bayer (Austrian, 1900–1985), Joost Schmidt (German, 1893–1948), and Gunta Stölzl (German, 1897–1983), is also featured in the show.

“The Bauhaus continues to spark imagination to this day. By focusing on the vibrant community of artist teachers and student artists who built the school, through a variety of disparate materials, media, and ideologies, we are able to immerse ourselves in the unique, philosophical spirit that birthed some of the most enduring visual ideas of the modern era.”

Maristella Casciato, Head of Architectural Collections at the Getty Research Institute.

The idea at the center of Bauhaus practice was Gesamtkunstwerk – the total work of art. In 1919 Walter Gropius (German, 1883–1969), widely circulated a manifesto, illustrated with a woodcut by Lyonel Feininger (American, 1871–1956), that announced his bold vision for the newly reformed, state-sponsored school of design and the model of education that would bridge the fine and applied arts. In the text, on view in the exhibition, Gropius outlined how uniting various forms of practices, especially painting, sculpture, architecture, and design, would produce socially and spiritually gratifying works of art. Feininger’s woodcut of a preindustrial Gothic cathedral represented the total work of art, in which designers, artists, and artisans worked together in service of a spiritual goal.

In early 1920, an opportunity to realize a Gesamtkunstwerk “building of the future”—an ideal set forth in the Bauhaus manifesto—presented itself. Adolf Sommerfeld, a lumber mill owner, building contractor, and real estate developer specializing in timber structures commissioned Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer (German, 1881–1929) to design a residence in the south of Berlin. Gropius recognized the opportunity to bring the various Bauhaus workshops together in the design of the house, which took inspiration from a rustic log cabin. Students from the various workshops designed key elements of the interior, including a large stained-glass window above the staircase, carved wood ornaments, a large curtain, a set of wooden tables and chairs, light fixtures, radiator covers, rugs, and wall hangings.

The exhibition also explores the Preliminary Course at the Bauhaus which introduced all first-year students to what were considered the fundamental principles of color, form, and material. Various Bauhaus masters led these first-year studies: after Johannes Itten (Swiss, 1888–1967) initiated the Preliminary Course in the fall of 1920, László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian, 1895–1946) and Josef Albers (German-American, 1888–1976) took over beginning in 1923. These courses were supplemented by specialized theoretical seminars led by important Bauhaus faculty, including Gertrud Grunow (German, 1870-1944), Vassily Kandinsky (Russian, 1866–1944), Paul Klee (Swiss, 1879-1940), Joost Schmidt (German, 1893–1948), and Oskar Schlemmer (German, 1888–1943). Despite their many ideological differences, the masters agreed that a firm grounding in the principles of form and color achieved through practical exercises was crucial to the development of a new class of artists.

Masters’ teaching aids and student exercises in the exhibition demonstrate how color theory remained a central focus at the Bauhaus throughout the school’s fourteen-year existence. Committed to understanding the nature of colors, instructors and students produced countless graphic systems of wheels, triangles, grids, and spheres to examine how colors relate to one another.

Though women were admitted to the Bauhaus in relatively large numbers—in 1919, 59 out of 139 enrolled students were women—they did not enjoy equal status with the male students. Despite many objections, the majority of women students were pushed to study weaving rather than other media such as metal-working or architecture after completing the Preliminary Course.

The products produced in the weaving workshop were some of the most successful and financially viable at the Bauhaus. In the aftermath of the war, materials and funds for the school’s workshops were scarce, and the weavers used looms held over from Van de Velde’s School of Applied Arts to produce artisanal, yet popular, one-off objects such as stuffed animals and dolls.

Early Bauhaus master Helene Börner instructed weaving students to draw upon foundational theories of color and form developed in the Preliminary Course to produce innovative designs. When former student Gunta Stölzl (German, 1897–1983) became director of the weaving workshop in 1926, she argued that “a woven piece is always a serviceable object,” pushing production away from the loom and toward industrial modes. Bauhaus textiles were manufactured in bulk and sold widely, rendering them one of the most successful and broadly disseminated Bauhaus products. The exhibition features textile samples as well as watercolor and other studies for textiles.

Bauhaus Beginnings is curated by Maristella Casciato, with assistance from Gary Fox, Katherine Rochester, Alexandra Sommer, and Johnny Tran. The exhibition installation is designed in consultation with architect Tim Durfee.

To coincide with Bauhaus Beginnings, the Getty Research Institute will also present an online exhibition, Building the New Artist, which further explores the school’s history, theoretical underpinnings, and novel pedagogy. Launching on June 11, 2019, Building the New Artist will feature three interactive activities modeled after the exercises developed by Bauhaus instructors – a Vassily Kandinsky color survey, a Josef Albers paper cutting exercise, and an activity related to Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet.

Erich Mrozek. Studies for Vassily Kandinsky's Farbenlehre (Theory of colour). Image courtesy of Getty Research Institute.

Léna Bergner. Durchdringung (Penetration) for Paul Klee's Course, ca. 1925–1932. Watercolor and graphite on paper. Image courtesy of Getty Research Institute. © Heirs of Léna Bergner.

Erich Consemüller. Cutting and folding exercise. Image courtesy of Getty Research Institute.

Joost Schmidt. Form and Color Study, ca. 1929–1930, watercolor over graphite on paper. Image courtesy of Getty Research Institute.

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More information

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Curator Comisaria

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Maristella Casciato

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Collaborators Colaboradores

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Gary Fox, Katherine Rochester, Alexandra Sommer, Johnny Tran.

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Consultant Consultor

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Tim Durfee

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Location Lugar

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The Getty Center. 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles, California.

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Dates Fechas

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From June 11 to October 13, 2019. Del 11 de junio al 13 de octubre de 2019.

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Artists Artistas

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Lyonel Feininger, Walter Gropius, Johannes Itten, Vassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Gerhard Marcks, László Moholy-Nagy, Oskar Schlemmer, Erich Comeriner, Friedl Dicker, Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, Erich Mrozek, Margarete Willers, Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Joost Schmidt, Gunta Stölzl.

VASSILY KANDINSKY

Kandinsky was born Moscow in 1866 into a comfortable and cultured family. He learnt German from his grandmother, and took lessons in piano, cello and drawing. In 1885, he began to study law at the Moscow faculty, going on to complete his thesis. But when he was just on the point of obtaining a teaching position, in 1895, he decided to break with his legal career and devote himself to art. He then went to Munich to learn painting, and very soon set up as a teacher himself by creating, with other Munich artists, the Phalanx art group. Through this association he met Gabriele Münter, a German-American artist, who was his companion until 1914. With her, he travelled throughout Europe and North Africa and then, in 1906, established himself in Paris for a year. At this time, his works consisted of small paintings, often landscapes in the impressionist style, like a travel logbook, which gained him the reputation of a dilettante in the Parisian milieu.

It was not until 1908, back in Germany, where he was living with Gabriele Münter in Murnau, that his real artistic career began. Although his favourite themes – landscapes, popular culture – remained the same, he treated them in an increasingly abstract manner with a growing autonomy of colours. In 1914, when war broke out, he left Munich to take refuge in Switzerland, then went to Moscow where he remained until 1921. There, he began to write a text, conceived as the companion piece to Concerning the Spiritual in Art, “On Materialism in Art”, which would not be published until 1926 as Point and line to plane. During this period, he painted little, favouring, for material reasons, drawing and works on paper. Then, as the new regime established itself, he devoted his attention to the creation of the country’s new artistic structures, such as the IZO, the state body responsible for fine arts.

Nevertheless, his situation, as much artistic as financial and political, had become precarious. During an official mission in 1921, he decided to remain in Germany with his wife Nina. Walter Gropius, director of the Bauhaus Movement, offered him a teaching position, which he would occupy up until the school’s closure in 1933 and his departure for France. At this time, his German nationality obtained in 1927 having been revoked, the stateless Kandinsky established himself in Paris. It was not until 1939 that he became a French citizen, in extremis before the start of the Second World War. Until 1944, the Kandinskys led a secluded life in Neuilly-sur-Seine, where the artist pursued his final research objectives.

Josef Albers

Josef Albers was born in 1888 in Bottrop, in the German region of Westphalia, into a family connected to artisanal trades. Before turning toward artistic practice, he worked as a primary school teacher, an experience that preceded a trajectory in which teaching and visual production would remain inseparably linked. After studying in Berlin, Essen, and Munich, he entered the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1920, one year after its founding by Walter Gropius as a site of convergence between art, technology, and industrial production in interwar Germany.

At the Bauhaus, Albers quickly moved from student to teacher. His initial training under Johannes Itten coincided with a period in which the school sought to redefine the material and perceptual foundations of artistic practice. In the glass workshop, he began developing abstract compositions made from fragments of industrial glass, investigating relationships between transparency, geometry, and seriality. From 1923 onward, he assumed teaching responsibilities within the preliminary course, the pedagogical core of the institution, where he promoted exercises focused on observation, the behaviour of materials, and formal economy. Following the Bauhaus’s relocation to Dessau in 1925 and later to Berlin, he continued to occupy a central position within the school’s academic structure, working alongside figures such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and László Moholy-Nagy. That same year, he married Anni Albers, whose textile research maintained multiple affinities with his own investigations into structure, repetition, and perception.

The closure of the Bauhaus in 1933, following pressure exerted by the Nazi regime on the institution, marked the beginning of his American exile. Josef and Anni Albers subsequently moved to North Carolina to join Black Mountain College, an experimental school that would bring together artists, musicians, poets, and choreographers associated with the cultural transformations of mid-twentieth-century America. There, between 1933 and 1949, Albers reformulated pedagogical methods previously developed in Germany and adapted them to a different intellectual context, one less oriented toward artisanal training and more closely aligned with interdisciplinary experimentation. His exercises on visual perception, contrast, and material structure influenced several generations of American artists, among them Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly.

Albers’s teaching activity cannot be separated from his artistic production. His paintings, prints, and graphic studies developed from the 1930s onward emerged from specific problems related to chromatic perception and the spatial tensions generated by elementary forms. In 1949, he was appointed chair of the Department of Design at Yale University in New Haven, where he consolidated a pedagogical program centered on visual analysis and on the relationship between perceptual experience and formal construction. From Yale, he further expanded his influence on postwar American art education at a moment when art schools were redefining their curricula following the emigration of numerous European artists and intellectuals.

In 1950, he initiated the series Homage to the Square, developed over more than two decades and destined to become one of the central bodies of work in his visual research. Through systematic variations of concentric squares and precise chromatic combinations, these paintings examined how colour alters the perception of space, scale, and proximity between planes. Rather than establishing closed compositions, the works functioned as perceptual experiments in which each colour transformed the reading of the others. The same concern structured his pedagogical activity and found a decisive formulation in Interaction of Colour, published in 1963, a book conceived as an investigation into the perceptual instability of colour and the impossibility of understanding it as a fixed and autonomous property.

Throughout his career, Albers maintained a sustained attention to the relationships between perception, repetition, and structure. His travels to Mexico and other Latin American countries further expanded his interest in pre-Columbian architecture and in geometric systems embedded in walls, platforms, and constructive layouts, references that appear indirectly in several of his compositions and graphic series. In 1971, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York devoted a retrospective exhibition to his work, making him the first living artist to receive a solo exhibition at the institution. By that time, his work had come to occupy a central position in debates surrounding abstraction, pedagogy, and visual culture in the twentieth century, situated within a shared territory between artistic practice, theories of perception, and experimental teaching.

Oskar SCHLEMMER

Oskar Schlemmer (4 September 1888 – 13 April 1943) was a German painter, sculptor, designer and choreographer associated with the Bauhaus school. In 1923 he was hired as Master of Form at the Bauhaus theatre workshop, after working some time at the workshop of sculpture. His most famous work is "Triadisches Ballett," in which the actors are transfigured from the normal to geometrical shapes. Also in Slat Dance and Treppenwitz, the performers' costumes make them into living sculpture, as if part of the scenery.

Walter Adolph Georg Gropius

Walter Adolph Georg Gropius was born in Berlin on 18 May 1883 (Passed away on 5 July 1969), son and grandson of architects, whose influence led him to study architecture in Munich and Berlin. After completing his studies, he worked in Peter Behrens' practice, where he later became independent. Between 1910 and 1915, he worked primarily on the rehabilitation and expansion of the Fagus Factory in Alfeld. This work pioneered modern architecture its thin metal structures, large glazed surfaces, flat roofs and orthogonal forms.

In addition, Gropius founded the famous Bauhaus School, a design school that taught students to use modern and innovative materials to create buildings, furniture and original and functional objects. He was in charge of it first in Weimar and then in Dessau, from 1919 to 1928.

From 1926, Gropius was intensely devoted to the design of housing blocks, which saw the solution to social and urban problems, in addition to betting for the rationalization in the construction industry, which would allow building faster and more economically.

Before the First World War, Gropius was already part of a movement of aesthetic renovation, represented by the Deutscher Werkbund, which aimed to unite art with industrial design.

After the war, Gropius, in his role as director of the Sächsischen Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts) and Sächsischen Hochschule für bildene Kunst (Superior School of Fine Arts), decides to merge the two schools under the name of "Staatliches Bauhaus "combining their academic goals and adding an architecture section. The building constructed for the school itself is a symbol of the most representative ideas of the Bauhaus: "form follows function".

In 1934 Gropius was forced to leave Germany due to the Nazi aggressions suffered by the Bauhaus and his work. He lived and worked for three years in England moving to America later, where he was a professor of architecture at the Harvard Design School. In 1946 The Architects Collaborative, Inc., a group of young architects known as TAC, of which he was responsible for the direction and training of the members for several years.

Walter Gropius died in Boston in 1969, at the age of 86 years old. His buildings reflect the style of the Bauhaus, with new materials used in their construction giving them a modern look, unknown at that time. Smooth facades and clear lines lack unnecessary decorative elements. This architecture has made him one of the key leaders of the so-called 'International Style' in architecture.

Published on: March 24, 2019

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