The Bauhaus: Most Influential Modernist Art And Graphic Design

The Bauhaus was known as the most influential modernist art and design school of the 20th century and had a vast impact on art, architecture and graphic design. They affected everything from the steel-framing through to fonts. With their motto form follows function, and a new wave of mass production, they sought and successfully brought aspects of this philosophy into the 21st century, for design to be led by the function rather than let the embellishments determine the shape (Wick, R. K.). This paper will approach the characteristics and the style of the Bauhaus movement alongside the design outcomes of that era. It analyses a range of contextual issues relevant to the Bauhaus ideology and outcomes.

The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 by the

During the Bauhaus movement living amid the industrial revolution in Germany could not be ignored. In the Bauhaus, metalwork shops were a popular course as it was successful in developing designs for mass production considering the economic pressures of the Great Depression in the United States and the growing political instability in Europe (Alexandra, 2004). Decorative flourishes and emphasis on exotic materials seemed increasingly irrelevant, allowing the Bauhaus to succeed who believed that beauty need not depend on ornament but could be achieved through the manipulation of form and the use of colour and texture, as form follows function making this a racial approach at the time (Alexandra, 2007). The Marianne Brandt teapot, Model No. MT49 tea infuser strictly follows the formal principles of the Bauhaus school with geometrically ‘pure’ forms. The teapot was one of the several prototypes designed and made by Brandt when she was a student, and later a teacher, in the Bauhaus metal workshop. She made the original prototype in 1924, her first year in these workshops (Rawsthorn, 2007). Brandt ensured that the teapot's form was directly related to its function: which is a fundamental principle of the Bauhaus. "Each individual part - lid, handle, spout and base - can be clearly read," said Christian Witt-Dörring (2007), curator of decorative arts at the Neue Galerie in

The increasingly unstable political situation in Germany for which they claimed the Bauhaus was a centre of communist intellectualism, combined with their financial condition, forced them to move (Kyriakopoulos, K. 2016) With the politically motivated move to the industrial city of Dessau in 1925, a new era began for the Bauhaus that only lasted a few years before closing again by the Nazis in 1933(Probst and Schädlich, C 1985). It was at this move to Dessau that Gropius put his ambitious plans into to practice, the building of the new Bauhaus. The design is a further development of Gropius’s previous building with the construction of the Fagus factory in Ahlfeld an der Leine, for which he drafted in his private office without a department of Architects (Bauhaus Foundation Dessau, 2017). Both these buildings included a glass facade on a steel frame work, allowing for a view of the interior, clearing a way to view the constructive elements which overall creates an impression of transparency and a turn away from the ornamentation of decorative building’s facades previous to 1919 (Bauhaus Foundation Dessau, 2017). Gropius designed every section of the Bauhaus differently, separating them customarily according to function. He positioned the wings asymmetrically this allows the formation of the complex to be grasped only by moving around the