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Portrait of Aleksandr Rodchenko
Photo courtesy of MOMA, New York
Portrait of Anton Lavinsky
Vkhutemas instructor and pioneering architectural constructivist Aleksandr Vesnin, 1922
plan was laid to launch an industrial design studio, led by some of the leading figures in Soviet design: Aleksandr Vesnin, Liubov Popova, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Anton Lavinsky. All were overt constructivists. This became one of the central episodes of the movement in helping shape its ideas and execution.
Varvara Stepanova's designs for the performance of An Evening of the Book
Photo by Aleksandr Rodchenko
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Haus Am Horn’s interior
Photo by Georg Muche
Haus Am Horn
Photo by Georg Muche
László Moholy-Nagy, 1925–26
Photo by Lucia Moholy
© Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
he Weimar government requested a public exhibition be organized to demonstrate the school's accomplishments, to be prepared by Gropius. The crowning glory of this endeavor was a single-family home, Haus Am Horn, designed by Adolf Meyer from drawings by George Muche. It’s the only building that could fully be considered “a child of the Bauhaus,” as it was meant to serve as a prototype for whole settlements of such dwellings.
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Kitchen, Haus am Horn, 1923
© Staatliche Bildstelle Berlin
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Haus am Horn
Photo by Werner Huthmacher
Meanwhile, Itten’s mysticism became too much for Gropius, who dismissed him in favor of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, whose arrival signified a new, largely Constructivist era for the Bauhaus, featuring innovations in type design, graphics and book publishing, as well as experiments in video and photography. A Hungarian by birth, Nad had been deeply affected by an exhibition of Russian avant-garde art in Budapest and very impressed by the ideas of Tatlin, Rodchenko, Malevich, Lissitsky, and Popova.
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"Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar 1919–1923” Book
© MET, New York
Gropius slogan:
“Art and technology—the new unity”
ikolai Ladovsky founds ASNOVA (Association of New Architects) to realize the rationalist principles taught at Vkhutemas.
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The first page of ASNOVA newspaper, 1926
This initiates the first of the school’s three years under Favorsky, considered by many scholars to be the school’s best. Favorsky shined as an outstanding creative personality, brilliant as an artist, outstanding as a theoretician, and a gifted teacher. Though very popular among masters and students alike, he rejected the Constructivists’ projected industrial design studio, which could have become the country’s first laboratory for industrial design. He apparently feared the excessive influence at the school of the new tendencies in art. His own approach is at heart not compatible with Constructivism.
Wassily Chair Model B3, designer: Marcel Breuer
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Portrait of Marcel Breuer sitting in his Wassily Chair
Portrait of Marianne Brandt
Director's office designed by Walter Gropius, c. 1927
© AKG-Images
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Bauhaus Books — Vol. 4. Die Bühne im Bauhaus, 1924
Bauhaus Books — Vol. 1. Internationale Architektur by Walter Gropius
s partial answer to the question of why the Bauhaus is known throughout the world while Vkhutemas is not, consider the Bauhaus’ achievements in publishing. Bauhaus Books was intended to be series of over 50 volumes, of which 14 saw the light of day – nine by leading Bauhaus figures, three by members of De Stijl, plus Glez’ book on Cubism and a book on Kazimir Malevich’s “non-objective world”. In addition, objects made by the school and sold to the public cast a wide-ranging influence, not to mention the effects on audiences of theater presentations and school fetes, as well as public-relations initiatives, including the organization of “Bauhaus Friends,” which included Albter Einstein, Marc Chagall and Arnold Schoenberg.
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Bauhaus Books — Vol. 5. Piet Mondrian’s Neoplasticism by László Moholy-Nagy, 1925
The same year saw the creation by student Marcel Breuer of a lightweight chair crafted from bent metal pipes, inspired by bicycle handlebars. The chair is known to history as “Wassily” because the first one was given to Wassily Kandinsky, who loved it; the story that Breuer specially dedicated the chair to Kandinsky, while widely believed, is not true. The chair’s light weight, many options, and ease of manufacture brought worldwide acceptance. It became a hallmark of the school.
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Wassily chair
This was the year, too, of Gropius’ “executive’s office,” the practical embodiment of his theory of space as a hierarchy of material, mathematical, and transcendental. Only the correct combination of the three produced space that is truly art, Gropius believed.
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Director's office designed by Walter Gropius
This is also the year when new student Marianne Brandt, an artist from Saxony who recast her life after seeing the 1923 exhibition of Bauhaus work, created wall fixtures in the metalworking studio that became another hallmark of the school. Brandt later headed the studio but was at first treated resentfully and given dullest and inconsequential assignments.
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Coffee and tea service designed by Marianne Brandt, 1924
© Bauhaus Archive
he various departments of the school responded differently to the new directions in art. Some were staunchly opposed and rigorously defensive. In others, the new won out, to greater or lesser degrees.
In the architecture department the Vesnin brothers’ and Ginzburg’s Constructivism came to rival the influence of Ladovsky’s rationalism. The Constructivists worked hard to legitimize their position within the department, gradually winning adherents.
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Costructivists party: A. Rodchenko, A. Gan, Sokolova-Zhemchuzhnaya, O. Rodchenko, E. Shub, V. Stepanova in Rodchenko's studio
