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Vkhutemas students of Favorsky’s class

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Vkhutemas students of Favorsky’s class, 1920s

 

wo schools dictated the direction of design education in the 20th century: Germany’s Bauhaus and the Soviet Union’s Vkhutemas, the Russian acronym for the Moscow-based Higher Art and Technical Studios. While reference to the Bauhaus is immediately understood anywhere in the world, mention of Vkhutemas often goes unrecognized, even in Russia.

 

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Advertising workshop, Bauhaus Dessau

Advertising workshop, Bauhaus Dessau, 1926

© Bibliothek der Friedrich-Ebert Stiftung

 

War and revolution in the early 20th century forced thinking people to recalibrate their ideas about life and how best to proceed. One approach to this daunting task was to envision a new type of person, fostered by an improved human environment. These two schools, the German and the Soviet, were experiments in training new kinds of specialists needed to create a new world. Without ignoring differences between the schools, we hope here to convey, by means of comparative chronologies, the parallel essence of these institutions and the nature of their programs.

 

 

Vladimir Tatlin, costume design for Life for the Tsar, 1913–15

© A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum

 

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Portrait of Walter Gropius, c. 1928

Photo by E. Bieber
© Bauhaus Archive

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alter Gropius created the government-sponsored Bauhaus by merging the Saxony-Weimar Higher School of the Arts with the Saxony School of Applied Art. A manifesto from this time laid out his argument for combining arts and crafts. The word “Bauhaus” refers to the medieval “bauhutte,” an organization of artisans combining skills to build a cathedral (not merely, as has sometimes been suggested, any sort of building). Fittingly, Lyonel Feininger used an image of a soaring gothic cathedral on the cover Gropius’ manifesto.