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.

 

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SHM (Free State Art Studios), Moscow, c. 1919

 

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SHM (Free State Art  Studios), the predecessor of Vkhutemas, was created in the wake of the Russian revolution of 1917 to develop a new, “revolutionary” approach to artist training. Much of the impulse to create the studios came from students of two very different schools, the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture and the Stroganov School of Applied Art, which merged to form GSHM. The restructuring was intended to dilute the perceived elitism of the Moscow School of Painting with an institution more in step with the spirit of the age. Students believed that the free studios, where every educational phase occurs under the guidance of the same instructor, better fostered the individuality of the student.

 

 

Students of SHM (Free State Art Studios)

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Students of SHM (Free State Art Studios), c. 1919

 

 

Kazimir Malevich with his students, 1920s

 

Portrait of Johannes Itten by Paul Stockmar. Itten standing with a star on a background

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Portrait of Johannes Itten

Photo by Paul Stockmar
© Itten Foundation, Kunstmuseum Berne

 

 

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lthough the Bauhaus was founded by an architect who considered the merging of arts and crafts key to creating an architecture of the future, for years Gropius remained the sole architect on staff. In fact, architecture was not taught until 1927. The school’s methods developed gradually and intuitively, as Gropius recruited specialists in diverse fields whose views he found interesting – and often similar to his own. One of the school’s great early personalities was Johannes Itten, an advocate for artistic intuition, a cultic (Mazdaznanist) vegetarian, and highly sensitive, considerate teacher who designed the school’s signature introductory course. The Circle of Life describes the number and kinds of subjects studied:

 

A conversation between Gropius and Kandinsky

“Architecture

as an art of synthesis”

“The unity of all the

arts in the making
of great architecture”

Walter Gropius, Diagram of the Bauhaus curriculum. Concentric circles with courses names

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Walter Gropius, Diagram of the Bauhaus curriculum, 1922

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Nikolai Ladovsky (standing with a hat in his hand) on the early stage of work on Red Stadium designed by Vkhutemas students, 1924

 

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he traditional system of education, beginning with a survey of art history before proceeding to practical training, was rejected and replaced by a Renaissance system of individual studios, although this meant the loss of much that was scientifically sound.

 

It soon became clear that the previous academic system needed to be replaced by a confirmable method, not a guild process of on-the-job instruction. Nikolai Ladovsky, the architect, played a crucial role in this. He developed a psychoanalytic methodology whose primary emphasis was space, “not stone, as the basic material of architecture.” The school’s introductory course, required of all students, was based in no small measure on Ladovsky’s ideas. “Space” was supplemented by courses on “Color,” “Form,” and “Graphics.”