Readymag Stories: Bauhaus

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.

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.

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.