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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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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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Bauhaus manifesto, 1919
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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Stroganov School of Applied Art, Moscow, early XXth century
SHM (Free State Art Studios), Moscow, c. 1919
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.