Haus Beautiful: the Impact of Bauhaus

It lasted only 14 years, but the bauhaus stamped its own century and this one too. No one would claim that the taste for clean, simplified design that emanated from its classrooms ever became universal, certainly not among the toiling masses the Bauhauslers hoped to speak to. And nobody believes anymore that good design can produce a more virtuous world. But all those steadfast geometric tea sets and tubular steel furnishings drew lines in the collective consciousness. They're still basic to our picture of the modern home--even if we don't happen to live in one.

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The Haus of Modern Design

It's not a monolithic institution we meet in "Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity," a new show at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City, which runs there until Jan. 25. It's a collective of fierce individuals and a continuing work in progress. But while the school may have been a group enterprise, it was largely the creation of one man. In 1919, the year it opened, Walter Gropius was a young German architect recovering from dual traumas--World War I and his turbulent first marriage to the formidable Alma Mahler. One of history's supreme narcissists, she betrayed her first husband, composer Gustav Mahler, by having affairs with both Gropius and painter Oskar Kokoschka. After Gustav's death, it was Gropius she wed, only to leap a few years later into the arms of writer Franz Werfel. (Watch TIME's video "The Haus of Modern Design.")

So by 1920, when Gropius and Alma finally divorced, the exhausted architect was more than ready to turn the page. He had been invited years earlier to form an arts academy out of two existing schools in Weimar, the charming, tradition-minded little city where Goethe had lived. But very little about the school Gropius had in mind would be traditional. Instead of teaching students to imitate great works of the past, the Bauhaus entry course explored fundamentals like the material properties of wood and metal or how colors and forms operated within an image. Instead of focusing on painting and sculpture, the curriculum was built around workshops in woodworking, ceramics, metalworking, printmaking and weaving.

Over time the Bauhaus faculty would include some enduring names in 20th century art and design, including Josef and Anni Albers, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. They were all in their different ways ardent modernists, but in its first years the school was caught in a contradiction: a romance with individual craftsmanship at odds with the modernist ideal of mass production. Even the name Bauhaus (House for Building) carried echoes of Bauhütten, the shared lodgings of the medieval craftsmen who built the great cathedrals. As for the painters connected to the Bauhaus, whatever systems and principles Klee and Kandinsky believed their art was expressing, no one looking at anything they did--Klee's phantasmagorias, Kandinsky's swimming abstractions--would think the words factory produced.

That lyrical and nostalgic strain was amplified by Johannes Itten, the unlikely man Gropius first picked to teach the entry course. A vegetarian, Zoroastrian and state-of-the-art bohemian, Itten knew more about yoga than he did about factory floors. In the years when he set the tone for much of what the school produced, the would-be school of industrial art could seem more like a hippie craft shop. A product of the Bauhaus could be a hand-thrown pot or a funky hand-carved chair.