The Bauhaus
A German art school that lasted only 14 years, and still shapes how designers are taught color.
- Founded
- Weimar, 1919, by Walter Gropius
- Moved
- Dessau 1925, Berlin 1932
- Closed
- 1933
The Bauhaus was an art and design school founded by the architect Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919. It moved to Dessau in 1925 and to Berlin in 1932, and closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazis. In fourteen years it reshaped design: simple forms, function first, art and industry together. It also taught color more systematically than any art school before it, drawing on Goethe and Chevreul.
Color teaching there had several authors. Johannes Itten ran the preliminary course until 1923, drilling students in color contrasts and a 12-part color wheel. Wassily Kandinsky, who arrived in 1922, taught that colors and shapes have inner sounds. Paul Klee lectured on color too. And Josef Albers, a student who became a teacher, later turned the school's hands-on approach into Interaction of Color.
Kandinsky had already paired color with shape in Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911): sharp colors suit sharp forms, like a yellow triangle, and soft, deep colors suit round ones, like a blue circle. He brought those ideas into his Bauhaus classes. Treat them as shared intuition, not a law of nature.
When the school closed, its teachers scattered and took the method with them. Albers went to Black Mountain College in North Carolina and later to Yale; Gropius to Harvard; László Moholy-Nagy founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago. The first-year course in color and form at art schools worldwide descends from the Bauhaus, including the color wheel and contrast exercises design students still do.
Swatches
- Yellow · sharp forms, like a triangle (Kandinsky)
- Blue · round forms, like a circle (Kandinsky)
Colors
Sources
- Droste, M. (2019). Bauhaus 1919–1933. Taschen.
- Kandinsky, W. (1911). Über das Geistige in der Kunst; trans. M. Sadleir (1914), Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
- Wikipedia, 'Bauhaus'.
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