Painting 

It was no accident that Walter Gropius appointed artists as lecturers at the Bauhaus: he regarded the creative potential of avant-garde art as a basis for living, forward-looking work at his new college. He hoped through this to ‘stimulate the students from two sides … from the artistic side, on the one hand, and from the craft side on the other’. The artists thus worked as so-called ‘form masters’ in the workshops, which they were in charge of along with the ‘work masters’ – trained crafts specialists. In addition, they were able on their own initiative to explore new ways of teaching the foundations of art. They were responsible for giving the preliminary course – as did Johannes Itten, George Muche and László Moholy-Nagy – or developed their own individual course topics and teaching methods, as did Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Oskar Schlemmer. The courses also influenced their own artistic work. Pure painting classes were only introduced during the late Dessau period; in Weimar and in the early years in Dessau, the Bauhaus wanted to finally leave behind that type of academic teaching structure and follow new, more integrated paths in art training.

Visit us at the temporary bauhaus-archiv!

Our museum and archive at Klingelhöferstrasse are closed due to construction work.