“To understand the Bauhaus as a school of the future, you must view the Bauhaus as a whole, not in parts,” says Michael Siebenbrodt, curator of the Bauhaus-Museum/Klassik Stiftung Weimar. That the school was founded in the small town of Weimar, where Goethe spent much of his life, is no coincidence. An intellectual and cultural center since the Age of Classicism, after World War I it became the capital of a republic that paved the way for a democratic Germany, with political and social changes generating the optimism necessary to promote new solutions to old problems. The Bauhaus, founded in 1919 for a future-oriented society as an interdisciplinary, anti-establishment art school with international and avant-garde dimensions, tells a story as complex as the volatile political and social events of its times. When Nazi pressure finally shut its doors in 1933, many Bauhaus teachers immigrated to America, where their ideas blossomed in the free atmosphere, growing into the dynamic and irrepressible force the world calls Modernism.

Bauhaus roots, however, run deep. Reaction to the profound social changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution in the 1850s generated the Arts and Crafts Movement in England and then throughout Europe. Progressives in Germany who were concerned with social evils and growing criticism of poor-quality, machine-made goods founded the Deutscher Werkbund in 1907, an organization of independent artists and industrialists, whose purpose included “the refinement of commercial processes through the collaboration of arts, industry and crafts.” Its aims were to bolster Germany’s economy after the destructive chaos of World War I by “enhancing craft work” and to help designers find industrial employment—which also had the effect of improving the quality of German products. Aspects of this movement to bring art and design into the public sphere included inexpensive, healthy housing and functional, affordable wares. Peter Behrens, one of the founders of the Deutscher Werkbund, was a painter turned designer, architect and educator, as was another member, Belgian-born Henry van de Velde. Their influences on a young architect, Walter Gropius, who joined the Werkbund in 1910, cannot be underestimated.

Appointed director of a new school to reform art education in 1919, Gropius named it “Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar,” or State Bauhaus Weimar. In a revolutionary pamphlet, the Bauhaus Manifesto, he called for artists and craftsmen to reunite all arts under one roof and to work with a sense of social responsibility under the dominance of architecture. With Lyonel Feininger’s expressionist woodcut cover depicting a towering cathedral, the Manifesto rejected historic monumental styles, elevated crafts to the level of fine arts and embraced lofty social ideals: “The ultimate aim of all creative activity is a building! … Let us desire, conceive, and create the new building of the future together. It will combine architecture, sculpture, and painting in a single form, and will one day rise towards the heavens from the hands of a million workers as the crystalline symbol of a new and coming faith.”

Breaking with the past called for a curriculum as radical as its philosophy. During the first semester, students worked to discard preconceptions in the compulsory preliminary course or Vorkurs, the backbone of the educational program. To tap into their creativity, they practiced exercises using texture, form, color, tone and line analysis. Training to become a master craftsman in the artisan apprentice tradition also played an important role, since craft was considered the ideal unity of creative design and material production. “Schools,” the Manifesto proclaimed, “must return to the workshop.” Students had to complete practical hands-on training in workshops with both a master of form, an artist responsible for the aesthetic aspect of the work, and a master of crafts, who oversaw technical skills. This dual approach promoted teamwork and allowed method and technique to go hand-in-hand with intuition and creativity.

In a highly unusual move, Gropius chose masters of form who were not art teachers but artists. The first appointments, all associated with the avant-garde Der Sturm Gallery in Berlin, were Johannes Itten (Swiss painter and mystic), Lyonel Feininger (German-American painter and cartoonist) and Gerhard Marcks (fellow Werkbund member, sculptor and printmaker). Then came Oskar Schlemmer, Georg Muche, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, already a noted abstract painter and theorist of synthesis of the arts. These men, each of them intelligent with a shared sensibility, curious about fundamental problems and fiercely independent, were more likely to embrace new ideas than craftsmen—or so Gropius believed. Who better to encourage creativity than creators themselves?

But should a school that wanted to be modern revive age-old crafts? When the avant-garde Dutch founder of the De Stijl movement, Theo van Doesburg, arrived in Weimar in 1921, his skepticism galvanized Bauhaus students and forced Gropius to deal with issues that ultimately changed the school’s direction away from crafts towards industrial methods of production and their consequences for design. Rejecting this new focus, Itten who conceived and taught the Vorkurs, departed, paving the way for charismatic Hungarian Constructivist, László Moholy-Nagy.