- When Walter Gropius left the Bauhaus in 1928
to focus on his own architectural practice,
the effort to separate politics from design also departed.
Another blow followed when Moholy-Nagy,
Herbert Bayer, and Marcel Breuer also left the Bauhaus.
Gropius's successor was Hannes Meyer.
Meyer criticized the Bauhaus's previous work as formalistic
and required that all aesthetic
considerations should be excluded.
Design was now to have a stronger social basis
for people's needs instead of luxury items,
and produced only if appropriate to life.
The school, however, wasn't all doom
and gloom under a rigid regime.
In 1929 the Bauhaus travelling exhibition
toured Switzerland and Germany,
influencing more designers and architects.
The Bauhaus Theatre toured Germany and Switzerland
with Oskar Schlemmer's Bauhaus Dances.
This theatre workshop grew from Schlemmer's interest
with the possibilities of figures
and their relationship to the space around them.
Meyer continued to be a controversial figure
at the school and in the community.
He forced the resignations of popular professors
Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, and others.
Meyer then shifted the politics of the school
further to the left than it had been under Gropius.
While he didn't want the school to become a tool
of the left-wing party politics
and prevented the formation of a student communist cell,
his own communist beliefs became a threat
to the existence of the Bauhaus.
In 1930 the mayor of Dessau fired Meyer.
Gropius was asked to return but suggested
noted architect Mies van der Rohe as the new director.
Van der Rohe interviewed each student,
dismissing those that he deemed uncommitted.
He then stopped the school's manufacturing program
of products and focused only on teaching.
He then appointed his frequent collaborator Lily Reich.
Reversing Meyer's political dent,
he worked diligently to keep the college out of
public political debates through a clear nonpolitical style.
He implemented this approach internally
by expelling any students who supported Meyer.
In 1930 municipal elections were held in Dessau.
And the Nazi party became the strongest party.
One of his major election pledges
had been cancellation of grants to the Bauhaus
and the demolition of the Bauhaus buildings.
The Nazis closed the school in 1932
and Van der Rohe attempted to continue the college
as a private institution in Berlin.
However, the move to Berlin did nothing
to placate the Nazi party.
In 1933 the Bauhaus building in Berlin was
searched by the police and sealed off.
32 students were temporarily detained.
Also, suffering from severe financial difficulties,
on July 20, 1933, the faculty decided to close the Bauhaus.
Van der Rohe was expelled from Germany.
He and many other professors, students, and alumni
migrated to the United States,
reinventing modernism from an American point of view.