- Architecture was the highest goal of
Bauhaus training from its inception.
But from the start, the masters were almost all painters.
Feininger, Itten, Schlemmer, Klee,
Kandinsky, and Moholy-Nagy.
Most of the students worked with painting and drawing.
But unlike traditional fine arts education of the time,
copying a Leonardo da Vinci sitting at the Louvre,
the main goal was to stimulate
and sharpen a student's creativity.
Even though the Bauhaus did not see
itself as an art school,
the fine arts were initially well-respected.
Fine art was to be removed from being art for art's sake
and subjugated to the ideal of
all workmen cooperating and interacting with one another.
It also was to form the creative basis for
work in all areas of design.
Fine art not connected to architecture
was viewed as a source of inspiration,
but was not one of the subjects available to study.
Walter Gropius stated, "Modern painting,
"which has breached its historic boundaries,
"has generated countless ideas that are still
"waiting to be exploited by the practical world."
In the early years controversy surrounded
the role of fine art at the Bauhaus.
What was the value and role of art
in the overall structure and curriculum of the school?
Klee, Kandinsky, and Moholy-Nagy believed
that the Bauhaus was a purpose-led academy
and workplace that coordinated the arts
and explored the laws of form and color.
But they didn't want this to be mistaken
as a guideline for the production of works of art.
This idea was a universally valid model
for the development of all forms of art.
In the first Bauhaus magazine of 1926
Wassily Kandinsky explained the role
of fine art at the Bauhaus.
Painting is seen as a co-organizing force for all forms.
By 1927 the functional and technological orientation
of all the workshops was countered by the
intensified production of visual art.
The concepts of unity and art designed for a modern,
more humane society began to disappear.
Ernst Kallai, editor of the Bauhaus magazine,
stated that there was a solely purpose-led
and construction-oriented objectivity
typified by mass production on the one hand
and a metaphysical approach characterized by
dream, vision, and unequivocal spiritual belief
or paradoxical acts of magic on the other.
The influence of painting at the Bauhaus
connects Kandinsky's abstract expressionism
to Jackson Pollock's energetic painting in the 1950s,
or Moholy-Nagy's geometric compositions
to Mark Rothko's squares within squares.
But the Bauhaus's most lasting legacies
was the goal of unifying the visual arts.
This led to the blurring of lines
between fine and applied arts,
and to an educational approach based on exploration
and collaboration rather than duplication.