Core77

Alice Rawthorn tells a short version of the story of the Bauhaus in the International Herald Tribune. Well worth the read, here's a snippet:

There have been other great design schools, but none that matched the Bauhaus. Many of the most influential designers of the 20th century taught or studied there. Gropius and Mies van der Rohe in architecture. Marcel Breuer in furniture. Bayer in graphics. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in film. Oskar Schlemmer in theater design. Anni Albers and Gunta Stolzl in textiles. Marianne Brandt and Wilhelm Wagenfeld in product design. The list goes on. Working alongside them were great artists like Paul Klee, Josef Albers and Wassily Kandinsky. Even today, some 75 years after the Bauhaus closed, our lives wouldn't be the same without it.

The story of the Bauhaus, from 1919 when Gropius became director, to 1933, when Mies reluctantly disbanded it, is told in an exhibition at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art in England. How did one design school become so influential? Like most success stories, it was (almost) as much about luck as judgment, but behind its minimally elegant facade, the Bauhaus was a turbulent place, and very vulnerable to the political pressures of Nazi Germany. For much of the time, it was, as Anni Albers put it when she arrived in 1922, "a great muddle."