Today I watched the Bauhaus documentary which covers the history of the art school in Germany, from its rise to fall, how it impacted art, expression, and schools until this day.
It was an interesting well-made documentary that spoke about Bauhaus in-depth, how it came to be, how it changed the artistic expression, and what the students did that changed design history.
Bauhaus was the founder of many things, one of which being the foundation course.
A foundation course is a course where the students get to try different workshops for the first year to later go in-depth with. This practice is still around today, in several countries around Europe for students to prepare and try different mediums to work with before they make their decisions about what they want to study for a university degree.
When the School became popular for its unique and new ways of teaching, it broke the rules previous art schools had to develop the future of artistic expression. Walter Gropius, the founder of Bauhaus wrote a manifesto that attracted teachers and students from various backgrounds that wanted to take part in his vision. Soon enough, his vision became reality.
The school had its groundbreaking ways of teaching, like the foundation course for example. It gave the students the knowledge of how to work with various media that they had never worked with before. They experimented with different ways of teaching to help the students experience and learn with what they were working with in another light, to give them new ideas on how to express themselves and learn. This was done by dance, performance, and parties. They also studied various materials to get a deeper understanding of what they were working with, form follows function. The revolutionary approach gave birth to new ideas and creativity, in ways people had never seen before, that inspires us until today, as well lives with us until this day.
The school’s innovative thinking didn’t just affect the history of design, but their students were ahead of their time as well. Because of the free-spirited, rebellious and artistic nature of the students, they had the courage to express themselves, be different and challenge the norms. They broke the gender stereotype and experimented with their sexuality, which would anger a lot of people. Looking back at images, the students back then would be very similar in expressions like students are today, especially art students.
This is impressive knowing this was between the late 1910 and early 1930s. They were seen as degenerates by the public, and they didn’t want to be involved and because of their freedom of expression, they were quite open about their political views as well, which caused a lot of trouble with the then-current situation in Germany (1919-1933). These were a few of the reasons why the school moved location a total of three times before the government shut them down.
I found this documentary very interesting. I also found a lot of the information rather ironic and a lot of it made sense. In today’s society, art students are still frowned upon, they’re seen as ‘weird’, just like it was 90 to 100 years ago. Just because they’re not following the standards of society. What I found interesting was that we can still relate to these students from 100 years ago, which seems like forever since the society has developed quite far since then, but in reality, we’re just more technologically advanced while society stays the same.
As being said in the documentary, Bauhaus was shut down when Hitler came into power, and they were seen as degenerates and outsiders of society, and a couple of students and teachers were arrested and potentially taken to concentration camps. This whole ordeal is upsetting, but the irony was that the Bauhaus design could be seen in the designs of concentration camps, it never left, it still lives on.
We can still see the marks that Bauhaus left us until today, the radical artistic freedom, the way they taught the students, furniture design that is very similar to what they did back then, just the design in general. It left a massive mark on history and design itself, which is why it was such a revolutionary school because it was ahead of its time.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFcZpDMtAyQ&t
images are taken from the video and google images.
Thank you for reading.