Bauhaus

Designs of the time. The most famous art school of modernity

In a fleeting fourteen-year period, sandwiched between two world wars, Germany’s Bauhaus school of art and design changed the face of modernity. With utopian ideals for the future, the school developed a pioneering fusion of fine art, craftsmanship, and technology to be applied across painting, sculpture, design, architecture, film, photography, textiles, ceramics, theatre, and installation.

As much an intense personal community as a publicly minded collective, the Bauhaus was first founded by Walter Gropius (1883–1969), and counted Josef and Anni Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, Gunta Stölzl, Marianne Brandt and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe among its members. Between its three successive locations in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin, the school fostered charismatic and creative exchange between teachers and students, all varied in their artistic styles and preferences, but united in their idealism and their interest in a “total” work of art across different practices and media.

This book celebrates the adventurous innovation of the Bauhaus movement, both as a trailblazer in the development of modernism and as a paradigm of art education, where an all-encompassing freedom of creative expression and cutting-edge ideas led to functional and beautiful creations.

The author

Magdalena Droste studied art history and literature in Aachen and Marburg. She has worked at the Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin since 1980 and is professor of art history at the BTU Cottbus since 1997. Droste has contributed to numerous exhibitions and publications on Bauhaus artists, besides writing a number of essays on the furniture and textile workshops at the Bauhaus and on arts and crafts as a women’s profession.

The editor

Peter Gössel runs an agency for museum and exhibition design. For TASCHEN he published monographs on Julius Shulman, R. M. Schindler, John Lautner and Richard Neutra as well as several architecture titles in the Basic Art Series.

About the series

Each book in TASCHEN’s Basic Architecture series features:

- an introduction to the life and work of the architect
- the major works in chronological order
- information about the clients, architectural preconditions as well as construction problems and resolutions
- a list of all the selected works and a map indicating the locations of the best and most famous buildings
- approximately 120 illustrations (photographs, sketches, drafts and plans)