Weimar Berlin: On a day like today, in 1919, the Bauhaus.

This year, the centenary of the Bauhaus is celebrated. The Staatliches Bauhaus (The State’s house for the construction) was a center for new ideas and consequently attracted progressive architects and artists. The Bauhaus School has become a symbol of modern architecture worldwide, because of its educational theory and buildings, and it is inseparable from the name of the architect Walter Gropius.

"Architects, sculptors, painters, we must return to manual work! There is no essential difference between artist and craftsman. The artist is but an inspired craftsman. "

In his 1919 Bauhaus Manifesto, Gropius sums up his school's thinking : breaking the line between applied and fine arts. He opened the Bauhaus School in Weimar, that small town in central Germany, the same one that gave its name to the German Republic of 1919-1933. After the First World War, Gropius dreamed of a more egalitarian world, where dwellings, clothes, everyday objects would also be aesthetic objects, accessible to all.

This year of 2019, at the Berlinische Galerie, an anniversary exhibition will be held, called Original Bauhaus. The curator Nina Wiedermeyer explains: "The social component is part of the Bauhaus utopia. The people behind Bauhaus wanted to improve the world. "

Walter Gropius brought to Weimar artists of all disciplines, with different methods and characters. Among the best known, Paul Klee and Vassily Kandinsky, both responsible for the basic theoretical training of students. Also, Henry van de Velde, Hannes Meyer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. In an exercise that has since become famous, Kandinsky asks his students to pair one of the primary colors (red, blue, yellow) with one of the three basic forms (triangle, circle, rectangle).

What is called "design" today was then only in its infancy. Students are encouraged to experiment with new shapes, new materials, new colors. Within the school, they painted on glass, theater, typography, weaving with cellophane, carpentry ... Among the most famous objects produced in the Bauhaus, there were the Wassily chair, by Marcel Breuer and the teapot of Marianne Brandt.

"There is no Bauhaus style," says Nina Wiedermeyer. "Gropius himself insisted on it. It was a multicultural school where students had very different styles. "

An avant-garde philosophy that displeased the National Socialist Party, which came to power at the local level already in the 1920s. The school was forced to move to Dessau in 1924, then to Berlin in 1932. For Goebbels, the Bauhaus belongs to the "degenerate art" and is a symbol of "cultural Bolshevism". The school was dissolved in 1933, a few months after Hitler's conquest of the power.

Many Bauhaus alumni would teach in the United States. Walter Gropius himself headed the design school of Harvard University from 1937. Others settled down in Tel Aviv and built more than 4,000 buildings, most of them classified as World Heritage by Unesco. The dissolution of the school, far from killing the movement, contributed to its internationalization and its perpetuation.

Exhibitions :

In Berlin: original bauhaus, 6.9.2019 - 27.1.2020, Berlinische Galerie.

In Weimar: "The Bauhaus comes from Weimar », from April 6th.

In Dessau, Bauhaus Experimental Site, The Collection, Fall 2019.