Bauhaus School Germany: Teachers & Artists 1919-1933

architects, sculptors, painters, we all must go back to handwork! The artist is an intensification of the craftsman [Gropius, Bauhaus manifesto]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Johannes Itten: While teaching in Weimar between 1919 and 1923, Itten developed a universal doctrine of Design, which he taught as the Bauhaus preliminary course. In 1926, however he founded an art school of his own in Berlin to train painters, printmakers, photographers and architects. He also taught at the Krefeld School of Textile Design and other places. Teaching, giving lectures, organizing numerous exhibitions and obligations in administration left Itten virtually no time for painting. Gerhard Marcks: As one of the first Bauhaus teachers, Marcks was responsible for the Bauhaus pottery in Dornburg / Saale near Weimar in 1920. Later he was appointed to teach the sculpture class at the School for Decorative Design Burg Giebichenstein in Halle / Saale. His studio house in Berlin was bombed during an air raid in 1942 destroying most of the artists work. He kept teaching art at the State Art School Hamburg after the war and at the beginning of the 1950s he started working as an independent artist in Western Germany. Lyonel Feininger: In 1893, he returned to Berlin, where he worked as an illustrator among others until 1906. In 1909, Feininger joined the Berliner Sezession participating in several exhibitions. In Paris in 1911 he made contact with Cubism, when Alfred Kubin and the Bruecke painters Schmidt-Rotluff and Heckel opened up new dimensions in his work. In 1912, Feininger produced his first architectural compositions with his typical Cubist fragmentations. He participated the Der Sturm gallery exhibitions in Berlin. In 1919, Gropius invited Feininger to the Bauhaus in Weimar, where he taught graphic art and painting until 1926. Together with Klee, Kandinsky and Jawlensky, he founded the Blaue Vier in 1924 in Weimar. After emigration to New York in 1937, Feininger had to wait for his breaktrough as an artist in the US until 1944. Feiningers classes in North Carolina, his texts and later watercolors set a trend for Abstract Expressionist painting in the US. Georg Muche: In Berlin in 1915, he started working as an exhibition assistant for th Herwarth Walden, who introduced Muche to the circle of Expressionist artists. The 37 exhibition of Der Sturm showing 22 pictures by Muche was followed by several other exhibitions presenting his work. In 1918 he started teaching at the affiliated art school before he switched to the Bauhaus School in 1920. Muche left the Bauhaus in 1927 in order to teach at a private art school previously founded by Johannes Itten. He founded a master class for textile art in Krefeld in 1938 and remained director of the Textile Engineering School until 1958. After 1960, Muche worked freelance as a painter and graphic artist in Southern Germany.

Paul Klee: Participating in 1908 in the exhibitions mounted by the Munich and Berlin Secessions, Klee met Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc and Hans Arp, who would exert the formative influence on his work. He took part in the Blauer Reiter and First German Herbstsalon exhibitions in Berlin. In 1920, Klee was invited by Gropius to teach at the Bauhaus in Weimar. There he worked at first as a Formmeister (Master of Design) and later taught in the free-form painting class exhibiting increasingly at this time in Germany and abroad. Klee was part of the Blaue Vier group in Weimar together with Kandinsky, Feininger and Jawlensky. By then Klee was painting chiefly constructive and absolute pictures. Oskar Schlemmer: After Schlemmer exhibited at the Gallery Der Sturm in Berlin in 1919, Gropius invited him to Weimar in 1920 to run the sculpture department and the stage workshop at the Bauhaus school.This theatre work was an important factor in his work, which deals mainly with the problematic of the figure in space. Influenced by Cubism, Schlemmer usually integrated this figures into geometric structures. A similar striving for abstraction is reflected in his steel and wire sculptures. Oskar th Schlemmer was one of the most versatile artists of the 20 century. His occupation with murals, sculpture, drawing and painting shows that he always strove to create a Gesamtkunstwerk (synthesis of the arts). Wassily Kandinsky: As one of the fathers of abstract painting, Kandinsky was one of th the great pionieers of art in the 20 century. He paved the way for abstract painting as a painter as well as an art theoretic and left an epoch-making oeuvre. Together with his artist friends Paul Klee, August Macke and Franz Marc he founded the Blauer Reiter in 1912. Walter Gropius invited him to teach at the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1922, where he founded the artist group Die Blauen Vier together with Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger and Alexej von Jawlensky in 1924. Kandinsky stayed with the Bauhaus school in Dessau and Berlin until the dissolution in 1933. Josef Albers: He started his career as an art teacher in 1923, when he was commissioned to run the workshop for glass painting at the Weimar Bauhaus. He designed also numerous pieces of furniture as well as glass and metal devices. His last assignment as an art teacher was at the Art School of the Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Yale. After moving to the US, Albers experimented with linear shapes which transgress the safety of geometric arrangements (Geometric Surrealism). Both as a teacher and as an artist Josef Albers was seminal for an entire generation of American artists. Lazlo Moholy-Nagy: Noticed by Gropius in 1920 in Berlin, Moholy-Nagy was invited to join the Bauhaus in 1923. There he run the metal class but also worked in all other areas of design. Moholy-Nagy became one of the most important artists of Constructivism. The expectations of the age of technology and his new media led him to a functional use of Abstraction. Moholy-Nagys varied oeuvre ranges from painting, photography, film, design and stage design to experiments with photostream considerably influencing the development of light art and kinetic art. After emigrating to the US in 1937, he ran the New Bauhaus in Chicago and he opened his own art institute, the School of Design in Chicago in 1938.