Bauhaus 100: A BBC Arts Documentary

Source: Bauhaus 100: A BBC Arts Documentary, Dr Umer Hameed, 59:25, uploaded 2024-12-27, Watch Later position 605.

The BBC documentary begins with a contradiction. The Bauhaus existed for fourteen years, yet its influence still shapes the objects, buildings, schools, and habits that surround modern life. In 2019 that short history becomes present again when the left-wing punk band Feine Sahne Fischfilet is due to perform in the Bauhaus building in Dessau. Far-right groups threaten a protest, and the director cancels the concert to protect the institution. Critics say that the cancellation gives neo-Nazis what they want. The dispute asks what it means to preserve the Bauhaus when the school’s original purpose was to change the world around it.

A school born from war

The film travels first to Weimar, where Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in 1919. Its opening images show the geometric language of the original school building. Murals on a staircase reduce the basic forms to the circle, triangle, and square. An arrow points towards the secretariat and the director’s office, which gives the building a small lesson in its own system before the tour reaches Gropius’s room.

Gropius came from a prominent Berlin family with architects among his ancestors, and his career seemed decided from birth. He designed the Fagus Factory in Alfeld before the First World War, a building the film presents as a precursor to the school’s later architecture. The war interrupted an invitation to lead the School of Applied Arts in Weimar. Gropius joined the cavalry, fought at the front, and suffered repeated injuries. One account describes him leading his men into a building that collapsed after a bomb hit it, killing everyone except him. The film turns this story into a stark image of an architect nearly killed by architecture.

Gropius later described waking at night to the sound of screaming. His experience of industrial warfare left him with a question about technology. It had served destruction on an immense scale, yet it might also serve a progressive purpose. The Bauhaus grew from the hope that art, architecture, and education could help make a different society after the old one had lost its authority.

When Gropius accepted the Weimar invitation after the war, he merged the School of Applied Arts with the School of Fine Arts. He wanted every discipline under one roof because a painting, a chair, and the other things in an environment belonged to the same world. A chair had to work, yet beauty also counted as a basic requirement of life. The school therefore began as a series of experiments in the place of art and design within a damaged society.

Germany’s first democracy, the Weimar Republic, arrived with the Kaiser’s abdication and a period of violence. Groups on the far left and far right fought for power whilst the country tried to rebuild. Weimar itself carried the weight of Goethe and Schiller, its classical literary past making it an unlikely home for a radical school. Gropius answered the setting with a manifesto. He called for the disciplines to work together on a building of the future that would join architecture, sculpture, and painting as one unity, symbolised by the crystal of a new faith.

The manifesto drew on William Morris and his idea of the unity of the arts. It travelled throughout Germany and reached young people who wanted to leave traditional education behind. Gropius understood that a school required more than a single architect’s vision. He needed a group whose different abilities could generate a common direction. The film also notes that Gropius could not draw well. Necessity or temperament made him a collaborator, and collaboration became part of the institution’s method.

A faculty built from difference

Gropius assembled a remarkable group of teachers. Wassily Kandinsky brought a new kind of painting that moved away from representation and towards the expression of spirit. Paul Klee taught through paintings filled with ghosts and angels, and students remembered his lectures as a way to connect art with spirituality. Oskar Schlemmer began as a painter, moved into sculpture, and worked with theatre and dance. His interest in the human figure extended into movement and temporary architecture.

The stage gave the school a place to test its idea of a total work of art. Architects and designers could create a space, alter it, and make movement part of its construction. Dance for architects and designers became part of the curriculum. The faculty did not share one style or ideology. Gropius chose people because they differed from one another, which let the Bauhaus change direction as its teachers changed.

Students arrived from across Germany and beyond. Some had trained at conventional art schools. Some were eighteen-year-olds straight from secondary education. Others were returning soldiers, including people who walked to Weimar because they had no money for the journey. They came for different reasons, then found themselves inside a shared modernist project. The film reads their appearance in photographs as a form of social provocation. Short hair, androgynous clothing, mixed dancing, public smoking and drinking, and a more open attitude towards homosexuality unsettled the citizens of Weimar.

The students saw themselves as young radicals who might have joined punk bands or protested in the street. Their behaviour could shock the town, yet it also expressed the optimism of a generation that had survived the war and believed that modern life could become better. When students poured paint over sculptures associated with Weimar’s classical past, they made the conflict material. The old town treated the Bauhaus as an immoral intrusion from the cities.

The school’s teaching began with the preliminary course that later became a model for foundation years in British art schools. Johannes Itten asked students to forget their previous training and begin without fixed assumptions. Before a student drew a tiger, Itten said, they should roar like one. Students explored materials, colour, movement, and the senses before choosing a specialist workshop.

Itten treated colour as something with its own emotional force rather than as a tool for copying the natural world. One exercise gave shapes intrinsic attributes, so a red square expressed the idea that every square was red even when the paper showed no colour. Itten worked with Gertrud Grunow, a composer and concert pianist who proposed a harmony between colour, sound, and movement. Students were asked to feel those links in their bodies. One remembered being told to dance the colour blue.

The aim was an artistic Esperanto, a shared language that could travel across national and disciplinary boundaries. Itten also used breathing exercises to relax the students and give the subconscious a place in creative work. His teaching became entangled with Mazdaznan, a religious movement of Persian origin. He grew more remote from the school, and the conflict between his spiritual practice and his teaching eventually led him to withdraw.

László Moholy-Nagy took up the preliminary course in a different direction. He was more interested in technology, and Gropius changed the school’s motto to “Art and Technology: A New Unity”. The Bauhaus did not have one fixed programme that survived unchanged. New teachers redirected the school every few years, and Gropius had to persuade the faculty and the students to follow each change.

Materials, function, and the limits of equality

The first Bauhaus generation soon became ready to lead workshops. One teacher recalls Gropius asking him to take over the introductory course. He began with wire, asking students to give it a new shape, and then introduced paper, which was still treated as wrapping material. The method began with the material itself. Its nature helped determine the form, which made “form follows function” a practical working rule rather than a phrase attached to a style.

The film calls the Bauhaus one of the clearest embodiments of that idea. The school turned a principle about form and function into a movement that could be taught, repeated, and applied across a whole institution. Its education looked revolutionary in this respect. Its treatment of women showed how quickly the school’s social imagination stopped.

Women made up 51 percent of the first semester. Gropius worried that a school filled with women would fail to receive serious attention from the surrounding society, and most of the male teachers shared the assumptions of the nineteenth century in which they had grown up. All students had similar experiences in the preliminary course. Once they advanced to the workshops, men could choose carpentry or printing, whilst women were directed towards weaving.

Anni Albers had come to study with Klee, Kandinsky, and Lyonel Feininger. She was angry when the school prevented her from continuing in those areas and dismissed weaving as a workshop. A few women resisted the rule and demanded access to other fields. Marianne Brandt became the only woman to graduate from the metal workshop. When she arrived, the men gave her the most boring task and made her repeat it. She assumed that every beginner faced the same test until her colleagues admitted that they wanted her to leave. Brandt persisted, became an assistant to the workshop head László Moholy-Nagy, and took over as acting director when he left.

The documentary treats Brandt as a clear Bauhaus success story whilst keeping the school’s restriction in view. Its defenders can call the gendered workshops typical of their period, yet the fact remains that a school which claimed to rethink education reproduced the limits of the society around it. The radical experiment had a narrow entrance into its own future.

The first exhibition and the move to Dessau

The Bauhaus depended on public money during a period of economic collapse. Politicians wanted to know what the school produced and whether it fulfilled its manifesto. The Weimar government pressured Gropius into holding an exhibition in 1923. He thought the school lacked the infrastructure to show its work, although the deadline gave the students a clear shared task.

The school built a complete house for the exhibition and furnished it with work from its own workshops. The preliminary course was suspended for a semester so that everyone could contribute. The house proposed a form of modern life through its building, furniture, and objects. Gropius invited industrialists, professors, journalists, and visitors from across the world in the hope that international attention would prove the school’s value to Weimar.

The local response went badly. The town did not understand what the Bauhaus had made, and the film says that roughly 80 or 90 percent of the press cuttings collected by Gropius were negative. The exhibition showed Weimar the school’s achievements, yet the town saw a set of unfamiliar objects made for the wrong audience. The government cut the Bauhaus budget by half the following year. A nationalist government then arrived in Thuringia, and the Weimar chapter ended.

Gropius and his colleagues turned the crisis into publicity. Newspaper stories spread through Germany, presenting the school as shocking and controversial. Gropius used the attention to find a new home. During a speaking tour he met Ise Frank, who became his wife and an important part of the Bauhaus story. She understood the school’s ideals and helped him move between the political, social, and personal work that kept the institution alive.

Dessau offered a better setting. It was a small industrial city with aircraft and metal works, a left-wing government, and a direct connection to manufacturing. The school received land on the edge of town where it could build a purpose-designed campus. Students could study industrial production in the city, whilst Gropius could realise the large building he had imagined.

The Dessau building used a glass curtain wall and a steel frame to fill the school with light. A dormitory wing let students live and work together. A large cafeteria opened onto a stage, and an auditorium made performance part of the campus. The film calls it Gropius’s best building and describes its effect as something close to a spaceship landing in Germany. Its form only becomes clear whilst walking around it. The building refuses a single front-facing view, so its famous lettering gives only one part of the whole.

The Dessau years were the most stable years of the Bauhaus and of German society in the film’s account. Painting, sculpture, weaving, furniture, pottery, and architecture could finally occupy one institution. The school’s order also included parties. Metal, paper, and other themed events turned costumes, music, movement, and the building itself into a total work of art. Oskar Schlemmer said, “Show me how you party and I’ll show you who I am.” Gropius Day, held on 18 May for Gropius’s birthday, became the largest annual celebration.

The parties brought the school into public life and sometimes raised money. They also intensified the conflict with Dessau’s traditional citizens. Right-wing groups distributed leaflets against the Bauhaus, criticised its teaching, attacked modernist architecture, and invented affairs between Gropius and students to damage his reputation. The school’s politics, sexuality, and methods gave its opponents material for a sustained campaign.

Gropius left despite staff and students asking him to stay. He said that the growing Nazi movement made his position harmful to the Bauhaus because its attacks focused on him. He had also spent years running a school whilst wanting to work as an architect. Leaving when the institution was at its strongest gave him a chance to return to private work before the political conditions became worse.

Three directors and the pressure of industry

Hannes Meyer succeeded Gropius and brought architecture closer to the centre of the school. He was a Swiss Marxist architect who treated aesthetics and art as bourgeois distractions. His view was direct: working-class people cared about cost and function. Under Meyer, the Bauhaus tried to bring its prototypes into industry, which had been one of Gropius’s ambitions.

The Bauhaus wallpaper became a major commercial success. The film says that the school sold millions of rolls, bringing in money during a period when German inflation and the cost of running the institution made finance a constant problem. Textiles also generated income. The women’s workshop was the only workshop, together with the wallpaper programme, that produced substantial revenue. The school’s gender division therefore placed women in the area that kept it solvent.

Meyer’s politics soon made his position impossible. Communist students became more committed to their cause, whilst extreme right-wing students also remained at the school. The canteen divided into left and right. As Germany moved towards National Socialism, the mayor of Dessau faced growing pressure. Meyer was removed in 1930. The film treats his ideas as serious and his political judgement as a vulnerability in a country where the Nazis were gaining power.

Gropius recommended Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who had become famous after his Barcelona Pavilion. Mies wanted a grammar that everyone could understand and use. He was a master architect with a very different character from Meyer’s playful experimental approach. He questioned each student about political activity, expelled around twenty people associated with Meyer, and declared that the Bauhaus would have no politics.

This attempt at depoliticisation could not save the school. Right-wing politicians had attacked the Bauhaus from its beginning, calling its art internationalist and un-German. National Socialists labelled it Bolshevik and Jewish, even though the documentary rejects those labels as inventions designed to discredit the institution. In 1932 the Nazi government in Dessau cut the funding and forced the school from its own building.

Mies moved the school to a disused telephone factory in Berlin and turned it into a private institution. The change from Weimar to Dessau to Berlin had already made the Bauhaus mobile, yet the Berlin move left it dependent on a small group’s ability to keep the finances together. After the Reichstag fire, Hitler used the attack to accuse Communists and other left-wing groups. The Bauhaus now stood inside the political category that the regime wanted to destroy.

Closure and exile

One morning Mies found the Berlin factory full of the Gestapo. Students were interrogated, and the school could reopen only if Jewish and Communist faculty members were expelled. The concession came too late. The Nazis had made the Bauhaus a target through its teachers, students, international outlook, and association with avant-garde culture.

In July 1933 the teachers met to decide the school’s fate. Mies brought a bottle of champagne. They chose to close the Bauhaus rather than hand it to the National Socialists, opened the bottle, drank it, and went their separate ways. The school ended after fourteen years, yet its forced dissolution scattered its teachers and students around the world.

Josef and Anni Albers went to the United States and taught at Black Mountain College. Hannes Meyer went to the Soviet Union to work on large projects. Gropius left Germany in 1934, travelled through London, and reached Harvard, where he became head of the architecture department. Mies moved to Chicago, designed the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology, and developed the glass and steel high-rise as a way to house people in tall apartment towers.

The Nazi attack therefore helped give Bauhaus ideas an international reach, even though the film treats that consequence as morally grim. The school’s destruction sent its teachers into Israel, Britain, the United States, and other countries, where they influenced new design courses. The same event that ended the institution made its teaching harder to contain within one country.

The film also refuses a clean political portrait of the Bauhaus. Its members included Communists, conservatives, right-wing figures, and National Socialists. Some people collaborated with the regime and gave up the spirit of the school. Franz Ehrlich, a Communist, was imprisoned in Buchenwald. The camp gates that bear the words “Jedem das Seine” use a Bauhaus typeface associated with his design. Other Bauhaus figures came from Jewish families and were murdered in concentration camps. National Socialist architects also designed barracks for Auschwitz. A school’s name could travel into many political lives, and the school could not control what its forms meant after it disappeared.

From social housing to corporate style

Tom Wolfe described the arrival of the Bauhaus group in America in From Bauhaus to Our House as something like an old black-and-white film in which silver princes enter a jungle and receive worship from the people they meet. The film uses Wolfe’s hostile image to introduce the American reception of European modernism. American institutions treated Gropius, Mies, and their colleagues as authorities who could teach the young architects of the future.

The transition changed the social meaning of the forms. The Bauhaus had developed its ideas for workers after the First World War under a social democratic government. In America, similar forms appeared in the offices and towers of corporate giants. Mies’s glass and steel buildings became part of a corporate style. Critics argued that the Bauhaus had lost its way and betrayed the social ideals that had mattered to Gropius.

The film also points to a contradiction inside the school’s own industrial ambition. The Bauhaus celebrated the machine age, yet it often made objects by hand so that they looked machine-made. Its social message depended on industrial production that the school rarely controlled. The American version embraced the look of the Bauhaus whilst leaving its programme of social inclusion behind.

One interviewee rejects the idea that this makes the Bauhaus a failure. Creative work remains exploration and experiment, and the school’s value lies in the different way it taught people to look. Another speaker sees its short life as part of its strength. The Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau to Berlin, then stopped before its newness could settle into a stable formula. The Nazi regime created a traumatic break that makes it impossible to know whether the school would have continued to work on its own terms.

Its legacy now appears in familiar objects and environments. The film links the Bauhaus ideal of refined form and mass production to Ikea, and it finds the union of form and function in the iPhone. These examples show how thoroughly the visual language travelled. They also carry a warning. A simplified object can preserve the Bauhaus look whilst losing the school’s idealism, its education, and its desire to change how people live together.

The building, the party, and the living institution

The documentary returns to Dessau and argues that the Bauhaus was a school before it became a design vocabulary. Its designs and devices survive as signs of simplicity and elegance, yet their historical force came from the way people were taught, worked, lived, and spent time together. The building contains that social history in its rooms, workshops, dormitory, stage, and routes through the campus.

UNESCO recognition protects the Dessau building as a World Heritage site, although one interviewee sees the museum as a dead object. Preservation prevents the building from changing, and the protected monument can lose the active spirit that once made it significant. The film asks readers to celebrate the school’s practice rather than turn its building into a corpse that visitors can only admire.

That question returns through the threatened concert in 2019. A German television channel plans to record a performance by Feine Sahne Fischfilet in the Bauhaus building. Right-wing groups threaten to demonstrate, and the Bauhaus director cancels the event. She says that her duty is to protect the institution and the building. Critics see a different responsibility. They speak about the idea that the building represents, whilst the director speaks about the building itself.

The dispute arrives during a period in which right-wing parties gain power across Europe. The film names Italy, Austria, Hungary, Poland, the United States, and Germany as places where the political climate is changing. Its list belongs to 2019 and does not provide a current measure of those developments. The point within the documentary is that cultural institutions face pressure when the political order moves towards the forces that attacked them in the past.

The Bauhaus had faced such attacks from the day it opened. Gropius answered each one directly, and the final interviews suggest that the uncomfortable debate around the concert may itself be part of the school’s legacy. The argument remains unresolved because protecting a building and defending the idea that produced it can demand different actions.

The utopian remainder

The film closes with the Bauhaus as a school that opened new worlds for a new generation. Its original hope was simple to state and difficult to fulfil: a better society could grow through work and design. The ambition is large, yet it still attracts people because design gives a person a way to alter the conditions of ordinary life.

Walter Gropius died in Boston on 5 July 1969. At his request, friends held a metal-themed Bauhaus party with drinking, dancing, laughter, and love. The final image returns the school to the form that the museum threatens to remove from it. The Bauhaus survives as a building, a style, and a set of products, yet its most durable part is the wager that education, materials, technology, and collective life can be arranged differently.

Limits

This note follows the documentary’s narration and interviews. The video gives a substantial historical account, although it does not provide a full bibliography, speaker list, archival references, or page numbers for the figures and claims it reports. The figures about women’s enrolment, negative press coverage, funding cuts, and wallpaper sales therefore remain claims made in the film. The documentary also compresses complex histories into a single hour, especially the relation between the Bauhaus, German politics, the Nazi regime, and American corporate architecture.

The English caption track contains frequent errors in proper names and place names. I have restored names where the surrounding account makes the reference clear, whilst keeping the documentary’s qualifications and disagreements. The 2019 discussion of right-wing politics and the cancelled concert belongs to the film’s period of production. It should not be read as current evidence without a separate source check.

Further reading / references

• William Morris, whose idea of the unity of the arts is identified in the film as an influence on Gropius’s Bauhaus manifesto.
• Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus manifesto, quoted in the film as the school’s founding statement.
• Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House, the critical book named in the film’s account of Bauhaus modernism in America.