Google is marking the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus movement with a commemorative animated Doodle. On April 12, 1919, the influential Bauhaus art school was founded by architect Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany. The school gathered many of Europe’s most brilliant artists and designers with the aim of reinventing the world with a new generation of creatives.
What is the Bauhaus movement?
The Bauhaus movement began in 1919 when Walter Gropius founded a school with a vision of bridging the gap between art and industry by combining crafts and fine arts.
Prior to the creative movement, finer arts such as architecture and design were held in higher esteem than craftsmanship such as painting and woodworking.
However, Gropius asserted that all crafts, including art, architecture and geometric design, could be brought together and mass-produced.
The German insinuation only operated for 15 years and was closed due to the rise of nazism.
However, the movement had already made its impact and art and architecture across Western Europe.
Google said of the Bauhaus movement: “Gropius envisioned the Bauhaus—whose name means “house of building”—as a merger of craftsmanship, the “fine” arts, and modern technology.
“His iconic Bauhaus Building in Dessau was a forerunner of the influential “International Style,” but the impact of the Bauhaus’s ideas and practices reached far beyond architecture.
“Students of the Bauhaus received interdisciplinary instruction in carpentry, metal, pottery, stained glass, wall painting, weaving, graphics, and typography, learning to infuse even the simplest functional objects (like the ones seen in today’s Doodle) with the highest artistic aspirations.
The Bauhaus attracted painters such as Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, photographer and sculptor László Moholy-Nagy, graphic designer Herbert Bayer, industrial designer Marianne Brandt and Marcel Breuer.
When the Bauhaus officially disbanded on August 10, 1933, students from 29 countries had to leave and return home.
But the movement lived on with the founded of the New Bauhaus in Chicago, Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and White City in Tel Aviv.
Bauhaus affiliates also took leadership positions at the Illinois Institute of Technology, the Harvard School of Architecture, and the Museum of Modern Art.
Through all of these institutionsthe ideas of the Bauhaus live on.