“Don’t look there, they’re from the Bauhaus!” – the well-meaning mothers of their young daughters warned. They (Bauhaus students) played strange music on weekends and bathed naked at night, the girls cut their hair short and wore pants, and the young men let their hair grow long and dressed like ragamuffins. The Bauhaus invented the modern long-haired art student, who in addition to his direct artistic exertions and plein airs always has on his agenda: to embroider a bag with Celtic patterns, to carve a pendant from a piece of unidentified metal found during a walk, overnight to invent the most ergonomic design of anything for the next festival or competition. And a dozen more important things to decorate and improve the world around us.
The Higher School of Construction and Artistic Design Bauhaus (Bauhaus – translated from the German “House of Construction”) was founded in Weimar on April 25, 1919. Today, the term Bauhaus also refers to the association of artists who taught and studied at this institution, as well as a particular style of architecture based on a constructivist approach.
Before the Bauhaus came along, art academy students had no opportunity to break out of tradition: their studies began with art history, drawing watercolors, and copying antique statues. The preparatory course at the Bauhaus began with the theory of color and the study of textures, they created three-dimensional structures from whatever came to hand, and in their senior years they performed plays from geometric figures, made their own furniture for classrooms and built houses for teachers. One student said his girlfriend cut her hair short at the time and he used it for one of his sculptures. In times of depression, when there was no money for professional materials, Johannes Itten, instructor of the introductory course, would send students to the dump: go find something interesting and try to understand the nature of these things.
The Buddhist and mystic Johannes Itten shaved his head and wore monk’s clothes. He developed a six-month preparatory course for Bauhaus students. During this time they were to have time to understand the expressive potential of forms and colors, materials and reliefs, learn to control their creative energy and manage their emotions. The classes began with breathing exercises, practicing drawing with eyes closed and drawing with both hands.
The Bauhaus was a dream come true. Here they wanted to put a real aesthetic experiment on the world of things and expected not just artistic, but social revolution: the human environment, created according to the laws of art, should change over time a person himself.