The Bauhaus, founded and directed by the architect Walter Gropius, is regarded as the landmark German modernist school of the early twentieth century, where the integration of art and design with technology was first explored and practised. The school consisted of workshops in painting, furniture design, typography and other fine and applied arts, each taught by a master.
Each Bauhaus student began their practical training with a study of the elements of design common to all modern design endeavours. Founded in 1919, the Bauhaus was the result of the merger of two pre-existing schools, the Weimar Academy of Art and the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts, sought ‘unity in diversity’ in function, design and thought, reflecting the influence of the Werkbund movement on its founder.
The Werkbund called for the integration of art and the economic realities of capitalism and looked favourably on the emerging technologies of the early twentieth century to support this aim.The Bauhaus was a surprising success in what may have seemed a utopian goal. Best known for the production of well-designed yet practical furniture, household items including crockery and cutlery, graphics, typography and teacher training, the Bauhaus had a profound and lasting impact in the field of photography.
Photography as a medium in its own right came to the Bauhaus rather late. It was not included in the school’s curriculum until 1929, four years after the founding of the Dessau Bauhaus (1925-1933) and a full decade after the earlier Weimar School (1919-1925).
László Moholy-Nagy, the multi-talented abstract artist and master of the basic design course, was the first to recognise the value of photography not only as a means of documenting the Bauhaus, but also as an art form in its own right. His modern teaching confirmed the importance of photography for generations of Bauhaus students from Germany to America, first in his teaching and later through his directorship of the New Bauhaus in Chicago (1936-1938). Number 8 in the famous Bauhaus book series, Painting, Photography, Film, by Moholy-Nagy, is devoted to this medium.
Bauhaus photography tends to be artistically self-referential: Bauhaus photographers photographed Bauhaus buildings, Bauhaus designs and Bauhaus personalities, including fellow Bauhaus photographers.
Although Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus masters repeatedly denied the existence of a ‘Bauhaus style’, Bauhaus photographers invented and shared an experimental method that is easily identifiable today. The hallmark of Bauhaus photography and its aesthetic strength lies in its abstract qualities. Intense contrasts of black and white or strong shadows in shades of grey dominate. Compositions are often structured by geometry, either the horizontals and verticals of Cubism or sliced by the raking diagonals of Futurism. Like the Bauhaus itself, photography at the school was dominated by a Teutonic coolness of form, an anti-Romantic New World view known as New Objectivity.
The New Objectivity, particularly as expressed in Bauhaus photography, is a world of stark images and abstract white cubic buildings inhabited by impersonal men and languid women. It is a world of pure Platonic form. The Bauhaus masters claimed that their inspiration was not to be found in art photography, but in technology and science. Thus, distortions such as scale and angle produced abstract photographs influenced by views that the eye could only actually encounter through the technology of a microscope or from an aeroplane.
Even the mundane objects of everyday life could become abstractions: human hands, for example, could be seen as sculptural abstractions in Bauhaus photographs.
The use of technology to create designs free from the constraints of the past was crucial to the Bauhaus. In fact, history courses were not part of the curriculum. Only by removing or reducing the vagaries of human emotion could a modern purity of design emerge, although paradoxically the basic Bauhaus courses emphasised practical activity through the creation of hand-made objects.
The aim was egalitarian: to improve the lives of ordinary people. A secondary aim was to introduce new ways of seeing, and technology was understandably at the forefront of this endeavour.
However, the purity of the image became so important to the Bauhaus photographers that technology was actually avoided. The direct contact of the subject with the treated paper, which even removed the camera from the photographic process, was developed by Moholy-Nagy in the form of the photogram, a photographic image made without the use of a camera (also known as light graphics). Although the form had been explored earlier by practitioners such as Man Ray, the perfection and dissemination of the photogram can be seen as a seminal contribution to photography by the Bauhaus.
Moholy-Nagy was also a sculptor, and the fusion of his sculptural abstraction with the flat image of the photograph was innovative. His imposition of three-dimensional objects, casting their shadows directly onto the two-dimensional flat surface of the treated photographic paper, created an entirely new formal type of composition. Ambiguous spatial effects are evident in these works, as unidentifiable objects seem to float in the empty space of a black background. An excellent example of such a photogram is in the collection of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University. Just when we think we have grasped Moholy-Nagy’s hard-edged abstraction, however, he surprises us with his sensual, erotic art photograph of 1927, ‘Two Torsos’.
Moholy-Nagy’s first wife, Lucia, was also one of the photographic innovators of the Bauhaus. Lucia is famous for her dramatic architectural portraits of the white cubic and glass Bauhaus buildings designed by Gropius. Her photographs provide the iconic images of the Bauhaus complex and the visual memories by which the world remembers the Bauhaus.
A selection of her documentary architectural photographs, also in the collection of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, testify to Lucia Moholy’s formal sense of composition, her love of abstract form, her dramatic vision of architecture devoid of people, and her profound stillness.
Other Bauhaus masters used photography with different and interesting perspectives. Master typographer Herbert Bayer incorporated photographs into his montages for posters, book jackets and advertisements. Bayer’s poster for master Marcel Breuer’s design exhibition ‘Metallmobel’ is a classic. T. Lux Feininger contributed an informal use of photography to the Bauhaus repertoire, creating the most naturalistic, snapshot-like images of other Bauhaus students and masters, often unexpectedly at play. Documentary portraits of some of the most important figures in the history of modernism who attended the Bauhaus were made by Bauhaus photographers, including formal images of the architects Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and the painters Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Amédée Ozenfant and El Lissitzky, to name but a few. Photographers associated with the German Bauhaus include Walter Peterhans, Florence Henri and Ellen Auerbach.
The achievements in photography at the Bauhaus were not limited to those primarily associated with the medium. Josef Albers, known for his ‘Homage to the Square’ paintings, produced photographs that are the closest of any Bauhaus artist to what could be called art photography, surprising in that they suggest that the master painter allowed himself a freedom in photography that he denied himself in his primary medium. In a series of abstract landscapes of fields and fences and views of sea foam on sand, for example, Albers let his camera paint freely.
The great educational experiment came to an end in 1933 when the Bauhaus was closed by the Nazis.
Bauhaus photography continues to be valued and appreciated, not only for its rigorous aesthetics and design innovations, but also as a document of a seminal period in the development of modernism that grew out of the utopian visions of a handful of artists. The legacy of the Bauhaus continues in photography today through the influence of Moholy-Nagy’s Institute of Design (New Bauhaus) and the dozens of teachers who trained there in the mid and late twentieth century.
