Bauhaus
Founded in 1919 the Bauhaus movement was conceived by Walter Gropius to bridge the gap between fine arts and applied arts, and, influenced by Constructivism, celebrating modernism and social relevance. At the heart of Gropius’s vision was the Bauhaus School, opened in Weimar and moved to Dessau in 1923, with a unique and revolutionary programme and curriculum of aesthetic courses, combined with practical workshops and experimentation – art as a research process. Among its protagonists were the Expressionist Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, Lyonel Feininger, Oskar Schlemmer, Hannes Meyer, who took over from Gropius. Forced to close in 1932 by the Nazis, the school moved to Berlin under Mies van Der Rohe, who advocated the functionalist architecture that made the movement known as International Style. The impact of Bauhaus rippled for decades through its most notable exponents, with Josef Albers at the Black Mountain College, with Moholy-Nagy at the School of Design, later Institute of Design in Chicago (the New Bauhaus) and with Max Bill, who prolonged its legacy founding the Concrete Art movement. Its legacy was also kept alive in Germany by the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm.