Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus school of art in 1919 in Weimar, Germany. This was just after the First World War and Germany lay in ruins. The artists responded to this desolate landscape with the approach of starting from zero. In this, influence was drawn from the Deconstructionists and Cubists, such as Pablo Picasso. The concept was to break down materials, and ideas, to their basic form. Here's identify Bauhaus artwork.
Instructions
1. Know who was teaching at the Bauhaus. Three recognizable names are Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Josef Albers. The philosophy of these painters, and of those studying at Bauhaus, was that geometric form was a pure form of expression. These painters produced canvases of bright, bold color and geometric shapes.
2. Wassily Kandinsky perhaps represented this idea in its most abstract. His works explore the relationship between point and line, and their relationship to the plane on which they are painted. This breaks the act of painting down to its most basic components.
3. Paul Klee’s approach is one of color and the relationships of colors to one another. While at the Bauhaus, Klee produced numerous works. His figures are stick figures, or grotesquely misshapen. The geometric forms are vehicles for his exploration of color.
4. Josef Albers, like Klee and Kandinsky, explored relationships. He brought to his paintings an almost mathematical approach; his works seem to calculate the relationship between color and form. Yet, Albers works express a kind of spiritual unity of materials to abstract concepts.
5. These three painters are representative of the Bauhaus philosophy. Their artwork, though, is not limited to canvases. Each explored the use of other materials, such as glass, paper and metals to create works of art. Their three-dimensional works express the same philosophy of starting from zero, and reflect the breaking down to the basics approach.
