The Bauhaus

The Bauhaus School of Art, Architecture and Design (1919-1933) channelled the 20th century's revolutionary technological changes into a school of learning that reframed the position of the artist as an artisan working in a community of other makers. Under the leadership of Walter Gropius, it became one of the most vital expressions of art, design and pedagogy under the Weimar Republic, where a renewed reverence was applied to everyday life, the objects that comprise it and the methods with which they were produced. Gropius’s core objective was to reimagine the material world to reflect the unity of all the arts through craft, “the artist is an exalted craftsman. In rare moments of inspiration, moments beyond the control of their will may cause his work to blossom into art. But proficiency in their craft is essential to every artist. Therein lies the source of creative imagination.” (Walter Gropius/Bauhaus Manifesto/April 1919)

Gropius wanted to end the division between industry and art and described the school as “a utopian craft guild.” (Female students who had been overlooked for decades in the German education system were finally getting their due at the Bauhaus.) The Bauhaus course organisation of 1919 re-reads as an entirely contemporary curriculum of interdisciplinary studies, and is a universal model of socially engaged course design. Reinventing Bauhaus pedagogy for Guildhall in 2022 has given us a new way of seeing and hearing.

The Bauhaus and Guildhall

Guildhall students have welcomed the Bauhaus idea and run with it - over the past year we have developed sixty Bauhaus Creative Projects in music, live performance and film. Students have come from Production Arts, Video Design for Live Performance, Classical Music, Jazz Music, Composition and Electronic and Produced Music. But as all arts students’ experience of the world has become increasingly technological in scope and more experimental in conception and method, a daunting challenge emerges on leaving higher education, as old professional certainties disappear and an ambiguous Pandora’s box of new possibilities springs open. In the altered post-Covid world, successful young artists and musicians will need to be even more resourceful and multi-skilled, as a leaner but revitalised arts scene emerges. Interdisciplinary skills in film, dance, theatre, design, art projects, and in programme curation will be made richer by students with a practical and theoretical fluency in related disciplines, and with well-honed critical and analytical skills. (For example, many cultural commentators now believe music to be a visual and aural art form.) All this is “work in progress’ at Guildhall.

The Bauhaus was one of the most potent forces that shaped the cultural world as we now experience it, and we can renew our sense of experimentation, artistic process and creativity by reinterpreting the cultural landscapes that formed the Weimar Renaissance and The Bauhaus in 2022. By walking backwards into the future we can seek clarity of identity and purpose in the present day.

Timeless modernity…
and the continuous present…

John Harle
May 2022