Founded in 1919 by architect Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus was an influential German art school that aimed to unify the fields of art and design through a focus on materials, color, and craft. From puppetry to weaving, students of the Bauhaus received hands-on training from some of the most groundbreaking artists of the 20th century, including Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Josef Albers, Marcel Breuer, and Oskar Schlemmer. According to Gropius, this integrated educational approach produced “a new guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist.” The Bauhaus school closed in 1933 when many former students and teachers fled Nazi Germany and immigrated to the United States, spreading the tenets of the Bauhaus to American institutions such as Black Mountain College and the Yale University School of Art. As the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus approached in 2019, numerous museum shows and auction sales spotlighted the historically overlooked women of the Bauhaus, such as Anni Albers, Marianne Brandt, and Gertrud Arndt, who pushed modernism forward through their textile techniques, industrial designs, and experimental photography.
