"Bauhaus" book - Taschen

In the space of fourteen fleeting years, caught between two world wars, the German Bauhaus School of Art and Design changed the face of modernity. Guided by utopian ideals, the school developed a revolutionary fusion of fine arts, crafts and technology, which would be applied to painting, sculpture, design, architecture, film, photography, textile art, ceramics, theatre and art installations. Both an intensely human and collective community open to the public, the Bauhaus was founded by Walter Gropius (1883-1969) and its members included Josef and Anni Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, Gunta Stölzl, Marianne Brandt and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. In its successive premises in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin, the school encouraged charismatic and creative exchanges between teachers and students, all with their own personal and varied styles and tastes, but united by their idealism and deep interest in the total work of art, which draws on different disciplines and practices. This book celebrates the innovative audacity of the Bauhaus movement, a forerunner in the development of modernism and a paradigm of art education, in which the combination of total liberation of creative expression and avant-garde ideas gave rise to beautiful and functional creations.

About the author: Magdalena Droste studied art history and literature in Aix-la-Chapelle and Marburg. After working from 1980 at the Bauhaus Archives in Berlin, she has been a professor of art history at the BTU Cottbus since 1997. She has contributed to numerous exhibitions and publications on Bauhaus artists and has published numerous essays on the Bauhaus textile workshop and on craftsmanship as a female occupation.

About the publisher: Peter Gössel runs a design agency for museums and exhibitions. He has published monographs for TASCHEN on Julius Shulman, R. M. Schindler, John Lautner and Richard Neutra, as well as several titles in the Small Architecture Collection.