Bauhaus Artists

Pictured Right: The Bauhaus Museum - Tel Aviv

Bauhaus, was an art school in Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts, and was famous for the approach to design that it publicised and taught. It operated from 1919 to 1933. At that time the German term About this sound Bauhaus (help·info)—literally "construction house"—was understood as meaning "School of Building".

The Bauhaus was first founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar. In spite of its name, and the fact that its founder was an architect, the Bauhaus during the first years of its existence did not have an architecture department. Nonetheless, it was founded with the idea of creating a "total" work of art in which all arts, including architecture, would eventually be brought together.

The Bauhaus was not a formal group, but rather a school. Its three architect-directors (Gropius, Meyer, and van der Rohe) are the names mst closely associated with it.

Furthermore, a large number of artists were lecturers at the Bauhaus:

• Anni Albers
• Josef Albers
• Herbert Bayer
• Otti Berger
• Max Bill
• Marianne Brandt
• Marcel Breuer
• Avgust Černigoj
• Christian Dell
• Werner Drewes
• Lyonel Feininger
• Naum Gabo
• Ludwig Hilberseimer
• Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack
• Johannes Itten
• Wassily Kandinsky
• Paul Klee
• Otto Lindig
• Gerhard Marcks
• László Moholy-Nagy
• Piet Mondrian
• Oskar Schlemmer
• Lothar Schreyer
• Joost Schmidt
• Naum Slutzky
• Gunta Stölzl

The White City

The White City of Tel Aviv (Hebrew: העיר הלבנה‎, Ha-Ir HaLevana) refers to a collection of over 4,000 Bauhaus or International style buildings built in Tel Aviv from the 1930s by German Jewish architects who emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine after the rise of the Nazis. Tel Aviv has the largest number of buildings in this style of any city in the world. In 2003, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) proclaimed Tel Aviv's White City a World Cultural Heritage site, as "an outstanding example of new town planning and architecture in the early 20th century."[37]

Established in 2000, The Bauhaus Center in Tel Aviv is an organization dedicated to the ongoing documentation of the architectural heritage.[38] In 2003, it hosted an exhibition on preservation of the architecture that showcased 25 buildings.[39] To further the architectural culture in the city, a small Bauhaus Museum opened in Tel Aviv in 2008, designed by Israeli architect Ron Arad.

Bauhaus and German modernism

Germany's defeat in World War I, the fall of the German monarchy and the abolition of censorship under the new, liberal Weimar Republic allowed an upsurge of radical experimentation in all the arts, previously suppressed by the old regime. Many Germans of left-wing views were influenced by the cultural experimentation that followed the Russian Revolution, such as constructivism. Such influences can be overstated: Gropius himself did not share these radical views, and said that Bauhaus was entirely apolitical.[3] Just as important was the influence of the 19th century English designer William Morris, who had argued that art should meet the needs of society and that there should be no distinction between form and function.[4] Thus the Bauhaus style, also known as the International Style, was marked by the absence of ornamentation and by harmony between the function of an object or a building and its design.

However, the most important influence on Bauhaus was modernism, a cultural movement whose origins lay as far back as the 1880s, and which had already made its presence felt in Germany before the World War, despite the prevailing conservatism. The design innovations commonly associated with Gropius and the Bauhaus—the radically simplified forms, the rationality and functionality, and the idea that mass-production was reconcilable with the individual artistic spirit—were already partly developed in Germany before the Bauhaus was founded.