Bauhaus
Soon after his return to Germany at the end of 1921, Kandinsky received an invitation to become a teacher at the Bauhaus in Weimar. This was an experimental school-studio, where a new educational system was implemented for the training of masters of applied arts. Its founder, Walter Gropius, preached the idea of the synthesis of the arts, believing that painting, architecture, and sculpture should be combined to create a "building of the future." In the 1919 manifesto, he stated: "The ultimate objective of all educational activity is the building! ... There should be no fundamental differences between the artist and the craftsman. Let us create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class divisions that raise an arrogant wall between craftsmen and artists, striving to build a high wall between craftsmen and artists..."
These new ideas resonated deeply with Kandinsky, and he gladly accepted the invitation. In 1922, he headed the Bauhaus workshop of painting. To organize the training process, Gropius gathered the most modern and original artists at the school. By the time Kandinsky arrived, his friends Paul Klee and Lyonel Feininger were already working there, as well as O. Schlemmer, G. Marcks, L. Schreyer, and G. Muche. The training was conducted in parallel in the art and production workshops - this was Gropius's decision. All students first attended a general introductory course, which revealed the theoretical fundamentals of art and its formal elements. Then the students familiarized themselves with more detailed materials, methods, and tools. In the following courses, they studied the individual materials (wood, stone, glass, textile) in the creative workshops, and in the end all knowledge was combined in such courses as "Design" and "Construction and engineering skills".
At the Bauhaus, Kandinsky taught several courses: "Analytical Drawing", the main objective of which was to teach students to penetrate into the essence of things and understand abstraction; "Fundamentals of Artistic Design", which is, in fact, the theory of design; and his most famous course, "Color". In this course, Kandinsky taught color theory, from the history of the development of various color systems to the modern psychology of color perception. In his training course Kandinsky implemented a radically new approach to teaching about color, based on the analysis of individual elements - a point, a line, a plane, and examining their relationships. The result of this analysis would be his work Point and Line to Plane. Kandinsky's Weimar period (1923-1925) was under the influence of the ideas of Suprematism and Constructivism, which reigned at the Bauhaus at that time. His main work in those years was the monumental Composition VIII. But this period also produced such chamber, almost intimate pictures as Small Dream in the Red, painted as a gift for his wife.
In 1925, the Weimar authorities stopped subsidizing the Bauhaus because of attacks and criticism from right-wing political parties. The school moved to Dessau, an active young city near Leipzig. Here a new building was built for the school, designed by Gropius. This building is considered to be one of the most striking examples of functionalist architecture. Gradually, the school's program reoriented itself toward the practical needs of construction. The content of the training courses also changed. It was in Dessau that the particular style of the Bauhaus began to develop, which manifested itself in a trend toward greater utilitarianism and machine functionality. This functionalism, a pragmatic approach to art leads to conflict within the school. Proponents of aesthetics - Feininger, Klee, Kandinsky are under fire for their approach to teaching. Klee and Feininger left, Kandinsky increasingly withdrew from teaching. In the same 1925, he created two important paintings: In blue and Yellow-Red-Blue. The second painting marks the appearance of a new "cold romanticism", which become the main trend in his works of the Bauhaus period. Despite the management's attempts to adapt the school's ideology to the political situation, it met with no success. From 1931, a large-scale campaign by right-wing circles began against the Bauhaus, successfully concluding in 1932, when the school was closed, declared a "hotbed of Bolshevism in culture." The Kandinsky family made a difficult decision - to leave Germany. They went to Paris, the city that would be the final stage of Kandinsky's creative and life journey. For some time the heads of the Bauhaus prolonged its existence as a private educational institution in Berlin, but in 1933 the Nazis finally closed the school. Many teachers emigrated to the United States. In 1937, the "New Bauhaus" was founded in Chicago (directed by L. Moholy-Nagy), and Gropius and Breuer organized the School of Design at Harvard University.
The Bauhaus program had a huge impact on the development of art education and European art. Architects and designers of future generations continued to study the collections of scientific and theoretical articles by the school's teachers. The Bauhaus Archive-Museum was founded in 1960, for which a special building was constructed in Berlin in 1979, designed by Gropius. At the present time, the design center "Bauhaus-Dessau" operates in Dessau.
