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The Bauhaus Weaving Workshop

© Ann Garner

The Bauhaus was a school of design for both fine arts and practical arts, flourishing in Germany during from 1919 up to just before the beginning of WWII. Students flocked to the textile arts division of the school. Their particular qualification was that Bauhaus students had a background in graphic arts or in fine arts before coming to the institution. They came to Bauhaus without the technical skills for weaving even a firm, straight selvage, but they came with plenty of ideas on form and shape; they were expressionists using the cloth medium.

Some of the early Bauhaus weaving workshop students admitted that it was not textile arts that attracted them to the school but rather the presence of painters such as Klee and Kandinsky. Walter Gropius, the head of the institution, had named painters to lead the weaving and pottery design workshops in order to promote his view of the crafts as art and art as craft.

Social movements on the Continent in that era were often led by people who were influenced by a philosophy that promoted the arts as a means of spreading the propaganda of a particular political movement. Certain political ideas were more compatible with the purist, avant-garde expressionist painters of "fine art." On the other hand, different political parties could use to greater effect the folk art motifs known by the traditional craftsmen of the guilds. Both these groups were represented at the Bauhaus. But the "form masters" (directors of the weaving and pottery divisions) were the painters, not the craftsmen. From the guild folk, the students learned the discipline weaving and pottery making, while their education in form and color came mainly from the expressionist painters.

The Bauhaus leadership in general fell more into the expressionist school of art; however its use of traditional hand crafts such as weaving and pottery as the media for expressionist forms engaged students in German nationalistic ideals. The Bauhaus was instrumental (it still has a strong influence, in fact) in furthering the notion of art, architecture and household furnishings as neat and orderly ways of arranging life and expressing ideas.

Gropius insisted that crafts were as artistically valuable as painting on canvas, and the Bauhaus art movement constituted perhaps the strongest effort by a society to equalize the two. Gropius declared that the goal was to remove the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between the craftsman and the artist.

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