During his tenure at Bauhaus, Kandinsky’s work became more focused on abstract shapes and lines, as displayed in his 1923 painting Composition VIII. Kandinsky remained with the school until its closing. László Moholy-Nagy The Pan Am building in New York, designed by Gropius in the 1960s, was seen by many as a ‘monolithic mistake’. Photograph: F Roy Kemp/Getty Images Following this decision, Mies van der Rohe, Gropius, the Albers and many others within the Bauhaus school fled to the United States, where they continued to have a profound and lasting influence on 20th-century art and design. Sources

Oskar Schlemmer taught at the school from 1920 to 1929, specializing in design, sculpture and murals, but preferring to pursue theater. He was appointed the school’s director of theater activities in 1923 and created an experimental theater workshop in 1925.László Moholy-Nagy was born in Hungary in 1895. In 1920 he emigrated to Germany, and in 1923, with his artistic reputation already somewhat in place, he was invited by Gropius to take over the running of the school's "basic course" or vorkurs from Johannes Itten. Though Moholy-Nagy worked across a range of media, his photograms became icons of Bauhaus experimentation. Created by placing objects on photo-sensitive paper exposed to ambient light, these works, in the artist's own words, made light "the medium of plastic expression". Though photography was not officially part of the school's curriculum, Moholy-Nagy operated as a photographic department of one, and his ardent enthusiasm inspired many of the Bauhaus's faculty and students to undertake their own photographic experiments. Fascinated by light, Moholgy-Nagy would continue to explore the possibilities of the photogram throughout his career, notably at the Chicago School of Design, which he founded in 1939 after moving to America. "Light laboratory" courses were fundamental to the curriculum at Chicago, and Moholy-Nagy's work influenced many subsequent North-American artists, such as Arthur Siegel. This book is made in collaboration with the Bauhaus-Archiv/Museum für Gestaltung in Berlin, the world’s largest collection on the history of the Bauhaus. Some 550 illustrations including architectural plans, studies, photographs, sketches, and models record not only the realized works but also the leading principles and personalities of this idealistic creative community through its three successive locations in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin. From informal shots of group gymnastics to drawings guided by Paul Klee, from extensive architectural plans to an infinitely sleek ashtray by Marianne Brandt, the collection brims with the colors, materials, and geometries that made up the Bauhaus vision of a “total” work of art. In a fleeting 14-year period between two world wars, Germany’s Bauhaus School of Art and Design changed the face of modernity. With utopian ideas for the future, the school developed a pioneering fusion of fine art, craftsmanship, and technology, which they applied across media and practices from film to theater, sculpture to ceramics.

Although the Bauhaus abandoned many aspects of traditional fine-arts education, it was deeply concerned with intellectual and theoretical approaches to its subject. Various aspects of artistic and design pedagogy were fused, and the hierarchy of the arts which had stood in place during the Renaissance was levelled out: the practical crafts - architecture and interior design, textiles and woodwork - were placed on a par with fine arts such as sculpture and painting. Marcel Breuer's classic Model B3 chair is a revolutionary take on the classic upholstered 'club chair' of the nineteenth century drawing room, a sleek amalgamation of curving, overlapping stainless steel tubes, with taut rectangular fabric panels floating like geometric forms in space. The artist himself described the chair as "my most extreme work . . . the least artistic, the most logical, the least 'cozy' and the most mechanical." But it was also his most influential, exemplifying the groundbreaking developments in functional design that were marking out the Bauhaus by the mid-1920s. Lightweight, easily moved, and easily mass-produced, it met all the requirements of the school's design philosophy, its components arranged with a clarity that made its structure and purpose immediately legible. Magdalena Droste studied art history and literature in Aachen and Marburg. From 1980 she worked at the Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin, after which she worked as a professor of art history at the BTU Cottbus. She has been responsible for numerous exhibitions and publications across all Bauhaus themes and artists. Albers Foundation director Nicholas Fox Weber offers a personal insight into Bauhaus with this title, which relates stories he was told by Anni and Josef Albers – the revered married couple who studied and taught at the school. News from Dezeen Events Guide, a listings guide covering the leading design-related events taking place around the world. Plus occasional updates. Dezeen Awards China

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She points out that Gropius’s primary motivation was a belief in art, which he wanted to touch all aspects of human life. Plenty of others have done this, but it can’t be said too often. Whatever valid critiques might be made of his work, to dismiss him as a mechanistic functionalist is not one of them. She is keen even to defend the Pan Am building that, as a grand old man, Gropius designed above Grand Central Station in New York, terminating the view down Park Avenue in a way that even sympathetic critics see as a monolithic mistake. Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy arrived at the school in 1923 to teach preliminary classes and run a metal workshop, but his real passion was for photography.