The modernist idea factory: Oscar Schlemmer's Bauhaus Classroom

Master and students discuss how a postwar society understands and teaches practical applications of creative work.

Publicity photo of Oskar Schlemmer and cast (including Bauhaus students) of his “Triadic Ballet,” which premiered in Stuttgart, 1922. “The conscientious application of the laws of mechanics and acoustics are decisive for our stage design,” Schlemmer said.

One day in spring 1922, Oskar Schlemmer’s students found themselves in a heated discussion about Germany’s dire need for affordable public housing.

Schlemmer had been teaching at Weimar’s Bauhaus State School a little over a year and, from the start, his students had challenged him with the most hot-button issues of contemporary aesthetics and design. Their conversations at the Bauhaus were rife with bold ideas about how industrial technology and its applications might better serve people’s human- and societal needs for food, clothing, housing, etc.

There was no arguing about the need for safe and stable public housing, especially in urban areas. (Germany’s private wealth had fled with the revolution-smacked kaiser or, otherwise, had sunk into the mire of the failing economy.) Being enrolled at the Bauhaus School — the country’s newest, most high-profile public institution of art and design — these students themselves were new beneficiaries of a cutting-edge state-funded education program.

Why were housing choices so limited for so many urban industrial workers, they asked. Shouldn’t society work harder on the production of houses for the rising working class (and later middle class)? How might new, emerging ideas of design and technology in these apartments give such working-class renters a greater sense of ease and comfort, if not freedom?

Such issues were hotly discussed at the Weimar Bauhaus: Should one’s art and design always be an exercise in individualistic self-expression? Or should it be more accessible, more functional to a broader group of people? Should a work of art be “revolutionary” — or is it just as valuable for being decorative, aesthetically appealing to the largest possible number of people in a society? How might a piece of furniture — or sculpture, or this building, or that stage drama — make the world a better place? Such discussions and arguments could extend late into the night at the Weimar Bauhaus, often exhausting the students — and their beleaguered instructors like Oskar Schlemmer, as well.