From Arts and Crafts to the Bauhaus

How free can form be? How much does it need to account for the demands of function? Is design an art form? And should design work more with artisans or with industry? Does modernism need a style? These questions, immediately associated with the Bauhaus, were already discussed fifty years before in the British Arts and Crafts movement. At the moment of its founding in 1919 and during its initial years in Weimar, the Bauhaus is not a milestone of design history, but the next step in this debate that shaped design all across Europe.

To mark the centennial anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus, the exhibition at Bröhan-Museum will explore the prehistory of the Bauhaus and contextualize it within the Europe-wide emergence of modernism. It will show decisive steps in this development including the Glasgow School, Vienna Jugendstil, Deutscher Werkbund, and the Dutch group De Stijl leading up to the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau. With around 300 highlights—furniture, graphic design, metal art, ceramics, painting—from fifty years of design history, the exhibition will seek to explain this pan-European discourse on design.