BAUHAUS LEGACIES
From Bauhaus
to Nowhaus
Kym Maxwell and Meredith Turnbull
What is potentially most significant about the structure
of Bauhaus education, and the ongoing fascination of
Australian artists and educators with its history and
legacy, is its community: how holistic connections
between life and art were combined; a community where
students and teachers lived and worked together in a
complete work, art and life relation. Many contemporary
artists who themselves were taught Bauhaus pedagogical
methods, including Melbourne-based artists Sarah
crowEST, Tracey Lamb and Masato Takasaka, respond
specifically to the school’s social dimensions – the events,
festivals, parties and celebrations – and are sympathetic
to a revisionist (or new kind of) feminist reading.
The Bauhaus education principles were driven by
the vision of the artist/craftsperson who would activate
the concept of total design outlined by its architect
founder Walter Gropius in his 1919 manifesto. This
meant understanding ‘the composite character of a
building, both as an entity and in terms of its various
parts’. The study undertaken to achieve this aim was
formulated around the structure of the workshop:
comprehensive foundational study (Vorkurs) under a
practising master artist was followed by three or more
years of specialist training. This training aimed to
transform students into industry professionals with
the ability to realise design prototypes through mass
production, contributing to works with the capacity to
engender social change.
Bauhaus pedagogues created unique syllabi
attuned to their own political, social and artistic agendas.
Gropius attempted to bind modernism into a series of
principled, philosophical and scientific programs that
could bridge the divide between applied arts and free
(or autonomous) arts. The six-month Vorkurs specialised
training was followed by individual workshops – either
stone sculpture, wood carving, metal, pottery, wall
painting, glass painting, cabinet-making, weaving,
printing or bookbinding. According to Gropius, the
Bauhaus’s core idea was ‘the restoration of a missing
coherence’ in modern life. Initially, social and wellbeing
aspects such as movement, breathing and meditation
36
were included in Johannes Itten’s preliminary courses,
whereas later Vorkurs teachers Josef Albers and László
Moholy-Nagy changed the emphasis to new media and
technology.
It is remarkable that the legacy of the Bauhaus
remains despite it only having existed for 14 years across
three incarnations in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin, and
trained less than 500 students before being occupied and
forcibly closed down by the Nazis in 1933. It was iconic
in its pedagogic instruction attuned to its manifesto.
Although differentiation was encouraged between
instructors, great coherence to the manifesto ensued.
Sarah crowEST, whose multivalent artworks
incorporate textiles, performance and sculpture, aptly
reflects some of the concerns of Bauhaus pedagogy
– in particular, the importance of social solidarity
through these specific areas and mediums. She recalls,
especially, the importance that the Bauhaus enthusiasm
for industrial methods and materials had on her own
education at Kent’s Medway College of Design in the
1970s:
It was a school that valued and encouraged links
with industry during a time when many art schools
changed emphasis towards vocational training.
Discussion and awareness of Bauhaus principles
that combined art, craft and design were very
current in the 1970s British art-education circles.
Learning by doing combined with the punk rock
ethos of diving in and getting on with it has become
fundamental to my art process ever since. Thereby
the combination of art, craft, design and hands-on
making form a strong back beat.
crowEST’s most recent work, Dark Ruumbling Earth
(2019), which was curated by John Nixon for the
Melbourne Art Theatre in April, featured performers
wearing crowEST’s signature ‘strap-on paintings’ in
front of one of the artist’s large-scale handpainted linen
banners. The work demonstrates, above all, crowEST’s
ongoing integration of Bauhaus principles of community
through collaboration, with friends and peers regularly
Frank Hinder, Eleonore Lange, 1939, pastel on paper, 58 x 44cm (sheet);
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, purchased 1980; © Estate of
Frank Hinder

37
taking part in her work. Here participants executed
a variety of gestures from synchronised group
choreography, yogic-like movements by artist Belle
Bassin to peak in what was described by crowEST as ‘a
wild dance’ by artist Sean Peoples.
The emigration of many of the staff and students
of the Bauhaus ensured its educational objectives
and design ideals were shared globally. For example,
Gropius and Marcel Breuer were later employed in
the Architecture Department at Harvard University;
Moholy-Nagy established the New Bauhaus in Chicago
in 1937; Anni and Josef Albers became teachers at the
experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina
and were also involved with the Bauhaus exhibition that
opened at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1938.
Three Bauhaus students (or Bauhäuslers) – Gertrude
Herzger-Seligmann, Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack and
George Adams-Teltscher – were among the first to arrive
in Australia as a result of the Second World War, and
their ‘use of pedagogical tools such as colour charts and
material studies were diversely applied in Australian and
New Zealand art, architecture and design education’.
Additionally, Hirschfeld-Mack and Eleonore Lange
incorporated the pioneering study of Aboriginal and
Asian art into their syllabus in secondary and primary
education. For many of the immigrant modernists, art
education was not ancillary to their arts practice but,
rather, an important social mission.
A crucial moment in the émigré consolidation
of the Bauhaus influence on the Australian education
system was at a UNESCO symposium held at the
National Gallery of Victoria in 1954. During this
first global arts education conference for Australia, a
desire was formed to reframe the western-focused arts
education to a local context. The keynote lecture by
Joseph Burke emphasised creative expression to be
‘accompanied by a new critical consciousness’.10 The
reform recommended education should centralise local
artists’ work in order to ‘close the gap between the artist
and his social environment’. After significant lectures
by Slawa Duldig, Hirschfeld-Mack, Ursula Hoff and
Frederick McCarthy, it was agreed that Australian
‘artists should advise on syllabuses’. The seminar also
38
addressed broad issues of accessibility that ‘galleries
and museums should be open seven days a week and at
night’ and ‘all Australian universities should be urged to
establish chairs of Fine Arts’.11 This foregrounding of art
and life could be attributed to the Bauhaus influence.
Since the 1990s some of the inconsistencies of the
Bauhaus ideals have led to a more thorough investigation
into the role of women artists in the school. It was
internal policy to corral women artists into the weaving
workshop after their preliminary studies. It was only in
very few cases where class and financial independence
enabled artists like Marianne Brandt (metal workshop)
and Florence Henri (photography) to defy the Bauhaus
administration. In addition, there were only six women
in total hired as teachers at the Bauhaus, three of whom
were German textile artists. Many of the women artists
who studied at the Bauhaus already had professional
careers: Ida Kerkovius was an established painter; Anni
Albers was an accomplished weaver, drawing teacher and
gym instructor; Benita Koch-Otte was a noted colourist
and weaver; ceramicist Grete Marks ran her parents’
ceramic company until she was exiled during the Second
World War; and sculptor Alma Siedhoff-Buscher created
one of the most engaging aspects of the ‘Haus am
Horn’, designing the furniture and toys for the colourful
modular nursery space. Differences in training and
interest, along with these established careers were largely
ignored by the administration. It is not surprising,
however, given the level of collective skill in the weaving
workshop, that it became one of the most inventive and
profitable disciplines of the Bauhaus.
Tracey Lamb’s sculptural works in welded steel
are also influenced by Bauhaus instruction. The feminist
artist, who approaches the Bauhaus from a critical
perspective, recalls her introduction to it at the Box Hill
College of TAFE early last decade:
Paul Klee’s approach of taking ‘a line for a walk’
and theory of colours were discussed along with
Bauhaus ‘masters’ such as Walter Gropius, Mies
van der Rohe and Johannes Itten. Disappointingly,
the women of the Bauhaus were not – a curricular
omission I further took interest in to research.12
Opposite:
Sarah crowEST, Dark Ruumbling Earth, 2019, documentation of
performance, Melbourne Art Theatre, RMIT School of Art, Melbourne,
15 April 2019; courtesy the artist; photos: Yanni Florence

Tracey Lamb, Tenuous connections with endless ramifications, 2018,

installation detail view, ‘MADA Master of Fine Art Graduate Exhibition’,
Monash University, Melbourne, 2018; concrete, plaster, timber,
cotton twine, resin, linen, bronze, leather, stainless steel, paint,
350 x 330 x 350cm; courtesy the artist; photo: Christo Crocker

39
Lamb’s experience demonstrates how the dominant
male-centric focus of the Bauhaus prevailed long after
its closure and was carried across the world to Australia.
She continues:
The architecture and design of Le Corbusier, who
was a contemporary and colleague of Gropius, is
relevant to my recent installations Tenuous connec-
tions with endless ramifications (2018) and We don’t
embroider cushions here (2016), which critique mi-
sogynist aspects of Le Corbusier’s practice including
his appropriation of early modernist architect and
designer Eileen Gray’s work.
Lamb highlights a somewhat common practice within
the Bauhaus of more senior practitioners borrowing
from female artists without crediting them. Indeed,
Lamb’s practice is typical of many Australian artists
who celebrate the Bauhaus but also have the benefit of
hindsight to frame their works in a more critical light.
Also critically incorporating the Bauhaus into his
practice is Masato Takasaka, whose work is inclusive of
sound, text and sculptural installations which embody
the world-building approach propagated by the Bauhaus:
I remember the gruelling colour-wheel studies in
my design class at high school and I would do my
own versions much to the teacher’s bemusement.
Later on when I studied architecture at RMIT for
five minutes (it was the longest five minutes of my
life!), I recall having to make spatial constructions
in the first-year design studio workshops that were
Bauhaus-inspired, experimenting with a material
language that I would later remix and remake in my
art installations.13
For Takasaka, the rigid Bauhaus structure was not as
freeing as others have claimed, and he has gone on to
incorporate a deliberate misinterpretation of Bauhaus
pedagogy into his practice: ‘I have always been fascinated
by the mashup of art-historical lineages and the cross-
pollination of art and design.’
An early work by Takasaka – Smile! Bauhaus
babushka sundae boogie woogie (model for a prog rock
SCULPTURE PARK) (1999–2007/2013) – makes
a direct reference to the school, and the table-top
assemblage includes a stationery notepad from the
Bauhaus museum gift shop:
40
I was interested in the idea of creating a modernist
museum gift shop artefact, part-artwork-ready-
made-museum-gift shop-commodity-assemblage.
This practice of (re) appropriating the all-ready-
made is something that reoccurs in my practice as
an educator and artist – from Bauhaus to Nowhaus.
Indeed, Takasaka’s repurposing of the Bauhaus
demonstrates how its pedagogy remains significant to
arts education in Australia. A century since the school
first formed in Germany, most first-year visual and fine
art degrees in Australia still feature an art-historical
lecture referencing the Bauhaus Vorkurs, its educators
and pedagogy. Most importantly, however, this influence
is as marked by irreverence as it is by a true recalling of
its people and its history.
1. During its lifetime the Bauhaus had three directors: Gropius
(1919–28), Hannes Meyer (1928–30) and Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe (1930–33). All of these men were architects despite the
school’s remit to also encompass art and design; architecture
was always foregrounded as the primary discipline.
2. Walter Gropius, ‘Bauhaus Manifesto and Program’ and László
Moholy-Nagy, ‘Education and the Bauhaus’, in Glenn Adamson
(ed.), The Craft Reader, Berg Publishers, Oxford and New York,
2010, p. 554.
3. Andrew McNamara, ‘George Teltscher (1904 – 1983)’, in Philip
Goad, Ann Stephen, Andrew McNamara, Harriet Edquist
and Isabel Wünsche, Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond:
Transforming Education Through Art, Design and Architecture,
Miegunyah Press, Melbourne University Publishing, 2019, p. 74.
4. Rudolf Steiner’s Waldorf education similarly instils a holistic
education that considered the cognitive, spiritual and
perceptual being. Interestingly, in 1919 Steiner spoke of a need
for social renewal as did Gropius.
5. Gillian Naylor, The Bauhaus, Studio Vista, London, 1968, p. 7.
6. Sarah crowEST in email conversation with author Meredith
Turnbull, 20 April 2019.
7. Sound for this performance was developed by Luke Whitten
and Kirk Bodi, with choreography by Belle Bassin, dancing
by Sean Peoples and performers Isabella Andrews, Chloe
Newberry, Chantelle Coy, Michelle Li, Belle Bassin, Daphne
Mohajer va Pesaran, Lucinda Conelley, Alex McQuire, Blake
Barns, Madeleine Porritt, Thi Kim Oanh Luu, Kurt van Velzen
and Patchanida Chimkire.
8. Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond, op. cit., pp. 4–14.
9. Andrew McNamara, ‘Eleonore Lange (1893 – 1990)’, in
Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond, op. cit., p. 18.
10. Ann Stephen, ‘Unesco and the struggle for modern art
education in the mid-twentieth century’, in Bauhaus Diaspora
and Beyond, op. cit., p. 132.
11. ibid.
12. Tracey Lamb in email conversation with author Kym Maxwell,
26 April 2019.
13. Masato Takasaka in email conversation with author Meredith
Turnbull, 26 April 2019.
Masato Takasaka, Smile! Bauhaus babushka sundae boogie woogie
(model for a prog rock SCULPTURE PARK), 1999–2007/2013, installation
view, ‘Reinventing the Wheel: The Readymade Century’, Monash
University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2013; courtesy the artist;
photo: Christian Capurro

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