Foundation

Everyone loves Bauhaus. The objects, the furniture, the look. How many people understand Bauhaus? The movement? It’s raison d’etre? Very few, I reckon, including myself. I did not live in Germany between 1919 and 1933, so can only imagine its political climate based on what the history books say. It must have been fraught with despair, uncertainty and fear, the perfect breeding grounds for artistic revolution.
The Bauhaus was a house for a building. A workshop where the inexperienced would learn from the experienced, and disciplines could co-mingle in the creation of functional objects for the every man. It was a highly political apolitical movement that vied to create a utopia post war ravaged nations seek to erect. As much as it was about employing great artistic minds under one roof, it was also about providing them free reign to construct a Shangri-las. There was drama, there was deceit, affairs and constant upheaval, yet through it all at the core remained the vision of a society that could flourish with form and function, under the umbrella of extraordinary art and craft. Bauhaus was idealist and it was beautiful.  
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In 2025 we in the States are constantly comparing our time to one that has passed, an exercise in futility, because just as much as history repeats itself, times change. The arts institutions are being de-funded, artists vilified, and the fear propaganda machine is in full tilt. But we cannot give up. Let it never be said that the most beautiful flower grows under the harshest of circumstances. Walter Gropius devised the idea of the Bauhaus while he was a uniformed officer in the trenches of World War I. Someone out there, right now, this very moment is thinking of an idea that will change the world. They are laying the foundation of a movement that will bring together a group of brave like-minded individuals who crave, who create, who care. The creative process is never entirely singular, only composed of diverging parts that together make a sublime functioning whole.

*Image of Walter Gropius' Bauhaus building in Dessau credited to Wikipedia*

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