Artistic movements: Bauhaus and De Stijl

Most of what we hang on walls today owes something to a handful of movements that decided, about a century ago, that art and everyday life belonged together. Two of them matter most to the work we're drawn to: Bauhaus and De Stijl. This is a short field guide to both.

Bauhaus

The Bauhaus was a German art school, founded in Weimar in 1919 by the architect Walter Gropius and closed under political pressure in 1933. Its radical idea was that there should be no border between artist and craftsman: students trained in workshops rather than studios, and painting, typography, furniture and architecture were treated as one discipline. Painters like Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee taught there alongside weavers, printers and metalworkers.

The look that came out of it is still instantly readable: geometric forms, primary colours used with restraint, clean sans-serif type, and the conviction that form follows function. The school's exhibition posters, all circles, bars and confident diagonals, are some of the most influential graphic design ever printed.

De Stijl

De Stijl, Dutch for The Style, began in the Netherlands in 1917 around a journal of the same name edited by Theo van Doesburg. Its best-known members were the painter Piet Mondrian and the designer Gerrit Rietveld. Where the Bauhaus was a school, De Stijl was closer to a doctrine: reduce everything to horizontal and vertical lines, rectangles of primary colour, and the neutrals of black, white and grey.

Mondrian called the idea neoplasticism, and it ran well past the canvas. Rietveld's Red and Blue Chair and the Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht are De Stijl you can sit in and walk through.

Two languages, one conversation

The two movements talked to each other constantly. Van Doesburg moved to Weimar in 1921 and taught a rival course on the Bauhaus's doorstep, and you can see De Stijl's grid discipline arrive in the school's later graphic work. The difference is temperament: De Stijl was strict and utopian, the Bauhaus pragmatic and industrial. One wanted a universal visual language; the other wanted better everyday things.

A century on, both still hold a wall better than most of what followed them. We're working on a Bauhaus series of our own; it will arrive under the same roof as the birds, and this page will grow as it does.