The Bauhaus in Exile: What Happened After its Closure in 1933

In the USA, Josef Albers became a respected art teacher at Black Mountain College (Asheville, North Carolina), which at times regarded itself as a successor to the Bauhaus. In 1937, László Moholy-Nagy founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago, which took up the educational programme developed in Weimar and Dessau by Walter Gropius and developed it further. Photography now played a more important part than it had earlier. The methodology of the New Bauhaus was adopted and modified by many other American colleges. This played a role in pushing back the Beaux Arts tradition that had predominated in the USA up to that time. In addition, the emigré former Bauhaus Directors Walter Gropius, Professor at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Director of the Department of Architecture at the Armour Institute in Chicago, contributed to the further spread of Bauhaus thought in their work and teaching.

In West Germany, the Bauhaus idea of linking the arts and crafts was initially continued after the Second World War at crafts colleges such as those in Krefeld, Cologne and Kassel. From 1955, the College of Design in Ulm arrived on the scene with a claim to be working in the spirit of the Bauhaus. The goal was ‘to improve the quality, form and usefulness of consumer goods that are manufactured in Germany’. Although the college later tried to distance itself from the Bauhaus model by developing contours of its own, its beginnings under its first Rector, former Bauhaus student Max Bill, were clearly marked by the Bauhaus. The college in Ulm became the internationally most important college of design after the Bauhaus, and its products represented German design for many decades.