Art Education · 9 min read · Kuriosis Studio Team, Berlin · July 2026
The Bauhaus lasted fourteen years and changed how the twentieth century looked. Founded in Weimar in 1919 and shut down under Nazi pressure in 1933, the German school produced the visual grammar we still live inside — primary colours, geometric form, sans-serif type, the grid under almost every page and poster. Bauhaus art prints carry that grammar directly, which is part of why they never look dated. Buy one and you are hanging a piece of the argument that still governs how modern things are designed. This guide covers what the school actually was, the people who taught there, and why its posters and paintings still hold a wall a century later.
What the Bauhaus Was
The architect Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Weimar on 1 April 1919 with a radical premise: that art and craft are one discipline, and that a painter and a cabinetmaker belong in the same building. Students learned to make things with their hands before they learned theory. The school ran under three directors — Gropius, then Hannes Meyer, then Ludwig Mies van der Rohe — and moved twice: to Dessau in 1925, into Gropius's now-iconic glass-and-steel building completed the following year, and to Berlin in 1932. It closed in 1933. As the Tate describes it, the Bauhaus set out to bring art back into contact with everyday life, giving design and craft equal standing with painting and sculpture.
The school also changed its mind as it went, which is part of what keeps it interesting. It began rooted in medieval craft and the workshop, but by the Dessau years it had turned decisively toward industry — designing objects that could be standardised and mass-produced without losing their integrity. The Victoria and Albert Museum calls it arguably the most influential art and design school of the twentieth century, and points to that shift — handcraft to industry, ornament stripped away, honesty about steel, concrete and glass — as its lasting contribution. "Form follows function" was not a slogan the Bauhaus invented, but it was the school that taught the century to believe it.
The closure is part of why the work matters so much now. When the school was shut, its teachers scattered — Josef and Anni Albers to Black Mountain College in North Carolina, László Moholy-Nagy to the New Bauhaus in Chicago, others to Tel Aviv and beyond. That diaspora is exactly why Bauhaus thinking became the global language of modern design, and why original works from the school are treated as museum pieces today.
The Idea and the People
The founding philosophy was set out in Gropius's 1919 manifesto, whose cover carried Lyonel Feininger's woodcut Cathedral — a medieval cathedral standing for the different arts built together, like a guild. Every student began with the Vorkurs, a preliminary course in materials, colour, and form taught in the early years by Johannes Itten and later reshaped by Moholy-Nagy and Albers toward industry.
The teaching roster reads like a modern-art syllabus. Paul Klee taught there for a decade and made some of his most personal work in those years. Wassily Kandinsky brought his colour theory. Moholy-Nagy pushed photography and typography into shapes still visible in graphic design now, and Herbert Bayer ran the printing and advertising workshop at Dessau, where he designed his geometric, all-lowercase Universal alphabet — a design idea more influential than it was ever widely cast into metal type. Furniture came too: Marcel Breuer's tubular-steel chair and Marianne Brandt's lamps turned Bauhaus principles into objects you could sit on and switch on.
The painters are worth pausing on, because they complicate the tidy story of geometry and function. Klee's Bauhaus-era work can look almost childlike — stick figures, mosaic grids, titles that read like lines of poetry — even as it rests on some of the most careful colour thinking of the period. Kandinsky, teaching in the same building, worked the other way, driving toward pure abstraction and a near-musical use of colour and line. The two taught side by side for years and shared a conviction that colour and form could be studied as seriously as any science, which is why a Klee or a Kandinsky reads as both rigorous and free at once.
Bauhaus Weimar Exhibition by Baschant
Bauhaus Exhibitions by Joost Schmidt
Joyful Mountain by Paul Klee
The Visual Language — and the 1923 Exhibition
The Bauhaus put its ideas on public view at its first major show, the 1923 Weimar exhibition, held under the motto "Art and Technology — A New Unity." Its principal poster was designed by Joost Schmidt: a diagonal composition of circles and squares carrying Oskar Schlemmer's Bauhaus signet, and it was posted in railway stations across Germany. Gropius also commissioned a set of twenty promotional postcards from the school's artists — Klee, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy, Feininger and Rudolf Baschant among them — each drawn straight onto the lithographic stone, which makes them miniature original prints and a favourite among collectors. The Bauhaus Kooperation archive documents the set in detail.
Underneath all of it sits a design language you can name in four parts — the same four that make a Bauhaus print read cleanly on a wall today.
Primary Colour
Red, yellow and blue, used flat and unmixed. The palette came out of the school's colour teaching and gives Bauhaus work its immediate, graphic punch.
Geometric Form
Circle, square, triangle — the basic shapes treated as a complete vocabulary. Ornament is stripped out; form carries the meaning.
Sans-Serif Type
Clean, lowercase, unfussy lettering — Bayer's typographic experiments turned words into another geometric element on the page.
The Grid
An asymmetric underlying structure holds everything in place. The grid beneath most Bauhaus print work is still the grid most designers default to today.
"Let us create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist."
— Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Manifesto, 1919
Browse Bauhaus Prints at Kuriosis →
Living With Bauhaus Prints
Bauhaus prints are graphic by nature — flat colour, hard edges, strong type — which makes them decisive on a wall. They belong in rooms with clear architecture: open-plan spaces, studios, mid-century and Scandinavian interiors, anywhere the geometry has room to breathe. A black frame is the natural choice, echoing the structure without competing with it; natural oak warms the primary palette for a living space. Kandinsky's 1923 Weimar exhibition print is a strong single statement, while a pair or trio in matching frames reads as a considered set.
The two grids in this collection also point to two different ways of using the work. The typographic posters — the 1923 exhibition pieces, the geometric studies — are graphic and confident, at their best in a workspace or an entrance where a strong statement earns its keep. The painters pull the other way: a Klee brings warmth, humour and a softer palette that suits a living room or a bedroom, proving the Bauhaus was never only about hard edges. Mixing the two — one typographic poster, one painted work — gives you the full range of the school on a single wall, structure and play together.
There is a good reason the originals are so prized. Much Bauhaus material was suppressed or dispersed after 1933, so surviving posters and prints are genuinely scarce, and the 1923 postcards — drawn by the masters directly onto the stone — are original artworks in their own right. But the deeper value is in the language itself. Because the school's teachers rebuilt design education across America and beyond, the Bauhaus vocabulary became the default grammar of the modern world, which is why a print in that idiom still looks current rather than dated a century on.
It is worth knowing what is Bauhaus and what only looks like it. Piet Mondrian's grids of primary colour — such as his Composition with Blue, Red, Yellow and Black — belong to the parallel Dutch De Stijl movement, not to the Bauhaus itself, though the two shared a moment and a sensibility. Hanging them together is entirely natural; they are cousins, and the shared vocabulary of line and primary colour holds the wall together.
More Bauhaus and modernist prints from our collection:
Persian Nightingales by Klee
The Harbinger of Autumn by Klee
Minimalist Geometric Study
Why Fine Art Prints? The Kuriosis Approach
We print our Bauhaus and modernist works in our own Berlin studio, made to order on archival pigment inks rated for a hundred years and more. Flat colour and hard geometric edges reward a matte surface that keeps the lines sharp — a fitting way, in the city where the school ended, to keep its visual language on the wall.
