Few developments central to the history of art have been so misrepresented or misunderstood as the brief, brave, glorious, doomed life of the Bauhaus—the epochally influential German art, architecture, crafts, and design school that was founded in Goethe’s sleepy hometown of Weimar in 1919. It then flourished from 1925 to 1932 in Dessau, an industrial backwater where the school’s first director, Walter Gropius, built its image-making headquarters (see illustration on page 25); and it ultimately but vainly sought refuge in cosmopolitan Berlin, where it closed in 1933, when Hitler took power. Now, nine decades after its inception and three quarters of a century after its dissolution, the Bauhaus has finally been explained to the museum-going public in terms much closer to its actual intent and immense achievement than ever before.
more from Martin Filler at the NYRB here.