Bauhaus
A German school of design (1919-1933) that unified fine art, craft, and industrial design under a philosophy of functional beauty -- geometric form, primary colors, and total integration of art and life.
The Bauhaus school was founded by architect Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany in 1919. Its founding manifesto declared that the ultimate aim of all creative activity was building -- that all arts must be reunited under the craft of architecture, ending the artificial division between fine and applied arts.
In practice, the Bauhaus produced some of the most influential graphic design, typography, furniture, and visual art of the 20th century. Its approach was rigorously formal: geometric shapes, primary colors (red, yellow, blue), functional construction, and the elimination of ornament for its own sake.
The faculty was extraordinary: Kandinsky and Klee taught at the Bauhaus, as did Lyonel Feininger, László Moholy-Nagy, and Herbert Bayer. Their teaching methods and visual philosophies -- especially the systematic study of color and form -- transformed art education worldwide.
The Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933, forcing many of its masters to emigrate to the United States, where Bauhaus ideas profoundly shaped American modernism, graphic design, and architecture.