The founding of the Bauhaus, April 1919
Walter Gropius took over a grand-ducal art school in a defeated country and renamed it the Staatliches Bauhaus.
The first of April 1919 counts as the founding of the school — a directorship, a merger and a new name, in a country five months into a republic.
Two schools become one
Walter Gropius became director of the Grand Ducal Saxon School of Fine Arts in Weimar, and on 12 April he formally merged it with the dissolved arts and crafts school that Henry van de Velde had built up before the war.[1] One institution, in van de Velde's two buildings on what is now the Geschwister-Scholl-Straße, under a name nobody had used before: Staatliches Bauhaus.
Why it was possible in 1919 and not in 1913
The university that occupies those buildings today calls the founding the result and the expression of a political upheaval, which is the plainest way to put it.[2] The monarchy had gone five months earlier, the state was being written from scratch in this same small town that spring, and a school proposing to abolish the distinction between artist and craftsman could suddenly be argued for in public rather than in a pamphlet.
What actually changed: the teaching
Students worked under two masters at once, a craftsman and an artist, with the workshop rather than the drawing class at the centre. That is the training that produced everything the Bauhaus is now known for — and it is what conservative Thuringia moved against within five years, because a school where the joinery mattered as much as the life class was not a quiet ornament to a residency town.
Sources
- Weimar – Die Bauhaus-Phasen — Bauhaus Kooperation, retrieved 29 August 2026
- Geschichte der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar — Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, retrieved 29 August 2026
Historical figures
Historical figures
1883–1969 • architect • founder and director of the Bauhaus • teacher
He was appointed director on 1 April 1919 and renamed the school.
1863–1957 • architect • designer • founder of the Weimar arts and crafts school
His arts and crafts school, dissolved during the war, was merged into the new one on 12 April.
Historic sites
Historic sites
Geschwister-Scholl-Straße 8, 99423 Weimar
The founding happened in this building, and the school took over van de Velde's second one with it.
Period
In Weimar's history
In Weimar's history
The school the Bauhaus was built out of: begun as a private seminar in borrowed rooms, closed by ministerial order thirteen years later.
The school Gropius merged in on 12 April — closed by the state in 1915, and the reason the Bauhaus had workshops from day one.
Six folded pages with a cathedral on the front — the document that told Weimar what the new school was for.
Written in the same month the school was founded and renamed.
On 6 February 1919 the assembly elected to write Germany a constitution met for the first time, in a court theatre eleven years old. Weimar was chosen because Berlin was too dangerous.
The same town, the same spring: the National Assembly was sitting in Weimar while the school was being founded.