When: 1922

The De Stijl course, 1922

A rival course, taught in a studio directly opposite the Bauhaus, by a man the school never employed.

In 1922 Theo van Doesburg held his De Stijl course in Weimar — not in the Bauhaus, but in the free studio of a former Bauhaus student, in a building the city places directly opposite the art school.

Across the road, on purpose

The studio belonged to Karl Peter Röhl, who had been enrolled at the Bauhaus from 1919 to 1921^[1] and had designed its first emblem. The city's register of Bauhaus sites puts the building directly opposite the art school.^[2] Whatever the intention, the geography was the argument: a Dutch painter teaching the straight line and the primary colours, within sight of a school whose founding image was a Gothic cathedral.

What the school says it did to it

The Bauhaus institutions' own account of the Weimar years names him without hedging: van Doesburg, Dutch De Stijl artist and propagandist, had acted on the school's development like a catalyst, as had its engagement with constructivism and with the demands of a technology-oriented world.^[3] Institutions do not usually credit an outsider with turning them; this one does.

The address is gone

The studio building was destroyed in the Second World War: nothing to visit, nothing to photograph.^[2] The turn the school is famous for was argued in a room that no longer stands.