This paper traces the ideological and personal connections between Germany's Bauhaus school and Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Beginning with Walter Gropius's vision of unifying art, craft, and industry at the Bauhaus, the paper follows key artists and educators — including Josef and Anni Albers, Mies van der Rohe, and Moholy-Nagy — as Nazi persecution drove them to America. It examines how these émigré figures shaped Black Mountain College's progressive curriculum, its vibrant creative community, and its eventual decline. The paper draws on firsthand accounts and scholarly sources to assess both the school's remarkable artistic legacy and the internal conflicts that led to its closure in 1956.
After World War I, the German state, under the direction of architect Walter Gropius, created a "consulting art center for industry and the trades" (Bayer 12). Called Bauhaus — "house for building" — the school combined the roles of artisans and craftspeople and encompassed everything from architecture to theater to typography. When the school was forced to close during the Nazi regime in 1932, many of its artists moved to the United States to pursue their own artistic expression. Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, among others, helped to spread Bauhaus ideology in their new home. Gropius consulted with educator John A. Rice, who opened Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Based on John Dewey's principles of progressive education, the school became home to many of the most progressive and innovative artists of the era. Josef and Anni Albers, also from the Bauhaus, combined Rice's progressive educational theories with their own disciplined approach to teaching art and created an entirely new approach to learning. Despite the struggles and challenges that arise whenever educators, artists, and innovators work together, Black Mountain became a monument to which colleges can aspire.
Established in Weimar in 1919, the Bauhaus philosophy largely stressed the integration of modern design principles with their industrial implementation. As the school's first director, Walter Gropius articulated the difference between the Bauhaus and its predecessors: "The tool of the spirit of yesterday was the 'academy.' It shut off the artist from the world of industry and handicraft, and thus brought about his complete isolation from the community." In earlier "vital epochs," however, the artist enriched all the community's arts and crafts because he had a part in its vocational life and gained, through practice, "as much adeptness and understanding as any other artist who began at the bottom and worked his way up" (Harrison & Wood 339). The Bauhaus would once again end the isolation of artists and restore their place within industry and handicraft.
The credo of the Bauhaus was to "strive to coordinate all creative effort, to achieve, in a new architecture, the unification of all training in art and design" (Harrison & Wood 340). The ultimate, if distant, goal, said Gropius, was "the collective work of art — the Building — in which no barriers exist between the structural and the decorative arts." The curriculum included both practical and theoretical studies "to release the creative powers of the student, to help him grasp the physical nature of materials and the basic laws of design." The Bauhaus deliberately avoided concentration on any single stylistic approach in order to break down earlier preconceptions and biases. As a result, "The Bauhaus did more than any other organization, either in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, to reconcile man and his man-made environment" (Naylor 7). Gropius declared at its opening:
Let us create a new guild of craftsmen, without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist. Together, let us conceive and create the new building of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers, like the crystal symbol of a new faith. (Harrison & Wood 340)
Gropius enlisted the support of avant-garde artists such as Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and László Moholy-Nagy to stimulate the creative process. He believed that with their help he could breathe life into the dead product of a machine. However, the Bauhaus was embroiled in political intrigue from the time of its opening to its closure. There were continual conflicts between the institution, state and city parliamentary funding bodies, and eventually between the Bauhaus and the Nazi Party. In 1923, for example, the Bauhaus held "Art and Technics: A New Unity," a major exhibition of art and objects in Bauhaus buildings and the newly built model house. Although the international reaction was very positive, local critics were hostile (Etlin 291). As with earlier exhibitions, the Bauhaus was denounced as a "Spartacist-Bolshevist" institution with un-German influences. Gropius dismissed these charges as "nationalistic and anti-Semitic slander."
In 1924, proto-Nazi groups in parliament refused to re-fund the school, and it relocated to the industrial city of Dessau. There, too, local opposition arose and Gropius was asked to resign. After several more directors departed, a Nazi majority was gained in the Dessau town council, funding for the Bauhaus was completely terminated in 1932, and the school's buildings were converted into a Nazi training camp.
Despite its turbulent history, Bauhaus architects and artists made a major impact on Western Europe and the United States. Moholy-Nagy used the school as a laboratory to examine the formal principles of abstraction in painting, photography, and sculpture. He also explored the influence of technology on artistic practice, developing a new kind of theater that integrated space, composition, motion, sound, movement, and light into a fully unified, abstract form of expression. Josef Albers explored abstraction and color; Kandinsky developed abstraction and became one of the most important innovators in modern art; Feininger specialized in analytical cubism, making use of rhythmic interpretations of natural forms and studying the effects of transparency and prismatic planes; Lucia Moholy's documentary photography broke new ground; and architect Mies van der Rohe perfected an international modern architectural style rooted in advanced structural techniques and Prussian Classicism (Etlin).
When the Nazi Party gained power in Germany, laws were passed to rid the country of its "undesirables," a category that included many dissident and nonconformist artists. Most of the Bauhaus staff headed to the United States. In 1933, Josef and Anni Albers began teaching at the newly founded Black Mountain College in North Carolina, which had been developed with insights from Gropius. Gropius himself was appointed head of a university school of architecture in 1937. That same year, Mies van der Rohe joined another American university. Moholy-Nagy founded a New Bauhaus — later renamed the Institute of Design — in Chicago. In this way, Bauhaus ideals and teaching methods began to be adopted by colleges throughout the United States (Naylor 153).
By 1942, émigrés had achieved a critical mass in America. "Yet the activities of one early émigré figure, Hans Hofmann, proved to be crucial" (Johnson 4). Before arriving in the United States in 1930, Hofmann had managed to assimilate the main elements of most of the important European artistic movements of his time, including Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Abstractionism, and Surrealist automatism. After moving to America, he opened a school for modern art in New York in 1934, thus beginning his career as "the most important teacher of modern art in America" (Johnson 4). His own work featured improvisation; he adopted the technique of pouring paint three years before Jackson Pollock and used color as the primary element of form.
In his essay "On the Aims of Art," Hofmann expressed his reverence for the creative act:
Art is spiritual, a result of introspection, finding expression through the natural entity of the medium … The artist intensifies his concepts, condenses his experience into a spiritual reality complete in itself and thus creates a new reality in terms of the medium. Thus is the work of art a world in itself, but reflecting the sensorial and emotional world for the artist. (Harrison & Wood 354)
In 1933, the New York Herald Tribune announced the opening of Black Mountain College. It was to be led by John Rice, who had been asked to resign from Rollins College over issues of tenure, teaching methods, and academic freedom. Black Mountain gave Rice an opportunity to create a new educational environment that would, he hoped, place as great an importance on the creative arts as on the development of intellect. He wanted to found a college "based on an idea of community among individuals working and learning together" (Duberman). The guiding emphasis was that learning and living are intimately connected, and that dramatics, music, and the fine arts are an integral part of college life. Although no student held an outside job, faculty and students alike worked on the college farm, constructed buildings, performed maintenance, and served meals. Many classes were held at night, with afternoons kept free for campus work. There was no organized athletic program, since it was believed that no distinction should exist between work and play.
The school's curriculum was divided into Junior and Senior Divisions, with all entering students placed in the lower division regardless of prior education. Advancement to the Senior Division and graduation did not depend on courses successfully completed, but on the results of comprehensive oral and written examinations and the student's overall achievement record. There were no required courses; instead, each student prepared a plan of work with an advisor and was expected to complete a well-rounded course of study. Classes — a combination of recitations, lectures, tutorials, and seminars — met at the teacher's discretion and attendance was voluntary.
Poet and critic Vincent Katz, who wrote about the school, emphasized that Rice envisioned an educational collective run by its teachers with input from students rather than directives from a governing board. Students at the deliberately non-accredited school took the courses they chose and, when they felt ready to graduate, requested an examination administered by someone outside the college.
Black Mountain was not conceived as an art school — courses in science and mathematics were always offered — but Rice believed the arts held a central place in a liberal arts education. Offerings included painting, writing, drawing, constructions and assemblages, weaving, music, drama, architecture, photography, typography, dance, and design. Like the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College was a center for cultural production. The guiding principle was "that a strong liberal and fine arts education must happen simultaneously inside and outside the classroom" (Dawson). Before long, many of the era's most celebrated figures — including Bauhaus artists Gropius, Willem de Kooning, John Cage, and Charles Olson — joined the faculty. The Board of Directors included poet William Carlos Williams and Albert Einstein. Students such as painter Robert Rauschenberg, publisher Jonathan Williams, and poet John Wieners found themselves at the center of sweeping innovations: Buckminster Fuller's Geodesic Dome, Charles Olson's Projective Verse, and some of the first performance art in the United States.
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