New build

The Bauhaus was a sort of university of design, whose progressive ideas eventually fell foul of the Nazis. But as the exhibition Bauhaus: Art as Life is keen to impress, it was also a lifestyle, a modernist utopia, where staff and students were encouraged to mix freely, which they did with gusto. This, just as much as its reputation as a nerve centre for a new aesthetic, made it a magnet for the central European avant-garde. Among its teachers were some of the greatest artists and designers of the 20th century: Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee taught art; Marcel Breuer was responsible for furniture; Laszlo Moholy-Nagy for product design; Oskar Schlemmer for performance; and Walter Gropius, the school’s founder, lectured on architecture.

Rather improbably, the first Bauhaus exhibition, in 1968, was held at the Royal Academy whose mission — to raise the professional status of the artist — is at odds with Bauhaus ideology, which thought that art was bourgeois: ‘It is harder to design a first-rate chair than paint a second-rate painting — and much more useful,’ was one of the school’s guiding principles.