The Nazi majority of Dessau suspended the seat of learning. Paul
Schultze-Naumburg was the architect that they sent into the school
to re-establish pure German art instead of the "cosmopolitan rubbish"
the Bauhaus artists were doing. He described Bauhaus furniture as
Kisten, or boxes. Bauhaus was even as private institution so much
hated by the National Socialist government that the police closed
it up on 11th April, 1933. By September 1932, the Nazis had won
a majority in Dessau, and cut off all financial support to the Bauhaus.
The school was forced to move to Berlin, where it survived without
any public funding for a brief time. On April 11 1933, the Berlin
police, acting on the orders of the new Nazi government finally
closed it.
The Nazi's "degenerate
art" exhibition in 1937 featured works by several former
Bauhaus teachers. The Nazis failed in their efforts to completely
erase the Bauhaus. Its forced closure and the subsequent emigration
of many of its former staff and students, ensured that it would
become famous and influential throughout the world, especially in
the United States, where a Bauhaus school was established in Chicago
in 1937. The Bauhaus had a lasting impact on art education
and in architecture.
The
New Bauhaus, founded in 1937 in Chicago, was the immediate successor
to the Bauhaus dissolved in 1933 under National Socialist pressure.
Bauhaus ideology had a strong impact throughout America, but it
was only at the New Bauhaus that the complete curriculum as developed
under Walter Gropius in Weimar and Dessau was adopted and further
developed. The former Bauhaus master Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was founding
director of the New Bauhaus. The focus on natural and human sciences
was increased, and photography grew to play a more prominent role
at the school in Chicago than it had done in Germany. Training in
mechanical techniques was more sophisticated than it had been in
Germany.
The
method and aim of the school were likewise adapted to American requirements.
Moholy-Nagy's successor at the head of the Institute of Design,
Serge Chermayeff, however, remained still quite true to the original
Bauhaus. In the 1950s the New Bauhaus merged with the Illinois Institute
of Technology. The Institute of Design is even now still part of
the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, and rates as a
respected and professionally oriented school of design.
