The Bauhaus season starts this week, celebrating 100 years since the brilliant and radical school opened its doors.
Why do a Bauhaus season?
The Bauhaus was so important. It was a school that only existed for 14 years and the effects of that one art school are still felt all around the world today.
In that short amount of time, they changed everything. They changed art school education, they introduced the idea of a foundation course, which every art school still does today. They also changed the idea of what you can do with design, what it’s for and how it can be a force for good. They were the people who came up with the solutions to a lot of design problems with their mantra, ‘form follows function’ and you can see that everywhere, even now.
The teachings of the Bauhaus have survived for so long for two main reasons. The first is simply that they were brilliant. They didn’t just want to change design, they wanted to change society. The second is about timing. The school was around in a particular point in German history, the school folded when the Nazis took over. That meant that so many of the teachers fled to other parts of the world. Walter Gropius, who started the school, ended up at Harvard and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the last director of The Bauhaus, went to Chicago.
With the centenary this year, I thought it would be good to take a look at the Bauhaus through 21st century eyes.
What can you expect from the Bauhaus season?
There are three films in the Bauhaus season:
Anni Albers: A Life In Thread
This is about Anni Albers, one of the female Bauhaus pioneers who helped to transform the perception of textiles from craft to modern art form.
Even though, the Bauhaus was very progressive and women were meant to have equal opportunities and equal pay, all the women had to go to the weaving workshop after their foundation year. Anni is one of the most famous artists to come out of that workshop. We wanted to profile her while telling the story of the weaving workshop, what happened to some of the women there and what they went on to do.
Bauhaus Rules
This is presented by Vic Reeves, who’s an enthusiastic art school graduate himself, and is based at Central St Martins.
We got six graduates from Central St Martins and they had to live by the Bauhaus rules. There were several Masters and they had strict rules about what you needed to do to make pieces of art in that discipline. A different Master, from today, comes in and gives a quick summary of the philosophy of whichever Bauhaus Master they are asking them to follow.
For example, someone comes in and is teaching in the style of Johannes Itten. They take the students onto the roof of Central St Martins and do meditation and breathing exercises. They then have to eat a meal of garlic mush - Itten loved garlic.
The students do this for a week, creating art in the different disciplines. Then on the final day they have a Bauhaus metal party, something else The Bauhaus was famous for.
You really get a sense for what went on at The Bauhaus at that time and how influential they were. It’s a really entertaining watch, it’s almost like reality TV but with art and design.
Bauhaus 100
This film looks at the history of The Bauhaus from when it began with Gropius to the end with Mies along with all of the other influential teachers from the school.
We wanted to hear about the school from Gropius himself. He obviously died a long time ago, but we were fortunate in that there were a huge amount of recorded interviews in the BBC archives, so it was really easy for us to get them to add to the film.
How I became an Executive Producer
I started out as a documentary director, which I absolutely loved. Then I became a series producer and a commissioning editor.
I’ve had a lot of experience of making films from different perspectives. It means that I understand what’s possible when making a film, so I’m not going to ask them to do something that isn’t possible. As a series producer I got the experience of overseeing a number of producers all working to the same goal and the commissioning editor experience gave me the experience of working out a strategy and knowing what ideas will work.
I think that’s the most important thing for anyone looking to become an exec producer, you should get as much experience in different areas of filmmaking and also watch a lot of TV - this will give you a broad understanding of what works and why.
The Bauhaus season starts with Anni Albers: A Life In Thread on Wednesday 21 August at 7.30pm, followed by Bauhaus 100 at 9pm and Bauhaus Rules at 10pm on BBC Four and BBC iPlayer.