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Imagine going to a school where the godfather of abstraction, Wassily Kandinsky, is teaching a class in wall painting? Or where pioneering modern architect Mies van der Rohe might look approvingly over your shoulder at a sketch for a bungalow? There are quarterly masked balls, summer solstice sozzle-ups and daily breathing exercises, not to mention the optional Hindu purging rituals and esoteric drawing lessons, in which the leap of a tiger or the sound of a violin are to be rendered with the fewest strokes of ink possible.
Welcome to the world's most influential art school, the Bauhaus, or Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar, as it was known when founded in 1919 as a cultural counterbalance to the newly signed Weimar Republic, likewise a short-lived, liberal democracy, born out of the city's still-glowing embers of WWI. Both these central German institutions died in the same year, when the Nazis came to power in 1933.
The first director of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, was far from a strict headmaster, preferring to hire a staff of all-round talents rather than a coterie of doctrinarians or 'a small clique of established art mummies' as he described the Academy of Fine Arts he was replacing. Gropius employed sculptors, painters, potters and a few weirdos, including the mystical Johannes Itten, who dressed like a shaven-headed monk and sparked a school mutiny backed by his many student followers (no doubt devout garlic-eaters and self-purgers like him).
Thankfully, Itten was also a consummate teacher in stained glass, cabinetry and much more besides, also indulging his pupils in complex colour theory and the scavenging of materials for delightfully ad-hoc assemblages. As almost nothing of what was made in those preliminary courses still exists, it's left to a handful of archive photos and a remade collage of wood and metal in the first rooms of the Barbican's expertly arranged Bauhaus show, 'Art as Life', to transport us there.
But if you've ever been to art school or enrolled on a foundation course, you're probably an unwitting disciple of Itten's teachings anyway.
This splendid, if restrained survey sticks to who went into, what went on in and what came out of the various Bauhaus iterations in Weimar, Dessau and finally Berlin – there's no baggy afterword about its wide-ranging spread of style and influence all the way down to Ikea and high-rise housing. Also, aside from a light-hearted section on the elaborate parties – where Bauhauslers dressed up to themes such as 'Metal', 'White' or 'Beard Nose Heart' – and a focus on their playfulness, including Paul Klee's frightening hand-puppets for kids, this exhibition keeps mythologising to a minimum. After all, it wasn't Hogwarts School of Woodcraft and Weaving for adults, but a seriously avant-garde seat of learning.
Interestingly, the Bauhaus did start out as a craft-oriented extension of German expressionism and nineteenth-century arts and crafts movements from Jugendstil to Wiener Werkstatte. Yet this broad, folksy church – symbolised by an early woodcut of a shining cathedral on the cover of the first Bauhaus programme – would develop, in less than 15 years, into a hard-edged, machine-like home for industrial design and especially, architecture – which, incidentally, was one of the only courses not on the original curriculum (despite Gropius being an architect).
Old 'Gropi', as he was affectionately known, remained its driving force nearly to the end, but other strong characters and leaders emerged. Itten's replacement, László Moholy-Nagy, oversaw a radical photography and film department, while Herbert Bayer almost single-handedly rewrote the rules of graphic design, advertising and typography, creating a series of emergency banknotes in denominations up to 50 million marks, which might have been worthless when they were printed at the height of hyper-inflation, but look fresh and relevant today.
That so many of these visionary educators began with only the most basic geometric elements – circles, squares, triangles – and yet managed to change their respective fields for ever is remarkable enough, but they also retained their humility: the Bauhaus logo was rarely capitalised in print and, after the school's financially enforced move to Dessau (damn those Fünfzig Millionen notes), the students lived together communally on campus, their masters only a short walk away through a pine forest.
If an air of corporate efficiency, professionalism and commerciality descended on the school in its last years – embodied by that office staple, Marcel Breuer's tubular steel chair – it was still a radical symbol of free-thinking in comparison to anything the Third Reich had planned, In striving to teach a holistic approach to looking at and ordering the visual world, the Bauhaus inadvertently became the very Gesamtkunstwerk – the total work of art – it had been striving to help discover all along.