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Physical Education at The Bauhaus 1919 33
Physical Education at The Bauhaus 1919 33
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The bauhaus was founded by Walter Gropius in April 1919 and became, in
the following years, one of the leading arts and crafts centres in Europe. One
reason for this was the equal importance given to architecture, art, sculpture
and crafts as well as industrial work. This idea of an integrated whole, fixed
in the human being itself, acquires sense and meaning only through vivid
life.1 The other reason was the international approach. Gropius derived the
inspiration for the idea and building of the Bauhaus from Ruskin and Morris
of England, Van de Velde of Belgium and the German Werkbund, which
consciously looked for and found initial ways to reunite the world of work
with that of creative artists.2 The staff was recruited from all over the world
and included such avant-garde artists as Johannes Itten from Switzerland,
the German-American Lyonel Feininger, the Russian Wassily Kandinsky
and the Hungarian Lzl Moholy-Nagy. They brought with them different
cultural and political ideas, which slowly coalesced to form a unique
project, sometimes even described as an order. Until 1933, when this place
of learning3 had to be closed down under pressure from the National
Socialists, this school was attended by eager young people from all over
Europe. Some of them were already adherents of either the Lebensreform or
the German Youth movement, two state-independent movements which
strove for a healthy community and a renewed culture as a reaction to rising
technology, while demanding a return to the body4 as the core of their
physical and philosophical ideals.5
Gropius aim was to create a sustainable relationship between work and
life. Today it is impossible to reform just one partial object, we have to take
a good look at the entirety of life itself: housing, the education of children,
gymnastics and much more.6 For this purpose he asked outstanding
protagonists to join his school where the final programme was the idea of
objective teaching. Gropius was convinced that the objective method of
teaching, even if the way to this is much longer and more thorny than the
autocratic method, not only safeguards us from imitation and
egalitarianism, it protects the uniqueness in every creative personality and
simultaneously promotes the common spiritual coherence of the times.7
This very open situation stimulated people to contribute their own ideas, if
The International Journal of the History of Sport, Vol.20, No.3 (September 2003), pp.115127
PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON
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only for a certain amount of time. Physical education at the Bauhaus was
always the personal preference of the leading individuals that determined
the syllabus, which included artistic gymnastics as well as dance and sports
in logical sequences.
The aim of this paper is to show that physical education at the Bauhaus
was used
1. to experience the space, rhythms and movements of the body and to
integrate these feelings into the students artistic expressions,
2. to heal neuroses through physical activities which followed certain rules
and regulations suitable to creating a community spirit,
3. to model art on bodily movements by looking for the essence at the heart
of both.
Johannes Itten and his Preparatory Course
The Swiss painter, Johannes Itten, was one of the first teachers at the
Bauhaus. When he started his work in autumn 1919 his main contribution
was to introduce a compulsory preparatory course, which adopted an
integrated approach. As a convinced reforming educator he did not want to
create a special school or to intrude on the personality of his students, but
he had absolute respect for the individuality of the learner8 and wanted to
foster hidden talents. Itten, apart from his artistic talents, had himself been
a successful competitive artistic gymnast. He also played soccer, did track
and field and played the piano. In the course of his own studies he tried to
combine all these different activities, and from 1913 his teacher Adolf
Hlzel encouraged him to do so. Hlzel himself did not start working until
he had completed 100 tuning-up exercises, like a violin player.9
Ittens idea from the very start of Bauhaus education was more
sophisticated. Following Platos idea of the three aspects of education
gymnos (physical education), arts (especially music) and mathematics
(education designed to encourage constructive, logical thinking) he
developed a training system that was suited to the individual character both
intuitively and objectively. It revealed the technical possibilities implicit in
disregarding the rules of form and colour in art, and developed them to
perfection in the realization of individual ideas.10
All he wanted to achieve with the preparatory course was to develop an
instrument to promote the talents of the student, to let the learner find his or
her own form of self expression and to select people for special training.
Itten, a trained primary school teacher, considered the human being in itself
to be his pedagogic responsibility, a nature to be encouraged and developed:
an evolution of the senses, an increase in the ability to think and to
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Bauhaus stage has discovered its special mission. It is called: the art of
movement in relationship to the pure expression of space and the pure
expression of material, the integration of human rhythm into a rhythm of
absolute structure.45
In 1928 and 1929 Grosch participated in different dance presentations.46
She also presented a work, which she created with Albert Menzel, called
colour dance where she started to dance in front of a white illuminated
square wall, which was brightened by horizontal colour projections during
her performance.47 This central focus on a woman who, in public, was able
on the one hand to act with her body under total control and, on the other,
to deliberately lose control of her body in space thus demonstrating other
possible forms of movement, proved that it was possible for women to act
according to their own ideas, in some areas at least, and therefore
strengthened the position of power of women in society.48
Looking for the Nucleus of Movement and Art
After World War I the threat of an approaching formlessness seemed to
spread throughout Europe. The regrettable situation was that the modern
human being no longer had any real feeling for his body and therefore he
also had no feeling for a common (social) form, and vice-versa.
Educationalists and artists thought the solution to this lack of orientation
could be found in building up a form from the inside49 by searching for the
nucleus of the human being. Margarethe Streicher50 based her theory on the
regular rhythm of the body, whatever work it undertakes. Therefore the
validity of all physical work is actually a standard for defining the accuracy
of physical rules.51 In order for physical exercises to be accepted as a
general means of education by broad sections of the population, the
principles of artistic physical education and of (artistic) gymnastics have to
be adapted to each other. This is possible if there is no longer a
differentiation between exchanging knowledge and educating the whole
human being. The task of the teacher of science as well as of gymnastics is
the same: to facilitate the best development of the power and talents of a
child, which is also the best preparation for work Physical work and
therefore physical education are also necessities of life.52
The basis of good physical education is knowledge of the body you want
to educate. Therefore Streicher suggested that instead of copying exercises
mechanically, one should observe the movements several times.
To find pure movement the student has to let an impulse swing out
in his/her body without hindering it arbitrarily anywhere, only
allowing the interplay of his/her joints. If you listen to your body and
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artist,64 was no longer true. The expressionistic artist had broadened his
field of action by presenting the permanent tension between the inner and
the outside world. The concrete should not only be shown, but be visible,
nature no longer reproduced, but represented via art.65
Conclusion
The question of form, and therefore body, determined the work of the
Bauhaus from start to finish. Physical education played different roles
thereby. Physical exercises were used to train and prepare the body for the
subsequent art work. Following the ideas of the Bauhaus reform-minded
educators, the human being had to be given an integrated education. The
unifying power of sport was implemented to cure highly sensitive and
individualistic artists of their neuroses and to find, via sport, a new approach
to society and a living example where women, too, had an active role.
The body, seen as a focus for artistic as well as physical expression,
especially dance, was, however different the approach, another way to
unify a society facing the threat of a common lack of form. It took quite
some time for the people at the Bauhaus to realize that sport is more than a
matter of developing muscles but is also an art form and that art is a part of
physical education.
Deutscher Turner-Bund
NOTES
1. Walter Gropius, Idee und Aufbau des Staatlichen Bauhauses, in Walter Gropius (ed.),
Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar 19191923 (Weimar and Munich: Bauhaus-Verlag, 1923), p.9.
Walter Gropius, Die neue Bau-Gesinnung, quoted in Probst and Schdlich, Walter Gropius
(Werkverzeichnis Teil III: Probst, Hartmut Ernst-Verlag) (1925), p.96.
2. Gropius, Idee und Aufbau des Staatlichen Bauhauses, p.8. For the educational-historical
coherence of craftsmanship and pedagogical motive see Rainer Wick, bauhaus Pdagogik
(Kln: Dumont, 1982, 4. berarbeitete und aktualisierte Auflage 1994), p.67f.
3. Gerhard Marcks an das Staatliche Bauhaus, 2.1.1924, in K.-H. Hter, Das Bauhaus in
Weimar (Berlin, 1983), p.219.
4. See Michel Foucault, Mikrophysik der Macht. ber Strafjustiz, Psychiatrie und Medizin
(Berlin: Merre Verlag, 1976), p.105ff.
5. See Rolf Bothe, Peter Hahn and Hans Christoph von Tavel, Vorwort, in idem. (eds.), Das
frhe Bauhaus und Johannes Itten. Katalogbuch anllich des 75. Grndungsjubilums des
Staatlichen Bauhauses in Weimar (Ostfildern-Ruit, 1994), p.7. Thomas Alkemeyer, Krper,
Kultur, Politik. Von der Muskelreligion Pierre de Coubertins zur Inszenierung von Macht
in den Olympischen Spielen von 1936 (Frankfurt and New York: Campus-Verlag, 1996),
p.65f.
6. Letter from Walter Gropius to Eckhart (Adolf Behne) dated 2 June 1920. Quoted in W.
Nerdinger, Walter Gropius. Ausstellungskatalog Bauhaus-Archiv (Berlin: Gebr. Mann,
1985), p.58.
7. Walter Gropius, Die Bauhaus-Idee Kampf um neue Erziehungsgrundlagen, in Eckhard
Neumann (ed.), Bauhaus und Bauhusler: Erinnerungen und Bekenntnisse (Kln: Hallwag,
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