The Bauhaus – answers and explanations
Here are the answers to all 15 questions in the The Bauhaus quiz, each with a short explanation. Haven't played yet? Take the quiz first and compare your score.
Play the quiz · 15 questions1. Which architect founded the Bauhaus school?
Answer: Walter Gropius
Walter Gropius founded the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar in April 1919 by merging the city's Academy of Fine Art with the former School of Arts and Crafts, aiming to unite fine art, craft and industry.
2. In 1925 the Bauhaus school moved from Weimar to which German city?
Answer: Dessau
Under political pressure in Weimar, the Bauhaus relocated in spring 1925 to the industrial city of Dessau, where Gropius designed the famous glass-and-steel school building completed in 1926.
3. Bauhaus designer Marcel Breuer's Wassily Chair were built using which material?
Answer: Bent tubular steel
Marcel Breuer's Model B3 club chair, later nicknamed the Wassily, used a frame of bent tubular steel with leather or fabric straps; he designed it in 1925, inspired by the handlebars of his Adler bicycle.
4. Which famous Russian-born abstract painter taught at the Bauhaus school?
Answer: Wassily Kandinsky
Wassily Kandinsky, the Moscow-born pioneer of abstract painting, was appointed by Gropius in June 1922 and taught form and colour theory and analytical drawing at the Bauhaus until the Nazis closed it in 1933.
5. Who was the Bauhaus school's final director, later famed for the Seagram Building?
Answer: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe became the Bauhaus's third and last director in 1930, moved it to Berlin and shut it in 1933; he later designed New York's bronze-and-glass Seagram Building, completed in 1958.
6. Bauhaus design famously favoured simple geometric shapes and which three colours?
Answer: Red, yellow and blue
Bauhaus teaching paired the three primary colours - red, yellow and blue - with basic geometric forms; Wassily Kandinsky linked red to the square, yellow to the triangle and blue to the circle, usually set against black, white and grey.
7. The Bauhaus school was shut down in 1933 under pressure from which political force?
Answer: The Nazi Party
Under Nazi pressure the Bauhaus, branded a hotbed of communist intellectualism, was wound up by its own leadership under Mies van der Rohe on 20 July 1933, after the Dessau school had already been forced out in 1932 and moved to Berlin.
8. Which famous design motto is most closely associated with the Bauhaus movement?
Answer: Form follows function
"Form follows function" became the slogan summing up Bauhaus thinking: objects and buildings should be shaped by their purpose, with ornament stripped away, an idea Walter Gropius applied to everything from lamps to housing estates.
9. Which Israeli city's "White City" is a UNESCO site of Bauhaus-style buildings?
Answer: Tel Aviv
Tel Aviv's White City, some 4,000 buildings in the Bauhaus/International Style built mainly in the 1930s by European-trained Jewish architects, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2003.
10. In which year was the Bauhaus school of art and design founded?
Answer: 1919
Walter Gropius founded the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919, merging two existing art and craft schools; it later moved to Dessau in 1925 and Berlin in 1932 before closing in 1933.
11. The Bauhaus aimed to unite art and craft with what to make everyday objects?
Answer: Industrial mass production
Walter Gropius repositioned the Bauhaus in 1923 under the motto "Art into Industry", combining art and craft with industrial mass production so workshops designed prototypes for factory-made lamps, furniture and textiles.
12. Bauhaus artist Anni Albers is best known for her pioneering work in which craft?
Answer: Weaving textiles
Anni Albers joined the Bauhaus weaving workshop in the early 1920s and went on to head it in 1931; her abstract textiles made her the first weaver given a solo show at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1949.
13. The Bauhaus strongly influenced which 20th-century architectural style?
Answer: The International Style
Bauhaus design, with its flat roofs, glass and steel and lack of ornament, fed directly into the International Style, a term popularised by Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson at a 1932 MoMA exhibition.
14. Which Hungarian-born artist and photographer was a leading teacher at the Bauhaus?
Answer: László Moholy-Nagy
László Moholy-Nagy, born in 1895 in Bácsborsód, Hungary, taught at the Bauhaus from 1923 to 1928, running the metal workshop and the preliminary course while pioneering camera-less photograms.
15. Bauhaus teacher Moholy-Nagy founded the "New Bauhaus" in 1937 in which US city?
Answer: Chicago
Invited by the Association of Arts and Industries, Moholy-Nagy opened the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937; it closed within a year but was revived as the School of Design, later the IIT Institute of Design.