But even growing acclaim for Bauhaus products and rising student enrollment after accreditation in 1926 could not halt unrelenting pressure from financial problems, political attacks and internal dissension. Gropius resigned in 1928. His successor, Swiss architect Hannes Meyer, continued to make low-cost furnishings but reoriented the institution toward architecture, sacrificing many basic courses. On the plus side, although Masters, Georg Muche and László Moholy-Nagy, earlier introduced photography as a means of visual training within the basic curriculum, Meyer established an independent photography course in 1929 under Walter Peterhans, making the Bauhaus an early school to recognize the value of photography as an independent art form. Meyer’s Marxist leanings, however, ultimately forced his termination. Under the succeeding directorship of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the Bauhaus abolished the apprenticeship system altogether and from 1930 on developed into an architecture school, entirely changing its founding orientation. But the public perception of the Bauhaus as a liberal hotbed of international and Jewish elements and therefore a source of degenerate, Bolshevik, anti-German values, was already well established.

In 1932 the Nazis, having achieved control of the Dessau city parliament the previous year, declared the Bauhaus closed. “The disappearance of this so-called ‘School of Design’ will mean the disappearance of one of the most significant sites of Jewish, Marxist ‘artistic’ will from German soil,” wrote Paul Schultze-Naumberg in the September 30, 1932 issue of the Anhalt newspaper. “Let homes or faculties soon be built that allow the German people to feel at home and relax.” The Bauhaus, a shadow of its former self, continued as a private institution in Berlin but lasted only a year under the Hitler regime.

In the end, the short-lived educational experiment that began in small-town Germany provided a world-wide impact likened to what poet Ralph Waldo Emerson called “the shot heard round the world” when he immortalized the band of Massachusetts farmers who engaged the British redcoats in his Concord Hymn. Many Bauhaus teachers, a veritable “Who’s Who” of Modernism including Mies van der Rohe, Josef and Anni Albers, Breuer, Bayer, Feininger and Moholy-Nagy, immigrated to America, where their works and teaching revolutionized artistic and architectural thinking. Gropius, always the unyielding promoter of the Bauhaus philosophy, taught at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. A year before his death in 1969, during his speech on the occasion of the groundbreaking of the Huntington Galleries’ expansion in Huntington, West Virginia, Gropius reiterated his core belief that “in a highly developed democracy, the intuitive qualities of the artists are as much needed as those of the scientist and the mathematician.” His legacy? Alive and well. Ask any first-year art, design, or architecture student. Better yet, focus on the average person buying quality, well-designed products at reasonable cost and consider the Michael Graves Design teakettles sold at Target. It warms the heart of any Bauhaus enthusiast. Gropius would surely be pleased.

Curator, lecturer and writer Cynthia Elyce Rubin has written books and exhibition catalogues on art topics, including Southern Folk Art; Siegmund Forst: A Lifetime in Arts and Letters; ABC Americana from the National Gallery of Art; and Larger than Life: the American Tall-Tale Postcard, 1905–1915.