Bauhaus as a style is easy to recognise and easy to get wrong. Three shapes — circle, square, triangle. Three colours — red, yellow, blue — plus black, white and grey. Type set flat and often at right angles to itself. Nothing on the sheet that is only there to be pretty. It is a grammar rather than a mood, which is why a Bauhaus print either works or looks like a poster about Bauhaus.
The rules the style actually follows
The school ran from 1919 to 1933 and its teaching produced a set of habits that still describe the look. Four of them are visible in any print worth calling Bauhaus.
- Geometry before drawing. Forms are constructed, not sketched. Edges are hard, curves are true circles or arcs of them.
- Primaries, used flat. No gradients, no shading. A red is one red across its whole area.
- Function before ornament. Every element earns its place by doing something — separating, indicating, balancing.
- Asymmetry held in balance. The composition is off-centre but weighted, which is what stops it looking like a diagram.
Mondrian and Kandinsky are the reference points most people reach for, and only one of them belongs to the school. Kandinsky taught at the Bauhaus and his colour-and-form theory sits underneath the whole style. Mondrian never did — he was De Stijl, in the Netherlands — but the grid, the black lines and the primary blocks come from the same decade and the same argument, so the two ranges sit together comfortably on a wall. Both traditions run through the Bauhaus collection. Paul Klee, who taught alongside Kandinsky, is the softer edge of the same school and has a collection of his own.
The colour arithmetic
Flat primaries are unforgiving in a room, and the usual mistake is using them in equal measure. The proportions that work look like this.
| Element | Share of the print | Share of the room |
|---|---|---|
| White or paper | 50-60 per cent | walls, ceiling |
| Black and grey | 20-25 per cent | frames, metal, dark wood |
| One dominant primary | 15-20 per cent | one object, no more |
| Second and third primary | 5-10 per cent | nothing in the room |
The last row is the useful one. If a print carries red, yellow and blue, the room should carry none of them. A yellow cushion under a Bauhaus print does not echo it; it competes with it and both lose.
Bauhaus orange on blue poster
Bauhaus Weimar 1923 poster
Bauhaus Orange Poster
Bauhaus Dress - David Wolf
Bauhaus Woman 02 - David Wolf
Bauhaus Woman 03 - David Wolf
Format and arrangement
Geometric work scales cleanly, which is unusual — a photograph enlarged shows its grain, a hard-edged circle does not. So the format decision here is purely about the wall.
| Number of prints | Format | Gap | Total span |
|---|---|---|---|
| One | 70×100 | — | 70 cm |
| Two | 50×70 | 4 cm | 104 cm |
| Three | 50×70 | 4 cm | 158 cm |
| Four, in a square | 30×42 | 4 cm | 64 cm wide, 88 high |
Note the gap. Bauhaus arrangements want the tight end of the usual 4 to 8 cm range, because the style is about a system, and a tight repeated interval reads as a system. The four-in-a-square block is the most reliable arrangement of the lot; the measured versions are in the gallery wall layouts.
Frames
Black, in most cases. It continues the black rules and keying lines that are already in the image and keeps the sheet reading as a designed object. Oak works when the print is mostly white and one colour, where black would double the weight. The coloured frames are the trap: a red frame around a print containing red is two reds, and they will not be the same red. Up to 50×70 the colours exist, and Bauhaus is the style where you should not use them. The finishes are shown across the frames.
Height is ordinary: centre at 145 cm, as set out in the hanging height guide. A geometric print hung crooked or high is more obviously wrong than any other kind, because the picture contains straight lines to check it against. Use a level, not an eye.