The Bauhaus existed for fourteen years, moved city three times and was closed under political pressure in 1933. In that time it produced furniture, buildings, textiles and typography, but the thing that carried the school's ideas furthest was the poster. A poster was cheap, it travelled, and it had to argue for the school in a single glance — which is exactly the discipline the Bauhaus was teaching.
The three phases, and what each looked like
| Years | City | Director | What the printed work looked like |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1919-1925 | Weimar | Walter Gropius | Expressionist woodcut giving way to hard geometry |
| 1925-1932 | Dessau | Gropius, then Hannes Meyer | The mature style: sans-serif, grids, photomontage |
| 1932-1933 | Berlin | Ludwig Mies van der Rohe | A private school in a disused factory; little printed output |
Weimar 1923: the exhibition that set the style
The first Bauhaus exhibition ran in Weimar in the summer of 1923, and it is the hinge of the whole story. The school had spent four years being accused of being a craft commune, and the exhibition was Gropius's answer: a public demonstration that the workshops could design for industry. The slogan attached to it, art and technology as a new unity, is effectively the school's second founding statement.
The publicity was produced as a set rather than a single sheet. Students and young masters were each given a card or poster to design, which is why the 1923 material looks like a range of experiments rather than a campaign. Two names dominate what survives. Herbert Bayer, then a student, was working towards the stripped geometric lettering he would later formalise as a single-alphabet typeface with no capitals at all. Joost Schmidt produced the exhibition's best-known poster, a construction of rotated blocks and type set at right angles that reads as a machine part more than as an announcement.
What both were doing is worth stating plainly, because it is the reason the style still looks modern. They removed decoration from typography and treated the letter as a geometric object, then used the whole sheet as a grid rather than as a page with a picture on it and words underneath.
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
A note on what can be reproduced
This is where honesty matters more than range. Bayer died in 1985 and Josef Albers in 1976, so their work remains in copyright across the EU for decades yet. Schmidt died in 1948, which puts him in a similar position for now. That means the actual 1923 posters are not something we or anyone else can legitimately sell as prints, whatever a search result suggests.
So this article is editorial, not a catalogue. What our range holds is work in the tradition rather than facsimiles of the exhibition sheets: geometric compositions, primary-colour constructions and typographic prints made in the same grammar, gathered in the Bauhaus collection. Where the school's own artists are out of copyright, that is a different matter — Paul Klee died in 1940 and his work is free in the EU, which is why his prints can be reproduced properly when the exhibition posters cannot.
Hanging typographic work
Poster designs are read, not just seen, and that changes two things.
| Format | Comfortable reading distance | Where that puts it |
|---|---|---|
| 30×42 | under 1 m | hallway, beside a desk |
| 50×70 | 1-1.5 m | most rooms |
| 70×100 | 1.5-2.5 m | living room, stairwell |
First, hang them where someone can stand still. Second, hang them straight and at the standard centre height of 145 cm, covered in the guide to hanging height, because a sheet built on a grid shows every degree of tilt. A black frame suits the type-led designs; the full range of sizes and finishes is in the frames. The period sheets were often trimmed to odd dimensions, so a modern reproduction is always re-set to standard formats rather than the original's — the figures for ours are in the size guide.