Itten develops the Bauhaus’s preliminary course, a revolutionary approach to foundational visual studies that explores line, shape, and color.

Feininger creates Cathedral, the woodcut on the cover of Gropius’s Bauhaus manifesto, as an emblem of Gesamtkunstwerk, the unification of craft and fine art into a “total work of art.”

Swiss-born painter Paul Klee comes to teach at the Bauhaus. He stays for more than a decade, bringing abstract geometry and expressive style.

De Stijl cofounder Theo van Doesburg moves to Weimar. While he did not teach at the Bauhaus, he did much to introduce objectivity, industrial production, and the use of a limited visual palette to the lexicon of local artists and students.

Designer and artist El Lissitzky arrives in Germany. He introduces Russian constructivism to future Bauhaus instructor László Moholy-Nagy, which would become a key ingredient in the Bauhaus’s aesthetic and philosophy.

Austrian artist and Bauhaus student Friedl Dicker typesets a section of an essay by Itten in Utopia. It is a feat in experimental letterpress, showcasing cantilevered, undulating, and otherwise expressively set text.

Adolf Hitler becomes chairman of the National Socialist Party, a far-right political party with racist and xenophobic views. As a result of post–World War I reparations, the value of German currency begins to plummet, creating an economic crisis that sets the stage for Hitler’s rise.

Famed Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky joins the faculty. His quest to forge color, form, sound, and motion into a spiritual ideal influences the Bauhaus’s early mysticism.

Bauhaus master Itten resigns, in no small part due to his own belief in Mazdaznan, an ascetic religion associated with eugenics and white supremacy. With his departure, the school’s focus shifts from the metaphysical and expressionistic to the utilitarian and mechanically replicable.

German artist Oskar Schlemmer—a newly appointed master of mural painting—reprises an earlier graphic to make the Bauhaus logo: a face reduced to geometric shapes in black and white.

Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy arrives to lead the preliminary course. He uses the tools of mass production to remake the Bauhaus’s typographic image in print. His wife and fellow photographer, Lucia Moholy, accompanies him and begins to document the school’s work.

The Bauhaus puts on an exhibition to justify its funding to the local government, producing an accompanying catalog. It also includes a week’s worth of lectures and performances, such as Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet, in which he adapts Bauhaus design principles to the body with elemental costumes and geometric choreography. The exhibition and its programming are a publicity success but a political failure.

Faced with increasing conservatism from government funders, Gropius establishes Bauhaus GmbH to produce and sell works designed in the student workshops, including weaving, woodworking, furniture, metalsmithing, and more.

The conservative government in Weimar cuts the Bauhaus’s funding. Gropius moves the school to the more liberal city of Dessau.

Gropius and Moholy-Nagy publish the first eight Bauhaus Books to share the pedagogies of the school’s masters and peers. They ultimately produce fourteen titles in the series. It is one of the first serious efforts to document the thinkers of the modernist movement, as well as an early example of branded series publishing, with every book in a consistent trim, format, and design.

Former Bauhaus student Herbert Bayer joins the faculty, leading the newly formed print and advertising workshop, the school’s first official program in design. He begins setting the school’s print materials solely in lowercase letters. This eschewal of more traditional German orthography—in which all nouns are capitalized—becomes a hallmark of Bauhaus typography.

Gropius unveils the school’s new building in Dessau with a revolutionary glass façade and iconic signage by Herbert Bayer.

The institution also begins publishing bauhaus, a quarterly magazine that reports on the school’s functions and contributions to larger conversations in art and architecture, as well as student life. It is published fairly consistently until 1933.

German artist and Bauhaus master Josef Albers begins to experiment with a sans serif, modular stencil alphabet in which each letterform is composed of some combination of a circle, square, and triangle. It becomes another quintessential example of Bauhaus typography.

Meyer takes over the directorship from Gropius, who leaves to focus on architecture. A strict functionalist, Meyer realigns the school to meet social needs through architecture and industry. In the wake of these tumultuous shifts to the curriculum, Moholy-Nagy and Bayer leave the Bauhaus.

World War I veteran and former student Joost Schmidt becomes head of the print and advertising workshop.

Five years after attending the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition, German-born designer Jan Tschichold synthesizes Bauhaus and constructivist ideas in his book The New Typography, laying the groundwork for one of the major design movements of the twentieth century, International Typographic Style, also known as Swiss Style.

The Bauhaus was famous for its costume parties, where students and masters mingled. The most spectacular example is the 1929 Metallic Festival. Attendees wore outfits made of metal and danced under an installation of reflective orbs.

The school pairs up with an industrial partner to manufacture a line of wallpaper. One of many products sold by the Bauhaus, the wallpaper proves wildly successful and helps fund the school as government support wanes. It is still in production today.

A record 201 students enroll in the Bauhaus’s winter session.

Accused of turning the school into a communist haven, Meyer, the second director, is fired and goes to Moscow. Leading German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe takes his place. He has little choice but to make the school more traditional to appease Dessau’s rising National Socialist Party.

The rising National Socialist Party wins a majority in the Dessau government. The city council votes to cut off all funding to the Bauhaus. Mies van der Rohe reopens the Bauhaus as a skeletal, privately funded institution in Berlin.

In January, Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany. In April, the Gestapo raids the Bauhaus Berlin under claims that it promotes “degenerate art” and “cosmopolitan modernism,” a thinly veiled anti-Semitic claim. Third director Mies van der Rohe and the Bauhaus faculty vote not to reopen the school.

Many Bauhauslers begin struggling to work in Germany due to their foreigner status, progressive politics, or association with the institution. The exodus out of Germany and then Europe at large begins: Moholy-Nagy moves to the Netherlands, and Albers relocates to the United States to lead Black Mountain College, where Feininger later teaches as well. Many Jewish teachers and students also flee Nazi persecution, establishing Bauhaus outposts as far afield as Tel Aviv.

Some are not able to leave, including Joost Schmidt, who is eventually blacklisted from working as a designer in Germany and dies in 1948, and Friedl Dicker, who is murdered at Auschwitz in 1944.

Gropius moves to Boston to teach at the new Harvard School of Design, where he goes on to make major contributions to U.S. architecture and design.

Moholy-Nagy relocates to Chicago to found what later becomes the School of Design. He teaches there until his death at age fifty-one in 1946.

Mies van der Rohe also moves to Chicago, where he leads the Illinois Institute of Technology and designs its new campus. He also becomes a noted architect in the States, with achievements such as the Seagram Building in New York.

Back in Germany, the Nazis display confiscated modernist artwork in the Degenerate Art Exhibition. It includes many pieces by Bauhaus masters, students, and disciples.

At Gropius’s urging, Bayer is hired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York to organize the first U.S. Bauhaus exhibition, which allows him to leave Germany just before the outbreak of World War II. He has a long career in advertising in America and dies in California in 1985.

Former Bauhaus directors Gropius and Mies van der Rohe pass away in the United States fifty years after the founding of the school and more than thirty after the Nazis forced its closure. A flurry of semicentennial events (such as MIT’s exhibition and accompanying publication, to name just one) further solidify the school’s legacy in the museum world and in print.