Josef Albers entered the Bauhaus as a student in the summer semester of 1920. Like other newcomers, he began with the school’s preliminary course (Vorkurs), which introduced experiments in form, color, and materials before workshop specialization.
In the early 1920s, Albers completed the preliminary course taught by Johannes Itten, which stressed hands-on material studies and personal exploration of color and form. This training shaped Albers’s later teaching style, especially his belief that students learn by testing materials directly.
While still a student, Albers designed stained-glass windows for the Sommerfeld Residence (Haus Sommerfeld) in Berlin, a major early Bauhaus collaborative commission. The project mattered because it put workshop learning into real architectural work, linking craft skills to modern building interiors.
In 1922, Albers was promoted within the glass painting (stained-glass) workshop, reflecting his growing technical responsibility. His workshop role shows how the Bauhaus used a craft-based training ladder (from student to higher workshop status) while also pushing experimentation in modern design.
In 1923, Walter Gropius appointed Albers to a teaching role, making him one of the first former students to move into instruction at the Bauhaus. Albers taught parts of the preliminary course, including material-based exercises that trained students to discover structure and function through making.
From 1923, Albers became master of works (a workshop leadership role) for the glass painting workshop, with Paul Klee serving as master of form. The arrangement shows the Bauhaus model of pairing hands-on production leadership with artistic guidance, keeping workshop craft tied to modern visual ideas.
After Itten left in spring 1923, László Moholy-Nagy took charge of the preliminary course and pushed it toward technical and constructive thinking. During this period, Albers co-taught within the preliminary course system, helping build a pedagogy centered on materials, tools, and disciplined experimentation.
The 1923 Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar marked a turning point: the school publicly emphasized making modern designs suited to technology and industry. This broader institutional shift set the stage for Albers’s later teaching focus on materials, tools, and practical problem-solving.
In 1924, the glass painting workshop was reorganized into a broader “experimental laboratory” setup, after workshop commissions declined. This change mattered for pedagogy because it encouraged exploration and testing, not just production for clients—an approach closely aligned with Albers’s materials-first teaching.
After political pressure in Weimar, the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, and Albers was promoted to junior master in 1925. The new setting supported a more production- and architecture-oriented school structure, strengthening Albers’s role as a teacher linking workshop practice to modern design goals.
When the Bauhaus relocated to Dessau, the stained-glass workshop closed, partly because it lacked enough paid commissions to continue. Albers’s career then leaned even more toward teaching and broader material studies rather than a single specialist workshop.
In 1928, after Moholy-Nagy left the Bauhaus, Albers became the official head of the preliminary course. He expanded structured exercises in material studies—using simple tools and ordinary materials to teach construction, efficiency, and careful observation.
Between 1928 and the early 1930s, Albers’s Vorkurs in Dessau emphasized discovering what materials can do—bend, hold, tear, reflect, or carry weight—before designing finished objects. The goal was not personal style first, but clear thinking: match material, construction, and function through repeated experiments.
Under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the Bauhaus shortened the preliminary course and abolished it completely in 1932, narrowing workshop work toward architecture. This effectively ended the institutional home for Albers’s signature Vorkurs pedagogy inside the school.
On August 22, 1932, the Dessau city council decided—at the request of the Nazi Party—to close the Bauhaus as of October 1, 1932. The closure disrupted teaching and pushed staff and students into a final, unstable Berlin phase.
In October 1932, Mies van der Rohe tried to continue the Bauhaus in Berlin as a private institute in an industrial building. Political policing escalated, and a raid and sealing of the premises in April 1933 made normal teaching impossible.
On July 20, 1933, the Bauhaus teachers voted to dissolve the school under mounting Nazi pressure, ending its 14-year experiment in modern design education. Albers’s Bauhaus work—especially his workshops and preliminary-course teaching—became a key model that later spread internationally as former Bauhaus figures emigrated.
Josef Albers: pedagogy, workshops, and studies at the Bauhaus (1920–1933)