Wassily Kandinsky accepted Walter Gropius’s invitation to join the Bauhaus faculty in Weimar, where he taught courses in form and color and worked within the school’s workshop-based curriculum (rather than a traditional painting academy model).
As the Bauhaus reorganized its workshops, Kandinsky was brought in to lead the wall-painting (Wandmalerei) area as a way to integrate painting into an applied, architectural context—helping push student work toward non-figurative and constructivist-leaning abstraction.
The Bauhaus’s major 1923 exhibition in Weimar helped publicize its new educational model (“art and technology” becoming increasingly central). Kandinsky’s teaching in form and color supported the school’s move toward systematic visual fundamentals as a basis for design and architecture.
After the move to Dessau, Kandinsky also taught non-applied (“free”) painting alongside theoretical instruction, positioning abstract painting not only as workshop support for architecture but as an independent discipline grounded in Bauhaus fundamentals.
After right-wing gains in Thuringia, funding cuts and dismissals made continued work in Weimar untenable; the Bauhaus declared its closure there effective April 1, 1925—setting up the move that reshaped Kandinsky’s teaching environment.
The school re-established itself under the city of Dessau, where its emphasis shifted toward prototypes and industry. Kandinsky continued as a key instructor, now teaching within a more design- and production-oriented institutional framework.
Kandinsky’s treatise Point and Line to Plane (Bauhausbücher no. 9) formalized a vocabulary of graphic elements—point, line, plane—and their dynamic relations, reinforcing the Bauhaus approach of teaching abstraction as an analyzable, transferable method for visual design.
Walter Gropius’s Dessau Bauhaus building opened as a purpose-built campus that embodied the school’s functional modernism. The new setting supported Kandinsky’s curriculum in which abstract form and color were treated as fundamental design tools connected to architecture and space.
While teaching at the Bauhaus, Kandinsky obtained German citizenship, reflecting his long-term professional anchoring in Germany during the school’s Dessau phase.
Following Nazi electoral success in Dessau, the Bauhaus was dissolved there (September 30, 1932). Under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe it re-opened in Berlin, where political pressure further destabilized teachers’ positions—including Kandinsky’s.
In Berlin, the Bauhaus operated in a former telephone factory in Steglitz, but the premises were searched and sealed on April 11, 1933, and students were arrested—an escalation that made continued teaching increasingly impossible.
Under conditions set by authorities (including demands to replace certain teachers and revise the curriculum to fit National Socialist ideology), the teaching staff decided to dissolve the Bauhaus—ending Kandinsky’s Bauhaus curriculum and institutional platform for abstract art pedagogy.
With the Bauhaus dissolved and modernist educators targeted, Kandinsky left Germany in 1933 and relocated to France—closing the 1922–1933 period in which Bauhaus teaching and theory deeply shaped his geometric abstraction.
Wassily Kandinsky’s curriculum and abstract painting at the Bauhaus (1922–1933)
