The First Appointment
Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in April 1919 and immediately needed a faculty. His first appointments, made that spring, were three: Lyonel Feininger, Gerhard Marcks, and Johannes Itten. Feininger, born in New York to German-American parents and working in Germany since 1887, was known for a style shaped by Cubism and German Expressionism — crystalline forms, fragmented planes, architectural subjects rendered as interlocking fields of light. Gropius assigned him Form Master of the graphic printing workshop, responsible for artistic direction while a craft master handled technical instruction. This dual-master structure, which paired a fine artist with a trained artisan in each workshop, was the institutional device Gropius used to hold art and craft together under the same roof.
Alongside the appointment, Gropius commissioned Feininger to make an image for the cover of the school’s founding manifesto. The resulting woodcut, Cathedral (Kathedrale, 1919), depicts a Gothic cathedral with three spires and rays of light radiating outward. Gropius chose the image deliberately: the medieval cathedral stood for a form of making in which painters, sculptors, and craftsmen worked together without the hierarchy between “fine” and “applied” that had separated the arts since the Renaissance. The cover reproduced a zinc etching derived from Feininger’s woodcut rather than the original print — a technical distinction often lost in later accounts of the image.
Workshop Years
Feininger ran the printmaking workshop for the length of the Weimar phase. In 1921 he published a portfolio of twelve woodcuts, one of the first formal Bauhaus publications, which demonstrated the workshop’s capacity for producing multiples with artistic seriousness. The graphic printing workshop operated alongside more prominent ones — carpentry, metalwork, weaving — and Feininger did not seek a dominant institutional role. His workshop contributed to the school’s early publication activities and to the graphic experimentation that characterized the Weimar period, without producing the kind of industrial prototypes that would define the school’s later reputation.
His own painting during these years continued what had occupied him before the Bauhaus: architectural forms dissolved into intersecting planes, cityscapes and coastlines rendered as crystalline structures in which solids and light exchange properties. These were not workshop projects in the design sense. They were the sustained practice of a painter who also taught.
Dessau and Berlin
When the school relocated to Dessau in 1925, Feininger followed. His role changed: he was relieved of regular teaching obligations and became a “master without teaching duties,” maintaining a studio on campus while remaining formally part of the school. He was in his mid-fifties, a founding figure from a generation that the school was gradually moving beyond as its priorities shifted toward industrial design, typography, and architecture. The arrangement acknowledged both his standing and the distance between his practice and the direction the Dessau Bauhaus was taking.
He stayed through the Berlin phase and was present until the school closed in 1933 — a tenure of fourteen years, longer than almost anyone else from the original cohort. He returned to the United States in 1937, three years later, as conditions under National Socialism made continuing in Germany untenable.
The Woodcut and Its Context
The Cathedral woodcut is among the most reproduced images in any account of the Bauhaus. Gropius chose it to communicate the founding ambition: an art school organized like a medieval building workshop, where making was collective and the separation between art and craft did not exist. The image was programmatic, tied to a specific moment and a specific argument. It was a statement about what the school wanted to become in April 1919, not a stylistic declaration about what it would produce.
The Bauhaus’s later work — tubular steel furniture, rationalist typography, functionalist architecture — has no visual relationship to a Gothic spire radiating light. Feininger’s own painting had no connection to the products of the metal or carpentry workshops. The woodcut recorded the utopian premise of the founding, expressed through the one image in the Western tradition that seemed to show what the unity of art and craft had once looked like. What the school actually built over the following fourteen years was something harder to summarize in a single image — which is partly why this one has remained so useful, and partly why it tells only a fraction of the story.