The Baby Cradle
Peter Keler studied at the Bauhaus Weimar from 1921 to 1925, working through the preliminary course and into the workshop programme. In 1922, while still a student, he designed the Baby Cradle — Kinderwiege — as a carpentry workshop project. The cradle consists of a rocking frame whose circular ends are painted blue, a triangular element in yellow, and a rectangular body in red.
These colour assignments were not arbitrary. Wassily Kandinsky, teaching at the Bauhaus from 1922, associated specific primary colours with elementary geometric forms: blue with the circle, yellow with the triangle, red with the square or rectangle. The correspondences were rooted in Kandinsky’s ideas about the synaesthetic and spiritual relationships between colour and shape and were taught as exercises students were expected to engage with practically. Keler applied them directly to a functional object.
The result is a piece of children’s furniture that is simultaneously a usable thing and a design argument. The rocking motion is stable; the scale is appropriate for an infant; the surfaces are simple and cleanly made. The Bauhaus ideal of translating formal principles from theoretical exercises into everyday objects is visible here in unusually compressed form — the distance between the Vorkurs colour assignment and the finished cradle is very short. Modern replicas are produced today by Tecta and Naef, and the piece is regularly used in design history teaching as one of the clearest demonstrations of how the preliminary course worked in practice.
Keler also produced wall-painting schemes at the Bauhaus, including work for László Moholy-Nagy’s Weimar studio around 1925. He did not continue as a prominent figure after the school moved to Dessau. His significance rests almost entirely on the cradle — a student project that proved more durable than much of what the school’s masters produced.