In April 1919 Walter Gropius became director of a new institution created from the merger of two Weimar schools: the Großherzoglich Sächsische Hochschule für Bildende Kunst (Grand Ducal Saxon Academy of Fine Art) and the Kunstgewerbeschule Weimar (School of Arts and Crafts), whose operations had been wound down before the war. Gropius’s contract is dated 1 April 1919; the formal institutional signing was recorded on 12 April. He succeeded Henry van de Velde, who had directed the Kunstgewerbeschule and had recommended Gropius as his replacement as early as 1914. The name Gropius chose — Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar — invoked the medieval builders’ lodge, the Bauhütte, signalling a craft tradition rather than an academic one.
The founding document, Programm des Staatlichen Bauhauses in Weimar, was issued in April 1919 with a title-page woodcut by Lyonel Feininger. It declared the school’s goal as the reunification of fine and applied arts through workshop training. Students would complete a preliminary phase and then a three-year apprenticeship in a specific craft — metalwork, weaving, pottery, and others — under a guild structure of masters, journeymen, and apprentices. Architecture was designated the ultimate collective work, toward which all workshop training was oriented. The first masters appointed, in May 1919, were Johannes Itten, Feininger, and Gerhard Marcks. The early school’s orientation was craft-based and showed expressionist influences. The 1919 program was not a statement of industrial modernism; that orientation came later, announced by the 1923 slogan “Art and Technology: A New Unity.”
The institutional context was the immediate aftermath of the 1918 German Revolution. The Weimar Republic’s constitutional assembly was meeting in the same city; the monarchy in Thuringia had just dissolved. The school Gropius opened in this setting was a craft institution organized on guild principles, not a laboratory for technological modernism. What it became between 1919 and its closure in 1933 was a product of pressures — political, economic, and pedagogical — that the 1919 program neither anticipated nor resolved.