Gropius founded the Bauhaus at thirty-five, having already established his credentials as an architect with the Fagus Factory (1911), built in collaboration with Adolf Meyer, which was among the first buildings to use a curtain wall of glass and steel on a structural framework. The Bauhaus was his central intellectual project: not simply a school but a demonstration that the principles he had been developing — the integration of industrial production and artistic intention — could be institutionalised and taught. He resigned the directorship in 1928, believing the school needed new energy; his American career, from 1937, was based at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he trained a generation of American architects and introduced Bauhaus pedagogy into the most influential architecture school in the United States.

Klee taught at the Bauhaus from 1921 to 1931, initially in the bookbinding workshop and subsequently in the weaving workshop, while also offering a course on the theory of pictorial form. His two Bauhaus publications — the Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925) and Point and Line to Plane (1926, co-published with Kandinsky) — represent an attempt to derive visual grammar from first principles: not to describe how pictures look, but to identify the elements from which visual form is constructed and the rules governing their combination. Klee was unusual among the Bauhaus masters in that his own painting practice was essentially incommensurable with the school’s functionalist tendencies; his influence was methodological rather than stylistic. He was stripped of his German citizenship by the Nazis in 1933 and returned to Bern, where he was diagnosed with scleroderma. He produced over nine hundred works in the final year of his life.

Kandinsky came to the Bauhaus in 1922 as one of the most theoretically articulate painters in Europe. His Concerning the Spiritual in Art, written in 1910 and published in 1912, had argued that visual art was on the threshold of a liberation from the object analogous to the liberation music had already achieved — that pure colour and form could act on the emotions directly, without the mediation of representation. At the Bauhaus he taught the preliminary course and the analytical drawing course, developing his colour and form theory into a systematic pedagogy. His wall paintings for the Juryfreie Kunstschau in Berlin (1922) and his contribution to the Bauhaus Stairwell in the Dessau building demonstrated the large-scale application of his theoretical programme. He left Germany in 1933 and settled in Neuilly-sur-Seine, where he continued to paint until his death in 1944.

Albers is the figure who most directly transmitted Bauhaus pedagogy to American art education. He arrived at the Bauhaus as a student in 1920, became a junior master in 1925, and took over the preliminary course after Moholy-Nagy’s departure. When the school closed in 1933 he emigrated immediately, accepting an invitation from Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he taught until 1949. His subsequent appointment at Yale (1950–1958) placed Bauhaus methods at the centre of the most influential American art and design school. His treatise Interaction of Colour (1963) is the most rigorous account of colour perception in the history of art education: the argument, demonstrated through hundreds of exercises, is that colour has no absolute properties, only relational ones — the same colour always appears different depending on its context.

Schlemmer directed the Bauhaus theatre workshop from 1923 to 1929 and was the master most concerned with the human body as a formal and philosophical problem. His Triadic Ballet, first performed in Stuttgart in 1922 and subsequently given its definitive Bauhaus production, used elaborate costumes to reduce the human figure to geometric forms and explored the relationship between bodily movement and abstract shape. Schlemmer understood the stage as the site where all the Bauhaus arts converged: architecture, painting, craft, movement, and light could be integrated in the theatrical event in a way that no single medium could achieve alone. His figurative work — the series of figure paintings and reliefs produced throughout the 1920s — pursues the same problem in two and three dimensions. His work was designated degenerate by the Nazis; he died in poverty in Baden-Baden in 1943.

Moholy-Nagy arrived at the Bauhaus in 1923 and transformed the preliminary course, reorienting it from the expressionist concerns of Itten towards a constructivist engagement with materials, space, and light. His concept of the Neue Sehen (New Vision) — articulated in his book Vision in Motion and in his Bauhaus Book Painting Photography Film — argued that the camera and the optical instruments of industrial modernity had fundamentally extended and altered human perception, and that art education needed to engage with these new visual possibilities. His Light-Space Modulator (1930), a kinetic sculpture designed to project patterns of light and shadow, is among the earliest works of what would later be called light art. He emigrated to Chicago in 1937 and founded the New Bauhaus, subsequently the School of Design at IIT. He died of leukaemia in 1946, still writing.

Mies was the third and final director of the Bauhaus, appointed in 1930 to rescue the school from the political difficulties that had developed under Hannes Meyer. He ran the Berlin Bauhaus as a private school after the Dessau municipality withdrew funding, and closed it in July 1933 rather than submit to Nazi demands regarding the curriculum and faculty. His own architecture had by this point already produced the Barcelona Pavilion (1929) — the most formally rigorous demonstration of the free plan and the expressive possibilities of structural steel that had yet been built. He emigrated to the United States in 1937 and spent the remainder of his career at the Illinois Institute of Technology, designing its campus and building a body of work — the Farnsworth House, the Lake Shore Drive apartments, Crown Hall, the Seagram Building — that represents the most consistent and demanding realisation of structural honesty as an aesthetic principle in the history of modern architecture. He was the son of a stonemason, and the precision of his steel connections retains something of the craftsman’s attention to joinery.

Bayer studied at the Bauhaus from 1921 and directed its typography workshop from 1925 to 1928. His Universal typeface (1925), a geometric sans-serif using only lowercase letterforms, was designed on the argument that the distinction between upper and lower case represented a historical convention without phonetic or communicative justification, and that a single-case alphabet would reduce the complexity of typesetting without loss of legibility. The typeface was not widely adopted in his lifetime but influenced the development of geometric sans-serif typography throughout the twentieth century. Bayer emigrated to New York in 1938 and subsequently worked for Container Corporation of America, for whom he designed one of the most sustained corporate design programmes in American history, and for the Aspen Institute, where he was instrumental in establishing the Aspen Design Conference.

Breuer arrived at the Bauhaus as a student in 1920 and became master of the furniture workshop in 1925, at twenty-three. The chair he designed that year — initially called the B3 and later renamed the Wassily after Kandinsky, who admired it — was the first piece of furniture made from bent tubular steel. The material came from the handlebar of his Adler bicycle; the structural logic came from the Bauhaus training in the relationship between material properties and formal possibilities. Breuer emigrated to London in 1935 and to the United States in 1937, where Gropius had secured him a teaching appointment at Harvard. His subsequent architectural career produced a large body of residential and institutional work culminating in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (1966), whose inverted trapezoidal mass and raw concrete surface represent one of the most assertive acts of urban architecture in twentieth-century America.