[Climbing the Mast], gelatin silver print

The Bauhaus was influenced by 19th and early-20th-century artistic directions such as the Arts and Crafts movement, as well as Art Nouveau and its many international incarnations, including the Jugendstil and Vienna Secession. In the Weimar Republic, a renewed liberal spirit allowed an upsurge of radical experimentation in all the arts. The most important influence on Bauhaus was modernism, a movement whose origins lay as early as the 1880s. After World War Germans of left-wing views were influenced by the cultural experimentation that followed the Russian Revolution, such as constructivism. The Bauhaus style, however, also known as the International Style, was marked by harmony between the function of an object or a building and its design. Bauhaus is characterized by simplified forms, rationality, and functionality, and the idea that mass production was reconcilable with the individual artistic spirit.

László Moholy-Nagy is arguably one of the greatest influences on post-war art education in the United States. A modernist and a restless experimentalist from the outset, the Hungarian-born artist was shaped by Dadaism, Suprematism, Constructivism, and debates about photography. When Walter Gropius invited him to teach at the Bauhaus, in Dessau, Germany, he took over the school's crucial preliminary course, and gave it a more practical, experimental, and technological bent. He later delved into various fields, from commercial design to theater set design, and also made films and worked as a magazine art director. But his greatest legacy was the version of Bauhaus teaching he brought to the United States, where he established the highly influential Institute of Design in Chicago.