The Formalism Style and its Application in the Bauhaus School of Germany

 
 
The present research is concerned with investigating the effect of the Formalism style on the Bauhaus school. Every picture is composed of multiple simple layers which significantly contribute to the aesthecity of an art work as long as it is designed following the visual art principles. The emergence of this thought  various domains of art is attributable to the creation of diverse and salient art works which have drawn a lot of attention throughout the history of art. Formalism accentuates formal structures and has influenced various works in literature, cinema, music, painting, photography, sculpture and architecture, which are formally distinct, yet share the same features in nature so that simplicity and purity, as the intrinsic characteristics of Formalism, manifest differently in these areas.
In the last decades, formalism has always been a topic of thought and discussion among various European critics and theorists like Roger Fry and Clive Bell. Since 1920s, formalism has gained its reputation through various researches on the stylistic characteristics and formal structure of the literal works conducted by a group of Russian authors including Viktor Shklovsky. Known as formalists, they merely devote their attention to scrutinizing forms. Formalism is an action which highlights form or formal structure.
In this study, we have attempted to answer the following questions by assuming that: How similar is the Bauhaus school to the formalism structuralism and whether form stands against content in the Bauhaus school?
As an analytical-comparative study, the ongoing research adopts the qualitative approach to analyze the data collected via library method.
The term “formalism” accounts for various concepts. It is noteworthy that formalists are inclined to believe that form does not serve as a container to express content, but the content of a literary work plays a pivotal role in creating its form. Therefore, the content is a major element which determines the form, thereby deserving a close scrutiny. Kant’s concerns about the independence of art and his account of beauty leads us to an important theory named Formalism. Accordingly, all artistic values and aesthetics have their roots in the form, and hence leave no room for the concepts of content, meaning and function. 
A number of central modifications in formalism and appealing discussions on the functions of the shape and form have triggered significant changes in other fields. We merely need to focus our mind on the static characteristic of posters and typography in the field of “poster designing and typography”. When form is recognized as the structural (formal) quality of pictures and letters, “space form” and “form and function” are two fundamental concepts which date back to the dynamic trend of the Bauhaus school, which in turn was attributable to the aesthetic theory of formalism. Another example comes from our insight into the nature of iconicity in the cinema. Besides the importance of the thoughts and opinions propounded by such modernists as Clive Bell, who believe in the nobility of the form within an artistic work, most part of the related literature place an important value on the role of Russian Structuralism and Russian Formalism streams in the developments of visual arts in the early 1920s, especially when the Bauhaus school of architecture and applied arts was established in the 1920s in Weimar, Germany, and then dissolved after National Socialist Party came to power. Taking a close examination of the educational foundations of the Bauhaus school reveals the influence of formalists’ opinions on this school of thought. Examples of such thinkers includes Wassily Kandinsky who not only was recognized as a pioneer in abstract art, but also exerted a significant effect on the Bauhausian thought owing to his Russian background and friendship with Russian formalists. He proposed the view that the “forms” of objects have a kind of music in their nature. The Bauhaus school, influence by Russian structuralism, seek to revive a more popular art, whose experimentalism and objective point of view inspired Gyorgy Kepes to write the book entitled “The Language of Vision”.
What discussed above was the etiology of the shape and form (in terms of their morphology and their interrelationships) which manifested in abstract, expressionism, minimalism post painterly abstraction and Op art, and have remained in the artistic expression method until recently; a form which was conveyed from formalism to the Bauhaus school, and then affected applied and ornamental art, entered painting, penetrated into the narrow openings of the rooms and influenced all furniture and fixtures.