Bauhaus Trivia
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49 free Bauhaus trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Bauhaus trivia quiz covers the school that shaped modern design, from Walter Gropius's founding manifesto in Weimar in 1919 to the faculty's decision to close the Berlin school in 1933. There are questions on the three cities and three directors, on Johannes Itten's preliminary course, on the painters who taught there (Klee, Kandinsky, Feininger, Schlemmer), on Marcel Breuer's tubular-steel chairs, Marianne Brandt's metalwork, Herbert Bayer's lowercase typography and Anni Albers's weaving. It also follows what came next: Mies van der Rohe and Moholy-Nagy in Chicago, Gropius and Breuer at Harvard, Black Mountain College, Tel Aviv's White City, the UNESCO listings, and, because it is what half of Google means by the word, the Northampton goth band that called itself Bauhaus 1919. About a third of the questions are easy for anyone who has taken an art history class, a third are medium, and the rest are for people who know which product made the school the most money. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and the histories it cites, and each question carries the sentence that establishes it. If you think one is wrong, use the report button and we will look again.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which motto is most closely tied to Mies van der Rohe, the Bauhaus's last director?
Less is more
Less is more. Mies made the phrase the creed of stripped-down modernism, and the postmodernist Robert Venturi later answered it with a jibe of his own: 'Less is a bore'.
Q 02The word Bauhaus translates literally from German as what?
Building house
Building house. Gropius's 1919 manifesto called building the ultimate aim of all artistic activity and told architects, sculptors and painters to go back to working with their hands.
Q 03Which painter of 'Twittering Machine' taught at the Bauhaus for a decade from 1921?
Paul Klee
Paul Klee. He left in 1931 for a professorship in Düsseldorf, but when the Nazis took power two years later they had him sacked at once and he went home to Switzerland.
Q 04Which American university hired Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius to teach architecture in 1937?
Harvard
Harvard. Gropius had slipped out of Hitler's Germany in 1934 and crossed the Atlantic three years later, and the students he went on to teach there included I. M. Pei.
Q 05Why did the city of Dessau sack Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer in 1930?
His left-wing politics
His left-wing politics. The city dismissed him for 'Communist machinations', and within months he had left for the Soviet Union, taking a group of former Bauhaus students with him.
Q 06After the Gestapo sealed the Berlin Bauhaus in April 1933, who took the final decision to dissolve it?
Its own teachers
Its own teachers. The Gestapo offered to let the school reopen on Nazi terms, but that July Mies van der Rohe and his fellow masters voted to shut it for good rather than accept them.
Q 07Which city has the highest concentration of Bauhaus-style buildings in the world?
Tel Aviv
Tel Aviv. European-trained Jewish architects who emigrated to Palestine in the 1930s built its White City in the new style, and UNESCO made the district a World Heritage Site in 2003.
Q 08Which craft workshop did the Bauhaus drop when it moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925?
Pottery
Pottery. The workshop sat in a master potter's yard at Dornburg, out in the country beyond Weimar, so when the school left for Dessau it was simply left behind.
Q 09Which 19th-century English designer's ideas about art serving society influenced the early Bauhaus?
William Morris
William Morris. Gropius's 1919 Bauhaus manifesto took up his cause, calling for 'a new guild of craftsmen' with no class barrier between the craftsman and the artist.
Q 10Which Belgian Art Nouveau architect put forward Walter Gropius to succeed him in Weimar?
Henry van de Velde
Henry van de Velde. As a Belgian in wartime Germany he had to step down in 1915, and four years later the school he left behind was folded into the new Bauhaus.
Q 11Which Swiss painter created and taught the Bauhaus preliminary course, the Vorkurs, until 1923?
Johannes Itten
Johannes Itten. He followed the Mazdaznan sect and drew students into the faith, a mysticism that set him against Gropius's turn towards industry until he walked out.
Q 12Which Hungarian designer took over the Bauhaus preliminary course in 1923 and later founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago?
László Moholy-Nagy
László Moholy-Nagy. His New Bauhaus ran out of money within a year, so in 1939 he simply opened a successor of his own, the School of Design.
Q 13Which Russian painter, a founder of Der Blaue Reiter, joined the Bauhaus faculty in 1922?
Wassily Kandinsky
Q 21Where in Berlin did Mies van der Rohe reopen the Bauhaus after its Dessau home was shut in 1932?
A disused telephone factory
A disused telephone factory. With no city left to fund it, Mies ran the school there as a private institute, and it lasted only until police searched and sealed the building in April 1933.
Q 22Nazi writers attacking the Bauhaus as 'un-German' stirred controversy over which feature in particular?
Flat roofs
Flat roofs. The architect Paul Schultze-Naumburg, star speaker of Alfred Rosenberg's Nazi culture league, led the charge with his polemics against the 'Jewish-Bolshevik flat roof'.
Q 23After leaving Germany, Mies van der Rohe became head of architecture at which Chicago college?
Wassily Kandinsky. He stayed eleven years, right up to the school's closure in 1933, then moved to France and never again lived in Germany or Russia.
Q 14Oskar Schlemmer, head of the Bauhaus theatre workshop, is best known for which work?
The Triadic Ballet
The Triadic Ballet. First staged in Stuttgart in 1922, it hid its dancers inside sculptural costumes so that they moved as geometric figures rather than as people.
Q 15Which Dutch art movement did Theo van Doesburg come to Weimar to promote among Bauhaus students in the early 1920s?
De Stijl
De Stijl. Van Doesburg, the movement's roving ambassador, settled in Weimar to spread its gospel of straight lines and primary colours, and its ideas left their mark on Gropius and Mies.
Q 16In Josef Hartwig's 1923 Bauhaus chess set, what does the shape of each piece show?
How it moves
How it moves. Hartwig threw out crowns and horses' heads for bare cubes and spheres, so the knight is an L of cubes and the bishop a diagonal cross.
Q 17Which American writer mocked modern architecture in his 1981 book 'From Bauhaus to Our House'?
Tom Wolfe
Tom Wolfe. Fresh from The Right Stuff, he blamed the school's ideas for filling American cities with stark, unadorned boxes in place of the ornate buildings he preferred.
Q 18The Bauhaus's 1926 building in Dessau is best known for which feature of its workshop wing?
A glass curtain wall
A glass curtain wall. Gropius set the supporting columns back inside the building so the facade could hang like a curtain of glass, leaving the workshops on show to the street.
Q 19What major building commission did the Bauhaus win while Hannes Meyer was director?
A trade union college in Bernau
A trade union college in Bernau. The unions had the use of it for barely three years: on 2 May 1933 the Nazis seized the building and made it a training school of their own.
Q 20Which close collaborator did Mies van der Rohe bring in to run the Bauhaus weaving workshop in 1932?
Lilly Reich
Lilly Reich. She and Mies had just fitted out the Tugendhat villa in Brno together, and she went on teaching when the school made its last move to Berlin.
Illinois Institute of Technology
Illinois Institute of Technology. It was still called the Armour Institute when he arrived in 1938, and he went on to design its entire new campus.
Q 24Fleeing Nazi Germany, Walter Gropius and two fellow Bauhaus masters regrouped in a modernist block of flats in which city?
London
London. They lived in the Lawn Road Flats, a concrete block in Hampstead built by the design firm Isokon, before all three moved on to the United States.
Q 25Which Bauhaus master's steel-tube chairs were inspired by bicycle handlebars?
Marcel Breuer
Marcel Breuer. Newly in charge of the furniture workshop, he designed his B3 club chair in 1925 and soon set up a firm of his own in Berlin to sell steel furniture.
Q 26Which Dutch designer did Germany's top court name in 1932 as the creator of the cantilever chair?
Mart Stam
Mart Stam. He had built the first chair with no back legs in 1926 from lengths of gas pipe, and the judges ruled it an artist's creation that belonged to him, not a mere technical trick.
Q 27What was the most profitable product the Bauhaus ever made?
Wallpaper
Wallpaper. First printed by the Rasch company in 1929, the plain patterns paid the school a commission on sales and became the biggest of all its licence incomes.
Q 28The Barcelona chair was designed by Mies van der Rohe and a collaborator for what?
The German Pavilion at a 1929 exposition
The German Pavilion at a 1929 exposition. The building in Barcelona was pulled down within a year, so the chair outlived its home by half a century until a replica rose on the site in 1986.
Q 29Marianne Brandt, whose geometric teapots and ashtrays became design classics, took charge of which Bauhaus workshop in 1928?
Metal
Metal. She took over when her teacher left the school, then struck deals with manufacturers such as Kandem that put the workshop's designs into mass production.
Q 30Anni Albers took up weaving at the Bauhaus for what reason?
Gender bias kept her out of other workshops
Gender bias kept her out of other workshops: she had wanted glass, not thread, yet in 1949 she became the first weaver given a solo show at New York's Museum of Modern Art.