Bauhaus Magazine Cover 1928 – Masters of the Bauhaus Poster

This poster reproduces the cover of the magazine bauhaus: zeitschrift für gestaltung, a double issue numbered 2/3 and published in 1928. Twelve photographic portraits of the Bauhaus' masters are set in a strict grid beneath the lowercase masthead.

The magazine was produced quarterly by the Bauhaus at Dessau and worked as a demonstration of the school’s own design thinking. Its lowercase sans-serif setting and its use of photography as primary visual material belong to the New Typography that Bauhaus designers were developing through the late 1920s. The cover carries no printed designer credit and is commonly attributed to Joost Schmidt, who had taken charge of the typography and advertising workshop after Herbert Bayer left the school in 1928.

The double issue appeared at a pivotal moment for the Bauhaus. In 1928 Walter Gropius stepped down as director and was succeeded by the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer, whose name appears on the cover as publisher, with Ernst Kállai taking over the editorship of the magazine. The portrait grid records the Dessau teaching staff of that year: Wassily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger and Paul Klee; Hannes Meyer, Hinnerk Scheper and Josef Albers; Joost Schmidt, Gunta Stölzl and Hans Wittwer; Ernst Kállai, Oskar Schlemmer and Mart Stam.

Presenting the faculty as a field of equally weighted photographic portraits was itself a statement. It placed painters such as Kandinsky and Klee next to the workshop masters and the newer architecture staff brought in under Meyer, framing the school as a collective enterprise rather than the work of a single figure. The modular arrangement and the preference for the camera over drawn illustration reflect the direction the Bauhaus took across its Dessau years.