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The Bauhaus, told through six of its leading figures

In the picture, the building Walter Gropius designed in 1926 in the city of Dessau (East Germany) and synonymous with the Bauhaus architecture. EFE / File

More than three quarters of a century after its dissolution, the Bauhaus school of design , art and architecture founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius , continues to fascinate, as evidenced by numerous books have been devoted and to which is added the titled 'The Bauhaus Group', by Nicholas Fox Weber.

Many of the creations of that school, from the famous Barcelona chair by Mies van der Rohe to Marcel Breuer furniture or lamps Marianne Brandt , as now adorn both offices and private homes.

Webber Fox's book focuses, as the subtitle 'Six Masters of Modernism "(Yale University Press), in the biographies of six of its members: those architects Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe , painters Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Josef Albers and the latter's wife, Anni Albers , known for his design of textiles.

As director he was for thirty-four years Albers Foundation, the U.S., the author has taken plenty of first-hand witness accounts of that movement, which coincided in time with the troubled Weimar Republic (1919-1933). Weber

met in the early seventies to Albers, the last two survivors of the Bauhaus, where, working in the small print of his family in Hartford, Connecticut, worked with Annie in a limited edition of prints , and they became an important source of information for the author.

The first biography is the founder of the Bauhaus, Gropius, and the author does not lose the opportunity of examining which would become his first wife, the famous Alma Mahler. Gropius

met her in 1910 during a cure at a spa when Alma had eight years married to the composer Gustav Mahler , who cheat on the architect, as we do with it after meeting the painter Oskar Kokoschka, who left turn, went mad to the point of creating a doll-size and its resemblance to finish seducing and marrying the poet and novelist Franz Werfel.

Paul Klee and Kandinsky

A personality very different from that of Gropius is Paul Klee, an artist who's founder and other members of the group as the painters Lyonel Feininger, Johannes Itten, invited to join them in 1920 and the first offered to take over classes bookbinding.

As Weber explains, the Swiss Klee took the group the spirit of surrealism as the third member of that deals with the author, the aristocratic and elegant Wassily Kandinsky, provided "the Russian soul" ; its "uncompromising attitude toward life and art , his faith in the invincibility of the human spirit came with him from Russia .

In the part devoted to Mies van der Rohe, the third and final director of the Bauhaus (1930-1933), after the somewhat disastrous stage of Marxist Hannes Meyer, ending with the defection of several members, Weber emphasizes the differences of character with Gropius, Mies had been like years ago disciple of the famous architect Peter Behrens in Berlin .

Mies van der Rohe was self-conscious about his humble origins , in contrast to the style of life, thanks to his wealthy family, took Gropius from his youth, and Berlin had already emerged between the two tensions.

Mies eventually married, however, a rich woman, and created a new identity and added the aristocratic "van der" to his surname, he began to dress impeccably, but above all he became one of the most influential architects of century.

Meanwhile, Josef and Anni Albers, the main sources of information the author, embody the fate of many members of the Bauhaus, that after the seizure of power by the Nazis left the U.S., where he worked at several universities and where one them, the Hungarian Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, founded even a New Bauhaus. While

are all that are not all they are, 'The Bauhaus Group 'is a book entertaining and full of information and anecdotes to help better understand the movement that emerged to reconcile the beauty, simplicity and value to industrial production.