Paul Klee, Baum und Architektur--Rhythmen (Tree and Architecture--Rhythms), 1920, NGA 130844

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.

Paul Baum (22 September 1859 in Meissen – 15 May 1932 in San Gimignano), was a German painter, draftsman, and printmaker. He was the most important representative of Neo-Impressionism in Germany. Paul Baum began as a flower painter at the Royal Porcelain Factory in Saxony and studied with Friedrich Preller at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. A year later, he switched to the Weimar Saxon-Grand Ducal Art School, where he studied under Theodor Hagen until 1887. During a trip to Paris in 1890, he had his first encounter with French Impressionism. Afterward, he left Dachau and spent four years in Knokke, Belgium, where he became friends with Camille Pissarro and the Belgian pointillist painter Théo van Rysselberghe. In 1894, he returned to Dresden and became part of the Dresden Secession. While visiting Berlin in 1902, he became a member of the Berlin Secession. In 1909, he joined the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (N.K.V.M.) and participated in their first exhibition. That same year, he received the Villa Romana Prize, which included a one-year stay in Rome. He then traveled to Tuscany, remaining there for four years in San Gimignano and, then, Florence. After the outbreak of war in 1914, he returned to Germany and became a professor at the Academy. He died of pneumonia in 1932.