Not merely by its educational mehtods of art teaching which it had developped as an academy of art did the Bauhaus (1919 – 1939) show the way; also its influence upon architecture, painting and design was world-wide. Architects like Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Hannes Meyer, Ludwig Hilberseimer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and painters like Josef Albers, Johannes Itten, Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Laszio Moholy-Nagy, Georg Muche and Oskar Schlemmer belonged to the teaching staff of the Bauhaus. The integration of art into life and the merging of the artist into the industrialized society were theit commun goal.

The chess pieces designed by Josef Hartwig in 1923 deviate from conventional pieces in that they utilize symbols based on the patterns of movement; they combine the stereometric shapes of the cube, the cylindre and the sphere.