Art school as it should be … A visitor looks at photographs of the Bauhaus building at Dessau. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images  Tracing the trajectory of the radical German art and design school from its founding in Dessau by Walter Gropius in 1919 to its closure in Berlin in 1933, the exhibition Bauhaus: Art as Life is superb. It is filled with fascinating and often beautiful things, from table lamps to ceramic pots, glove puppets to advertising posters for Nivea, school party invitations, dresses, photographic portraiture, gorgeous weaving and much besides.  The Bauhaus tried to encompass both old and emerging technologies and bring a new approach to everything – from stained glass to advertising, theatre design to packaging, furniture to painting and sculpture. It was the last thoroughgoing attempt to apply a consistent idea to modern living, and we still live with and among its ideas and artefacts. At the time, everyone involved was feeling the way forward. There is a sense here of the genuinely exploratory.  What also strikes me is not the uniformity or rationality of the Bauhaus aesthetic but its richness and diversity, its humour and playfulness, whether actual children's toys were being designed (who would have thought the spinning top would be worthy of Bauhaus attention), or chess sets and coffee machines. But the Bauhaus was not without its zealots and excessiveness, its cranks and quirks.  "Play becomes celebration; celebration becomes work; work becomes play," wrote Johannes Itten, Bauhaus teacher, colour theorist and nightmare person. Itten, something of a fanatic, aggressively encouraged students to follow his new age mishmash of Hindu and Christian ideas, which involved shaving your head, strong laxatives and fasts, the wearing of monastic robes and the eating of large quantities of garlic – the pervasive smell of which many, including Gropius, complained against.  Of such things the modern table lamp was not born. But it did lead Paul Citroën to produce a ribald drawing of followers of Itten's Mazdaznan hocus pocus vomiting and defecating across the page. That said, Itten's lithographs and painted colour wheels and charts are extremely lovely and, in their way, useful things.  A whole chapter of the catalogue is devoted to the dietary habits of Bauhaus members, especially focusing on Ittens and Paul Klee. Klee liked nothing better than offal – particularly a nice lung ragout. Times were hard, but at the Bauhaus even the minutiae of the everyday was worthy of examination. But life wasn't all rigour and regularity, and the sense of play is particularly evident in photographs of the Bauhaus parties – which became so popular they were even written about in the press. Encounters with the individuals who came together at the Bauhaus are among the strengths of the show. You get a real sense of time and place – sometimes through a haircut, a party dress, a picture of a terrace lunch, or a snapshot of a studio.  Seriousness and fun, study and play, innovation and infighting, charismatic – sometimes mad – teachers, and cohorts of lively students made the Bauhaus a model for later art schools. Dadaists and constructivists, hard line geometry and expressionism, photomontage and crazy drawing, the rational and the loopy all had their place. Among the terrific period photographs of staff and students – the serious, besuited teachers and tousle-haired students who wouldn't look out of place alongside today's Dalston or Brooklyn hipsters – one feels a sense of optimism but also disquiet of a whole world about to be dismantled.  Innovation and pleasure went hand in hand at the Bauhaus. Klee's paintings, and the glove puppets he made for his son Felix, are a delight. So too are the weavings, particularly by Gunta Stölzl. Anni Albers's wall hangings, and Josef Albers's vibrant sandblasted glass abstractions, could have been made yesterday (or tomorrow). They are a visual and technical jolt, electric and dazzling. There were inklings, too, of where the world was headed. Citroën went on to make the monumental collaged cityscape that directly influenced Fritz Lang's nightmarish film Metropolis, and a late Kandinsky painting shows a grim, brown world encroaching on the light-filled Bauhaus utopia.  Not only do we follow the rise and fall of the school against a backdrop of Germany's hyperinflation and the rise of Nazism but it is also a reminder what art schools could be like. There is a lesson here about much contemporary art education: the lack of common purpose, the overweening bureaucracy, the disillusionment and grasping for fees, the box-ticking lostness of so much of it. The Bauhaus had a sense of common purpose and shared ideas, of arguments that meant something, of making things up as you go along. And so much that it gave us was practical, and a delight to the eye. No wonder the National Socialists wanted it closed. Go see, and never mind the garlic.
From the great works of the radical art school to the dietary habits of those in the movement – it's all here in this rich celebration of the Bauhaus, writes Adrian Searle