Known to his friends and associates as Lajkó (the diminutive of his middle name and pronounced Lye-ko[1]), Breuer left his hometown at the age of 18 in search of artistic training and was one of the first and youngest students at the Bauhaus– a radical arts and crafts school that Walter Gropius had founded in Weimar just after the first World War. He was recognized by Gropius as a significant talent and was quickly put at the head of the Carpentry Shop. (Gropius was to remain a lifelong mentor for a man who was 19 years his junior.)
After the school had moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, Breuer returned from a brief sojourn in Paris to join older faculty members such as Josef Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee as a Master, eventually teaching in its newly established department of architecture.