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Under his leadership, the school moved during a struggle for survival with Germany’s ever-encroaching National Socialist Party, whose interference demanded experimental work be toned down as it seized control of the school. End of the Bauhaus News from Dezeen Events Guide, a listings guide covering the leading design-related events taking place around the world. Plus occasional updates. Dezeen Awards China Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy arrived at the school in 1923 to teach preliminary classes and run a metal workshop, but his real passion was for photography.
Showcasing the school's female architects, photographers, painters, designers, and sculptors, the book includes prolific figures such as Anni Albers, as well as lesser known artists like Helene Borner, who headed up the school's textile workshop. The Weimar school founded by architect Walter Gropius in 1919 was inspired by Expressionist art and the work of architect Frank Lloyd Wright and designer William Morris. Its creators believed in bringing artists and craftspeople together for a utopian purpose. Albers Foundation director Nicholas Fox Weber offers a personal insight into Bauhaus with this title, which relates stories he was told by Anni and Josef Albers – the revered married couple who studied and taught at the school. From 1925 to 1930, Gropius and Moholy-Nagy were responsible for the publication of 14 Bauhaus books. Supported in the practical aspects of publishing by Lucia Moholy, the aim of the project was to depict the challenges and accomplishments of the Bauhaus. In addition, monographic texts by both German and international authors were to awaken an understanding for the diverse currents of the avant-garde movement. Although the Bauhaus abandoned many aspects of traditional fine-arts education, it was deeply concerned with intellectual and theoretical approaches to its subject. Various aspects of artistic and design pedagogy were fused, and the hierarchy of the arts which had stood in place during the Renaissance was levelled out: the practical crafts - architecture and interior design, textiles and woodwork - were placed on a par with fine arts such as sculpture and painting.This iconic building, with its spare rectangular shape, glass-curtain walls, and distinctive vertical logo extending up one side, encapsulates the spirit of Bauhaus architecture, and predicts many of the developments that would emerge out of it in the years to come. As the architectural critic Lee F. Mindel wrote, Gropius's "innovative use...of industrial sash, glass curtain walls, and an asymmetrical pinwheel design forged an unforgettable path in the development of what we now call modernism and the International Style." From the Publisher. Nicholas Fox Weber, for thirty-four years head of the Albers Foundation, spent many years with Anni and Josef Albers, the only husband-and-wife artistic pair at the Bauhaus (she was a textile artist; he was a professor and an artist, in glass, metal, wood, and photography). The Alberses told him their own stories and described life at the Bauhaus with their fellow artists and teachers, Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, as well as with these figures' lesser-known wives and girlfriends. Marcel Breuer's classic Model B3 chair is a revolutionary take on the classic upholstered 'club chair' of the nineteenth century drawing room, a sleek amalgamation of curving, overlapping stainless steel tubes, with taut rectangular fabric panels floating like geometric forms in space. The artist himself described the chair as "my most extreme work . . . the least artistic, the most logical, the least 'cozy' and the most mechanical." But it was also his most influential, exemplifying the groundbreaking developments in functional design that were marking out the Bauhaus by the mid-1920s. Lightweight, easily moved, and easily mass-produced, it met all the requirements of the school's design philosophy, its components arranged with a clarity that made its structure and purpose immediately legible. The new introduction focuses on the centenary, and claims that 100 years later, Bauhaus continues to inspire the work of designers in a wide range of fields, as well as teaching methods. It says that the “holistic, often utopian aspiration to reform all aspects of life” seen at the Bauhaus school “has lost none of its fascination today”. Whether you’re a design aficionado or a casual reader intrigued by the legacy of Bauhaus, these top three books will undoubtedly enrich your knowledge and understanding of this influential movement.
Weekly updates on the latest design and architecture vacancies advertised on Dezeen Jobs. Plus occasional news. Dezeen Awards Under the leadership of Gropius, the Bauhaus movement made no special distinction between the applied and fine arts. Painting, typography, architecture, textile design, furniture-making, theater design, stained glass, woodworking, metalworking—these all found a place there.
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As we approach the Bauhaus centennial, this is a defining account of its energy and rigor, not only as a trailblazing movement in modernism but also as a paradigm of art education, where creative expression and cutting-edge ideas led to simultaneously functional and beautiful creations. Featured artists include Josef Albers, Marianne Brandt, Walter Gropius, Gertrud Grunow, Paul Klee, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Lilly Reich. Magdalena Droste studied art history and literature in Aachen and Marburg. From 1980 she worked at the Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin, after which she worked as a professor of art history at the BTU Cottbus. She has been responsible for numerous exhibitions and publications across all Bauhaus themes and artists. Other beginner-friendly options include “Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity” by Barry Bergdoll, and “The Bauhaus: #itsalldesign” by Mateo Kries and Jolanthe Kugler. Which book is suitable for those who want to dive deeper into Bauhaus design theory? This book is made in collaboration with the Bauhaus-Archiv/Museum für Gestaltung in Berlin, the world’s largest collection on the history of the Bauhaus. Some 550 illustrations including architectural plans, studies, photographs, sketches, and models record not only the realized works but also the leading principles and personalities of this idealistic creative community through its three successive locations in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin. From informal shots of group gymnastics to drawings guided by Paul Klee, from extensive architectural plans to an infinitely sleek ashtray by Marianne Brandt, the collection brims with the colors, materials, and geometries that made up the Bauhaus vision of a “total” work of art.
The updated version of the book contains around 250 new images with new captions, updated biographies of key people from the Bauhaus alongside bibliographies of their work and a new foreword. Moholy-Nagy onace stated that "to be a user of machines is to be of the spirit of this century." After he became the director of the Bauhaus's preliminary course in 1923, these ideas played a leading role in the school's development along the rationalist, Constructivist lines for which it is now remembered. He felt that the Bauhaus's early emphasis on Gesamtkunstwerk or the total work of art - influenced by the Expressionist philosophy of Itten - should be redirected toward an ideal of Gesamtwerk, a total work, which he identified with life's biological unity. Artistic experience was not to be partitioned off from life, but was to take its place as an integrated aspect of a broader, embodied perceptual process. Light Prop for an Electric Stage exemplifies this philosophy: Moholy-Nagy felt that its use of motion and time-bound light-patterns - dependent upon the viewer to create their own unique, narrative experience of the work - would transform his audience from passive recipients into active participants within an immersive creative environment. She points out that Gropius’s primary motivation was a belief in art, which he wanted to touch all aspects of human life. Plenty of others have done this, but it can’t be said too often. Whatever valid critiques might be made of his work, to dismiss him as a mechanistic functionalist is not one of them. She is keen even to defend the Pan Am building that, as a grand old man, Gropius designed above Grand Central Station in New York, terminating the view down Park Avenue in a way that even sympathetic critics see as a monolithic mistake.The idea of an immersive artistic environment was highly attractive to the second-wave avant-garde movements of the 1960s, and sure enough, Moholy-Nagy's Light Prop received great interest during that decade. It was seen as a forerunner of the Kinetic Art movement which was by that point in full swing, and was included in several exhibitions of kinetic sculpture, as well as being exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1968. Two working replicas of the Light Prop were made in 1970, and the Tate constructed a third in 2006. The work therefore indicates the influence which Bauhaus themes and forms would have on the modern spirit of later avant-garde art movements. Moholy-Nagy was known for darkroom experimentation, utilizing photograms and exploring light to create abstract elements through distortion, shadow and skewed lines, similar to the works of Man Ray though conceived separately from them. Bauhausbücher 9: Wassily Kandinsky „Punkt und Linie zur Fläche. Beitrag zur Analyse der malerischen Elemente“, 1926. Bayer's typeface was never cast in metal, but its influence has been widespread and longstanding. As well as standing at the forefront of developments in International Style typography across the 1920s-50s, influencing the Architype Bayer and Architype Schwitters typefaces amongst others, it is also the inspiration for Google's Product Sans, and for Bayer Next, a typeface designed by Sascha Lobe for the Bauhaus-Archiv Museum in Berlin in 2014.
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