Day Nine

NOTES

BAUHAUS 1919 - 1933
14 years
33 faculty
1250 students

1919 - 1925
In city Weimar

1925 - 1932
In city Dessau
Is where they really evolve. Dessau is a factory town and they're designing for the industry.

1932 - 1933
In city Berlin

In 1923 they do their first public exhibition. Not such a good thing because a year late they get a letter of resignation.

Utopian desire to create a new spiritual society

Unity of Artists and Craftsmen to build for the future.

Ideas from all the Advanced Art and Design Movements were explored and applied to functional design.

Core people of Bauhaus
Paul Klee, Moholy Nagy, Johnannas Itten, Herbert Bayer, Kandinsky, Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Oscar Schiemmer, Joseph Alberts

Walter Gropius 1919- 1928
Director of the Bauhaus

- Bauhaus Manifesto is basically the rules and guidelines
- Gerhard Marks does sculpture / pottery shot
- Lyonel Feringer does painting
- Johannes Itten does preliminary courses
- Johannes was very important because basically sculpts the basics of our courses today.
- Itten lives until 1967
- Very interested in the physical nature of materials
- They would do drawings of textures
- What is the materiality?
- Still being taught in European schools
- Americans are more pragmatic
- He taught the fundamental designs and principles of art
- Basics that everybody has to understand
- Color, material, to draw

Lazio Moholy Nagy
- Hungarian constructivist
- He's interested in materials
- art should have function and purpose
- Art should have a service for society
- He's experimenting with photography, montage, photograins, combining imagery, and typography
- Itten is replaced by Moholy Nagy
- Moholy Nagy looking for a way to unify photography and typography.
- He creates typophoto which is a combination of photography and typography
- He was interested in total communication
- Emphasis has to be on absolute clarity, legibility, and should never be impaired by an aesthetic.
- He does not like deconstructive theory
- He is trying to create a new graphic language and saw it as a new kind of literature.
- photoclastics basically photo collages. Back then it was harder. now it's a lot easier.

Herbert Behrens created a Bauhaus poster
- he was a student and became a professor of bauhaus
- his poster was very good because it wrapped up everything the Bauhaus stood for.
- Also gives us the universal alphabet. Behrens idea that we don't really have an alphabet. we have two alphabets. We have uppercase and lowercase.
- He rethinks the communication properties of the alphabet.
- This guy as a student is rethinking the alphabet
- sanserif type, asymmetry, practical use of design, negative space, minimalism is the nutshell of modern art

-In 1928 Gropius, Moholy leave the Bauhaus.
-Mies van der Rohe is from a school that's blood and soil. very down to business

JAN TSCHICHOLD
- Tschicochold created 1922 "Leipziger Messe" poster which is hand text
- studied calligraphy
- The ideas of the Bauhaus is not getting it's way towards America
- 1923 (Tichicochold 21 years old) goes to the Bauhaus exhibition. There he is exposed to all the ideas they're exploring. <- it rocks his world - In 1925 he's actually writing and publishing a paper that is explaining the new typography to printers, type setters, and designer - This paper had heavy rules, heavy type, sanserif type, etc - He wrote the "New Typography" He's saying that everything is crap and everything needs to be sanserif and asymmetrical. - Aim of every typographic work to be the delivery of a message in the shortest most efficient manner. Form follows function. Modernist. The Bauhaus. - He is harassed by the Nazi because of his typography and haul him off to jail. - He has to leave the country and thus turns over learning new typography - lives the rest of his life in Switzerland. He returns to and embraces classical typography


PERSONAL THOUGHTS
Lots of Bauhaus today! I love the Bauhaus movement. Learning about all the different core people of the Bauhaus was interesting. I think the most interesting one for me would be Moholy Nagy. The fact that he was a constructivist, experimented with different combinations, and really stressed absolute clarity, legibility, and should never be impaired by an aesthetic. "Education is a living thing. Just like art. Art is not static - Algebra is static" What an inspiring quote. This is why we go to art school. You went on a tangent on how art schools are more innovative and willing to experiment. I cannot express how much I agree with this. I'm a transfer student and last year attended Michigan State University. It's a big 10 college. Very enormous lots of greek life. I took a few studio courses and it was way to traditional. The problem I had with University art courses is that it doesn't challenge students to experiment. So learning about the Bauhaus was really inspiring that we as students should be experimenting everyday with our school projects.



QUESTIONS
Where there other artist like Moholy Nagy who experimented with photography combinations? Who were they?