see also:

The Bauhaus school

6 The Bauhaus and the New Typography
 

Chapter 3 discussed the unstable situation in German society after the disastrous defeat of the German military in the First World War. Reflecting the polarized political situation of that era, the members of Berlin Dada had thrust themselves into the fray, making political works that excoriated the foibles of the Weimar Republic (1919-33) as well as the violent nationalism of the nascent Nazi movement in Germany. The "Weimar Republic" denotes the democratic government based in the small city of Weimar that led Germany between 1919 and 1933. It oversaw an era marked by artistic ferment as well as social instability that was aggravated by periodic economic crises. It was into this volatile climate that Russian Constructivism was first introduced to Europe around 1920. Notably, one the most significant early routes whereby Russian Constructivism was brought to the attention of artists in Germany was through the efforts of the Berlin Dadaists. Several members of the group had joined the German Communist Party, and they hoped that a Communist revolution could rise from the ashes of the war in their own nation.

see also:

Dadaism

Dada and Russian Constructivism

In 1920, at the Berlin Dada exhibition called the "First International Dada Fair," the slogan "Art is Dead! Long Live the Machine Art of Tatlin!" was displayed prominently on the wall of the main gallery. Serving as a sort of unofficial theme for the exhibition, this idealization of Tatlin's Constructivist art had more to do with the Berlin Dadaists' embrace of Utopian Communism than with their employment of Russian Constructivist aesthetic strategies. In a similar vein, in 1920, Raoul Hausmann made a photomontage called Tatlin at Home (fig. 6.1). This work shows a man-machine hybrid, his brain made up of various industrial pans, including an automobile steering column. The figure's left eye is merged with a wheel from a car, suggesting that Tatlin's artistic vision is dispassionate and clinical, the vision of an engi­neer. In the upper right corner, a photograph of a ship's propeller seems to spring from the man's brain, like a thought bubble in a comic book. The photo is not an actual portrait of Tatlin, but a found image that is just as anonymous and impersonal as any of the other photographic elements. Hausmann later stated that he had only a vague notion of the guiding principles of Russian Constructivism in 1920, and had derived the idea of a machine-man representing Tatlin through an almost random process. At this time, the members of Berlin Dada were especially disgusted with the prominence in Germany of Expressionist an, which they believed was hopelessly subjective and romantic in outlook. Dadaists argued, somewhat inaccurately, that Expressionist artists loved to wallow in their own emotional tribulations while ignor­ing the reality of post-war society.

An influx of Russian emigres in the early 1920s, including El Lissitzky, Naum Gabo (1890-1977), and Antoine Pevsner (1884-1962), created a critical mass of artists interested in exploring Constructivist principles. Gabo and Pevsner were broth­ers who had left Russia for Germany in 1922 because their views on Constructivism, which stressed its aesthetic dimension, were not considered sufficiently orthodox by more politically minded Soviet artists. Combined with the high quality of the German printing industry, this influence made Germany the center of Constructivist thought. Theo van Doesburg's Constructivist Congress of 1922 served as an important touchstone for this com­munity of artists. Under the influence of Kurt Schwkters and Theo van Doesburg, Germany remained the focus for artists who sought to explore the connections between the Dada and Constructivist modes of making art. It should be noted that by 1922 the De Stijl movement led by Van Doesburg had been essentially folded into the general concern for geo­metric form in the 1920s that goes under the name "International Constructivism." International Constructivism, often called just "Constructivism," is distinct from the Russian movement of the same name in that it was not always associated with revolutionary Communist ideology. While it may seem difficult to tease out the two related strands of the Constructivist movement—and they often overlap—designs made in Europe including those by Russian artists such as Lissitzky (see fig. 5.38) are classified as International Constructivism.

The Constructivists concept of the artist as engineer had a number of parallels in Dada, whose members also rejected taking on the role of the fine artist because of its association with con­ventional aesthetics. The term "photomontage" in fact originated with Berlin Dada, who thought of themselves as "assemblers" (in German, a montage is an assembly). An interest in the potential of photomontage to serve as a tool of social activism united Dadaists and Russian Constructivists. It was important to Dada artists who wanted to make works that engaged with society to find a strategy that allowed them to represent the modern world in a novel way, without recourse to conventional realistic painting techniques. The Dadaists shared with the Russian Constructivists a sense that abstraction, by definition, could only communicate ideas in a limited fashion, and that it was necessary to reference the real world in order to convey their polemical beliefs.

 

see also:

Raoul Hausmann

6.1 Raoul Haussmann, Tallin at Home, 1920.

see also:

Expressionism

German Expressionism
 

Despite the inroads made by Dada and Constructivist artists early in the 1920s, it is important to remember that Expressionism remained a dominant force in German post-war culture. Before the outbreak of war in 1914, Germany had been perhaps the most important locus for Expressionists such as Oscar Kokoschka. The gallery owner Herwanh Walden had helped to create a thriving scene for artists who portrayed subjective, emotional states of mind. His Berlin gallery Der Sturm and the journal of the same name were essential purveyors of Expressionist aesthetics in cities such as Berlin.

 

Expressionist Film

 

The turmoil after the war naturally led to a situation where artists sought to use a language of feeling, creating a subjective sense of mood and atmosphere through their work. Some of the most stunning Expressionist projects in the post-war era were produced by German filmmakers. The government-subsidized film studio called Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (UFA) oversaw a "golden age" of German cinema during the years of the Weimar Republic. The largest film studio in Europe, UFA became internationally renowned for its Expressionist dramas and spectacular sets and special effects.

    The breakthrough film for UFA was made by the director Robert Wiene (1881-1938) immediately after the First World War ended in 1918. Called The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, this movie recounts the story of a gruesome series of murders in a small German town. Narrated in flashback by a young man who recounts how a hypnotist, the Dr Caligari of the title, and his zombie-like assistant come to his town and wreak havoc on the local citizenry. The Cabinet of Dr Caligari ends with what the film industry calls a "reveal," a dramatic new revelation that completely changes the viewer's interpretation of what has gone on before in the story. In this case, the "reveal" is the fact that the narrator is really an inmate in an insane asylum and the story is nothing more than a demented fantasy based on the doctors and patients where he lives. This story of a madman had particular resonance in post-war European society, where so many young men had returned from the trenches suffering from "shell shock," the term given at that time to sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder.

    The set designers of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari created dramatic Expressionist scenery, complete with distorted, illogical spaces and exaggerated, spiky forms (fig. 6.2) in order to express the tortured psyche of the narrator. Walter Reimann (1887-1936), Walter Rohrig (1897-1945), and Hermann Warm (1889-1976), the Expressionist artists in charge of the design, also devised fantastical lighting techniques that gave the film a forbidding atmosphere of mystery and violence. The highly subjective mood of the story is greatly enhanced by the compelling nature of their achievement.

    Posters advertising the release of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari share the aura of emotional distress that was depicted in the film's story, sets, and lighting. One striking poster was designed by Erich Ludwig Stahl (b. 1887) and Otto Arpke (1886-1943), collectively known as Stahl-Arpke. Their 1920 poster shows an empty room, the "cabinet," or office, of the title, with a lone chair before a desk with one burning candle (fig. 6.3). In traditional art, an empty chair often symbolizes a dead person, which adds to the poster's projection of unease. The chair and desk, as well as the walls and window in the background, are oddly shaped, their distorted forms suggestive of a world gone mad. The candle projects just enough light to make out the misshapen room, while dark shadows coat the edges of the floor and mask the ceiling completely. Stahl-Arpke had one advantage over the film's set designers, whose works were filmed in black and white; the poster artist is able to introduce a fiery palette of reds and oranges that complements the distorted space and eerie lighting. At the top of the poster, an odd assortment of hand-drawn letters, some nearly sans serif while others echo the blackletter tradition, sprawl topsy-turvy across the image in a shape that mimics the floor design.
 

6.2 Robert Wiene, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1919. Film still.

6.3 Erich Ludwig Stahl and Otto Arpke, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1919 Institut Collectie Nederland, Rijswijk, Amsterdam.

Metropolis

In 1927, UFA released its much-anticipated blockbuster science-fiction film Metropolis. Directed by Fritz Lang (1890-1976), Metropolis featured what at the time were the most expensive sets ever built for a film. The dramatic Expressionist scenery was populated by over 30,000 extras, to create one of the most spectacular film sets in cinema history (fig. 6.4). Metropolis relates a convoluted story about the social injustices of a large modern city, where a small elite live high in the skies in beautiful sky­scrapers while the masses of nameless and faceless workers toil underground in hellish industrial plants. This underground world of deep shadows projects a pervasive Expressionist theme of anxiety and alienation. Lang combined the basic theme of injustice with a love story as well as an Oedipal drama that features tension between a father and son.

    In the film's semi-coherent narrative, the administrator of Metropolis concocts a plan to defeat the leader of the rebellious workers by replacing her with a robot. This female robot is fashioned by a diabolical scientist in a frightening laboratory space that combines high-tech machinery with spiky, medieval architecture. In this way, Metropolis combined two themes that are pervasive in German Expressionism after the war; the fear of machines and the fear of women. In contrast to the technological utopianism embraced by artists of De Stijl and the Russian Constructivists, Expressionists offered an alternative view heavily influenced by the destruction wrought by machines during the First World War. For these artists, modern industrial society was a nightmarish place that portended a coming "dystopia," or anti-utopia, in this case a vision of a soulless, corrupt, and alienating future. While Lang shared the Constructivists' fascination with machines, he interpreted their effects on society in an almost diametrically opposed manner. The workers whose repetitive drudgery is a central visual motif of Metropolis perform their tasks in a mechanical way that resonates with the man-machine hybrids of the technological Utopians. Yet, their labor is destroying their individuality, transforming them into soulless automatons. Additionally, many male Expressionists such as Lang made works that project a distinct unease with respect to assertive women. It would seem that the "New Woman" movement in Germany, with its call for greater social and economic justice for women, was perceived by some as a threat to tradi­tional, patriarchal society. The emotionally laden language of Expressionism proved to be a perfect vehicle to convey these anxiety-provoking themes.

A poster by Heinz Schulz-Neudamm (1898-1969) for Metropolis uses an Expressionist idiom to suggest some of the major themes of the film (fig. 6.5). The angular, attenuated shapes of the letters at the top of the poster perfectly mesh with the visionary architecture and powerful beams of light depicted below it. This stylized, Expressionist title lettering sets the emotional tone for the poster, while the more pedestrian factual information at the bottom of the image is drawn with an anonymous bold sans serif. The robot woman that is at the center of Lang's narrative hovers in the foreground, confronting the viewer with a steady gaze. However, the chilling Expressionist vision of the future in a technologically advanced society was contested in Germany by artists committed to the belief that the machine would help Europe build a more just and equitable society.
 

6.4 Fritz Lang, Metropolis. 1927. Film still.

6.5 Heinz Schulz-Neudamm, Metropolis, 1927. Poster.

The Arbeitsrat fur Kunst

The political and artistic activist group named the Arbeitsrat fur Kunst ("Workers' Council for Art") played an important role in articulating the role of artists and designers in rebuilding German society after the First World War. Founded in December 1918 by the Expressionist architect Bruno Taut (1880-1938), the group was designed to serve as a think-tank where artists could help plan the new direction for postwar Germany. The founders of the Arbeitsrat, which included the art critic Julius Meier-Graefe, held strong Utopian beliefs, and many hoped that a new society would be built on Marxist principles of equality and justice. Taut, in composing the group's manifesto, asserted that artists would play a central role in terms of molding public opin­ion through the employment of the visual arts. He wrote, "Art and the people must form a unity. ... From now on the artist alone will be responsible for the visible fabric of the new state." This suggestion that artists were destined to play a leadership role in the political arena had often been theorized by Expressionist avant-garde artists; the dreams of the Arbeitsrat met the same fate as those of their predecessors, as the group never succeeded in making its vision into a reality.

    A woodcut attributed to Max Pechstein (1881-1955) serves as a son of visual manifesto of the Arbeitsrat (fig. 6.6). Designed as the cover for an essay outlining the group's beliefs, the image shows three people holding the tools of an engineer and a construction worker. Together, these figures appear to have crafted the words "Arbeitsrat fur Kunst Berlin," which soar outward from them. The spiky, abstract drawing forming a vision of stars and beams of light in the background is typical of Expressionist art. The subset of Expressionists with Utopian aspirations in particular often envisioned crystal cathedrals as a metaphor of spiritual transformation. Similarly, the oblique reference to non-Western art in the use of the "primitive" mask on the face of the figure to the left represents another key element from the repertoire of Expressionism. The use of the woodcut medium itself harks back to the medieval prints that were an important source of inspiration for German Expressionist artists. One element of the Arbeitsrat's vision for the future, its call for more collaboration in the arts that are to be the product of a close-knit community, was in fact rooted in an idealized vision of the past. Many Expressionists from the early twentieth century asserted that the medieval period had been a golden age of fraternal collaboration, when artists and craftsmen had worked side by side anonymously in pursuit of a common goal.

The membership of the Arbeitsrat was made up of artists and critics from a variety of fields, although architects in some ways dominated the group. When Taut dispiritedly resigned in 1919 because of the failure to achieve any significant political impact, leadership of the group was transferred to Walter Gropius, an architect who had worked before the war in the studio of Peter Behrens. Gropius eschewed direct political action on the part of the Arbeitsrat, instead refocusing the group on a visionary architectural plan he called the Bauprojekt ("building project"). This imaginary building was to serve as a center for the social and cultural regeneration of Germany. Again, the Utopian nature of the plan bears witness to the Expressionist roots of the Arbeitsrat—there was a pervasive belief in the group that Germany could be the site of a dramatic, if unspecified, social and even spiritual transformation. The Arbeitsrat soon folded as the violence and turmoil of the immediate post-war era did much to undermine people's faith in speculative, Utopian projects. However, two important themes devised at the Arbeitsrat would reappear in Gropius's later work: first, that the visual arts could play an instrumental role in the building of a new society; and, second, that architecture must assume a leadership role in the arts because it afforded the opportunity for the greatest aesthetic and social impact. Gropius's view of architecture was, of course, influenced by the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or "total work of art." He believed that the practice of architecture could serve as a centralized locus whereby all of the arts could be fused together into a new whole.

6.6 Max Pechstein, Arbeilsrat fur Kunst Berlin, 1919.
Research Library. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA.

see also:

The Bauhaus school

Weimar Bauhaus

 

In April 1919 in the German town of Weimar, Gropius established an educational institution that brought to fruition some of the ideas that had originated with the nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement as well as those of the Arbeitsrat. In merg­ing Saxony's school of the fine arts, the Kunstschule, with its school of the applied arts, the Kunstgewerbeschule, Gropius was ihle to pursue a curriculum that collapsed the conventional hier­archy between fine and applied arts (see Chapters 1 and 2). The Kunstgewerbeschule was at that time run by the Belgian designer Henry van de Velde, who recommended Gropius for the job »hen he was himself dismissed because of his foreign nationality. Gropius hoped that the new combined schools would complement each other, with the aesthetic theory of the fine arts duJectically interwoven with the empirical knowledge of the practitioners of the applied arts. The majority of the students at the school were men, and Gropius actively sought to exclude women from most media and especially the exalted practice of architecture, generally restricting them to the weaving, pottery,and bookbinding workshops.

In naming his new institution the Staatliches Bauhaus ("National House of Building") Gropius indicated his conviction that the arts and crafts could best be synthesized thorough the example of architecture, the Gesamtkunstwerk, The neologism "Bauhaus" was intended to call to mind the medieval guilds of craftsmen that served as an inspiration for the school at the time of its founding. Before the First World War, Gropius had been a member of the Deutscher Werkbund and had wanted to design new, functional architecture for the modern industrial world. However, the trauma of the war drove him as well as many other members of the Werkbund to hunger for what they felt was a more spiritually authentic medieval past, in which artists had col­laborated for the greater good. Fairly quickly Gropius would revert to his prewar faith in the machine aesthetic and drop this Utopian nostalgia for the Middle Ages, but by that time the faculty at the Bauhaus had already been filled out with a number of spiritually minded Expressionists.
 

Expressionism at the Bauhaus

The Bauhaus was initially under the sway of Expressionist precepts brought to the curriculum by Gropius and two of his first faculty members, Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956) and Johannes Itten (1888-1967). Feininger, a German-American with experi­ence as a cartoonist, was given direction of the printmaking workshop by Gropius. One of his first works as a faculty member at the Bauhaus, the woodcut Cathedral (fig. 6.7), shows the strong influence of Expressionism in his work, as it is reminiscent of Max Pechstein's design for the Arbeitsrat, of which Feininger also was a member. Used as the title page for the Programm des Staatlichen Bauhauses im Weimar, the first publication that outlined the vision for the new school, Feininger's work portrays the insti­tution in starkly Expressionist terms. Here, the Bauhaus is portrayed as something akin to the Arbeitsrat's Bauprojekf, a visionary building shining such as a cathedral on a hill. Combined with the additional religious imagery of the brightly shining stars, this cathedral symbolizes the quasispiritual sense of mission that characterized the Bauhaus in its first years and which was drawn from Expressionist doctrine. The text of the Programm reinforced the theme of Expressionist spirituality that guided the new institution's faculty.

Let us create a new guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between crafts­man and artist! Together let us desire, conceive, and create a new building of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting into one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.
 

Clearly, Feininger's woodcut was intended to put into visual terms this concept of the Bauhaus as a "crystal symbol of a new faith." It is also notable that Gropius in the text touches on both the intended erasure of the arts and crafts hierarchy as well as the "new building," which will unify the arts in an architectural Gesamtkunstwerk. An acquaintance of Oskar Kokoschka, Gustav Klimt, and Herwarth Walden, Johannes Itten already had a long-established career as an Expressionist painter and printmaker when he joined the Bauhaus in 1919. His initial assignment at the school was to oversee the sculpture, metalwork, and glass painting studios, as well as to design and implement an introductory course for all students. This six-month-long foundation course included practical training, such as an introduction to different media and basic design principles, but it emphasized the more diffuse goal of setting free the innate creativity of students. Using unconventional teaching techniques, such as breathing exercises, Itten soon became a favorite of the Bauhaus's student body. Yet, more than in administrator or teacher, he was a presence that resonated throughout the institution. Usually garbed in monk's robes, his head shaved like a Buddhist holy man, he was a literal embodi­ment of the Expressionist view of art as an essentially spiritual activity (fig. 6.9). In the early 1920s, when Itten's student followers took to fasting and self-mutilation at their leader's behest, his colleagues became more and more uncomfortable with him. He resigned from the Bauhaus early in 1923.

In 1921, Itten oversaw the publication of a yearbook featuring Bauhaus works that he called Utopia and subtitled Documents of Reality (fig. 6.8). This idiosyncratic title is indicative of the hazy Bauhaus goal of making Utopian speculation into a social reality. The typography of the lithographed cover, by Oskar Schlemmer (1888-1943), complements Itten's conceptual speculation with its whimsical, intuitive design, which features an assortment of typographic elements drawn from Cubism and Futurism. The dramatic letterforms, an odd mix of outlined letters, expanded bolds, and attenuated sans serifs, are suffused with vibrant colors that appear to be derived from the palette of the Expressionist painter Paul Klee (1879-1940), another faculty member at the Bauhaus. Itten believed that form must always express content, and here his design is fully evocative of the romantic aspirations espoused by much of the faculty and many of its students in the early years.

    At the time of the Bauhaus's founding, the institution was forced to confront the dispute in Germany over the relative merits of blackletter versus roman lettering. As part of their Utopian belief in a universal design style, Bauhaus graphic artists focused on the latter, as they did not want to associate the school with German nationalist sentiment. Under the influence of the avant-garde, artists such as Schlemmer began experimenting with sans serifs from the time of the school's founding in 1919.

    The continuing dominance of Expressionist aesthetics is evident in a lithograph by Lyonel Feininger, director of the print-making workshop that was established in 1921. The lithograph was created as the cover of New European Graphics, a collection of Bauhaus prints published late in 1922 (fig. 6.10). The spiky letter­ing displays a strong calligraphic character, as the elongated legs of the letters seem to drip down on to the row of text beneath them. The form of the letter "M," in particular, resonates with the crystal-like forms of Expressionist graphics. The horizontal rows of text are decidedly uneven, as if they had been scrawled as part of a passionate frenzy of artistic inspiration. It was precisely this type of emotional impact that so disgusted the Dadaists and Constructivists who were beginning to congregate in Germany at this time.

    By 1922, the overarching Bauhaus emphasis on intuition and Expressionism evidenced by the prominent roles of faculty members such as Itten, Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) led to criticism by other members of the progressive avant-garde, especially followers of De Srijl. It is notable that Kandinsky, a Russian emigre, had joined the faculty in 1922, following an attempt to establish himself in post-revolutionary Russia. Unable to reconcile his Expressionist and spiritual beliefs with the nascent Constructivist movement and its reverence for political activism, Kandinsky had returned to Germany, where he found a refuge at the early Bauhaus.
 

6.8 Qskar Schlemmer, Utopia, 1921. Watercolor, silver, gold, bronze over drawing in ink.
Oskar Schlemmer Theater Estate. C. Raman Schlemmer Collection.

6.9 Johannes Itten, Self-Portrait. 1920. Photograph.
Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin.

see also:

The Bauhaus school

Constructivism and the Bauhaus

When the De Stijl leader Theo van Doesburg settled in Weimar late in 1921, he provided young artists with an alternative vision to that espoused by faculty members such as Kandinsky. Van Doesburg had numerous contacts with the Bauhaus professors and students during 1922, when he offered a series of lectures explaining the rational, geometric principles behind De Stijl and Constructivism. He also organized the Constructivist Congress in Weimar in 1922, which was attended by Lissitzky. Van Doesburg found a receptive audience among the Bauhaus student body as well as members of the faculty who were not comfortable with the prevailing Expressionist ethos. Oskar Schlemmer, who had joined the faculty in 1920 and soon became the head of sculpture in stone and wood, wrote about his concerns in March of 1922: "Turning away from Utopia! We must be realistic, and strive for the realization of ideas. Not cathedrals but machines to live in." Two exhibitions held in Weimar during 1922 that featured a preponderance of works by Itten's followers further reinforced the opinion that the Bauhaus was failing in its mandate to advance the development of German art and architecture.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

In 1923, under the influence of De Stijl and Russian Constructivism, the Bauhaus moved toward a curriculum that emphasized functionalism and a machine aesthetic based on reductive geometric abstraction. In the spring of that year, Gropius responded to the increasing pressure on him from van Doesburg and the Constructivists by appointing to the faculty Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), a Hungarian artist who had moved to Berlin in 1921. In Germany, Moholy-Nagy had become acquainted with both van Doesburg and Lissitzky, and he had quickly absorbed their knowledge of Constructivist aesthetics. Moholy-Nagy arrived at the Bauhaus during the same term that Itten resigned, and the young Hungarian quickly assumed control over both the metals workshop and the preliminary course that had been Itten's province. The appointment of Moholy-Nagy allowed Gropius to avoid feeling compelled to hire van Doesburg, whose strong personality and somewhat dogmatic beliefs threat­ened Gropius's own authority. The new direction at the Bauhaus also represented another response to the trauma of the First World War, as the leaders of the school emphasized the rebuilding of society at every turn.

Moholy-Nagy's influence was immediately apparent in the way in which he reorganized the preliminary course that served as the foundation of the Bauhaus curriculum. Assisted by Josef Albers (1888-1976), Moholy-Nagy moved quickly to rationalize the teaching of elementary design principles so that the focus shifted away from idiosyncratic spiritual values and toward the logical analysis of form. Promoting Constructivist principles, Albers and Moholy-Nagy made an understanding of new materials such as Plexiglas and steel one of the centerpieces of the course. The exercises that Moholy-Nagy designed for the three-dimensional section of the preliminary course became legendary for the way in which they enabled students to master the fundamentals of Constructivist technique. Students were taught to use the tools of the engineer, the compass and the straightedged ruler, in place of freehand drawing techniques. It is important to realize how these tools serve to distance the hand of the artist in a literal as well as a conceptual sense from the resulting work —a direct rejection of the Expressionist ethos that privileges both the artist's subjective sensibility and his or her masterly touch of the brush.

The concept of the artist turned engineer also resonates with the widespread adoption in Germany after the war of the principles of scientific management of industrial processes. The American theorist Frederick W. Taylor (1865-1933) had advocated the rationalization of labor in order to advance the effectiveness of mass production. After watching workers on the assembly line and analyzing the specifics of each movement and the time taken to perform each task, Taylor was able to suggest ways in which industrial workers could improve their efficiency. Taylor's principles thematicalty connect with the idea of the man-machine hybrid, enforcing strict rules whereby each worker performed a mechanical, repetitive task as quickly as possible. While critics saw "Taylorism" as another factor that made indus­trial work soulless and alienating, most people in the 1920s embraced Taylor's theories as another positive step down the road to a machine-driven Utopia. Just as workers must become machines, as reflected in a famous photograph (fig. 6.11) by Lewis Hine (1874-1940), so artists would become engineers in the coming industrial Utopia. The romantic view of technology espoused at the Bauhaus viewed Taylorism in this positive sense, and hoped to put its principles into effect in the cause of advancing German industry.
 

6.11 Lewis W Hine, Mechanic at a Steam Pump in an Electric Power House, 1920.
George Eastman House, Rochester, New York. Gift of the Photo League.

see also:

The Bauhaus school

Women at the Bauhaus

When the Baubaus was established in 1919, Germany was in the throes of reconstruction and dramatic social change following its defeat in World War I. The 1919 Weimar Constitution had stipulated an end to gender discrimination in many aspects of German life including education, so women were no longer to be excluded from publicly funded institutions such as the Bauhaus. Director Walter Gropius initially embraced this doctrine, telling a gathering of students in 1919 that women students should expect "absolute equality of status, and therefore absolute equality of responsibility." However, in practice Gropius and other Bauhaus teachers pursued a policy that channeled female students into craft-oriented workshops, mainly those teaching weaving, bookbinding, and pottery.

    The relegation of women students to such workshops only rein­forced the stereotype that certain artistic practices were innately "feminine" while others were uniquely "masculine." Such a traditional approach was somewhat surprising in an institution dedicated to breaking the age- old distinctions between fine arts and crafts.

    The weaving workshop—which became the textile department after the move to Dessau in 1925—played the largest role in women's careers at the Bauhaus, mainly because the bookbinding workshop was closed in 1922 and the professors in the pottery workshop proved resistant to accepting female students. After completing the preliminary course in the weaving workshop, students were taught by George Muche with the technical assistance of Helene Borner, who had previously worked for Henry van de Velde at the Weimar Kunstgewerbeschule. Students of weaving were inspired by the paintings of Paul Klee and Johannes Itten, and they worked towards making textile design a respected form of non-functional artistic expression.

    After 1925, former student Gunta Stolzl (1897-1983) was appointed technical instructor of the textile department, and she assumed the role of artistic director in 1927, a position she held until 1931. Stolzl became the first female artistic leader of a Bauhaus workshop. Embracing the machine aesthetic wholeheartedly, Stolzl introduced new modern materials to the students, including rayon and cellophane. She also established some of the strongest links between a Bauhaus workshop and industry, an original goal of the school that had proved to be little more than a pipe dream in many of the other workshops.

    Despite the entrenched attitudes that prevented women from working in a full range of workshops, a few artists such as Marianne Brandt (1893-1983) managed to overcome these barriers and succeed outside the weaving milieu. In 1923 she matriculated from the metal workshop, which had moved away from the Expressionist, fine-art interests championed by Itten to the Constructivist functionalism of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Brandt was part of a collaborative team that designed one of the Bauhaus's most successful products, the Kandem Lamp that remains ubiquitous to this day. With the departure of Moholy-Nagy in 1928, Brandt became artistic director of the metal workshop and, like Stolzl, proved to be one of the school's most effective negotiators, establishing a number of contracts with local industries. She is also remembered as a pioneering photographer.
 

The 1923 Exhibition

Moholy-Nagy arrived at the Bauhaus at a critical time in the school's history, because the Thuringian state government, which had provided financing since 1919, was demanding that the institution hold an exhibition in the summer of 1923 to justify the past four years of work. The relationship between the Bauhaus and the state government had been a tumultuous one, and it appeared that the exhibition was required in the hope that it would result in the public humiliation of the school. The government demand resulted in the "Bauhaus Austellung 1923," at which Gropius had an opportunity to display the institution's new, post-Expressionist, functionalist identity. Taking the theme "Art and technology, a new unity: technology does not need art, but art does need technology," Gropius used the exhibition as a platform from which he could turn the Bauhaus back to the machine aesthetic and the Deutscher Werkbund goal of providing high-quality designs for the modern world.

During the months leading up to the exhibition, Moholy-Nagy was instrumental in overseeing the design of publicity materials for the exhibition as well as any other Bauhaus graphics. In 1923, he devised a new logo for the Bauhaus Press, consisting of an interlocked square and equilateral triangle tightly circum­scribed by a circle (fig. 6.12). Functioning visually as an arrow in some instances, this composition displays the elementary geometry and dynamic asymmetry that are at the heart of the Constructivist aesthetic. Moholy-Nagy also quickly established an expanded sans serif as the typographic standard at the school. He was adamant that all typography must emphasize clarity over any other element, rejecting the whimsical Expressionism of Feininger and Itten. The issue of clarity is just one example of the overall "functionalist" principles that Moholy-Nagy established as the focus of the curriculum; each and every art form was to be evaluated primarily on its ability to perform its most basic task effectively. There was no room for decorative effects that jeopardized the core principles of a book, or a poster, chair, teapot, or building.

The Bauhaus's promulgation of sans serif typography proved to be one of the successes of the 1923 exhibition, as the Thuringian government hired a Bauhaus student, Herbert Bayer (1900-1985), to design new paper currency (during this period each German state government issued its own currency). The resulting bills were a model of sans serif typography, the letters and numbers set off by rectangular blocks of color to enhance their readability (fig. 6.13). Because of the rampant inflation that was destabilizing the German economy at that time, the bills quickly became worthless, as even their high denominations could not match the astounding rise in prices of that summer and fall. By November 1923, a newspaper in Germany cost 50 billion Marks, and Bayer's 2 and 3 million denominations seemed quaint.

    The dramatic shift in the style of Bauhaus graphics during the spring of 1923 shows how swiftly the students and faculty shifted gears to embrace the Constructivist trend. Of course, professors such as Schlemmer had been longing for just this sort of opportunity. Schlemmer's 1922 design of a man in profile, clearly influenced by the reductive geometric abstraction of De Stijl, became an important motif at the Bauhaus after 1923. Besides serving as the new Bauhaus official seal, replacing an Expressionist design, it was included in a variety of graphics including a lithographed poster (fig. 6.14) by Fritz Schleifer (1903-1977). An advertisement for the 1923 exhibition, Schleifer's poster shows a simplified design in which the profile of the face consists solely of four rectangles, with a red square indi­cating the allimportant eye. Schlemmer's original had featured hairline serifs leading off the geometric shapes at right angles.

    Another Bauhaus student, Joost Schmidt (1893-1948), designed an exhibition poster that is clearly indebted to Russian Constructivism (fig. 6.15). A tight oval shape structures the com­position along a dynamic diagonal axis; all the other elements of the poster respond in some way to this oval form. On the upper end, a circle filled with Schlemmer's man in profile is embedded in a circle that is itself embedded in the curve of the oval. Lettering that spells out "State Bauhaus" wraps itself around the circle forming the contour of the oval, yet the word "Staatliches" breaks away from the dominant shape, its form falling outside the original contour. In the middle of the poster, the word "Ausstellung" ("exhibition") cuts into the side of the oval, bisect­ing it. The simple red and black palette enhances the design, as it creates the same sort of point-counterpoint that governs the bal­ancing of the geometric forms. Schmidt's functionalist design anticipates the dominant style at the Bauhaus after 1923, and he in fact went on to become a member of the faculty, leading the advertising workshop between 1928 and 1930.

    Perhaps the most important graphic design to come out of the 1923 exhibition was the exhibition catalog Staatliches Bauhaus im Weimar, 1919-1923. Moholy-Nagy himself created the layout, while Bayer was appointed to design the binding. The cover page represents perhaps the best use of the book's unusual square format (fig. 6.16). All of the text is structured based on its relationship to this frame, and each row and column of this orthogonal design calls attention to the upper left corner of the page. The expanded bold sans serif type features dramatic contrasts, because some of the words are made up of letters divided into horizontal bars. The overprinting of the "B" in Bauhaus is unorthodox and seems to introduce a Dada element into the rigidly structured composition. It is notable that, despite the dogmatic assertions of Constructivists such as Moholy-Nagy, who would define his aesthetic as something diametrically opposed to Expressionist whimsy, elements such as the square format and the overprinted "B" are arguably expressive and idiosyncratic in a manner akin to the style of Itten.

    The center of the 1923 exhibition was, of course, architecture. Despite its proposed role at the Bauhaus as the overarching Gesamtkunstwerkj, there was in fact no department of architecture at the school by 1923. Furthermore, most of the workshops operated as discrete units and there had been little opportunity to explore a grand synthesis of the arts. While Gropius had not had any opportunity to build a monument of lasting significance, the collection of models and drawings grouped around the theme "International Architecture" served to explain the Bauhaus director's plans for a new architecture based on geometric abstract design. Including designs by Le Corbusier, the De Stijl architect JJ.P. Oud (1890-1963), and Gropius, the survey sought to place the work of the Bauhaus in a broader European context.
 

Political Problems

It was very important to the future of the school in the face of government hostility to portray geometric abstraction, either in architecture or any other medium, as devoid of political content. Considering the Bauhaus's ideological roots in the Arbeitsrat fur Kunst, it was especially important to separate the Bauhaus from the polemical Communism of that group and from the revolu­tionary politics of Russian Constructivism. Hence, the idea that Constructivist aesthetics were apolitical and universal, or at least pan-European, was at the heart of the conceptual framework of the exhibition. This concern went a long way in terms of divorcing Russian Constructivism from the "International Constructivism" practiced at the Bauhaus. The entire enterprise was somewhat disingenuous, because it was true that a significant number of students and faculty at the Bauhaus had contempt for the bourgeois-dominated Weimar Republic, and in fact hoped that their abstract work could help bring about some sort of revolution in Germany.

    Despite some success in the summer of 1923, the Bauhaus's future in Weimar was still imperiled during the winter of 1923-4. While Gropius and the faculty worked to implement the new curriculum and to create more commercial relationships with local industry, changes in the Thuringian Landtag, a type of parliamentary body, sealed its fate. New elections had resulted in the defeat of a socialist majority in favor of a new assembly dominated by conservatives and right-wing reactionaries. Because the Bauhaus was viewed as inextricably tied to the socialists who had overseen its first charter, the new ministers sought to dismantle the school as quickly as possible. Gropius's championing of the International Constructivist style greatly upset right-wing politicians, who wanted the Bauhaus to have a more overt German nationalist profile. The hostility of the right-wing government caused the Bauhaus's former enemies in progressive circles, such as Van Doesburg (who felt that the remaining "older" faculty continued to taint Moholy-Nagy's new Constructivist approach), to rally around the school. The new parliament moved quickly, sharply cutting the state's financial support. Reading the writing on the wall, Gropius abruptly announced the closure of the Weimar Bauhaus in December of 1924.
 

see also:

The Bauhaus school

Dessau Bauhaus

Fortunately for the students and faculty of the Bauhaus, the school was not without options, as a number of less conservative German states proved eager to host the institution. Eventually Gropius negotiated a new set of contracts with the mayor of the industrial city of Dessau, and the process of moving commenced in the spring of 1925. For the first twenty months the Bauhaus operated out of temporary quarters, while Gropius directed the design and construction of a new complex of buildings financed by the Dessau government.
 

New Buildings

The main structure completed at Dessau late in 1926 featured three wings: one devoted to the workshops, another to the admin­istrative offices, and a third to serve as a student dormitory (fig. 6.17). These three rectangular blocks, two with a horizontal emphasis in their mass and one, the dormitory, taller and more vertically proportioned, were stitched together by three corresponding hallways that intersected in the middle. The hallway that connected the administration wing with the other areas was constructed as a bridge, and hovers a full story above the ground. From the air, the building looks like an asymmetrical airplane propeller, a feature that was in part an homage to the Junkers company, an aircraft manufacturer that was among the most important industries in Dessau. However, asymmetry was also a key aesthetic component of Gropius's plan for the Bauhaus building. He believed that conventional architecture was essentially two-dimensional, the buildings' symmetrical facades flat and static in appearance. In contrast, the Bauhaus buildings were intended to be experienced in three dimensions, their geometric shapes interacting in a dynamic fashion. Gropius wrote that it was necessary for the viewer to walk around the complex in order to grasp the inherent harmony of its different parts.

Conforming to the principles espoused by Moholy-Nagy's preliminary course, the Bauhaus building is constructed of the most modern industrial materials—steel, reinforced concrete, and glass. While these materials had been used for decades in architecture, in conventional buildings they would be cloaked under a skin of stone or terra cotta. Gropius, in contrast, boldly left these materials exposed, demonstrating the beauty of the machine aesthetic. The most dramatic element of the structure Is the "curtain wall" of glass that encases the wing housing the work­shops. Treating a wall as only a barrier against the weather, Gropius demonstrated how modern materials allowed for new forms, as the glass walls of the Bauhaus are possible because they are not functioning as part of the loadbearing structure. Only the steel frame of the building is necessary to support its own weight.

    Like Le Corbusier's Pavilion de l'Esprit Nouveau, also from 1925, the Bauhaus does not feature decorative elements that are superfluous to the function of the building. Instead, the geometric abstraction of the composition serves as both the functional and the main visual element. This austere aesthetic, in which each element is simultaneously functional and aesthetically pleasing, is clearly related to Constructivist principles. Constructivist graphic designers tried not to add anything to their compositions that would take away from a given work's clarity and readability. In architectural parlance, there are two axioms that can help illuminate the modern style of the Bauhaus: "form follows function," which refers to the integrated nature of the aesthetic and functional elements; and, "less is more," which is illustrated by the Bauhaus building's spartan negation of ornament. The conventional wisdom asserts that the Bauhaus buildings in Dessau represent the polar opposite of the Expressionist style in their logical order and dry functionalism. However, it is also possible that the curtain wall of glass, a material whose ostensible spiritual qualities—witness the stained glass in medieval cathedrals—made it a favorite metaphor of Expressionism, gives the building a residual Expressionist flavor.

Gropius's building program represented his first opportunity to pursue architecture under the rubric of the Gesamtkunstwerk. The majority of the light fixtures, furnishings, equipment, and even the blankets on the student's beds, were designed to comple­ment the reductive geometric abstraction and modern industrial materials of the building itself. For example, Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) designed chairs for the building that for the first time employed unadorned tubular steel for the frame. A fine example of Breuer's work at the Dessau Bauhaus is the Wassily chair, named for his colleague Wassily Kandinsky (fig. 6.18). Its spare steel frame forms cubic shapes that seem to pass through each other, its beauty resting in proportion and the balance of simple geometric forms. Eschewing the springs and wood frames of conventional furniture, Breuer designed this chair and others like it with unadorned pieces of canvas fabric. Some later versions of the Wassily chair featured more luxurious materials, the steel now chrome plated and the seat and arms made of strips of leather. After the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, the Constructivist curriculum championed by Moholy-Nagy was strengthened, with more resources devoted to art forms that could serve a modern industrial society. The pottery workshop, for example, was abolished while technological processes such as photography were given added emphasis. Additionally, the preliminary course, which was devoted to the machine aesthetic, was expanded to encompass twelve months of work.

6.17 Walter Gropius. Bauhaus Buildings (front), Dessau, 1925-6. Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin.

6.18 Marcel Breuer, "Wassily" Chair, 1925.
 

Herbert Bayer

 

     The printing workshop that had been led at Weimar by Lyonel Feininger, an unrepentant Expressionist, was transformed at Dessau into a new area that focused on commercial, as opposed to fine art, graphics. Herbert Bayer was appointed the head of this revamped workshop devoted to typography and advertising, allowing graphic design to become more central to the curricu­lum. Bayer, like Marcel Breuer, was one of a new type of teacher called a Jungmeister ("young master") who had himself completed the Bauhaus curriculum as a student and was subsequently hired as a member of the faculty. Along with Albers and Moholy-Nagy, Bayer worked assiduously at the Dessau Bauhaus to improve the quality of modern graphics.

    Bayer's mature Constructivist style is evident in a poster he designed in 1926 to publicize an exhibition and birthday celebra­tion for Kandinsky (fig. 6.19). The basic orthogonal composition of the poster is equivalent, in its dynamic asymmetry, to the overall plan of the Bauhaus buildings. Squares and rectangles are connected to one another by bold rules much like the wings of the building and their respective hallways. The viewer's eye must travel around the composition in much the same way that Gropius intended the viewer to walk around his building in order to grasp its overarching harmony. Bayer has added an additional element, however, in the way in which he skews the whole geo­metric structure on to a slight diagonal, creating a kinetic element. A principal concern of graphic designers at the Bauhaus was the integration of typography with photographs. Here, Bayer has used the rectangular frame of a photo to form a discrete geometric unit, which is balanced by the text directly across the page. The black and white photograph also meshes nicely with the subdued black and red color of the typography.

    In 1928, Bayer designed a cover for a journal called simply bauhaus that featured the simple geometric solids and engineer's tools that are fundamental to the machine aesthetic (fig. 6.20). In particular, the transparent plastic triangle represents both a tool of the engineer as well as a commitment to exciting industrial materials. The geometric forms recall the Neoplatonist philosophy that was the conceptual basis for so much geometric abstraction during this era. In this cover photograph, Bayer also made use of a favorite design trick from this era: using the subject of the picture to perform double duty as the banner of the journal itself. In this case, the image consists of what looks like a folded architectural drawing on a desk, with the fold artfully placed so that the word "Bauhaus" on it serves also as the title of the journal.
 

6.19 Herbert Bayer, Kandinsky, 1926. Poster. Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin

6.20 Herbert Bayer, Bauhaus, 1928. Magazine. Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin.

"Typophoto"

As part of his work at the Dessau Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy made significant progress in terms of integrating photography into the design arts. While he was untrained as a photographer and most of his work in this vein was highly experimental, some aspects of his photographic practice were absorbed into functionalist proj­ects. In 1925, Moholy-Nagy coined the term "typophoto," stating as his goal a set of aesthetic principles that would govern the integration of typography and photography in graphic work. He was able to put his principles into practice in the Baubausbucher ("Bauhaus Books"), a series of volumes devoted to international developments in modern art. Edited by Moholy-Nagy and Gropius beginning in 1925, the Bauhaus books covered topics that included works from the school itself as well as related movements such as De Stijl and even Cubism.

Moholy-Nagy published his own essays in Malerei Photographic Film ("Painting Photography Film"), the eighth book in the series (fig. 6.21). The cover combines an orthogonal structure for the text with a startlingly abstract background photograph. Moholy-Nagy was at this time experimenting with a number of "cameraless" photographic techniques, and the result shown here is an atmospheric overview of unidentifiable geometric shapes. Cast on a diagonal axis, the scaled gray tones and murky forms strongly contrast with the bold, clearly delineated character of the text. Note especially how the number "8" is played off a series of concentric circles in the photograph that themselves resemble an "8" perched on its side. Additionally, the photographic background lends the image a sense of three-dimen­sional depth that is lacking in most non-photographic Constructivist work.

Amid the varied writings that made up Malerei Photographic Film, Moholy included a discussion of typophoto that would prove to be hugely influential on the practice of graphic design. "What is Typophoto? Typography is communication composed of type. Photography is the visual representation of what can be optically apprehended. Typophoto is the visually most exact rendering of communication." For Moholy-Nagy, the synthesis of ihese two iconic industrial technologies was the key to revolution­izing graphic design so that it could convey with clarity the modern spirit. Taking his cue from the Futurists, Moholy-Nagy asserted in the book that "simultaneity," as displayed by film and neon signs, was the optical focus of the modern age. This kinetic model, he believed, would replace the "Gutenberg" model for typography, which was static and rigidly linear. Moholy-Nagy's publicity leaflet from 1927 promoting the Bauhaus books wittily referenced letterpress and photographic printing technologies (fig. 6.22). Anticipating the design of Bayer's 1928 cover for the journal bauhaus, here Moholy-Nagy used a photograph of metal type as the subject—that same metal type of course also conveying the message of the work. His photograph is in fact a montage, as he has combined a reverse view of the type with a positive one. Compositionally, the two rows of type create competing perspective devices, leading the eye of the viewer back into space at oblique, contradictory angles.
 

6.21 Laaszlo Moholy-Nagy, Malerei Fotografie Film (Painting Photography Film). 1927. Book jacket.

6.22 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Bauhaus Books, 1927.

see also:

The Bauhaus school

Depoliticization at the Bauhaus

It is very important to recognize how Constructivist principles, most of which had arisen in Russia in the service of a specific political vision, were largely "depoliticized" during the period 1925-8 at the Bauhaus. As mentioned above, it was necessary for the school's own survival that it de-emphasize the radical politics that had played a role in the adoption of Russian Constructivism. In later decades, the political commitments of many members of the faculty and student body would be written out of art history. The period 1928-30, when Hannes Meyer (1889-1954)— promoted from head of the architecture workshop to overall director—attempted to bring revolutionary Communist politics to the fore at the school, is often completely omitted from histories of the institution. Similarly, the root of the Bauhaus in Arbeitsrat fur Kunst is often ignored in design histories.

    For example, Moholy-Nagy's often repeated quote "To be a user of machines is to be of the spirit of this century. It has replaced the transcendent spiritualism of past eras," from 1922, can be seen as exemplary of the functionalist vision of technologi­cal advancement that he put into place at the Bauhaus in 1923. However, the context of the quote and others like it is often disregarded. The statement in fact comes from an article called "Constructivism and the Proletariat" that Moholy-Nagy published in the revolutionary left-wing Hungarian periodical Ma. At this point in his career, Moholy-Nagy was upset that the new Communist regime in his native Hungary had refused to accept non-representational art as a propaganda tool, as the Bolsheviks had initially done in Russia. Disgusted with a party that he condemned as "bourgeois," Moholy-Nagy exiled himself in 1920 to Austria, before eventually ending up in Germany. It is crucial to keep in mind that Moholy-Nagy viewed Constructivism as indivisible from its revolutionary context, and it was this commitment to radical social change that drove his work, as well as that of many other Bauhaus participants.

    Scholars today view the political climate at the Bauhaus as harboring one central contradiction: the simultaneous embrace of Communist ideology and an adoration of the capitalist industries that stood as icons of the modern machine age. This situation would seem to provoke the strongest possible cognitive dissonance, as the two ideologies were diametrically opposed to one another. What did unite Russian Communism and European capitalism in the 1920s was a shared vision of technological Utopia, and it was this theme that allowed members of the Bauhaus to reconcile these seemingly disparate trends in political and economic thought.
 

see also:

The Bauhaus school

Typography at the Bauhaus

An essential component of modern graphic design espoused at the Bauhaus was the use of rational, geometric letterforms. Bauhaus typographers believed that sans serif type was indispensable for three reasons: first, it was the only type capable of expressing the spirit of the machine age (geometric forms were increasingly viewed more as an instrument of logical planning than as representative of Platonic beauty); second, sans serif lacked any nationalist associations (unlike blackletter), so it could serve as a unifying force in the post-war era; and, third, its simple clarity and impersonal character were the best match for photography—hence typophoto.

    An example of a geometric sans serif developed at the Bauhaus can be seen in Josef Albers's Stencil, developed in 1925 (fig. 6.23). In this type each letter has been built up out of a set of simple geometric forms—mainly semicircles, rectangles, and triangles—that are intended to remove any subjective, Expressionist, or decorative elements from the letters. Stencil is unusual among the Bauhaus sans serifs in that it appears highly stylized, calling attention to itself along the lines of Art Deco designs such as Broadway or Peignot. Stencil also exemplifies the most obvious flaw in the reasoning that justified the widespread use of sans serifs: it is scarcely legible and exceedingly difficult to read. While this is an extreme case, it is true that the supposed "clarity" of geometric sans serifs was at the very least widely over­stated by their more zealous partisans. The nineteenth-century view of sans serifs, that they were effective as a highly legible dis­play type but unreadable in body text, represents a more balanced view, unbiased by the technological utopianism of the Bauhaus.

    The most famous sans serif experiment to come out of the Bauhaus was Bayer's Universal, which he began work on in 1923 and revised several times over the years (fig. 6.24). Universal differs from Stencil in that its geometric forms are made up of strokes of uniform thickness, obviating the calligraphic element of most type. Bayer intended his new type to be printed by machines, so he felt that conventional type designers' nostalgic use of forms that had been developed in the age of the chisel and the quill pen was anachronistic. Like Stencil, the forms of Universal are made up of geometrically perfect circles and orthog­onal horizontal and vertical lines. Some letters, such as the "m" and the "w," are standardized so that they are simply inverted versions of one another. Bayer chose a set of three angles with which he structured the armature of each letter. Universal's stark forms reject any sense of eclecticism or illusionism that could mar its perfect clarity. Like an engineer, he developed the type using only the compass, T-square, and triangle.

Bayer did not feel that he was inventing new letterforms for Universal, but rather that he was completing a logical progression that resulted in rationalized shapes for each letter. This process of refinement was based on historical roman letters, not on the German blackletter tradition. While Bayer intended Universal to stand alone as an international typeface, conservative Germans argued that its basis in roman, as opposed to blackletter, type, rep­resented a snub to German tradition. Essentially, it was impossible completely to avoid a political reading of typography amid the overheated discourse of post-war Europe. Bayer's theory of type also echoes Taylor's principles of scientific management, whereby each action on an assembly line is designed to demonstrate the utmost economy and efficiency.

Another significant aspect of Universal is the fact that it was designed as a single-case alphabet. Bayer asserted that uppercase letters were superfluous in the age of scientific management, land a single-case letterset would be both easier to learn and read, as well as providing substantial savings for the printing industry. There were a number of precedents for Bayer's single-case strategy in the world of display type, where all-upper-case alphabets had been common since the nineteenth century. In the contemporary era, Art Deco letters such as those in Cassandre's Peignot were only designed in upper case. After 1925, when Bayer joined the faculty of the Bauhaus, all of the school's publications were printed solely in lower case, along the lines advocated by Bayer.

    In contrast to the illusory clarity of sans serif text, Bayer's claim that the single-case alphabet would not harm the readability of text was apparently true, as most readers never even notice the shift that occurred in Bauhaus publications. However, by advocat­ing an alphabet that was strictly lower-case, Bayer again walked into a uniquely German political quagmire. In the orthography of the German language, the rules of capitalization play a more prominent role than in other native European tongues. For example, all nouns have an initial capital in German, regardless of their place in a sentence. By eliminating all upper-case forms, Bayer inadvertently found yet another way to aggravate German conservatives, who argued that his Universal was not only "unGerman," but also that its roman lineage associated it with the tradition of France, Germany's sworn enemy. It proved impossible for Bayer to control the reception of his work, and Universal became iconic of all that was wrong with the Bauhaus in the minds of right-wing politicians.

6.23 Josef AJbers, Stencil Typeface, 1925, from Offset Buch and Werbekunst, July 1926, p. 397.
Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. St Bride Printing Library, London.

6.24 Herbert Bayer, Universal Typeface, 1923-5. Courtesy of P22 Type Foundry.

Paul Renner and Futura

While not designed at the Bauhaus, Futura (1927; fig. 6.25), by Paul Renner (1878-1956), would prove to be the sans serif with the most long-lasting impact on modern typography. The director of the typography department at the Frankfurter Kunstschule, Renner had originally trained as an architect. His work in many ways parallels the formal and ideological concerns of the "func­tionalists" at the Bauhaus. Like Bayer, he advocated the use of a single-case alphabet while trumpeting the clarity and the clean, logical forms of geometric sans serifs. However, Futura is also a perfect example of a designer forced to confront the difficulties of putting theory into practice; while developing Futura, Renner recognized that the most pure geometric forms neither appeared beautiful as individual shapes nor connected fluidly with one another. For these practical reasons, the final version of Futura departs from the pure geometry of the earliest prototypes, and Renner introduced a weighted, slightly calligraphic stroke in many of the letters.

    Produced by Bauer, a prominent commercial foundry, Futura quickly gained fame and was adopted by Renner's colleagues in the avant-garde. Kurt Schwitters was among its more enthusiastic practitioners, and he made Futura the typographical basis for the stationery that he designed in a Constructivist style for his home city of Hanover in 1929. Schwitters succeeded in making Futura the "official typeface" of Hanover, while establishing a consistent visual identity for the city. However, in 1933, under the new Nazi government, Futura was officially banned in Hanover and government offices were forbidden to use it ever again.

The year 1928 marks the end of the "golden age" of the Dessau Bauhaus. By the end of it, Gropius, Moholy-Nagy, Albers, and Marcel Breuer had left the school to pursue other opportunities. Schlemmer resigned in 1929. Hannes Meyer, the previous head of the architecture workshop (which had finally been established in 1927), took over as director and helped to expand the Bauhaus's engagement with German industry. While a proponent of the machine aesthetic, however, Meyer was also a committed socialist, and his overt political stance further angered conservative forces in the German government. He was replaced for political reasons in 1930, after which the less ideologically inclined architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) assumed the directorship. Under Meyer and Mies van der Rohe, the Bauhaus became increasingly a school of architecture, and work in the other design arts as well as the fine arts was increasingly sidelined.

    In 1932, the Dessau Bauhaus was closed because of pressure from newly elected members of the extreme right-wing National Socialist (or Nazi) Party. While the school was briefly reopened in Berlin, it was shut down for ever in 1933 by the Nazis, who gained control of all of Germany that year (fig. 6.26). Eventually, most of the major artists fled Germany for countries that were less hostile to modern art. By 1939, the year of the outbreak of the Second World War, Gropius, Albers, Moholy-Nagy, Bayer, and Mies van der Rohe had all immigrated to the United States, where they would have an enormous impact on the way in which the design arts would be practiced in that country after the war.
 

6.25 Paul Renner, Futura Typeface, 1927. St Bride Printing Library, London.

6.26 Anonymous, Closing of the Bauhaus, 1933. Newspaper photograph.

The New Typography
 

The catch-all term for the modern progressive movement in typography of the 1920s, the New Typography, was first used by Moholy-Nagy in 1923. He included the phrase in a catalog essay that accompanied the Bauhaus exhibition held in Weimar in the summer of that year. Both the phrase and the machine aesthetic on display at the exhibition caught the eye of a young German from Leipzig named Jan Tschichold (1902-1974). The son of a lettering artist and sign painter, Tschichold had worked for several years as a calligrapher while becoming gradually more involved in the field of typography. Profoundly moved by what he saw at the Weimar Bauhaus exhibition, and energized by his acquaintances Moholy-Nagy and Lissitzky, Tschichold soon established himself as a leading voice in the promulgation of the New Typography.

Perhaps the most significant contribution that Tschichold made to the New Typography was the creation of two seminal publications outlining the theory and practice of a wide range of avant-garde designers. The first appeared in 1925, when Tschichold edited a special issue of the Leipzig journal Typographische Mitteilungen ("Typographic News"; fig. 6.27). Christening the issue Elementary Typography, Tschichold set out to establish a standardized set of principles for the New Typography that could be easily grasped by printers unfamiliar with modern an and design. For this journal, Tschichold took on the Slavic-sounding nom de plume Ivan Tschichold, showing his desire to emulate the work of the Russian Constructivists.

The names of the contributors to Elementary Typograpbywere listed on the cover, and included Moholy-Nagy and Bayer of the Bauhaus, Lissitzky, and Schwitters, as well as Tschichold himself. The texts in this anthology of writings included the Russian Constructivist manifesto of 1920 as well as a number of excerpts from Bauhaus publications. The cover demonstrates many of the most important formal principles of the New Typography: orthogonal design, bold rules, positive use of negative space, asymmetry, and sans serif lettering. While on the one hand Tschichold's work seems exemplary of the most extreme machine functionalism, it is notable that Constructivist principles had been increasingly integrated with the exuberant experimentation of Dada and Futurist design.

    Tschichold was adamant in adapting sans serif lettering as representative of the machine age, although he tended to favor the less stylized "grotesques" by anonymous designers of the nine­teenth century that were widely available and inexpensive. He disdained the assertiveness of Bauhaus type such as Stencil or Bayer's Universal, which he felt called too much attention to their individual "artistic" aspects in their extreme abstract structure. In a sense, he felt that conventional grotesques were more function­ally "universal" in their anonymity than the artist-designed equivalents. Tschichold was also a strong proponent of the aboli­tion of upper-case letters, thereby aligning himself with Bauhaus designers such as Bayer. The cover of Elementary Typography is a fine example of a design that eliminates capital letters without sacrificing clarity. It is essential to remember the continuing controversy provoked by this issue in Germany; it is never a wholly aesthetic decision for a German designer to eschew blackletter. Overall, Tschichold worked to "rationalize" typography into a functional science, emphasizing simple sans serif letterforms that resulted in the utmost legibility.
 

6.27 Jan Tschichold, Typographische Mitteilungen:
Elementare Typographie (Typographic News: Elementary Typography),
October 1925. Journal cover. Dada Archive.

Die Neue Typographie

The essence of the New Typography is clarity. This puts it into direct opposition to the old typography, whose aim was 'beauty' and whose clarity did not attain the high level we require today." In 1928, Tschichold published in Berlin Die Neue Typographie. This book, subtitled Bin Handbuch fur zeitgemass. Sebaffende ("Handbook for the Contemporary Designer"), was intended fur­ther to codify his avowed set of design principles (fig. 6.28). As a handbook published by the educational department of a printer's union, Die Neue Typographie was intended to set out in clear terms the history, theory, and practice of the New Typography. The design of the book itself, a sober black volume with silver letter­ing and rounded corners so that it could be slipped into the working designer's pocket, bespeaks Tschichold's adoption of the artist-as-engineer paradigm favored by the Constructivists. While one might expect that a book like this that extolled the virtues of the machine age would be typeset using the mechanical hotmetal systems, it was in fact set by hand. This anomaly was probably a result of Tschichold's publisher, a labor union consisting of "old school" printers.

Many of the themes sounded in Die Neue Typographie—such as the significance of speed and simultaneity in modern life, the need to work collectively as opposed to individually, the new role of the engineer replacing that of the artist, the absolute goal of clear communication, and the need to integrate typography and photography as the quintessential modern media—had all appeared in earlier essays by modern designers such as Moholy-Nagy or El Lissitzky. What Tschichold accomplished was to provide a text replete with examples that could serve as a funda­mental reference for graphic designers both inside and outside the major modern groups.

   One of the most famous sets of illustrations from Die Neue Typographie shows how asymmetry functions to enliven the page (fig. 6.29). Tschichold renounced axial symmetry as one of the most deadening elements of what he genetically called "old typography." He felt that axial symmetry was a dishonest, decorative strategy that negatively impacted the clarity of the text. Tschichold wrote:

The liveliness of asymmetry is also an expression of our own movement and that of modern life; it is a symbol of the changing forms of life in general when aymmetrical movement in typography takes the place of symmetrical repose. This movement must not however degenerate into unrest or chaos.

The last part of the quoted text demonstrates how Tschichold, while citing Dada and Futurist designers such as Tzara and Marinetti as pioneers of the New Typography, also sought to bring the "chaos" of those revolutionary movements under con­trol. Compared to his more expansive stance in the 1925 Elementary Typography issue, in Die Neue Typographic Tschichold seems dogmatic in asserting that the new styles must demonstrate the artist's firm control at every turn. For Tschichold, the impul­sive play and rulebreaking spirit of Dada were yet further examples of a superfluous element—like older decorative, seriffed letters—that must be ruthlessly eliminated so as not to compromise the plainness and clarity that are the goal of all typography. For Tschichold, asymmetry represented a sort of "controlled Dadaism," expressive of the new freedoms of the modern industrial world while remaining a supportive part of the underlying order manifest in the orthogonal grid. In Die Neue Typographic, Tschichold heartily embraced Moholy-Nagy's concept of typophoto, arguing that the integration of typography and photography best expressed the modern spirit. Visually speaking, he called for graphic designers to focus on the dynamic contrasts made available by juxtaposing photography's three-dimensional element with typography's inherently two-dimensional character.

    An example of Tschichold's own work in this vein can be seen in the movie poster he made in 1927 for the Phoebus-Palast in Munich (fig. 6.30). Advertising a film called The Woman without a Name, Part II, the lithograph artfully synthesizes photos of people that have a clear sculptural mass with linear geometric ele­ments that playfully suggest three-dimensional space without providing the weighted forms that would make it convincing. The photographic elements are arranged on an asymmetrical, diagonal axis formed by a schematic linear perspective drawing; the title-words seem to soar on another diagonal out of the same illusory vanishing point.

    An important part of Tschichold's conception of typophoto was the use of sans serif text only. While in other situations Tschichold had suggested that simple roman forms were acceptable, he felt that the modern photograph could only be complemented by sans serif block. The key to the relationship between photography and sans serif lettering was their shared objective and impersonal form, which was the most suitable rejoinder to the individuality expressed by the decorative old typography. For the text of Die Neue Typographie, Tschichold employed Akzidenz Grotesk, an anonymous sans serif that was widely available at the time. While he had intended the book to rebut claims that sans serif was unfit for long, continuous passages of text because of its readability issues, a number of commentators pointed out that reading the book through was "hardly the pleasant exercise that Tschichold assumes it will be."

    Like the other members of the avant-garde, Tschichold considered the New Typography to be exemplary of the merging of art and life that was a fundamental tenet of modern design movements such as Dc Stijl, Constructivism, and the Bauhaus. Rather than simply a visual style, the New Typography was to serve as the basis for a more just and equitable society administered according to socialist principles. However, it is unclear whether Tschichold was a "true believer" in the Soviet state or whether he was simply going through the motions of associating Constructivism and socialism. While Die Neue Typographie makes continual reference to socialist thought, more ideologically com­mitted designers criticized Tschichold for what they considered to be his lack of political fervor. For example, a review in the journal bauhaus, written at the time when Hannes Meyer was director and the institution was at its most overtly political, sharply attacked Tschichold for being nothing more than a dogmatic formalist, questioning his ideological purity in the same manner in which the Russian Constructivists were attacked by promoters of Socialist Realism under Stalin. On the other hand, Tschichold's book later became known as the bible of modern "functionalism," and, like the parallel writings by Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus, was often misrepresented as completely rejecting political activism, and intended only as a scientific discussion of typography, no more politicized than an introductory physics textbook. It would seem likely that the truth lies somewhere outside these two polarized distortions of Tschichold's work. In a fascinating development, Tschichold drastically altered his own perspective on the New Typography in later decades.
 

6.28 and 6.29 Jan Tschichold, Die Neue Typographie (The New Typography). 1928.
International Dada Archive, University of Iowa Libraries.

6.30 Jan Tschichold, Die Frau ohne Namen, Zweiter Teil (The Woman without a Name, Part II), 1927. Offset lithograph. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Peter Stone Poster Fund.

Ring Neue Werbegestalter

In 1928, Kurt Schwitters was instrumental in the establishment of a loose group of graphic designers who called themselves the Ring Neue Werbegestalter ("Circle of New Advertising Designers"). Sometimes nicknamed the "Ring," and not to be confused with a contemporary association of German architects that had inspired Schwitters, this group of typographers and graphic designers used exhibitions to promote the Constructivist aesthetic in the commercial realm. Between 1928 and 1930, members of the Ring displayed their work in cities across Germany and the Netherlands via two traveling exhibitions. While Schwitters was himself based in Hanover, the Ring existed mainly in epistolary form, as the different members and invited guests, who included Tschichold, Moholy-Nagy, Bayer, Gropius, John Heartfield, and Piet Zwart (formerly of De Stijl), organized the group's exhibitions through the mail. The German typographer Georg Trump (1896-1985) designed the letterhead that was used by Schwitters when he circulated new designs for the members of the Ring to peruse and judge (fig. 6.31). Trump's asymmetrical composition, sans serif lettering, and use of rectangular elements to organize information are all typical of the Constructivist style favored in the Ring. The one dramatic element of this design is the way in which the acronym NWG has been pushed into the upper right corner of the page, creating an element of tension in the way it crowds the margin. Compare the overall "feel" of those letters with the more austere and spacious character of the rest of the letterhead.

    The members of the Ring faced the same dilemma as the Bauhaus artists, with whom they were closely associated: how to reconcile left-wing political ideology with the service of clients from the capitalist countries of Europe. No one anist resolved this conflict in a simple manner; rather, it was something that each struggled with, perhaps bolstered by the belief that a new and more just society was in the making. This new society would be somehow made possible by the modern technology exemplified by the typophoto style. The overarching style of most of the Ring designers was drawn from the standards of the New Typography, featuring sans serif type organized by an underlying grid and integrated with elements of photomontage. While photomontage had earlier been perceived as a vehicle of strict revolutionary sentiment, by the late 1920s it was just another formal device in the modernist designer's repertoire, and could be employed outside its original ideological context.

    A fine representative of the many contradictions implicit in the work of the Ring can be seen in the writings and designs of the Dutch artist Paul Schuitema (1897-1973). At the same time that he was writing articles such as "Photography as a Weapon in the Class War" for Dutch left-wing periodicals (in this case Links Richten, literally "Left Aiming," February 1933), he was happily working on commercial graphics in a Constructivist style. For example, Schuitema designed a series of advertisements for the Dutch scale manufacturer Berkel, combining montaged photos of their product with sans serif lettering (fig. 6.32). Berkel was a major industrial conglomerate in the Netherlands, and throughout his career Schuitema worked on their advertising posters, stationery, exhibition booths and other printed ephemera. In this advertisement, a vertical bar on the left margin serves to anchor both the text, which is ranged off it horizontally, and the photomontage, in which the repeated curves of the scales contrast with the geometric clarity of the grid. The photomontage seems :o compete with the text, at times managing to subdue it, as when the edge of a scale bites into the top of the letter "c" in "Toledo."

    During the time he was associated with the Ring, Tschichold designed the cover of a portfolio of photos by reusing Lissitzky's famous photomontage self-portrait originally called The Constructor (fig. 6.33). Lissitzky himself had previously recycled the image in a lithograph for Pelikan Ink (see fig. 5.44). Tschichold's catalog, titled Foto-Auge ("Photo Eye"), was intended to invoke the work and theory of the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, who had romanticized the eye of the camera as the perfect, dispassionate symbol of modern vision. Again, at the same time that he was promulgating the depoliticized functionalism of the New Typography, Tschichold still recognized his debt to Constructivism's Russian, Communist roots. A survey of modern photographic techniques, Foto-Auge was condemned by the Nazis in 1933, and Tschichold's co-editor Franz Roh (1911-1965), an an historian, was arrested and imprisoned for having published the book. In fact, the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 immediately halted almost all of the work of the German avant-garde—be they at the Bauhaus, members of the Ring, or individuals committed to the New Typography. Chapter 7 will trace the dramatic evolution of graphic design in Germany at the time when it was dominated by the National Socialists, or Nazis.
 

6.31 George Trump, NWG ring "neue werbegestalter, " c. 1928. Letterhead.
Letterpress. Collection Elaine Lustig Cohen.