Art of the 20th Century



A Revolution in the Arts
 

Art Styles in 20th century Art Map

 

The Great Avant-garde Movements

 

The Bauhaus

 

The Bauhaus school was founded in Weimar in 1919 by Walter Gropius (1883— 1969), an architect who felt that it was his duty to be involved in the community. Keen to share his conviction that there was no need for a conflict of interests to arise between art and technology, Gropius wanted members of the Bauhaus to under-take constructive action that would create a new visual environment for the benefit of society.

Following in the footsteps of Morris William , Henry van de Velde, and the Deutscher Werkbund, the Bauhaus aimed to achieve a synthesis of art. craftsmanship, and industry that would satisfy society's needs, creating mass-market products of high aesthetic value. To this end, Gropius advocated very high teaching standards for the school. Among the subjects covered were the theory of colour and vision, and the psychology of form. Pupils were trained in various crafts and were encouraged to experiment with the latest developments. They were also required to master a wide range of technical disciplines. Members of various avant-garde movements were invited to teach at the Bauhaus. These included the painters Johannes Itten and Lyonel Feininger; ceramics expert Gerhard Marcks; stage designer and sculptor Oskar Schlemmer; tapestry designer Georg Muche; and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, a fervent supporter of "applied art", who specialized in metalwork and the artistic use of photography. The impressive calibre of these lecturers made the desired high standards of quality, beauty, and originality more achievable. Moreover, it allowed for concrete expression of the creative potential and imaginative strength of some outstanding contemporary artists. Each artist was entrusted with the task of passing on his or her own personal aesthetic vision, teaching in a clear and lucid manner, in order to build up the school's collective experience of skill and experimentation. The most significant and fundamental contributions to the Bauhaus were made by Paul Klee and Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944). whose outstanding lectures on theory were published, respectively, in Pedagogical Sketchbook (1925) and Point and Line to Plane (1926). In these works, the question of space and the sensual and emotional value of colours and forms were explored in a scholarly manner, yet without sacrificing poetic-communication, or the spiritual and emotional appeal necessary to interpret new meanings in the world of natural forms. Accused of being a "hotbed of Bolshevism", the Bauhaus closed its doors in the spring of 1925. It re-opened in Dessau, occupying a building that was purpose-designed by Gropius, and later moved to Berlin. The architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969)took over as director in 1928, but five years later the school was closed clown by Hitler's National Socialist government. Paradoxically, the school's enforced closure enhanced the international influence of the Bauhaus. as many of its masters and pupils left Germany and spread its ideas further afield, especially in the US, where Moholy-Nagy founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937.

The Bauhaus school includes also:
Naum Gabo, Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee, Anni Albers, Marianne Brandt, Marcel Breuer, Joost Schmidt, Naum Slutzky, Wolfgang Tumpel.
 

Walter Gropius

(Encyclopaedia Britannica)

born May 18, 1883, Berlin, Ger.
died July 5, 1969, Boston, Mass.,U.S.


German architect and educator who, particularly as director of the Bauhaus (1919–28), exerted a major influence on the development of modern architecture. His works, many executed in collaboration with other architects, included the school building and faculty housing at the Bauhaus (1925–26), the Harvard University Graduate Center, and the United States Embassy in Athens.
Youth and early training.

Gropius, the son of an architect father, studied architecture at the technical institutes in Munich (1903–04) and in Berlin–Charlottenburg (1905–07). He worked briefly in an architectural office in Berlin (1904) and saw military service (1904–05). Before completing school he built his first buildings, farm labourers' cottages in Pomerania (1906). For a year he traveled in Italy, Spain, and England, and in 1907 he joined the office of the architect Peter Behrens in Berlin.

Gropius acknowledged that his work with Behrens and the design problems he undertook for a German electricity company did much to shape his lifelong interest in progressive architecture and the interrelationship of the arts. From the time he left Behrens in 1910 until 1914, Gropius developed a clear commitment to and talent for organization and a dedication to promoting his ideas on the arts. In 1911 he became a member of the German Labour League (Deutscher Werkbund), which had been founded in 1907 to ally creative designers with machine production. Gropius argued for such building techniques as prefabrication of parts and assembly on the site. However much he accepted the inevitability and restrictions of mechanization, he felt it was up to the artistically trained designer to “breathe a soul into the dead product of the machine.” He was against imitation, snobbery, and dogma in the arts and cautioned against such oversimplification as the notion that the function of a product should determine itsappearance.

Gropius' growing intellectual leadership was complemented by his design of two significant buildings, both done in collaboration with Adolph Meyer: the Fagus Works at Alfeld-an-der-Leine (1911) and the model office and factory buildings in Cologne (1914) done for the Werkbund Exposition. The Fagus Works, bolder than any of Behrens' works, is marked by large areas of glass wall broken by visible steel supports, the whole done with little affectation. The Cologne buildings were more formal, some say influenced by the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Together these two buildings testify to Gropius' design maturity prior to World War I.

During that war Gropius served as a cavalry officer on the Western Front, was wounded, and received the Iron Cross for bravery. In 1915 he married a widow, Alma (Schindler) Mahler, whom he had met in 1910 when she was still married to the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler. Their wartime marriage, dependent on furloughs, was complicated by her affair with the German author Franz Werfel, and they were divorced in 1919. Their only child, Alma Manon, died in 1935.


Bauhaus period.

Even before the end of the war, the city of Weimar approached Gropius for his ideas on art education. In April 1919 he became director of the Grand Ducal Saxon School ofArts and Crafts, the Grand Ducal Saxon Academy of Arts, andthe Grand Ducal Saxon School of Arts, which were immediately united as Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar (“Public Bauhaus Weimar”). Gropius' acceptance of this appointment was the most decisive step in his career. With his temperament for the practical world of art, politics, and administration, Gropius succeeded in establishing a viable new approach to design education, one that became an international prototype and eventually supplanted the 200-year-old supremacy of the French École des Beaux-Arts.

A key tenet of Gropius' Bauhaus teaching was the requirement that the architect and designer undergo a practical crafts training to acquaint himself with materials and processes. Although the program was to have been a comprehensive one, budget limitations permitted only a portion of the crafts shops to open. No formal study of architecture was offered at Weimar. Despite the early Werkbund principle of joining art with industry, much activitycentred on handicrafts, such as ceramics, weaving, and stained-glass design. Many painters and sculptors joined thestaff: Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, Gerhard Marcks, and, later, László Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers—altogether an astonishing roster of artists.

Somehow it did not seem incongruous for artists to be teaching applied design. As an introduction to design principles, a beginning course, Vorkurs, was developed by the Swiss painter and sculptor Johannes Itten, which itself became the most widely copied aspect of the Bauhaus curriculum. Students explored two- and three-dimensional design using a variety of simple materials, such as wire, wood, and paper. The psychological effects of form, colour, and texture were studied as well. Although his instructors were gifted, it was Gropius' own persistence that made this educational experiment work.

Historians disagree on the character of the early Bauhaus years. Certainly in 1919–22 Bauhaus students were allowedto express subjective feelings in their art; individuality and expressionism were not uncommon. The prewar Gropius belief that art must conform to and express the economic character and rational order of modern society seemed to be submerged in a new belief that the greatness of art stood above utilitarian considerations. A reverse shift came in 1922, not without controversy; Itten left, and a more rational and objective approach returned. The individually made products were intended as prototypes for machine production, and some designs were produced commercially. They emphasized geometrical forms, smooth surfaces, regular outlines, primary colours, and modern materials—all of which, to many eyes, epitomized impersonality in art. It is this last phase of Bauhaus output that is publicly accepted as characteristic of Bauhaus “style,” although Gropius himself disdained the use of the word “concept.”

Gropius saw architecture and design as ever changing, always related to the contemporary world. He spoke of the architect's duty to encompass the total visual environment. He himself designed furniture, a railroad car, and an automobile. He emphasized housing and city planning, the usefulness of sociology, and the necessity of using teams of specialists.

In 1925 the Bauhaus moved to Dessau with the promise of better financial support and an escape from the growing antagonism of the conservative Weimar community. In Dessau, Gropius designed the school building and faculty housing (1925–26). The school itself is a key monument of modern architecture and Gropius' best-known building. Its dynamic composition, asymmetrical plan, smooth white walls set with horizontal windows, and flat roof are features associated with the so-called International Style of the 1920s. Gropius resigned as director of the Bauhaus in 1928 to return to practice privately as an architect in Berlin. During 1929–30 he designed a portion of a housing colony in Berlin–Siemensstadt. Gropius' regular facades of enormous length, together with a rigid orientation, illustrate an excessively intellectual solution with a “curse of uniformity,” which Gropius himself decried in later years.

Harvard years.

Unsympathetic to the Nazi regime, he and his second wife, Ise Frank, whom he had married in 1923, left Germany secretly via Italy for exile in England in 1934. Hitler's government closed the Bauhaus in 1933. Gropius' brief timein England was marked by collaboration with the architect Maxwell Fry that resulted in their important work, Village College at Impington, Cambridgeshire (1936).

In February 1937 Gropius arrived in Cambridge, Mass., to become professor of architecture at Harvard University. The following year he was made chairman of the department, a post he held until his retirement in 1952. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1944. At Harvard he introduced the Bauhaus philosophy of design into the curriculum, althoughhe was unable to implement workshop training. He was also unsuccessful in abolishing the history of architecture as a course. His crusade for modern design, however, was immediately popular among the students. His innovations atHarvard soon provoked similar educational reform in other architectural schools in the United States and marked the beginning of the end of a historically imitative architecture in that country.

In addition to his teaching, Gropius collaborated with Marcel Breuer, a former Bauhaus pupil and later fellow teacher, from 1937 until 1940. Among their designs was Gropius' own house in Lincoln, Mass., which, with its use of white-painted wood and fieldstone, restated New England traditionalism in modern terms. This house and others designed by them werecontroversial, but the architects lived to see acceptance of their ideas. In 1942 Gropius renewed his interest in the production of architecture by industry when he became the vice president of General Panel Corporation, a company that made prefabricated housing. He retired in 1952.

In 1946, with six of his former Harvard pupils as partners, Gropius formed The Architects Collaborative (TAC), based in Cambridge. Among its varied American and international commissions, TAC received one to do the Harvard UniversityGraduate Center (1949–50), a grouping of dormitory buildings and dining commons. The design is reminiscent of but less forceful than the Dessau Bauhaus buildings. Other TAC designs include the United States Embassy in Athens (1960) and the University of Baghdad (design accepted 1960, still under construction). Gropius remained an active member of TAC until he died at the age of 86. In accord with his request made in 1933 that his funeral not be a mournful affair but marked in a festive manner, 70 friends in Cambridge drank champagne in his memory two days after his death.


Assessment.

Most assessments of Gropius' influential career centre upon his achievements as educator and author rather than as architect. In his own building designs he turned away from personal and subjective aspects in favour of reaching for intellectual solutions of larger and socially urgent problems. Among his most important ideas was his belief that all design—whether of a chair, a building, or a city—should be approached in essentially the same way: through a systematic study of the particular needs and problems involved, taking into account modern construction materials and techniques, without reference to previous forms or styles.

His architecture does not have the aesthetic fascination of Wright's or Le Corbusier's but reflects a sober and programmatic concern that marked his whole life. Yet always, in conversation and criticism, he reminded his pupilsof the vitality of the individual spirit, of the spontaneity of life itself. His habit of wearing a beret with a business suit was perhaps symbolic of the two worlds he hoped to bridge, “the gap between the rigid mentality of the businessman and technologist and the imagination of the creative artist.”

H.F. Koeper
 

Walter Gropius

Johannes Itten Color is life Johannes Itten (b Sudern-Linden, 11 Nov 1888; d Zurich, 25 May 1967). Swiss painter, textile designer, teacher, writer and theorist. He trained first as a primary school teacher in Berne (1904–6), where he became familiar with progressive educational and psychoanalytical ideas. He was, however, interested in art and music, and in 1909 he decided to become a painter. He enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Geneva but was so disappointed that he returned to teacher training in Berne. He read widely and developed an interest in religion and mystic philosophy. After qualifying he returned to Geneva and greatly enjoyed the course on the geometric elements of art run by the Swiss painter Eugene Gilliard (1861–1921). After travelling in Europe, in 1913 Itten went to Stuttgart to study at the academy of Adolf Holzel, a pioneer of abstraction who was also convinced of the importance of automatism in art. Greatly impressed, Itten absorbed his teaching on colour and contrast and his analyses of Old Masters paintings. Encouraged by Holzel, he made abstract collages incorporating torn paper and cloth.
Johannes Itten Space Composition I	Johannes Itten Space CompositionII

Georg Muche (b Querfurt, 8 May 1895; d 1987). German painter and teacher. His father was an amateur painter and art collector who became known as the naive painter Felix Ramholz. In 1913 Muche began studying painting at the Azbe-Kunstschule in Munich. His work was entirely conventional until 1914, when he moved to Berlin and became Herwarth Walden’s exhibitions assistant at the Sturm-Galerie. After his introduction to Expressionist circles, he began to paint intensively, plunging into a heady abstraction that combined a Cubist approach to form with the rich saturated colours of the work of Der Blaue Reiter and Marc Chagall.   Haus am Horn 1923

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

(Encyclopaedia Britannica)

born March 27, 1886, Aachen, Ger.
died Aug. 17, 1969, Chicago, Ill., U.S.


original name Maria Ludwig Michael Mies German-born American architect whose rectilinear forms, crafted in elegant simplicity, epitomized the International Style (q.v.) of architecture.

Early training and influence

Ludwig Mies (he added his mother's surname, van der Rohe, when he had established himself as an architect) was the son of a master mason who owned a small stonecutter's shop. Mies helped his father on various construction sites but never received any formal architectural training. At age 15 he was apprenticed to several Aachen architects for whom he sketched outlines of architectural ornaments, which the plasterers would then form into stucco building decorations. This task developed his skill for linear drawings,which he would use to produce some of the finest architectural renderings of his time.

In 1905, at the age of 19, Mies went to work for an architect inBerlin, but he soon left his job to become an apprentice with Bruno Paul, a leading furniture designer who worked in the Art Nouveau style of the period. Two years later he received his first commission, a traditional suburban house. Its perfect execution so impressed Peter Behrens, then Germany's most progressive architect, that he offered the 21-year-old Mies a job in his office, where, at about the sametime, Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier were also just starting out.

Behrens was a leading member of the Deutscher Werkbund, and through him Mies established ties with this association of artists and craftsmen, which advocated “a marriage between art and technology.” The Werkbund's members envisioned a new design tradition that would give form and meaning to machine-made things, including machine-made buildings. This new and “functional” design for the industrial age would then give birth to a Gesamtkultur, that is, a new universal culture in a totally reformed man-made environment. These ideas motivated the “modern” movement in architecture that would soon culminate in the so-called International Style of modern architecture.

In Berlin Mies was influenced by Behrens' emulation of the pure, bold and simple Neoclassic forms of the early 19th-century German architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. It was Schinkel who became the decisive influence on Mies's search for an architecture of Gesamtkultur. Throughout his life, the elegant clarity of Schinkel's buildings seemed to Mies to embody most perfectly the form of the 20th-century urban environment. Another decisive influence was Hendrik Petrus Berlage, a pioneer of modern Dutch architecture, whom Mies met in 1911. Berlage's work inspired Mies's own love for brick, and the Dutch master's philosophy inspired Mies's credo of “architectural integrity” and “structural honesty.” With regard to structural honesty, Mies would eventually go further than anyone else to make the actual rather than apparent or dramatized supports of his buildings their dominant architectural features.


Work after World War I

During World War I Mies served as an enlisted man, building bridges and roads in the Balkans. When he returned to Berlin in 1918, the fall of the German monarchy and the birth of the democratic Weimar Republic helped inspire a prodigious burst of new creativity among modernist artists and architects. Architecture, painting, and sculpture, according tothe manifesto of the Bauhaus—the avant-garde school of the arts just established in Weimar—were not only moving toward new forms of expression but were becoming internationalized in scope. Mies joined in several modernist architectural groups at this time and organized many exhibitions, but there was virtually nothing for him to build. His foremost building of this period—an Expressionist memorial to the murdered communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, dedicated in 1926—was demolished by the Nazis.

Mies's most important work of these years remained on paper. In fact, these theoretical projects, rendered in a seriesof drawings and sketches that are now in the New York Museum of Modern Art, foreshadowed the entire range of his later work. The Friedrichstrasse Office Building (1919) was one of the first proposals for an all steel-and-glass building and established the Miesian principle of “skin and bones construction.” The “Glass Skyscraper” (1921) applied this idea to a glass skyscraper whose transparent facade reveals the building's underlying steel structure. Both of these building designs were uncompromising in their utter simplicity. Other theoretical studies explored the potentials of concrete and brick construction, and of de Stijl form and Frank Lloyd Wright concepts. Few unbuilt buildings surpassed them in the variety of ideas and in their influence on the development of the architecture of the time.

This influence was apparent at the first postwar Werkbund exposition at Weissenhof near Stuttgart in 1927. The exhibition consisted of a housing demonstration project planned by Mies, who had by then become the Werkbund's vice president. Europe's 16 leading modernist architects, including Le Corbusier and Mies himself, designed various houses and apartment buildings, 33 units in all. Weissenhof demonstrated, above all, that the various architectural factions of the early postwar years had now merged into a single movement—the International Style was born. Though not a popular success, the exposition was a critical one, and Europe's elite suddenly began to commission modern villas, such as Mies's Tugendhat House (1930) at Brno, Czech.

Perhaps Mies's most famous executed project of the interwar period in Europe was the German Pavilion (also known as the Barcelona Pavilion), which was commissioned by the German government for the 1929 International Exposition at Barcelona. It exhibited a sequence of marvelous spaces on a 175- by 56-foot (53.6- by 17-metre) travertine platform, partly under a thin roof, and partly outdoors, supported by chromed steel columns. The spaces were defined by walls of honey-coloured onyx, green Tinian marble, and frosted glass and contained nothing but a pool, in which stood a sculptural nude, and a few of the chairs Mieshad designed for the pavilion. These cantilevered steel chairs, which are known as Barcelona chairs, became an instant classic of 20th-century furniture design.

In 1930 Mies was appointed director of the Bauhaus, which had moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1925. Between Nazi attacks from outside and left-wing student revolts from within, the school was in a state of perpetual turmoil. Thoughnot cut out to be an administrator, Mies soon won respect as a stern but superb teacher. When the Nazis closed the schoolin 1933, Mies tried for a few months to continue it in Berlin. But modern design was as hopeless a cause in Hitler's totalitarian state as was political freedom. Mies announced the end of the Bauhaus in Berlin late in 1933 before the Nazis could close it.

Mies in America

Four years later, in 1937—again after working mainly on projects that were never built—Mies moved to the United States. Soon after he arrived in the country, he gained an appointment as director of the School of Architecture at Chicago's Armour Institute (later the Illinois Institute of Technology). Mies served as the school's director for the next 20 years, and, by the time he retired in 1958, the school had become world-renowned for its disciplined teaching methods as well as for its campus, which Mies had designed in 1939–41. A cubic simplicity marked the campus buildings, which could easily be adapted to the diversified demands of the school. Exposed structural steel, large areas of glass reflecting the grounds of the campus, and a yellow-brown brick were the basic materials used.

The many commissions that his architectural office received after World War II gave Mies unique opportunities to realize large-scale projects, among them several high-rise buildings that are conceived as steel skeletons sheathed in glass curtain-wall facades. Among these major commissions are the Promontory Apartments in Chicago (1949), the Lake Shore Drive Apartments (1949–51) in that city, and the Seagram Building (1956–58) in New York City, a skyscraper office building with a glass, bronze, and marble exterior that Mies designed with Philip Johnson. These buildings exemplify Mies's famous principle that “less is more” and demonstrate, despite their austere and forthright use of the most modern materials, his exceptional sense of proportion and his extreme concern for detail. The International Style, with Mies its acknowledged leading master, reached its zenith at this time. The United States in the 1950s had a faithin material and technical progress that seemed similar to theearlier German notion of Gesamtkultur. Miesian-influenced steel-and-glass office buildings appeared all over the United States and indeed all over the world.


Late work

In the 1960s Mies continued to create beautiful buildings, among them the Bacardi Building in Mexico City (1961); One Charles Center office building in Baltimore (1963); the Federal Center in Chicago (1964); the Public Library in Washington, D.C. (1967); and, most Miesian of all, the Gallery of the Twentieth Century (later called the New National Gallery) in Berlin, dedicated in 1968. A heavy man, badly plagued by arthritis, Mies continued to live alone in a spacious apartment in an old building near Lake Michigan in Chicago until his death in 1969.

Although Mies attracted a great number of disciples, his indirect influence was perhaps of even greater importance. He is the only modern architect who formulated a genuinely contemporary and universally applicable architectural canon, and office buildings all over the world echo his concepts. His work eventually came under criticism in the 1970s for rigidity, coldness, and anonymity, but it was Mies's declared choice to accept the nature of 20th-century industrial society and express it in his architecture.

Wolf Von Eckardt
 

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Apartment Block, Stuttgart, Germany, 1927	Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Apartment Block, Stuttgart, Germany, 1927
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Tugendhat House, Brno, Czech Republic, 1932

Design for Wall Hanging, 1926.

Anni Albers (b Berlin, 12 June 1899; d Orange, CT, 10 May 1994). Textile designer, draughtsman and printmaker, wife of Josef Albers. She studied art under Martin Brandenburg (b 1870) in Berlin from 1916 to 1919, at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg (1919–20) and at the Bauhaus in Weimar (1922–25) and Dessau (1925–29). In 1925 she married Josef Albers, with whom she settled in the USA in 1933 after the closure of the Bauhaus, and from 1933 to 1949 she taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina; she became a US citizen in 1937. Her Bauhaus training led her as early as the 1920s to produce rectilinear abstract designs based on colour relationships, such as Design for Rug for Child’s Room (gouache on paper, 1928; New York, MOMA), but it was during her period at Black Mountain College that she began producing her most original work, including fabrics made of unusual materials such as a mixture of jute and cellophane (1945–50; New York, MOMA) or of mixed warp and heavy linen weft with jute, cotton and aluminium (1949; New York, MOMA). She began producing prints in 1963, using lithography, screenprinting, etching and aquatint and inkless intaglio.

Bauhaus lamps,1925

Marianne Brandt (b Chemnitz, 1 Oct 1893; d Kirchberg, 18 June 1983). German metalworker and designer. One of the best-known of the BAUHAUS metalworkers, she studied painting and sculpture at the Kunstakademie in Weimar (1911–14). Around 1923 she went to study at the Bauhaus in Weimar and on the advice of László Moholy-Nagy joined the metal workshop there. The development of her work parallels the philosophical developments at the Bauhaus, from the craft orientation of the Weimar period (1919–25) to the interest in technology and industrial design of the Dessau period (1925–33). Her early designs, for example the hand-crafted nickel-silver teapot (1924; New York, MOMA) and brass and ebony tea-essence pot (1924; Berlin, Bauhaus-Archv), are based on pure geometrical forms—cylinders, spheres and hemispheres. Functional considerations are secondary to aesthetic concerns. Her later designs, particularly those for lighting fixtures, reflect the influence of Moholy-Nagy. Under his direction the metal workshop concentrated on producing prototypes for mass production. Notable among Brandt’s lamp designs are a ceiling fixture (1925), equipped with chains so the globe could be lowered to change the bulb, an adjustable ceiling light (with Hans Przyrembel; 1926; e.g. at Berlin, Bauhaus-Archv) and the ‘Kandem’ bedside table lamp on a flexible stem (1927). The last was one of several lamps by Brandt that were commercially manufactured by Körting & Mathiesson, Leipzig, from 1928. Brandt was the head of the metal workshop at the Bauhaus from 1928 to 1929. She worked as an independent designer from 1933 and was an instructor at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Dresden (1949–51), and the Institut für Angewandte Kunst, Berlin (1951–4).

Tea Pot, 1924

Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) Architect and designer, one of the most influential exponents of the International Style; he was concerned with applying new forms and uses to newly developed technology and materials in order to create an art expressive of an industrial age. From 1920 to 1928 Breuer studied and then taught at the Bauhaus school of design, where modern principles were applied to the industrial as well as to the fine arts. There he followed the lead of Walter Gropius in espousing unit construction; i.e., the combination of standardized units to form a technologically simple but functionally complex whole. In 1925, inspired by the design of bicycle handlebars, he invented the tubular metal chair; his original version is known as the Wassily chair. In 1928 Breuer began the private practice of architecture in Berlin. For the Swiss architectural historian Sigfried Giedion, he designed the Dolderthal Apartments, Zürich (built 1934–36). During his two years of architectural practice in London, in partnership with F.R.S. Yorke, he designed for the Isokon firm some laminated plywood furniture that became widely imitated. In 1937 he went to Harvard University to teach architecture, and from 1938 to 1941 he practiced with Gropius in Cambridge, Mass. Their synthesis of Bauhaus internationalism with New England regional aspects of wood-frame building greatly influenced domestic architecture throughout the United States. Examples of this style of building were Breuer's own house at Lincoln, Mass. (1939), and the Chamberlain cottage at Wayland, Mass. (1940). Breuer moved to New York City in 1946 and thereafter attracted numerous major commissions: the Sarah LawrenceCollege Theatre, Bronxville, N.Y. (1952); the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Headquarters, Paris (1953–58; with Pier Luigi Nervi and Bernard Zehrfuss); St. John's Abbey, Collegeville, Minn. (1953–61); De Bijenkorf department store, Rotterdam (1955–57); the International Business Machines (IBM) research centre, La Gaude, Fr. (1960–62); and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City (completed 1966); and the headquarters for the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Washington, D.C. (1963–68). He retired from practice in 1976.
Marcel Breuer Armchair, 1922	Marcel Breuer Breuer House I,  Lincoln, Massachusetts, 1939.
	Marcel Breuer Frank House,  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1939

Joost Schmidt Poster for the Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar, 1923

Naum Slutzky Rare and important teapot, 1928

Wolfgang Tumpel Silver and Ivory Tea Pot, 1925

Bauhaus

(Encyclopaedia Britannica)

In full Staatliches Bauhaus, school of design, architecture, and applied arts that existed in Germany from 1919 to 1933. It was based in Weimar until 1925, Dessau through 1932, and Berlin in its final months. The Bauhaus was founded by the architect Walter Gropius, who combined two schools, the Weimar Academy of Arts and the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts, into what he called the Bauhaus, or “house of building,” a name derived by inverting the German word Hausbau, “building of a house.” Gropius' “house of building” included the teaching of various crafts, which he saw as allied to architecture, the matrix of the arts. By training students equally in art and in technically expert craftsmanship, the Bauhaus sought to end the schism between the two.

Beginning in the mid-19th century, reformers led by the English designer William Morris had sought to bridge the same division by emphasizing high-quality handicrafts in combination with design appropriate to its purpose. By the last decade of that century, these efforts had led to the Arts and Crafts Movement (q.v.). While extending the Arts and Crafts attentiveness to good design for every aspect of daily living, the forward-looking Bauhaus rejected the Arts and Crafts emphasis on individually executed luxury objects. Realizing that machine production had to be the precondition of design if that effort was to have any impact in the 20th century, Gropius directed the school's design efforts toward mass manufacture. On the example of Gropius' ideal, modern designers have since thought in terms of producing functional and aesthetically pleasing objects for mass society rather than individual items for a wealthy elite.

Before being admitted to the workshops, students at the Bauhaus were required to take a six-month preliminary course taught variously by Johannes Itten, Josef Albers, and László Moholy-Nagy. The workshops—carpentry, metal, pottery, stained glass, wall painting, weaving, graphics, typography, and stagecraft—were generally taught by two people: an artist (called the Form Master), who emphasized theory, and a craftsman, who emphasized techniques and technical processes. After three years of workshop instruction, the student received a journeyman's diploma.

The Bauhaus included among its faculty several outstanding artists of the 20th century. In addition to the above-mentioned, some of its teachers were Paul Klee (stained-glass and painting), Wassily Kandinsky (wall painting), Lyonel Feininger (graphic arts), Oskar Schlemmer (stagecraft and also sculpture), Marcel Breuer (interiors), Herbert Bayer (typography and advertising), Gerhard Marcks(pottery), and Georg Muche (weaving). A severe but elegant geometric style carried out with great economy of means has been considered characteristic of the Bauhaus, though in fact the works produced were richly diverse.

Although Bauhaus members had been involved in architectural work from 1919 (notably, the construction in Dessau of administrative, educational, and residential quarters designed by Gropius), the department of architecture, central to Gropius' program in founding this unique school, was not established until 1927; Hannes Meyer, a Swiss architect, was appointed chairman. Upon Gropius' resignation the following year, Meyer became director of the Bauhaus until 1930. He was asked to resign because of his left-wing political views, which brought him into conflict with Dessau authorities. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe became the new director until the Nazi regime forced the school to close in 1933.

The Bauhaus had far-reaching influence. Its workshop products were widely reproduced, and widespread acceptance of functional, unornamented designs for objects of daily use owes much to Bauhaus precept and example. Bauhaus teaching methods and ideals were transmitted throughout the world by faculty and students. Today, nearly every art curriculum includes foundation courses in which, on the Bauhaus model, students learn about the fundamental elements of design. Among the best known of Bauhaus-inspired educational efforts was the achievement of Moholy-Nagy, who founded the New Bauhaus (later renamed the Institute of Design) in Chicago in 1937, the same year in which Gropius was appointed chairman of the Harvard School of Architecture. A year later Mies moved to Chicago to head the department of architecture at the IllinoisInstitute of Technology (then known as the Armour Institute),and eventually he designed its new campus.
 

Art Deco

 

Although it is not possible to identify a specific Art Deco style of architecture, during the 1920s and 1930s. European and American architects produced designs that relied heavily on the characteristics and nuances of Art Deco. They used the style to enhance the spare, Viennese Secession-inspired style of the turn of the century, which had tended to produce a stiff and schematic version of the sinuous, organic principles of Art Nouveau design. Soft curves became angular, and the free, fluid forms of earlier designs were organized into a strict symmetrical style, with the exuberant fin de siecle ornament now confined within geometric patterns. Buildings with severe, basic shapes and light, bright exteriors were embellished with cement or sandstone friezes, fascias, and figurative inserts, and their surfaces arranged in ordered and rhythmical patterns. The Art Deco style was widely applied to buildings between the wars. It was used in residential districts, commercial buildings, and places of leisure and entertainment (such as cinemas, which were being sandstone friezes, fascias, and figurative inserts, and their surfaces arranged in ordered and rhythmical patterns. The Art Deco style was widely applied to buildings between the wars. It was used in residential districts, commercial buildings, and places of leisure and entertainment (such as cinemas, which were being built at a great rate during this period), as well as exhibition halls and department stores. The style soon spread overseas to French colonial cities (Casablanca being a prime example) and to the US. where it met with great success and left its mark on the soaring skyscrapers of Manhattan -and consequently on the New-York skyline. It was also used to striking effect in seaside resorts, such as Miami Beach. The new architecture spread rapidly in the wake of increased travel, news coverage, and communications. Capital cities and old urban centres were no longer alone in striving for the newest effects. Minor centres also began to flourish, with new settlements springing up that were instantly elevated to city status.

Art Deco includes: Leon Bakst, Jean Dupas,  Georges Barbier,  Winold Reiss,  Louis Icart,  Cassandre, d'Erte ,  Tamara de Lempicka, Charles Martin,  Georges Lepape,  Charles Dana Gibson,  Raphael Kirchner,  Josef Divek, Franz von Bayros,  Blaine Mahlon,  Gerda Gottlieb Wegener,   Norman Lindsay,  Harrison Fisher, Paul Manship,  Lee Lawrie,  Rene Lalique, Walter Dorwin Teague, William Van Alen, Josef Hoffmann, Carl Paul Jennewein, Raymond Hood, Rene Lalique, Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann, Jean Dunand.

Pin-Up art
 

International movement in painting, sculpture and printmaking. The term originated in the mid-1950s at the ICA, London, in the discussions held by the INDEPENDENT GROUP concerning the artefacts of popular culture. This small group included the artists Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi as well as architects and critics. Lawrence Alloway (1926–1990), the critic who first used the term in print in 1958, conceived of Pop art as the lower end of a popular-art to fine-art continuum, encompassing such forms as advertising, science-fiction illustration and automobile styling. Hamilton defined Pop in 1957 as: ‘Popular (designed for a mass audience); Transient (short term solution); Expendable (easily forgotten); Low Cost; Mass Produced; Young (aimed at Youth); Witty; Sexy; Gimmicky; Glamorous; and Big Business’. Hamilton set out, in paintings such as £he (1958–61; London, Tate), to explore the hidden connotations of imagery taken directly from advertising and popular culture, making reference in the same work to Pin-Ups and domestic appliances as a means of commenting on the covert eroticism of much advertising presentation.

 

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see also:

Cards and Posters


  (G. Barbier,  Rie Cramer, J. Harbour, R. Kirchner, Carl Zander, d'Erte)

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ART DECO SCULPTURE

Rene Lalique

Art Deco

(Encyclopaedia Britannica)

Movement in the decorative arts and architecture that originated in the 1920s and developed into a major style in western Europe and the United States during the 1930s. Its name was derived from the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, held in Paris in 1925, where the style was first exhibited. Art Deco design represented modernism turned into fashion. Its products included both individually crafted luxury items and mass-produced wares, but, in either case, the intention was to create a sleek and antitraditional elegance that symbolized wealth and sophistication.

The distinguishing features of the style are simple, clean shapes, often with a “streamlined” look; ornament that is geometric or stylized from representational forms; and unusually varied, often expensive materials, which frequently include man-made substances (plastics, especially bakelite; vita-glass; and ferroconcrete) in addition to natural ones (jade, silver, ivory, obsidian, chrome, and rock crystal). Though Art Deco objects were rarely mass-produced, the characteristic features of the style reflected admiration for the modernity of the machine and for the inherent design qualities of machine-made objects (e.g., relative simplicity, planarity, symmetry, and unvaried repetition of elements).

Among the formative influences on Art Deco were Art Nouveau, the Bauhaus, Cubism, and Sergey Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. Decorative ideas came from American Indian, Egyptian, and early classical sources as well as from nature. Characteristic motifs included nude female figures, animals, foliage, and sunrays, all in conventionalized forms.

Most of the outstanding Art Deco creators designed individually crafted or limited-edition items. They included the furniture designers Jacques Ruhlmann and Maurice Dufrène; the architect Eliel Saarinen; metalsmith Jean Puiforcat; glass and jewelry designer René Lalique; fashion designer Erté; artist-jewelers Raynmond Templier, Jean Fouquet René Robert, H.G. Murphy, and Wiwen Nilsson; and the figural sculptor Chiparus. The fashion designer Paul Poiret and the graphic artist Edward McKnight Kauffer represent those whose work directly reached a larger audience. New York City's Rockefeller Center (especially its interiors supervised by Donald Deskey), the Chrysler Building by William Van Alen, and the Empire State Building by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon are the most monumental embodiments of Art Deco. Although the style went out of fashion during World War II, beginning in the late 1960s there was a renewed interest in Art Deco design.