The Bauhaus was an art school that opened in Germany after the war to attempt and rebuild German culture and economics. They believed this began with art, and so the school was opened in 1919. Their ultimate goal in the end was to combine art and machine since it was finally realized that the machine was here to stay. This idea was not fully embraced though until after the 1923 exhibition when it became evident that the De Stijl movement had left its impression on the staff and students; medievalism, expressionism and handicraft began to fade into the background. Modernism movements became largely influential as the machine grew more popular. The school practiced and taught all forms of art to attempt and nurture the creative ability in students to discover their own design method instead of producing similar pieces. Some of the staff members I would like to explore further that taught these classes were Wassily Kandinsky, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer.
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was a Hungarian constructivist that came to the Bauhaus and had a large impact on its transition from medievalism and handicraft to its teachings of rationalism and designing for the machine. Moholy-Nagy became head of the preliminary course when he started teaching. Painting, photography, film, sculpture and graphic design were his methods of creation and he even explored new materials like acrylic resin and plastic, new methods such as photomontage and kinetic motion with light. His innovative ideas and knack for pushing the boundaries of art was perfect for inspiring new artists to follow their unique design eye when they first began at the Bauhaus. The school put no limits on the definition of art. Moholy-Nagy’s passion though was typography and photography which he inspired the Bauhaus interest in. He believed that the collision of world and image on a poster was the strongest and purest form of communication because it minimized the artists interpretation having affect on the viewer. He began to use the camera as a tool for design, using natural light and shadows that created spatial lines and areas naturally in the photograph and could be manipulated simply through changing the normal viewpoint to worm’s-eye or bird’s-eye. He took so much pride in his photos that he grew into photomontage so as to further play with the uses of film. Through photomontage he realized he could take truths from photographs and manipulate and collage them to create new meanings or ideas that were more creative and functional then the regular image.
The second staff member, Kandinsky, was a Der Blaue Reiter painter that introduced advanced ideas about form, color and space to the Bauhaus. He had a unique interest in the power of form and especially color. He was painting during the expressionism era, however less concerned with the portrayal of human condition at the time, he sought a spiritual reality beyond nature and explored color and form. When Kandinsky came to the Bauhaus to teach he had mastered the ability to reveal the spiritual nature of people (as expressionism did), but in a new way through the orchestration of color, line and form. He believed that emotion could be depicted with color and form alone instead of the literal presentation of symbols and subject matter; it is this teaching method and technique that he introduced to the new age of the Bauhaus upon his arrival in 1922, opening the door for intensive expressive color use in future art movements.
The third teacher of the Bauhaus I wish to reflect upon is Herbert Bayer, the typography and graphic design professor. Bayer, originally a student at the Bauhaus, Gropius realized his potential as a graphic designer and helped to nurture Bayer’s talent. He returned to teach in the Dessau era of the Bauhaus. An extraordinary graphic designer with a knack for typography. He pushed typographic boundaries, uses sans-serif almost exclusively and even going on to produce his own universal type that simplified the alphabet. What I found most interesting about Bayer is that he designed his font omitting uppercase letters, because he believed that the two different forms of the same letters created a slight road block in the aesthetics of design, so he broke the alphabet down into one set of letters that was universally recognized. The simplicity of his type and the sans-serif echo speaks predominantly to the approaching modernism of the time, and even today as I recognized that Beets by Dre uses Bayer’s ‘b’ in his font as their logo.
Needless to say the Bauhaus played a significant role in the leap into modernist art. The school assisted in blurring the lines between applied and fine arts, striving to bring art into a close relationship with life just as other art movements had done in the past. The only difference with the Bauhaus though is that it succeeded in blurring the lines, incorporating art and life together, and breaking the boundaries that were placed on art altogether. All because of a talented, unique staff that not only saw, but accepted that the art world was changing.
Bayer:
Moholy-Nagy:
Kandinsky:
Fascinating!!!
ReplyDelete