Day 10

NOTES:

Walter Groupius – Director of the BauHaus from 1919 to 1928

Soldier in the First World War went to school for architecture

Bauhaus students thought they were going to affect the world and shape the new century.

Gerhard Marks-Sculpture/Pottery Shop

Lyonel Feringer-Painting

Johannes Itten-Preliminary Courses

Fanatical about releasing each individual’s special talents

Nagy Hungarian constructivist

Interested in materials and wants art to serve a purpose

Experiments with everything

Itten is replaced by Nagy

Has incredible influence on the Bauhaus

Groupius prime minister

Nagy experiments by combining imagery and typography

Unifies photography and typography – typophoto

Interested in legibility

Thought communication should never be impaired by an aesthetic

Trying to create a new graphic language – new literature

Experiments with photo prints

Photo Classtiques – collage, photos that were cut up and replaced

Golden period for the Bauhaus – rebuilt great building

Took students projects and sold them

Made catalogues

Herbert Bayer was a student at Bauhaus then became part of the faculty

Gives us the universal alphabet

Idea is that we don’t really have an alphabet

We have two, Upper case and Lower case

We should omit capitals

1.     Just the idea

2.     Need the visual cues

This is the kind of thinking they are doing just as students

Groupius, Bayer, Nagy leave the Bauhaus for the Bauhaus to be left alone by the Nazis.

Hans Mayer is hired and is a vocalist and is not popular with the Nazis

Vanderoua is from Blood and Soil School (Germany)

Tschichold the son of a designer/painters

Studied calligraphy

21 years old and went to Bauhaus exhibition

Got exposer of the Bauhaus

Writing and publishing a 24 insert explaining a new typeface

1928 writes Typography

Aim of every typographic work to be the delivery of a message in the shortest most efficient manner- form follows function

THOUGHTS:

Bauhaus seems to have had a great affect on Art and seems to have been one of the best Art schools. It must have had an effect great enough that it caused the Nazi's to come in and destroy it. It would be interesting to know more about what the students actually learned at Bauhaus.

QUESTIONS:

If the Bauhaus was an awesome school, why were students like Bayer so worried about the alphabet? Wasn't there more important things to worry about like what we have in art school today? Is that all the Bauhaus taught, is Typography?

day 9

NOTES:

El Lissitzky – a painter originally started off helping pioneers

Influences constructivism and also Bauhaus

Lissitzky explores the intersection between Painting and architecture which is Proun(acronym)

Projects for the establishment of new art.

Taking a scientific approach to take on art

Beat the whites with the red wedge” propaganda piece (Lissitzsky’s known piece)

Page and Book design, For the voice

Also writes the Isms of Art- page system he developed mathematically (grids/bars)

English French and German

Columns divides each language

Sans Serif Type

Grids are completely liberal for designers

Solutions are in the problem

Analyze the geometry it tells you the solution

Alexander Rochanco  - art student 100 years ago

Style is primitive, its raw

Evolved working with modern aesthetics

Becomes a constructivists

Something that serves a social need –valid art

Destijl – functions in a window of time

Based on a Utopian approach to aesthetics

Theo Bandosberg- publisher

1922 format of magazine changes to A symmetrical

eada movement that said the world is chaos

the world has no meaning so why should art reflect on it

Before building a new world everything old had to be torn down

Piett Mondrion

Bauhaus was a school

Utopian ideal to change society

We should return to the old stuff

No machine back to creating by hand

Bringing the crafts and the man together

Bauhaus is about rebuilding

1919-1933

1919-1925- Weimar

First exhibition – 1923

Letter of registration – 1924

1925-1932 – Dessau

Groupius replaced by Meyer – 1928

Meyer replaced by van der Rohe – 1930

1932-1933 – Berlin

THOUGHTS:

Movies were depressing. People back in the day seemed to be confused on what they wanted to do. Like Lissitzsky, he helped pioneers, then started painting, then started architecture and wrote books? I like the movement with bringing man and crafts together. Working by hand is more valuable to me then with machine.

QUESTIONS:

Why would Lissitzsky take on a scientific approach on art? Art is suppose to be fun, imaginative and creative, not scientific.

In the movie, why were the Nazi's destroying the Bauhaus and why did Hitler hate artist so much? Were artists/designers treated as bad as the Jews?