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?