Josef Albers was a German artist whose art laid the foundation of one of the most influential styles of the 20th century. Albers’s roots lead back to a town named Bottrop in Westphalia, Germany. From the time of 1908 to 1913, Albers worked as an educator in his town. In 1918, Albers got his premier public commission, Rosa mystica ora pro nobis, which was a stained-glass window for a local place of worship. He studied art in many major German cities before becoming a student at the prestigious Weimar Bauhaus school in 1920. Despite the fact that Albers was also studying painting, his preferred method was to make stained glass. He joined the ranks in 1922, and used his preferred medium as a part of architecture and as a form of art.
A man named Walter Gropius, who was the founder of the Bauhaus, requested Albers to teach new students, due to Albers’s extensive knowledge and background. Albers quickly rose through the ranks, and he became a professor in the year of 1925, the same year that the Bauhaus had moved to the city of Dessau. During his time there, he married Anni Albers, a stu...
Marcel Breuer, born in the early 1900’s in Hungary, was one of the first and youngest students to learn under the Bauhaus style, taught by Walter Gropius. Breuer started his career designing furniture, using tubular, or “handle bar like”, steel (Dodd, Mead, and Company 32). One of the most popular of these furniture designs was his Club Chair B3designed in 1922. In the 1930’s, Breuer moved to the United States to teach and practice architecture. In the 1950’s, he received the Medal of Honor from the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). Between 1960 and 1980, Breuer was honored with several honorary doctoral degrees from several universities around the world. After retiring in 1976 due to poor health, Breuer was awarded several other awards, and his work was displayed in exhibitions around the world. Breuer died on July 2nd, 1981, at the age of 79 (Marcel Breuer Associates 6).
Founded by Walter Gropius in 1919, the Bauhaus was a German art school that initiated the combination of art and crafts innovatively to produce goods for everyday use, which influenced and shaped modern life. The Bauhaus value is still effective today since we can still see the impact of the Bauhaus. For example, contemporary furniture are mostly minimalist, which is one of the values from the Bauhaus. This essay will discuss the failure of the Bauhaus in achieving its mass-produce ideal through examining three Bauhaus production, the Wassily Chair, the chess set and Model No. MT49 tea infuser. Through the aspects of artistry and utility, the Bauhaus pursued to generate reasonably priced mass-production by taking the forms and materials into
Josef Albers, a prominent artist of the 20th century whom created astounding paintings that evoked his passion and curiosity for color. He mastered a wide range of mediums and continually shared his explorations with his students. Josef Albers is an idol the art community will never forget.
To understand the Ashcan movement it is necessary to look more closely at some of the major artists who were involved. George Bellows moved to New York in 1904 after he dropped out of Ohio State University following his junior year. Once in New York he enrolled in classes at The New York School of Art. He quickly became Robert Henri's star pupil and valued friend. Bellows was fascinated by New York City. He attempted to capture in his art the social change which he noticed in the city. By the time he was twenty four his art had the attention of the cities leading critics, and his work was shown regularly at exhibitions at the national academy of design. Bellows became the youngest artist ever to elected an associate of the National Academy of Design in 1909.
A lot of modern architects and designers boasted the fact that they followed know existing style, some say modernism was a lot more than just a style, it was a new, refreshed and revived outlook on the world accustomed by new viewpoints of space and time. One of the most iconic ‘modern’ architects was Charles Edouard Jeanneret Gris, who took a great interest in exploring new materials, who rejected precedents from the past and pioneered simplicity. Charles Edouard Jeanneret Gris was born in Switzerland on October 6th 1887 and chose to be known as Le Corbusier. He initially worked in France, where he was most active, utilizing his many talents by being an architect, designer, writer, painter, urban planner and theorist. Corbusier started his academic life in 1900, as a goldsmith & engraver; he studied at La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland. Corbusier was taught the history of art, drawing and naturalist aesthetics of art nouveau by L’Eplattenier who Corbusier later, himself referred as his only teacher. Corbusier left his current studies at the time and progressed with his studies of art and decoration with the intention of becoming an artist/painter. It was L’Eplattenier who insisted that Corbusier studies architecture, and therefore organized some local projects that Corbusier could work on.
“He was born soon after 770 and was given his father’s name. The family sent him as a boy to the great monastery of Fulda, where he was educated, and made a grant to the abbey of land which they held in the Maingau. In the 790’s he was sent by the abbot to Charlemagne’s court, where he became the pupil of Yorkshireman Alcuin who had gone to teach there, and succeeded him as teacher at the palace school.”
Himmler graduated in July 1919. He majored in agriculture at the Technical University in Munich. This is where he combined a German-nationalist student group and began to read intensely in the racist-nationalist literature popular on the essential right of the interwar German political field. By the time he received his university degree in August 1922, Himmler was a nationalist and a political activist. Forced to take a job in a manure-processing factory near Munich, Himmler made contact with t...
Two debates formed in German design around this time; tradition versus modernity. “Black-letter” or “gothic” letter was used only in Germany for the first half of the 20th century. Later the debate came between Gothic and roman type, this was an important debate for Renner as well as other artists of the applied arts. The second debate was on the most important aspect of the era, technology. Technology was highly influential from everywhere around the world. At first Renner was at the conservative side of the debate, but later Renner slowly moved towards the idea of roman type, tec...
Weingart was conceived close to the Swiss fringe of Germany, in the Salem Valley, in 1941. He selected in a two-year course in connected craftsmanship and outline at the Merz Academy in Stuttgart in 1958. There he found the school printing offices and, at the age of 17, set metal sort surprisingly. In the wake of graduating, he attempted a thorough apprenticeship as a typesetter at Ruwe Printing in Stuttgart, where he met house fashioner Karl-August Hanke, a previous person at the Basel School of Design. It was Hanke who turned into a guide to the junior Weingart, acquainting him with outline being carried out outside of Germany, especially in Switzerland, where Ruder, Armin Hofmann and Karl Gerstner were making work that might come to be alluded to as Internatio...
The Bauhaus was a school in Weimer, Germany. It was founded in 1919 by a German architect named Walter Gropius. The goal behind the Bauhaus was to bring the arts together into a new age of modern art or, as Gropius described, “Architects, sculptors, painters, we must all get back to craft” (Borteh). Gropius expressed this idea in the Proclamation of the Bauhaus, a document by Gropius that stated the Bauhaus was a “utopian craft guild” that combined architecture, sculpture, and painting (Wilson). This idea attracted many highly experienced staff members.
Arwas, V., Newell, S., Museum, S. & Gallery, A., 1996. The art of glass. 8th ed. Paris: Andreas Papadakis Publisher.
The Bauhaus was the most influential modernist art school of the 20th century as it laid many foundations for design theory and helped us understand the importance of art in relation to society and technology. Although the school was in operation only between 1919 and 1933, it was a major influence in the fields of architecture, graphic design, typography, industrial design and interior design long after it has closed.
The ideology of the Bauhaus was conceived when Walter Gropius, a German architect, sought for a unification of the arts through craft. Gropius wanted to end the division between industry and art by training students equally in both crafts and fine arts. In 1919, the Weimar Academy of Arts and the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts merged together into what is known as the Bauhaus, or “house of construction.” Walter Gropius was appointed director and described the school as “a utopian craft guild combining architecture, sculpture, and painting into a single creative expression” in his Proclamation of the Bauhaus. Gropius soon developed a curriculum in which he combin...
Gustav Klimt, one of the most prominent figures in the Vienna Secession movement, was born July 14, 1862 in Baumgartner, Vienna—making him the second oldest of seven kids. Though he wasn’t the only child who showed artistic promise early on he is the most memorable of the group. Despite growing up in poverty he was still able to attend the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, where he studied and received training as an architectural painter until 1883. While enrolled in this school Gustav was noticed right away for the talent and art forms he created, therefore giving him his first ever commission to create are for the public at such a young age.
A leader in the renewed attempt of art as science was Hippolyte Taine, who proposed that styles of art should be studied in the same way as plants are studied by botanists, and are subject to the same evolutionary development. At the same time in Germany, the name Kunstwissenschaft was applied to the historical writings of Semper, Fiedler, Burckhardt, and Riegl. In their writings, they strove for neutrality in comparative analysis i...