 Walter Gropius | ||
| The German architect Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus school of art and design in Weimar Germany. Along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, he is regarded as one of the pioneers of modern architecture. | ||
Researching Bauhaus!
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| paul klee burdened children, line drawing |
‘An active line on a walk, moving freely, without goal…?
Lesson one lines...... Basically this lesson was ultimately about going back to the start and finding out what line can do! For me as a student I find this is underestimated. Without stripping back and research, testing and reviewing your findings how can you begin to move forward.
Sounds simply right, wrong! To try and forget what you think you know and learn again can be hard to do... To rewrite what has already been programmed in, I've found this difficult because it means letting go and trusting it very little! Control freak me vs unknown me! In truth I'm not knowing much so you'd think it would be easy to just explore line or tone or form.....but its not because I have ideals embedded deep within the cortex's of my brain that tell me it must be or look a certain way. Why would I just draw some random lines to see what came of them?
Klee’s was really trying to step back and look at what underlies the way we do that, and the whole way an artist makes a composition. It’s about understanding what you’re capable of and what those things mean. This would have been a crazy idea and inapprotraite waste of time to many teachers of art. Mainly because people stuck to ideals also.
Klee’s approach of going back and addressing the actual mechanics of mark-making was totally revolutionary, and it definitely has parallels in the other teaching of the bauhaus school at the time.
Klee wrote in letters to his wife how he’d visited Johannes Itten’s (another teacher) first year classes and seen him make the students do exercise to loosen up the body before drawing, and ask them to draw emotion rather than objects. Something we also did week one of our course.
For me the story behind Paul Klee is a very interesting rad and definitely worth a read. http://www.tate.org.uk/
This example of how nature has the answers gave me the first real way of understanding abstract art in an easy to describe format. Brilliant
In a lecture he gave in 1924, Klee talked about the tree as a symbol, and how nobody expects the canopy of the tree and the roots of the tree to look identical, but we can all understand that there’s a relationship between them. And he uses that as an image for abstract art – that what lies behind the work is related but different to the work itself.
Part of the Pedagogical Sketchbook which is a book by Paul Klee. It is based on his extensive lectures on visual form at Bauhaus Staatliche Art School where he was a teacher in between 1921-1931. Originally handwritten – as a pile of working notes he used in his lectures – it was eventually edited by Walter Gropius, designed by László Moholy-Nagy and published in 1925 as a Bauhaus student manual.
Creativity and manufacturing were drifting apart, and the Bauhaus aimed to unite them once again, rejuvenating design for everyday life. Fine art and craft were brought together with the goal of problem solving for a modern industrial society.
Johannes Itten
Swiss expressionist painter and color theorist Johannes Itten was an influential teacher at the Bauhaus in Weimar Germany. See http://www.worqx.com/color/itten.htm as a great example of his findings regarding colour theory.
At the Bauhaus he designed an innovative introductory course: he let students explore form, color, rhythm and contrast. Itten, a vegetarian with a shaved head (remember, this was 1919!) who wore homemade monks' robes, led the students in meditation and breathing exercises, and urged them to forget their learning and use only intuition. Itten’s principles were of tremendous influence not only on art education, but also on Kandinsky and Klee. I do like how teachers as well as students were learning from each other and can understand why some people rejected its principles.
Although the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci contain writings on color theory, most color theorists point to Isaac Newton as the developer of color theory. Johannes Itten expanded upon the work of Newton and others to develop his theory of color. Itten’s theory takes into account not only a color’s contrasting properties but also its emotional ones.
Learning more about this subject/school I already feel inspired to learn everything but also saddened at just how little of the terminology I know.
key factors -
- form follows function - functionality comes first, but with industrial mass production.. Motto of "the needs of the people instead of the need for luxury".
- the idea that design is in service of the community, and a belief in the perfection and efficiency of geometry
- encouraged everyone to collaborate
Experimenting with new materials and forms entailed a whole new living environment. Bauhaus artists began creating prototypes for industrial production, their rational designs based on simple geometric shapes and primary colors. Also Herbert Bayer's universal typeface (1926) was a perfect embodiment of Bauhaus ideas: simple, economical of form, legible and clean, and international — no umlauts or capital letters to declare its German-ness!
Many Bauhaus designs have become a part of modern households, both the original designs and their derivatives, such as the cantilever chair (inspired by bike frame) the Wagenfeld lamp or the Bauhaus wallpaper.
Some people, however, do not like the radical ideas and applications of the Bauhaus artists. From the very beginning, opinions differ strongly with regard to the items and buildings, which are something completely new for the society of the 1920's. Conservative circles have always been annoyed by the leftist and internationalist members of Bauhaus. When the National Socialists seize power in 1933, the Bauhaus is closed immediately. The leftist politics and Jewish persuasion of many Bauhaus artists made it a prime target for the Nazis, who furthermore saw the school's internationalist philosophy as "anti-German. Many of the renowned artists emigrate to France, Great Britain, Switzerland and the US.
I think this a very interesting movement and subject matter. I may do this in more detail for my essay as I feel I've only brushed the surface.
Quotes I enjoyed!
There is no essential difference between the artist and the craftsman. The artist is an exalted craftsman. In rare moments of inspiration, moments beyond the control of his will, the grace of heaven may cause his work to blossom into art. But proficiency in his craft is essential to every artist. Therein lies a source of creative imagination.
man's greatest powers', are the regents, and the engineer is the sedate executor of unlimited possibilities. Mathematics, structure, and mechanization are the elements, and power and money are the dictators of these modern phenomena of steel, concrete, glass, and electricity. Velocity of rigid matter, dematerialization of matter, organization of inorganic matter, all these produce the miracle of abstraction. Based on the laws of nature, these are the achievements of mind in the conquest of nature,...
The school is the servant of the workshop, and will one day be absorbed in it. Therefore there will be no teachers or pupils in the Bauhaus but masters, journeymen, and apprentices.
other sources http://www.bauhaus-movement.com
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