37 Walter Gropius

Walter Gropius

Walter Adolph Gropius (May 18, 1883 – July 5, 1969) was a German architect and founder of the Bauhaus.

Born in Berlin, Walter Gropius was the third son of a building advisor to the government with the same name, and Manon Auguste Pauline Scharnweber (1855–1933) whose family owned a manor near Berlin.

Gropius was an architect, like his father before him, and designed buildings which used modern materials and are often compared to abstract paintings. He founded the Bauhaus, a school of design where students were taught to use modern and innovative materials to create original furniture and buildings.

Gropius married Alma Schindler after the death of her husband Gustav Mahler, and they had a daughter, Manon (1916–1935). When Manon died of polio at age seventeen, composer Alban Berg wrote his Violin Concerto in memory of her. Gropius’ marriage to Alma did not last and Alma later married again, to Franz Werfel.

Gropius left Germany in 1934 due to the rising power of the Nazi Party and lived and worked in Britain and then America.

In 1945, Gropius founded The Architects’ Collaborative (TAC)in Cambridge, Massachusetts with a group of younger architects. The original partners included Norman C. Fletcher, Jean B. Fletcher, John C. Harkness, Sarah P. Harkness, Robert S. MacMillan, Louis A. MacMillen and Benjamin C. Thompson. After this establishment, TAC would become one of the most well known and respected architectual firms in the world. Some of TAC’s most important works include the Harvard Graduate Center (1949-1950), the University of Baghdad (1957-1960), the John F. Kennedy Federal Building (1963-1966), the Attleboro Junior High School (1948), the Pan-Am (now Metlife) building (1958-1963), the Interbau Apartment blocks (1957), and the architectual award-winning Wayland High School (1961). TAC has remained a notable landmark in architectual history.

36 Herbert Bayer

Herbert Bayer

Herbert Bayer (1900-1985) was an Austrian graphic designer, painter, photographer, and architect.

Bayer apprenticed under the artist Georg Schmidthammer in Linz. Leaving the workshop to study at the Viennese Darmstadt Artists Colony, he became interested in Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus manifesto. After Bayer had studied for four years at the Bauhaus under such teachers as Wassily Kandinsky and Moholy-Nagy, Gropius appointed Bayer director of printing and advertising.

In the spirit of clean simplification, Bayer developed a crisp visual style and adopted an all-lowercase and sans-serif alphabet for all Bauhaus publications. Bayer is also credited with designed the custom geometric sans-serif font, universal.

In 1928, Bayer left the Bauhaus to become art director of Vogue magazine’s Berlin office. Ten years later, he settled in New York City where he had a long and distinguished career in nearly every aspect of the graphic arts.

In 1946 Bayer relocated again. Hired by industrialist and visionary Walter Paepcke, Bayer moved to Aspen, Colorado as Paepcke virtually invented and promoted skiing as a popular sport. Bayer’s architectural work in the town included co-designing the Aspen Institute and restoring the Wheeler Opera House, but his production of promotional posters identified skiing with wit, excitement, and glamour. Bayer would remain associated with Aspen until the mid-1970s.

In 1959, he designed his “fonetik alfabet”, a phonetic alphabet, for English. It was sans-serif and without capital letters. He had special symbols for the endings -ed, -ory, -ing, and -ion, as well as the digraphs “ch”, “sh”, and “ng”. An underline indicated the doubling of a consonant in traditional orthography.

35 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies) (March 27, 1886 - August 17, 1969) was an architect and designer. Born in Aachen, Germany, he worked in the family stone-carving business before he joined the office of Bruno Paul in Berlin. He entered the studio of Peter Behrens in 1908 and remained until 1912.

Under Behrens’ influence, Mies developed a design approach based on advanced structural techniques and Prussian Classicism. He also developed a sympathy for the aesthetic credos of both Russian Constructivism and the Dutch De Stijl group. He borrowed from the post and lintel construction of Karl Friedrich Schinkel for his designs in steel and glass.

Mies worked with the magazine G which started in July 1923. He made major contributions to the architectural philosophies of the late 1920s and 1930s as artistic director of the Werkbund-sponsored Weissenhof project and as Director of the Bauhaus. During this period he designed some seminal buildings, including the Barcelona Pavilion and the elegant Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Czech Republic, now listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

However he fled reluctantly in the late 1930s as he saw the Nazis growing in power. When he arrived in the United States in 1937, he was already a somewhat influential designer. He had been the director of the Bauhaus design school for several years and had won the commission for several architectural projects.

Famous for his dictums ‘Less is More’ and ‘God is in the details’, Mies attempted to create contemplative, neutral spaces through an architecture based on material honesty and structural integrity. Over the last twenty years of his life, Mies achieved his vision of a monumental ’skin and bone’ architecture. His later works provide a fitting denouement to a life dedicated to the idea of a universal, simplified architecture.

Mies settled in Chicago where he was appointed as head of the architecture school at Chicago’s Armour Institute of Technology (later renamed Illinois Institute of Technology - IIT). His one condition on taking this position was that he would be able to redesign the campus. Some of his most famous buildings still stand there, including Crown Hall, the home of IIT’s School of Architecture.

In 1944, he became a naturalized citizen. From 1946 to 1950 Mies van der Rohe built the Farnsworth House for Dr. Edith Farnsworth, a doctor in Chicago. It was the first home Mies built in the United States. The house is rectangular with eight steel columns set in two parallel rows. Suspended between columns are two concrete slabs (one the floor, the other the roof) and a simple, glass-enclosed living space and porch. All the exterior walls are glass, and the interior is entirely open except for a wood paneled area containing two bathrooms, a kitchen and service facilities. Besides the glass, the building is bright white. (The Farnsworth House is sometimes confused with Philip Johnson’s Glass House.)

In 1958 Mies van der Rohe built what has been regarded as the ultimate expression of the International Style of architecture, the Seagram Building in New York. Mies was chosen by the daughter of the client, Phyllis Bronfman Lambert, who has become an architectural figure in her own right. The Seagram Building is a large glass work, but controversially, the architect chose to set the structure back, include a massive plaza and fountain, and create an open space in Park Avenue. Mies had to argue with the Bronfman’s bankers about exploiting all of the plat. More controversially Mies included external I-beams that were not structurally necessary but that ‘expressed’ the structure, touching off a conversation about whether Mies had or had not committed the crime of ornamentation. Philip Johnson had a role in designing the plaza and the Four Seasons restaurant. The Seagrams Building is said to also be the first major ‘fast-track’ construction process, when design and construction are done concurrently.

Mies designed and built many modern high-rises in Chicago’s downtown and elsewhere. Some of his credits include the Federal Building (1959), the IBM Building (1966) and 860-880 Lake Shore Drive (1948-52), the first building to use an all glass and steel curtain wall in its construction, the hallmark of the modern skyscraper. (Ironically, Mies himself lived in a pre-World War II building during his whole residence in Chicago.) Two last major projects were the Toronto-Dominion Centre in 1967 in Toronto, Ontario, the first of the bank skyscrapers to be built in that city, and the Neue Nationalgalerie art museum in Berlin.

34 Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky (first name sometimes spelled as “Vasily,” “Vassily” or “Vasilii”) (December 4, 1866 – December 13, 1944) was a Russian-born painter and art theorist. One of the most important 20th-century artists, alongside Picasso and Matisse, he is credited with painting the first abstract works in the history of modern art.

Kandinsky was born in Moscow but spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Moscow and chose law and economics. Although quite successful in his profession, he started painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30. He settled in Munich but went back to Moscow in 1918 after the Russian Revolution. Being in conflict with official theories on art, he returned to Germany in 1921. There he was a teacher at the Bauhaus from 1922 until it was closed by the Nazis in 1933. At that time he moved to France. He lived the rest of his life there, becoming a French citizen in 1939. He died at Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1944.

33 Josef Albers

Josef Albers

Josef Albers (1888 - 1976), was a German artist and educator whose work, both in Europe and in the United States, formed the basis of some of the most influential and far-reaching art education programs of the 20th century.

Born in Bottrop, Westphalia, on March 19, 1888, Albers studied art in Berlin, Essen, and Munich before enrolling as a student at the prestigious Weimar Bauhaus in 1920. He began teaching in the preliminary course of the Department of Design in 1922, and was promoted to Professor in 1925, the year the Bauhaus moved to Dessau.

With the closure of the Bauhaus under Nazi pressure in 1933, Albers emigrated to the United States and joined the faculty of Black Mountain College, North Carolina, where he ran the painting program until 1949. At Black Mountain his students included Willem de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Motherwell. In 1950 Albers left Black Mountain to head the Department of Design at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut until he retired from teaching in 1958. In 1963 he published “Interaction of Color” which presented his theory that colors were governed by an internal and deceptive logic. Albers continued to paint and write, staying in New Haven with his wife, textile artist Anni Albers, until his death on March 26, 1976.

Accomplished as a designer, photographer, typographer, printmaker and poet, Albers is best remembered for his work as an abstract painter and theorist. He favored a very disciplined approach to composition. Most famous of all are the dozens of paintings and prints that make up the series “Homage to the Square.” In this rigorous series, begun in 1949, Albers explored chromatic interactions with flat colored squares arranged concentrically on the canvas.

Albers’ theories on art and education were formative for the next generation of artists. His own paintings form the foundation of both hard-edge abstraction and Op art.

32 Marcel Breuer

Marcel Breuer

Architect and furniture designer Marcel Breuer (1902 Pécs, Hungary - 1981 New York City) was an influential modernist. One of the fathers of Modernism, Breuer showed a great interest in modular construction and simple forms.

Known as Lajkó, Breuer studied and taught at the Bauhaus in the 1920’s, stressing the combination of art and technology, and eventually became the head of the carpentry shop there. He later practiced in Berlin, designing houses and commercial spaces, as well as a number of tubular metal furniture pieces, replicas of which are still in production today.

Breuer may be best known for his design of the Wassily Chair, the first tubular bent-steel chair, designed in 1925 for Wassily Kandinsky and inspired in part by bicycle handlebars. Still in production, the chair can be assembled and disassembled most easily with bicycle tools.

In the 1930’s, due to the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, Breuer relocated to London and eventually ended up in the United States. Breuer taught at Harvard’s architecture school, working with students such as Philip Johnson and Paul Rudolph who later became well-known U.S. architects. (At one point Johnson called Breuer “a peasant Mannerist”.) At the same time, Breuer worked with old friend and Bauhaus colleague Walter Gropius, also at Harvard, on the design of several houses in the Boston area.

Breuer dissolved his partnership with Gropius in May 1941 and established his own firm in New York. The Geller House I of 1945 is the first to employ Breuer’s concept of the ‘binuclear’ house, with separate wings for the bedrooms and for the living / dining / kitchen area, separated by an entry hall, and with the distinctive ‘butterfly’ roof (two opposing roof surfaces sloping towards the middle, centrally drained) that became part of the popular modernist style vocabulary. A demonstration house set up in the MOMA garden in 1949 caused a new flurry of interest in the architect’s work, and an appreciation written by Peter Blake.

The 1953 commission for UNESCO headquarters in Paris was a turning point for Breuer: a return to Europe, a return to larger projects after years of only residential commissions, and the beginning of Breuer’s adoption of concrete as his primary medium. He became known as one of the practitioners of Brutalism, with an increasingly curvy, sculptural, personal idiom.

Breuer is sometimes incorrectly credited, or blamed, for the former Pan Am Building (now the MetLife Building), perhaps the most-hated high-rise in New York City. The Pam Am was actually credited to Walter Gropius. In 1969 Breuer developed a 30-story proposed skyscraper over Grand Central Terminal, called “Grand Central Tower”, which Ada Louise Huxtable called ‘a gargantuan tower of aggressive vulgarity’, and became a cause celebre. Breuer’s reputation was damaged, but the legal fallout improved the climate for landmark building preservation in New York City and across the United States.

31 Lyonel Charles Feininger

Lyonel Charles Feininger

Lyonel Charles Feininger (July 17, 1871 - January 13, 1956); was a German-American painter and caricaturist.

Feininger was born to parents of German descent and grew up in New York City. He moved to Berlin to study at the Königliche Akademie Berlin under Ernst Hancke and art schools in Berlin with Karl Schlabitz and in Paris with sculptor Filippo Colarossi. He started working as an caricaturist for several magazines including Harper’s Round Table, Harper’s Young People, Humoristische Blätter, Lustige Blätter, Das Narrenschiff, Berliner Tageblatt and Ulk.

Feininger married Clara Fürst, daughter of the painter Gustav Fürst and they had two daughters. Later he had also several children together with Julia Berg and they later married.

The artist is represented with drawings at the exhibitions of the annual Berlin Secession in the years 1901 through 1903.

Feiniger only started working as an artist at the age of 36, after having worked as a commercial caricaturist for twenty years for various newspapers and magazines in both the USA and Germany; he was a member of the Berliner Sezession in 1909, was associated with expressionist group Die Brücke, the Novembergruppe, Gruppe 1919, and The Blue Four. He also taught at the Bauhaus for several years, beginning 1919.

When the NSDAP came to power in 1936, the situation became unbearable for Feininger and his wife, who was partly Jewish. They moved to America after his work was exhibited in the ‘degenerate art’ (Entartete Kunst) in 1936, but before the 1937 exhibition in Munich.

Feininger was one of the very few fine artists also to draw comic strips as a cartoonist. His short-lived strips, The Kin-Der-Kids and Wee Willie Winkie’s World were noted for their fey humor and graphic experimentation.

30 Johannes Itten

Johannes Itten

Born in Südern-Linden, Switzerland, he had a Friedrich Froebel influenced education and was initially a teacher where he was exposed to the ideas of psychoanalysis. He later enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Geneva but then returned to Berne, after being unimpressed with the educators there.

He then received some teaching from Eugène Gilliard, who was an abstract painter. From 1919-1922, Itten taught at the Bauhaus, developing the so-called preliminary course which was to teach students the basics of material characteristics, composition, and colour. He later published a book - The Art of Color- which describes these ideas as a furthering of Adolf Hozel’s colour wheel. Itten’s colour wheel went on to include 12 colours.

After falling out with Walter Gropius, he resigned from the Bauhaus School. His works exploring the use and composition of colour resemble the square op-art canvases of artists such as Josef Albers, Max Bill and Bridget Riley, and the expressionist works of Wassily Kandinsky.

29 Paul Klee

Paul Klee

Paul Klee (December 18, 1879 – June 29, 1940) was a Swiss painter.

Klee was born in Münchenbuchsee (near Bern) of Switzerland into a musical family - his father, Hans Klee, taught music at the Hofwil Teacher Seminar near Berne. In his early years, Paul wanted to be a musician, but decided on the visual arts in his teen years. He studied art in Munich with Heinrich Knirr and Franz von Stuck. After travelling to Italy and then back to Bern, he settled in Munich, where he met Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc and other avant-garde figures, and became associated with the Blaue Reiter. Here he met Bavarian pianist Lily Stumpf, whom he married; they had one son.

In 1914, he visited Tunisia and was impressed by the quality of the light there, writing “Color has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase after it, I know that it has hold of me forever … Color and I are one. I am a painter.”

Klee worked with many different types of media - oil paint, watercolor, ink and more. He often combined them into one work. He has been variously associated with expressionism, cubism and surrealism but his pictures are difficult to classify. They often have a fragile child-like quality to them, and are usually on a small scale. They frequently allude to poetry, music and dreams and sometimes include words or musical notation. The later works are distinguished by spidery hieroglyph-like symbols. His better known works include Southern (Tunisian) Gardens (1919), Ad Parnassum (1932) and Embrace (1939).

Following World War I, in which he fought as part of the imperial German army, Klee taught at the Bauhaus, and from 1931 at the Düsseldorf Academy, before being denounced by the Nazi Party for producing “degenerate art”.

Composer Gunther Schuller also immortalized seven works of Klee’s in his Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee. The studies are based on a range of works, including Alter Klang [Antique Harmonies], Abstraktes Terzett [Abstract Trio], Little Blue Devil, Twittering Machine, Arab Village, Ein unheimlicher Moment [An Eerie Moment], and Pastorale.

In 1933, Paul Klee returned to Switzerland; in 1935 he was diagnosed with scleroderma. The progression of his disease can be followed through the art he created in his last years.

28 Gerhard Marcks

Gerhard Marcks

Gerhard Marcks (born 18 February 1889 in Berlin, died 13 November 1981 in Burgbrohl, Eifel) was a German sculptor, famous for his woodcuts, drawings, lithographs and ceramics.

In 1907 Marcks was an apprentice to Richard Scheibe. In 1914 he married Maria Schmidtlein; altogether they were to have six children. Marcks took part in World War I which left him very ill.

From 1919 Marcks worked as the Form Master at the Pottery Workshop which he co-founded at the Bauhaus, the Modernist German art and architecture school in Weimar. As such he was one of the first teachers ever employed there. Works from his first Bauhaus portfolio (Neue Europaeische Graphik I) are Die Katzen (”The Cats”) and Die Eule (”The Owl”), both woodcuts. At first Marcks was interested in animal portrayals, but soon his attention moved on to human figures, and this subject fascinated him all his life.

From September 15, 1925, after the Bauhaus school relocated to Dessau, he worked at the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Applied Arts) in Burg Giebichenstein near Halle. After the death of its director, Paul Thiersch, Marcks replaced him. He stayed in Burg Giebichenstein until 1933 when he was dismissed, as his works were considered unacceptable by the Nazis. Some even featured in the Nazi exhibition of “degenerate art” in Munich.

Marcks nonetheless remained in Germany during the war (in Mecklenburg) but in 1937, twenty-four of his works were confiscated and destroyed by the Nazis. He was prohibited from exhibiting and threatened with a total ban on working; during this time he made several trips to Italy and was funded by the Villa Massimo in Rome. In 1943 his studio in Berlin was bombed and nearly all his works destroyed.

After World War II Marcks became Professor of Sculpture at the Landeskunstschule (District School of Art) in Hamburg, where he worked for four years. He was also commissioned to create memorials for soldiers and civilians killed in the war. In 1949, Marcks was awarded the Goethe Medal, and in 1952 he was made Knight of the Order Pour le Mérite peace class.


Site Search

More...

Powered by WordPress.
Entries and comments feeds. Valid XHTML and CSS.
Didn't find what you needed? Try searching with Google.