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.

27 Laszlo Moholy

Laszlo Moholy

László Moholy-Nagy (probably July 28, 1895 – November 24, 1946) was a Hungarian painter and photographer as well as professor in the Bauhaus school.

He was editor of the art and photography department of the European avant-garde magazine International Revue i 10 from 1927 to 1929.

In 1937, at the invitation of Walter Paepcke, the Chairman of the Container Corporation of America, Moholy-Nagy moved to Chicago to become the director of The New Bauhaus. The philosophy of the school was basically unchanged from that of the original, and its headquarters was the Prairie Avenue mansion that architect Richard Morris Hunt designed for department Store magnate Marshall Field.

Unfortunately, the school lost the financial backing of its supporters after only a single academic year and it closed in 1938. Paepcke, however, continued his own support, and in 1939, Moholy-Nagy opened the School of Design. In 1944, this became the Institute of Design. He authored an account of his efforts to develop the curriculum of the School of Design in his book Vision in Motion.

26 Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier (October 6, 1887–August 27, 1965) was a Swiss architect famous for what is now called the International style, along with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and Theo van Doesburg. He also designed furniture.

Born as Charles-Edouard Jeanneret in La Chaux-de-Fonds, a small town of Neuchâtel canton in northwestern Switzerland, just across the border from France, Le Corbusier was attracted to the visual arts and studied under the tutelage of the teacher at the local arts school, Charles L’Éplattenier, who had himself studied in Budapest and Paris. He himself designed his earliest houses, like the Villa Fallet, the Villa Schwob, and the Villa Jeanneret (the latter of which was for his parents) in La Chaux-de-Fonds. These houses recall the indigenous mountainous vernacular architectural styles popular in the Alps.

Frequently in his early years he would escape the somewhat provincial atmosphere of his hometown by travelling around Europe. In about 1907 he travelled to Paris, where he found work in the office of the French pioneer in reinforced concrete, Auguste Perret, and between October 1910 and March 1911 he worked for the renowned architect Peter Behrens near Berlin, where he met a young Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and became fluent in German. Both of these experiences proved influential in his later career. Later in 1911 he would journey to the Balkans and visit Greece and Turkey, filling sketchbooks with renderings of what he saw, including many famous sketches of the Parthenon, whose forms he would later praise in his work Vers une architecture (1923).

25 Eileen Gray

Eileen Gray

Eileen Gray (August 9, 1878 – October 31, 1976) was an Irish lacquer artist, furniture designer, and architect now well-known for incorporating luxurious lacquer work into the stark International Style aesthetic.

She first studied painting at London’s Slade School of Design. She eventually left painting to study lacquer under the guidance of lacquer craftsman, Sugawara.

In 1913, she held her first exhibition, showing some decorative panels at the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs. She combined lacquer and rare woods, geometric abstraction and Japanese-inspired motifs into her work. It attracted the attention of Jacques Doucet, an art connoisseur and collector. He commissioned a few pieces – her only signed and dated creations.

So far, her work went mostly unnoticed. In London after the start of World War I, Gray needed to rely on her family’s financial support. Near the end of the war, Gray was commissioned to decorate an apartment on Rue de Lota in Paris. Her interior designs generated a great deal of praise in the press. She opened the Jean Desert Gallery in 1922.

Shortly thereafter, persuaded by Le Corbusier and Jean Badovici among others, she turned her interests to architecture. In 1924 Gray and Badovici began work on the house E-1027 in Roquebrune, Cap Martin in southern France (near Monaco). L-shaped and flat-roofed with floor-to-ceiling windows and a spiral stairway to the guest room, E-1027 was both open and compact. Gray designed the furniture as well as collaborated with Badovici on its structure. Her circular glass E-1027 table and rotund Bibendum armchair were inspired by the recent tubular steel experiments of Marcel Breuer at the Bauhaus. The house is now in poor repair.

In 1968, a complimentary magazine article quickly grew into an unexpected hit, and the Bibendum chair and E-1027 table went back into production. Following the purchase of her archive in 2002, the Irish National Museum at Collins Barracks Dublin opened a permanent exhibition of her work.

43 Barcelona Chair

Barcelona Chair

The Barcelona Chair was designed by Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe for the German Pavilion exhibit in Barcelona

The Barcelona Chair was designed to be used as a throne for the king and queen of Spain while visiting the German Pavilion exhibit.

… it was an instant success. Amongst others, the Barcelona Chair (also Barcelona stool, table, daybed, etc.) is an example of Van Der Rohe’s design genius.

Originally constructed of high quality Leather and Chromed steel, many of today’s reproductions use stainless steel instead of chrome. In my opinion, nothing can match the finish of a high quality chromed steel; the shine, smooth finish and seamless look are fantastic!

This is one of my personal favourites, I simply love the clean and simple lines of the Barcelona Chairs and the entire collection from the German Pavilion… simple, elegant and unmatched quality make this article a must have for all Bauhaus lovers.


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