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).
Born in Haag, Austria, in 1900, Herbert Bayer grew up in the period of the fast changing environment and technologically revolutionary years. After serving in the Austrian Army, he started studying architecture under Professor Schmidthammer in Linz, but in 1921, he enrolled as a student at the Bauhaus in Weimar, where he studied mural painting with Wassily Kandinsky. Bayer was later appointed by Walter Gropius to head the first printing and advertising workshop in Dessau. “Under Bayer’s charge, the newly installed workshop developed into a professional studio for graphic design and commercial art. The study of the communicative potential of letterforms and typographic layout was part of a basic curriculum in the mechanics of visual education. Such innovations as the elimination of capital letters, and the replacement of the archaic Gothic alphabet used in German printing by a modern “cosmopolitan” font, and the concept of composition based on strong geometrical elements and expressive values of colors, testify to a move away from individually handcrafted and traditionally shaped goods towards objects meeting functional requirements suitabl...
Lie spent much of his youth studying art in Paris and Norway (Rollins 2). While studying in Paris, Lie found great inspiration from the works of Impressionist artist, Claude Monet. After returning from Paris, Lie moved to New York city, giving art classes for aspiring young artists (Caldwell 2). During this period, Lie painted Dusk on Lower Broadway, and through this piece, one is able to see the heavy influence of Impressionism and the techniques of Claude Monet reflected
“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.”
Claes Oldenburg was born in 1929 in Stockholm, Sweden. His father was a Swedish Consul General, and because of his job they moved to Chicago in 1936 where he became an American citizen. When he graduated Yale University in New Heaven, he took up the job as working as a reporter in 1946. Later on in 1952 Oldenburg attended Chicago Art Institute. While he was there he published some drawings in magazines and started to paint pictures. He was inspired by Abstract Expressionism. Then in 1956 he moved to New York and met Jim dine, two years later he met Alan Kaprow and a couple other artists. All of them were interested in art and pushed the question “What is art?” They started to stage “happenings”. That was the start of the Pop Art Movement. Pop Art is the products of mass media. From 1958 -59 he arranged and designed his first sculpture. After that he started to replicate food, like hamburgers, ice-cream and cakes. Oldenburg’s first exhibit was in 1958. There was a selection of his drawings that were included in a group show at the Red Grooms’ City Gallery. A year later, Oldenburg had his first one-man show. He had sculptures at the Judson Gallery. Then in 1962 he had his art work in the “News Realist” which helped define the Pop Art Movement. He also had other exhibitions in 1964, a one man show at the Sidney Janis Gallery and also in 1968 at the Museum of Modern Art. In the mid-1960s he also began making creation for huge monuments.
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...
Renner was born in 1878, and grew up in Wernigerode, Germany. He was a teacher, graphic designer, type designer and author. In 1926 he was a director at Munich’s Graphic Arts College, Later in 1927 he went on to become the director of the Munich Master Printers in 1927. He then wrote a book called Typography as Art in1922, he also wrote cultural Bolshevism in 1932.The Cultural Bolshevism later caused him dismissal from his directorship, because of the National Socialist Party. In his early studies Renner went on to explore different aspects of letterform that varied from the traditional roman form.
Kinney, Arthur F. "Auden, Bruegel, and 'Musee des Beaux Arts'" 7: 529-531. EBSCOhost. Homer Babbidge Library, Storrs. 11 Dec. 2005. Keywords: Auden + Musee Des Beaux Arts.
"Ornament serves strength with strength. It is not an afterthought as is decoration. It is not merely applied but becomes one with the object it helps create". Leon Alberti was an Italian architect, artist, rationist and renaissance humanist in the early 1400's (1404 -1472AD). He wrote variety of books on paintings, sculpture and about family and society but his most important book was when he decided to renew Vitruvius book.
Griffith Wilson, Alexandra. “The Bauhaus 1919-1933.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art. N.D. Web. 9 Feb. 2014. .
John Heartfield was born as Helmut Herzfelde in Berlin on June 19, 1891. Heartfield parent’s abandoned him and his siblings and they spent their childhood with other relatives. He worked at a bookstore in Wiesbaden before going to school in Munich. Heartfield had a passion for painting so he went to school at the Royal Bavarian Art and Crafts School in Munich. He had a chance to learn from two commercial graphic designers Albert Neisgerber and Ludwig Hohlwein. After graduating from the Royal Bavarian Art and Crafts School in Munich he gained a lot of experience. Heartfield decided to have his own career as a commercial artist, starting off with designing book covers in Mannheim. Heartfield was still active in a school; he did most of his studying with artist Ernst Neumann in Berlin.
Leon Battista Alberti can be considered one of the most wonderful architects in the Renaissance. Everyone knew who he was and that he was a man in which he believes architecture represented only one activity among many. He was considered to be one of the great scholars at that time. He was born in Genoa in 1404 where he was the inadmissible son of an important Florentine merchant family. Alberti was given a great education first at the University of Padua where in his early age he has attained to the mastery of Greek and Latin, and then later in his scholar career, he was at the University of Bologna where in which he studied law. He began interest in architecture in the 1440s during the last years of Brunelleschi’s lifetime and it was probable then in which he began to compose his greatest theoretical work. Alberti have practiced all three arts however there was no certain paintings or sculptures on him and his reputation as an artist rests equally on his writings and on the buildings. (Murray pgs.45-47)
The German Pavilion, more commonly known as the Barcelona Pavilion, is one of the most recognizable buildings of the modern period during the early 20th century. It encapsulates every element of modern architecture in one structure. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, one of the fathers of modern architecture, was the architect of this beautiful building. In this essay I will explore how Mies impacted the modern movement in architecture through his groundbreaking ideas, using the Barcelona Pavilion as a case study. The German Pavilion was designed in 1929 for the International Exposition in Barcelona.
At age 13 Le Corbusier had finished and left grade school to move on to attend Arts Decoratifs in his home city of La Chaux-de-Fonds. Here a young Le would learn the art of facing watches, just like his father, through enameling and engraving. While attending Arts Decoratifs Le Corbusier was under the influence of his teacher L’ Eplattenier who he would later refer to as his “Master” and only teacher. Under L’ Eplattenier’s instruction a young Le Corbusier would learn the history of art, drawing and the naturalistic attributes of newly developed art. With his in depth teachings of art Le Corbusier soon abandoned his previous career of watch making and further continued his education in decoration and art intending to eventually...
Bayer, Herbert, Walter Gropius, and Ise Gropius. Bauhaus, 1919-1928. Boston: Charles T. Branford, 1952. Print.