Maggie's Graphic Arts Blog: The Bauhaus and the New Typography

The Bauhaus and the New Typography

Maggie Merkin

ARTH 230-01

T. Long

Belgian art nouveau architect Henri van de Velde (who was director of the Weimer Arts and Crafts School) resigned from his position in 1914 so that he could return to Belgium. One of the three possible replacements for the school was Walter Gropius (1883-1969), who, during the world war, had already gained an international reputation for his factory designs using glass and steel. After the war, Gropius was confirmed as the new director for the school, and had merged the school with a fine arts school, the Weimer Art Academy. He renamed the school Das Staatliche Bauhaus, or “State Home for Building.” The school formally opened on April 12, 1919, and served as a place for artists to actively try and solve problems of visual design created by industrialism. Of the artists and teachers at the Bauhaus, three had a significant impact on the school: Herbert Bayer, Wassily Kandinsky, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Austrian-American artist Herbert Bayer (1900-1985) was both a student and teacher at the Bauhaus. He worked in typography, painting, sculpture, architecture, and advertising. As a student he studied underneath Kandinsky, and quickly became a student teacher for typography. He worked as an art director for the Container Corporation and was also an architect in both America and Germany. He notably developed a sans-serif typeface consisting of all lower-case letters that was used for many Bauhaus publications. In 1928 Bayer left for Belgium, and his position as a professor of typography was given to Joost Schmidt, a former student of his. Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was born in Moscow to a well-established family. He notably was one of the founding members of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) an early expressionist group that redefined art as an object without subject matter, but with perceptual properties that were used to convey feelings and emotions. In 1922, Kandinsky joined the Bauhaus staff, heading a fresco workshop. Experimenting with color and applying his beliefs in the autonomy and spiritual values of color and form, his artwork progressively changed and evolved. Geometric elements entered foregrounds, cold color harmonies were employed, and shapes were used symbolically. He eventually became the leading advocate of art that could essentially reveal the spiritual nature of people through the use of color, line, and form on the canvas. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) was born in 1895 in Borsod, Austria-Hungary. Before enlisting in the Austro-Hungarian army as an officer in the artillery, Moholy-Nagy had begun to practice drawing and sketching, producing hundreds of sketches on the back of military postcards. In 1919 after attending law school, he turned to non-representational painting and was heavily influenced by Kasimir Malevich. He also worked in photography, film, sculpture, and graphic design. In 1923 he replaced Johannes Itten as head of the preliminary course at the Bauhaus, and began to explore and introduce several innovative techniques to his work and the school. Innovations such as photomontage, transparency, and new techniques with resin, plastic, and acrylic, were among those that were made by Moholy-Nagy. His passion for typography and photography influenced the school to pursue and work with visual communication, and lead to the unification of the two arts. His work and instruction heavily influenced the evolution of the structure of the Bauhaus, as he influenced the unification of both fine art and technology. Overall, these three artists each had profound yet different effects and influences on the Bauhaus school that established them as the more significant teachers/artists during that time.