Modern art includes artistic work produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the styles and philosophies of the art produced during that era.
The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the
past have been thrown aside in a spirit of experimentation.
Modern artists experimented with new ways of seeing and with fresh
ideas about the nature of materials and functions of art. A tendency
away from the narrative, which was characteristic of the traditional arts, toward abstraction is characteristic of much modern art. More recent artistic production is often called contemporary art or postmodern art.
Modern art begins with the heritage of painters like Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec all of whom were essential for the development of modern art. At the beginning of the 20th century Henri Matisse and several other young artists including the pre-cubistsGeorges Braque, André Derain, Raoul Dufy, Jean Metzinger and Maurice de Vlaminck
revolutionized the Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored,
expressive landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism. Matisse's two versions of The Dance signified a key point in his career and in the development of modern painting. It reflected Matisse's incipient fascination with primitive art:
the intense warm color of the figures against the cool blue-green
background and the rhythmical succession of the dancing nudes convey the
feelings of emotional liberation and hedonism.
At the start of 20th-century Western painting, and initially influenced by Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin and other late-19th-century innovators, Pablo Picasso made his first Cubist paintings based on Cézanne's idea that all depiction of nature can be reduced to three solids: cube, sphere and cone. With the painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
(1907), Picasso dramatically created a new and radical picture
depicting a raw and primitive brothel scene with five prostitutes,
violently painted women, reminiscent of African tribal masks and his own new Cubist inventions. Analytic cubism was jointly developed by Picasso and Georges Braque, exemplified by Violin and Candlestick, Paris, from about 1908 through 1912. Analytic cubism, the first clear manifestation of cubism, was followed by Synthetic cubism, practiced by Braque, Picasso, Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Albert Gleizes, Marcel Duchamp and several other artists into the 1920s. Synthetic cubism is characterized by the introduction of different textures, surfaces, collage elements, papier collé and a large variety of merged subject matter.
The notion of modern art is closely related to modernism.
Although modern sculpture and architecture are reckoned to have emerged at the end of the 19th century, the beginnings of modern painting can be located earlier. The date perhaps most commonly identified as marking the birth of modern art is 1863, the year that Édouard Manet showed his painting Le déjeuner sur l'herbe in the Salon des Refusés in Paris. Earlier dates have also been proposed, among them 1855 (the year Gustave Courbet exhibited The Artist's Studio) and 1784 (the year Jacques-Louis David completed his painting The Oath of the Horatii). In the words of art historian H. Harvard Arnason:
"Each of these dates has significance for the development of modern
art, but none categorically marks a completely new beginning .... A
gradual metamorphosis took place in the course of a hundred years."
The strands of thought that eventually led to modern art can be traced back to the Enlightenment. The modern art critic Clement Greenberg, for instance, called Immanuel Kant
"the first real Modernist" but also drew a distinction: "The
Enlightenment criticized from the outside ... . Modernism criticizes
from the inside." The French Revolution
of 1789 uprooted assumptions and institutions that had for centuries
been accepted with little question and accustomed the public to vigorous
political and social debate. This gave rise to what art historian Ernst Gombrich called a "self-consciousness that made people select the style of their building as one selects the pattern of a wallpaper."
Influences upon these movements were varied: from exposure to Eastern decorative arts, particularly Japanese printmaking, to the coloristic innovations of Turner and Delacroix, to a search for more realism in the depiction of common life, as found in the work of painters such as Jean-François Millet. The advocates of realism stood against the idealism of the tradition-bound academic art that enjoyed public and official favor.
The most successful painters of the day worked either through
commissions or through large public exhibitions of their own work. There
were official, government-sponsored painters' unions, while governments
regularly held public exhibitions of new fine and decorative arts.
The Impressionists argued that people do not see objects but only
the light which they reflect, and therefore painters should paint in
natural light (en plein air) rather than in studios and should capture the effects of light in their work. Impressionist artists formed a group, Société Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs
("Association of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers") which, despite
internal tensions, mounted a series of independent exhibitions.
The style was adopted by artists in different nations, in preference to
a "national" style. These factors established the view that it was a "movement".
These traits—establishment of a working method integral to the art,
establishment of a movement or visible active core of support, and
international adoption—would be repeated by artistic movements in the
Modern period in art.
During the years between 1910 and the end of World War I and after the heyday of cubism, several movements emerged in Paris. Giorgio de Chirico moved to Paris in July 1911, where he joined his brother Andrea (the poet and painter known as Alberto Savinio). Through his brother he met Pierre Laprade, a member of the jury at the Salon d'Automne where he exhibited three of his dreamlike works: Enigma of the Oracle, Enigma of an Afternoon and Self-Portrait. During 1913 he exhibited his work at the Salon des Indépendants and Salon d'Automne, and his work was noticed by Pablo Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, and several others. His compelling and mysterious paintings are considered instrumental to the early beginnings of Surrealism. Song of Love (1914) is one of the most famous works by de Chirico and is an early example of the surrealist style, though it was painted ten years before the movement was "founded" by André Breton in 1924. The School of Paris, centered in Montparnasse flourished between the two world wars.
World War I brought an end to this phase but indicated the beginning of a number of anti-art movements, such as Dada, including the work of Marcel Duchamp, and of Surrealism. Artist groups like de Stijl and Bauhaus developed new ideas about the interrelation of the arts, architecture, design, and art education.
Modern art was introduced to the United States with the Armory Show in 1913 and through European artists who moved to the U.S. during World War I.
By the end of the 1970s, when cultural critics began speaking of
"the end of painting" (the title of a provocative essay written in 1981
by Douglas Crimp), new media art had become a category in itself, with a growing number of artists experimenting with technological means such as video art. Painting assumed renewed importance in the 1980s and 1990s, as evidenced by the rise of neo-expressionism and the revival of figurative painting.
Towards the end of the 20th century, a number of artists and architects started questioning the idea of "the modern" and created typically Postmodern works.
Allan Kaprow first coined the term "happening" in the spring of 1959 at an art picnic at George Segal's farm to describe the art pieces that were going on. The first appearance in print was in Kaprow's famous "Legacy of Jackson Pollock" essay that was published in 1958 but primarily written in 1956. "Happening" also appeared in print in one issue of the Rutgers University undergraduate literary magazine, Anthologist. The form was imitated and the term was adopted by artists across the U.S., Germany, and Japan. Jack Kerouac
referred to Kaprow as "The Happenings man", and an ad showing a woman
floating in outer space declared, "I dreamt I was in a happening in my Maidenform brassiere".
Happenings are difficult to describe, in part because each one is unique. One definition comes from Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort in The New Media Reader,
"The term 'happening' has been used to describe many performances and
events, organized by Allan Kaprow and others during the 1950s and 1960s,
including a number of theatrical productions that were traditionally
scripted and invited only limited audience interaction."
Another definition is, "a purposefully composed form of theatre in
which diverse alogical elements, including nonmatrixed performing, are
organized in a compartmented structure". However, Canadian theatre critic and playwright Gary Botting,
who himself had "constructed" several happenings, wrote in 1972:
"Happenings abandoned the matrix of story and plot for the equally
complex matrix of incident and event."
Kaprow was a student of John Cage, who had experimented with "musical happenings" at Black Mountain College as early as 1952.
Kaprow combined the theatrical and visual arts with discordant music.
"His happenings incorporated the use of huge constructions or sculptures
similar to those suggested by Artaud,"
wrote Botting, who also compared them to the "impermanent art" of Dada.
"A happening explores negative space in the same way Cage explored
silence. It is a form of symbolism: actions concerned with 'now' or
fantasies derived from life, or organized structures of events appealing
to archetypal symbolic associations."
A "Happening" of the same performance will have different outcomes
because each performance depends on the action of the audience.
Happenings can be a form of participatory new media art,
emphasizing an interaction between the performer and the audience. In
his Water, Robert Whitman
had the performers drench each other with coloured water. "One girl
squirmed between wet inner tubes, ultimately struggling through a large
silver vulva." Claes Oldenburg,
best known for his innovative sculptures, used a vacant house, his own
store, and the parking lot of the American Institute of Aeronautics and
Astronautics in Los Angeles for Injun, World's Fair II and AUT OBO DYS.
The idea was to break down the fourth wall between performer and
spectator; with the involvement of the spectator as performer, objective
criticism is transformed into subjective support. For some happenings,
everyone present is included in the making of the art and even the form
of the art depends on audience engagement, for they are a key factor in
where the performers' spontaneity leads.
Later happenings had no set rules, only vague guidelines that the
performers follow based on surrounding props. Unlike other forms of
art, happenings that allow chance to enter are ever-changing. When
chance determines the path the performance will follow, there is no room
for failure. As Kaprow wrote in his essay, "'Happenings' in the New
York Scene", "Visitors to a Happening are now and then not sure what has
taken place, when it has ended, even when things have gone 'wrong". For
when something goes 'wrong', something far more 'right,' more
revelatory, has many times emerged".
During the summer of 1959, Red Grooms along with others (Yvonne Andersen, Bill Barrell, Sylvia Small and Dominic Falcone) staged the non-narrative "play" Walking Man,
which began with construction sounds, such as sawing. Grooms recalls,
"The curtains were opened by me, playing a fireman wearing a simple
costume of white pants and T-shirt with a poncholike cloak and a Smokey
Stoverish fireman's helmet. Bill, the 'star' in a tall hat and black
overcoat, walked back and forth across the stage with great wooden
gestures. Yvonne sat on the floor by a suspended fire engine. She was a
blind woman with tin-foil covered glasses and cup. Sylvia played a radio
and pulled on hanging junk. For the finale, I hid behind a false door
and shouted pop code words. Then the cast did a wild run around and it
ended". Dubbing his 148 Delancey Street studio The Delancey Street Museum, Grooms staged three more happenings there, A Garden, The Burning Building and The Magic Trainride (originally titled Fireman's Dream). No wonder Kaprow called Grooms "a Charlie Chaplin forever dreaming about fire". On the opening night of The Burning Building, Bob Thompson
solicited an audience member for a light, since none of the cast had
one, and this gesture of spontaneous theater recurred in eight
subsequent performances.
The Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama staged nude happenings during the late '60s in New York City.
Difference from plays
Argentine artist Marta Minujín in a 1965 happening, Reading the news, in which she got into the Río de La Plata wrapped in newspapers.
Happenings emphasize the organic connection between art and its
environment. Kaprow supports that "happenings invite us to cast aside
for a moment these proper manners and partake wholly in the real nature
of the art and life. It is a rough and sudden act, where one often feels
"dirty", and dirt, we might begin to realize, is also organic and
fertile, and everything including the visitors can grow a little into
such circumstances."
Happenings have no plot or philosophy, but rather is materialized in an
improvisatory fashion. There is no direction thus the outcome is
unpredictable. "It is generated in action by a headful of ideas...and it
frequently has words but they may or may not make literal sense. If
they do, their meaning is not representational of what the whole element
conveys. Hence they carry a brief, detached quality. If they do not
make sense, then they are acknowledgement of the sound of the word
rather than the meaning conveyed by it."
Due to the convention's nature, there is no such term as
"failure" which can be applied. "For when something goes "wrong",
something far more "right", more revelatory may emerge. This sort of
sudden near-miracle presently is made more likely by chance procedures."
As a conclusion, a happening is fresh while it lasts and cannot be
reproduced.
Regarding happenings, Red Grooms
has remarked, "I had the sense that I knew it was something. I knew it
was something because I didn't know what it was. I think that's when
you're at your best point. When you're really doing something, you're
doing it all out, but you don't know what it is."
The lack of plot as well as the expected audience participation can be likened to Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed,
which also claims that "spectator is a bad word". Boal expected
audience members to participate in the theater of the oppressed by
becoming the actors. His goal was to allow the downtrodden to act out
the forces oppressing them in order to mobilize the people into
political action. Both Kaprow and Boal are reinventing theater to try to
make plays more interactive and to abolish the traditional narrative
form to make theater something more free-form and organic.
Contribution toward digital media
Allan Kaprow's
and other artists of the 1950s and 1960s that performed these
happenings helped put "new media technology developments into context". The happenings allowed other artists to create performances that would attract attention to the issue they wanted to portray.
Around the world
In 1959 the French artist Yves Klein first performed Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle.
The work involved the sale of documentation of ownership of empty space
(the Immaterial Zone), taking the form of a cheque, in exchange for gold;
if the buyer wished, the piece could then be completed in an elaborate
ritual in which the buyer would burn the cheque, and Klein would throw
half of the gold into the Seine.
The ritual would be performed in the presence of an art critic or
distinguished dealer, an art museum director and at least two witnesses.
In 1960, Jean-Jacques Lebel oversaw and partook in the first European happening L'enterrement de la Chose in Venice. For his performance there – called Happening Funeral Ceremony of the Anti-Process
– Lebel invited the audience to attend a ceremony in formal dress. In a
decorated room within a grand residence, a draped 'cadaver' rested on a
plinth which was then ritually stabbed by an 'executioner' while a
'service' was read consisting of extracts from the French décadent
writer Joris-Karl Huysmans and le Marquis de Sade. Then pall-bearers carried the coffin out into a gondola and the 'body' – which was a mechanical sculpture by Jean Tinguely – was ceremonially slid into the canal.
Jean-Jacques Lebel – at Exhibition Beat Generation, 2013
Poet and painter Adrian Henri claimed to have organized the first happenings in England in Liverpool in 1962, taking place during the Merseyside Arts Festival. The most important event in London was the Albert Hall "International Poetry Incarnation" on June 11, 1965, where an audience of 7,000 people witnessed and participated in performances by some of the leading avant-garde young British and American poets of the day (see British Poetry Revival and Poetry of the United States). One of the participants, Jeff Nuttall, went on to organize a number of further happenings, often working with his friend Bob Cobbing, sound poet and performance poet.
In Tokyo in 1964, Yoko Ono created a happening by performing her Cut Piece at the Sogetsu Art Center.
She walked onto the stage draped in fabric, presented the audience with
a pair of scissors, and instructed the audience to cut the fabric away
gradually until the performer decided they should stop. This piece was presented again in 1966 at the Destruction in Art Symposium in London, this time allowing the cutting away of her street cloths.
In the Netherlands, the first documented happening took place in 1961, with the Dutch artist and performer Wim T. Schippers
emptying a bottle of soda water in the North Sea near Petten. Later on,
he organized random walks in the Amsterdam city centre. Provo organized happenings around the a statue Het Lieverdje on the Spui, a square in the centre of Amsterdam, from 1966 till 1968. Police often raided these events.
In Canada, Gary Botting created or "constructed" happenings between 1969 (in St. John's, Newfoundland) and 1972 (in Edmonton, Alberta), including The Aeolian Stringer
in which a "captive" audience was entangled in string emanating from a
vacuum cleaner as it made its rounds (similar to Kaprow's "A Spring
Happening", where he used a power lawnmower and huge electric fan to
similar effect); Zen Rock Festival in which the central icon was a huge rock with which the audience interacted in unpredictable ways; Black on Black held in the Edmonton Art Gallery; and "Pipe Dream," set in a men's washroom with an all-female "cast".
Behind the Iron Curtain, in Poland, artist and theater director Tadeusz Kantor staged the first happenings starting in 1965. In the second half of 1970s painter and performer Krzysztof Jung ran the Repassage gallery, which promoted performance art in Poland. Also, in the second half of the 1980s, a student-based happening movement Orange Alternative founded by Major Waldemar Fydrych
became known for its much attended happenings (over 10 thousand
participants at one time) aimed against the military regime led by General Jaruzelski and the fear blocking the Polish society ever since martial law had been imposed in December 1981.
Since 1993 the artist Jens Galschiøt has made political happenings all over the world. In November 1993 he made the happening my inner beast where twenty sculptures were erected within 55 hours without the knowledge of the authorities all over Europe. Pillar of Shame is a series of Galschiøt's sculptures. The first was erected in Hong Kong
on 4 June 1997, ahead of the handover from British to Chinese rule on 1
July 1997, as a protest against China's crackdown of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. On 1 May 1999, a Pillar of Shame was set up on the Zócalo in Mexico City. It stood for two days in front of the Parliament to protest the oppression of the region's indigenous people.
The non-profit, artist-run organization, iKatun,
artist group, The Institute of Infinitely Small Things, has reflected
the use of "happenings" influence while incorporating the medium of
internet. Their aim is one that "fosters public engagement in the
politics of information". Their project entitled The International Database of Corporate Commands
presents a scrutinizing look at the super-saturating advertisements
slogans, and "commands" of companies. "The Institute for Infinitely
Small Things" uses these commands to conduct research performances,
performances in which we attempt to enact, as literally as possible,
what the command tells us to do and where it tells us to do it.
For example, a user may look at a long list of slogans on the website
database section, and may submit, in text, his or her take on the most
literal way to act out the slogan/ command. The iKatun team will then
act out the slogan in a research-performance related way. This means of
performance art draws on the collaboration of the web world and
tangible reality to conduct a new, modern happening.
In 2018 the Prague-based performance and poetics collective OBJECT:PARADISE was established by writers Tyko Say and Jeff Milton. The collective has since aimed to make poetry
readings more similar to language happenings which involve a variety of
interdisciplinary acts and performances occurring at the same time.
Philosophy
Kaprow
explains that happenings are not a new style, but a moral act, a human
stand of great urgency, whose professional status as art is less
critical than their certainty as an ultimate existential commitment. He
argues that once artists have been recognized and paid, they also
surrender to the confinement, rather the tastes of the patrons (even if
that may not be the intention on both ends). "The whole situation is
corrosive, neither patrons nor artists comprehend their role...and out
of this hidden discomfort comes a stillborn art, tight or merely
repetitive and at worst, chic." Though the we may easily blame those
offering the temptation, Kaprow reminds us that it is not the
publicist's moral obligation to protect the artist's freedom, and
artists themselves hold the ultimate power to reject fame if they do not
want its responsibilities.
Festivals as happenings
Art and music festivals play a large role in positive and successful happenings. Some of these festivals include Burning Man and Oregon Country Fair. Along with the famous Allan Kaprow, Burning Man
frowns on the idea of spectators and stresses the importance of
everyone being involved to create something amazing and unique. Both
parties embody the "audience" and instead of creating something to show
the people, the people become involved in helping create something
incredible and spontaneous to the moment.
Both of these events are happenings that are recreated and special each
year and are always new and organic. These events draw crowds of close
to 50,000 people each year and reach more people than just the attendees
with their messages and ideals.
The Staatliches Bauhaus (German:[ˈʃtaːtlɪçəsˈbaʊˌhaʊs]ⓘ), commonly known as the Bauhaus (German for 'building house'), was a German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined crafts and the fine arts. The school became famous for its approach to design, which attempted to unify individual artistic vision with the principles of mass production and emphasis on function. Along with the doctrine of functionalism, the Bauhaus initiated the conceptual understanding of architecture and design.
The Bauhaus was founded by architect Walter Gropius in Weimar. It was grounded in the idea of creating a Gesamtkunstwerk
("comprehensive artwork") in which all the arts would eventually be
brought together. The Bauhaus style later became one of the most
influential currents in modern design, modernist architecture, and architectural education.
The Bauhaus movement had a profound influence on subsequent
developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography. Staff at the Bauhaus included prominent artists such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Gunta Stölzl, and László Moholy-Nagy at various points.
The school existed in three German cities—Weimar, from 1919 to 1925; Dessau, from 1925 to 1932; and Berlin, from 1932 to 1933—under three different architect-directors: Walter Gropius from 1919 to 1928; Hannes Meyer from 1928 to 1930; and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from 1930 until 1933, when the school was closed by its own leadership under pressure from the Nazi regime, having been painted as a centre of communist intellectualism. Internationally, former key figures of Bauhaus were successful in the United States and became known as the avant-garde for the International Style.
The changes of venue and leadership resulted in a constant
shifting of focus, technique, instructors, and politics. For example,
the pottery
shop was discontinued when the school moved from Weimar to Dessau, even
though it had been an important revenue source; when Mies van der Rohe
took over the school in 1930, he transformed it into a private school and would not allow any supporters of Hannes Meyer to attend it.
Term and concept
Several
specific features are identified in Bauhaus forms and shapes: simple
geometric shapes like rectangles and spheres, without elaborate
decorations. Buildings, furniture, and fonts often feature rounded
corners and sometimes rounded walls. Other buildings are characterized
by rectangular features, for example protruding balconies with flat,
chunky railings facing the street, and long banks of windows. Furniture
often uses chrome metal pipes that curve at corners. Some outlines can
be defined as a tool for creating an ideal form, which is the basis of
the architectural concept.
Bauhaus and German modernism
After Germany's defeat in World War I and the establishment of the Weimar Republic,
a renewed liberal spirit allowed an upsurge of radical experimentation
in all the arts, which had been suppressed by the old regime. Many
Germans of left-wing views were influenced by the cultural
experimentation that followed the Russian Revolution, such as constructivism. Such influences can be overstated: Gropius did not share these radical views, and said that Bauhaus was entirely apolitical. Just as important was the influence of the 19th-century English designer William Morris
(1834–1896), who had argued that art should meet the needs of society
and that there should be no distinction between form and function. Thus, the Bauhaus style, also known as the International Style, was marked by the absence of ornamentation and by harmony between the function of an object or a building and its design.
However, the most important influence on Bauhaus was modernism,
a cultural movement whose origins lay as early as the 1880s, and which
had already made its presence felt in Germany before the World War,
despite the prevailing conservatism. The design innovations commonly
associated with Gropius and the Bauhaus—the radically simplified forms,
the rationality and functionality, and the idea that mass production
was reconcilable with the individual artistic spirit—were already
partly developed in Germany before the Bauhaus was founded. The German
national designers' organization Deutscher Werkbund was formed in 1907 by Hermann Muthesius
to harness the new potentials of mass production, with a mind towards
preserving Germany's economic competitiveness with England. In its first
seven years, the Werkbund came to be regarded as the authoritative body
on questions of design in Germany, and was copied in other countries.
Many fundamental questions of craftsmanship versus mass production, the
relationship of usefulness and beauty, the practical purpose of formal
beauty in a commonplace object, and whether or not a single proper form
could exist, were argued out among its 1,870 members (by 1914).
Poster for the Bauhausaustellung (1923)
German architectural modernism was known as Neues Bauen. Beginning in June 1907, Peter Behrens' pioneering industrial design work for the German electrical company AEG
successfully integrated art and mass production on a large scale. He
designed consumer products, standardized parts, created clean-lined
designs for the company's graphics, developed a consistent corporate
identity, built the modernist landmark AEG Turbine Factory,
and made full use of newly developed materials such as poured concrete
and exposed steel. Behrens was a founding member of the Werkbund, and
both Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer worked for him in this period.
The Bauhaus was founded at a time when the German zeitgeist had turned from emotional Expressionism to the matter-of-fact New Objectivity. An entire group of working architects, including Erich Mendelsohn, Bruno Taut and Hans Poelzig,
turned away from fanciful experimentation and towards rational,
functional, sometimes standardized building. Beyond the Bauhaus, many
other significant German-speaking architects in the 1920s responded to
the same aesthetic issues and material possibilities as the school. They
also responded to the promise of a "minimal dwelling" written into the
new Weimar Constitution. Ernst May, Bruno Taut and Martin Wagner, among others, built large housing blocks in Frankfurt
and Berlin. The acceptance of modernist design into everyday life was
the subject of publicity campaigns, well-attended public exhibitions
like the Weissenhof Estate, films, and sometimes fierce public debate.
The Vkhutemas, the Russian state art and technical school founded in 1920 in Moscow,
has been compared to Bauhaus. Founded a year after the Bauhaus school,
Vkhutemas has close parallels to the German Bauhaus in its intent,
organization and scope. The two schools were the first to train
artist-designers in a modern manner.
Both schools were state-sponsored initiatives to merge traditional
craft with modern technology, with a basic course in aesthetic
principles, courses in color theory, industrial design, and architecture. Vkhutemas was a larger school than the Bauhaus, but it was less publicised outside the Soviet Union and consequently, is less familiar in the West.
With the internationalism of modern architecture and design, there were many exchanges between the Vkhutemas and the Bauhaus.
The second Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer attempted to organise an
exchange between the two schools, while Hinnerk Scheper of the Bauhaus
collaborated with various Vkhutein members on the use of colour in
architecture. In addition, El Lissitzky's book Russia: an Architecture for World Revolution published in German in 1930 featured several illustrations of Vkhutemas/Vkhutein projects there.
The school was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar on 1 April 1919, as a merger of the Grand-Ducal Saxon Academy of Fine Art and the Grand Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts for a newly affiliated architecture department. Its roots lay in the arts and crafts school founded by the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach in 1906, and directed by Belgian Art Nouveau architect Henry van de Velde. When van de Velde was forced to resign in 1915 because he was Belgian, he suggested Gropius, Hermann Obrist, and August Endell as possible successors. In 1919, after delays caused by World War I and a lengthy debate over who should head the institution and the socio-economic meanings of a reconciliation of the fine arts and the applied arts
(an issue which remained a defining one throughout the school's
existence), Gropius was made the director of a new institution
integrating the two called the Bauhaus. In the pamphlet for an April 1919 exhibition entitled Exhibition of Unknown Architects, Gropius, still very much under the influence of William Morris and the British Arts and Crafts Movement,
proclaimed his goal as being "to create a new guild of craftsmen,
without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between
craftsman and artist." Gropius's neologismBauhaus references both building and the Bauhütte, a premodernguild of stonemasons.
The early intention was for the Bauhaus to be a combined architecture
school, crafts school, and academy of the arts. Swiss painter Johannes Itten, German-American painter Lyonel Feininger, and German sculptor Gerhard Marcks,
along with Gropius, comprised the faculty of the Bauhaus in 1919. By
the following year their ranks had grown to include German painter,
sculptor, and designer Oskar Schlemmer who headed the theatre workshop, and Swiss painter Paul Klee, joined in 1922 by Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky. A tumultuous year at the Bauhaus, 1922 also saw the move of Dutch painter Theo van Doesburg to Weimar to promote De Stijl ("The Style"), and a visit to the Bauhaus by Russian Constructivist artist and architect El Lissitzky.
From 1919 to 1922 the school was shaped by the pedagogical and aesthetic ideas of Johannes Itten, who taught the Vorkurs or "preliminary course" that was the introduction to the ideas of the Bauhaus. Itten was heavily influenced in his teaching by the ideas of Franz Cižek and Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel. He was also influenced in respect to aesthetics by the work of the Der Blaue Reiter group in Munich, as well as the work of Austrian Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka. The influence of German Expressionism
favoured by Itten was analogous in some ways to the fine arts side of
the ongoing debate. This influence culminated with the addition of Der Blaue Reiter founding member Wassily Kandinsky to the faculty and ended when Itten resigned in late 1923. Itten was replaced by the Hungarian designer László Moholy-Nagy, who rewrote the Vorkurs
with a leaning towards the New Objectivity favoured by Gropius, which
was analogous in some ways to the applied arts side of the debate.
Although this shift was an important one, it did not represent a radical
break from the past so much as a small step in a broader, more gradual
socio-economic movement that had been going on at least since 1907, when
van de Velde had argued for a craft basis for design while Hermann Muthesius had begun implementing industrial prototypes.
Gropius was not necessarily against Expressionism,
and in fact, himself in the same 1919 pamphlet proclaiming this "new
guild of craftsmen, without the class snobbery", described "painting and
sculpture rising to heaven out of the hands of a million craftsmen, the
crystal symbol of the new faith of the future." By 1923, however,
Gropius was no longer evoking images of soaring Romanesque cathedrals and the craft-driven aesthetic of the "Völkisch movement", instead declaring "we want an architecture adapted to our world of machines, radios and fast cars."
Gropius argued that a new period of history had begun with the end of
the war. He wanted to create a new architectural style to reflect this
new era. His style in architecture and consumer goods was to be
functional, cheap and consistent with mass production. To these ends,
Gropius wanted to reunite art and craft to arrive at high-end functional
products with artistic merit. The Bauhaus issued a magazine called Bauhaus
and a series of books called "Bauhausbücher". Since the Weimar Republic
lacked the number of raw materials available to the United States and
Great Britain, it had to rely on the proficiency of a skilled labour
force and an ability to export innovative and high-quality goods.
Therefore, designers were needed and so was a new type of art education.
The school's philosophy stated that the artist should be trained to
work with the industry.
Weimar was in the German state of Thuringia, and the Bauhaus school received state support from the Social Democrat-controlled
Thuringian state government. The school in Weimar experienced political
pressure from conservative circles in Thuringian politics, increasingly
so after 1923 as political tension rose. One condition placed on the
Bauhaus in this new political environment was the exhibition of work
undertaken at the school. This condition was met in 1923 with the
Bauhaus' exhibition of the experimental Haus am Horn.
The Ministry of Education placed the staff on six-month contracts and
cut the school's funding in half. The Bauhaus issued a press release on
26 December 1924, setting the closure of the school for the end of March
1925.
At this point it had already been looking for alternative sources of
funding. After the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, a school of industrial
design with teachers and staff less antagonistic to the conservative
political regime remained in Weimar. This school was eventually known as
the Technical University of Architecture and Civil Engineering, and in
1996 changed its name to Bauhaus-University Weimar.
The Bauhaus moved to Dessau
in 1925 and new facilities there were inaugurated in late 1926.
Gropius's design for the Dessau facilities was a return to the
futuristic Gropius of 1914 that had more in common with the International style lines of the Fagus Factory than the stripped down Neo-classical of the Werkbund pavilion or the Völkisch Sommerfeld House.
During the Dessau years, there was a remarkable change in direction for
the school. According to Elaine Hoffman, Gropius had approached the
Dutch architect Mart Stam
to run the newly founded architecture program, and when Stam declined
the position, Gropius turned to Stam's friend and colleague in the ABC
group, Hannes Meyer.
Meyer became director when Gropius resigned in February 1928,
and brought the Bauhaus its two most significant building commissions,
both of which still exist: five apartment buildings in the city of
Dessau, and the Bundesschule des Allgemeinen Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes (ADGB Trade Union School) in Bernau bei Berlin.
Meyer favoured measurements and calculations in his presentations to
clients, along with the use of off-the-shelf architectural components to
reduce costs. This approach proved attractive to potential clients. The
school turned its first profit under his leadership in 1929.
But Meyer also generated a great deal of conflict. As a radical
functionalist, he had no patience with the aesthetic program and forced
the resignations of Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer,
and other long-time instructors. Even though Meyer shifted the
orientation of the school further to the left than it had been under
Gropius, he didn't want the school to become a tool of left-wing party
politics. He prevented the formation of a student communist cell, and in
the increasingly dangerous political atmosphere, this became a threat
to the existence of the Dessau school. Dessau mayor Fritz Hesse fired
him in the summer of 1930. The Dessau city council attempted to convince Gropius to return as head of the school, but Gropius instead suggested Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
Mies was appointed in 1930 and immediately interviewed each student,
dismissing those that he deemed uncommitted. He halted the school's
manufacture of goods so that the school could focus on teaching, and
appointed no new faculty other than his close confidant Lilly Reich. By 1931, the Nazi Party
was becoming more influential in German politics. When it gained
control of the Dessau city council, it moved to close the school.
In late
1932, Mies rented a derelict factory in Berlin (Birkbusch Street 49) to
use as the new Bauhaus with his own money. The students and faculty
rehabilitated the building, painting the interior white. The school
operated for ten months without further interference from the Nazi
Party. In 1933, the Gestapo
closed down the Berlin school. Mies protested the decision, eventually
speaking to the head of the Gestapo, who agreed to allow the school to
re-open. However, shortly after receiving a letter permitting the
opening of the Bauhaus, Mies and the other faculty agreed to voluntarily
shut down the school.
Although neither the Nazi Party nor Adolf Hitler had a cohesive architectural policy before they came to power in 1933, Nazi writers like Wilhelm Frick and Alfred Rosenberg
had already labelled the Bauhaus "un-German" and criticized its
modernist styles, deliberately generating public controversy over issues
like flat roofs. Increasingly through the early 1930s, they
characterized the Bauhaus as a front for communists and social liberals.
Indeed, when Meyer was fired in 1930, a number of communist students
loyal to him moved to the Soviet Union.
Even before the Nazis came to power, political pressure on
Bauhaus had increased. The Nazi movement, from nearly the start,
denounced the Bauhaus for its "degenerate art",
and the Nazi regime was determined to crack down on what it saw as the
foreign, probably Jewish, influences of "cosmopolitan modernism".
Despite Gropius's protestations that as a war veteran and a patriot his
work had no subversive political intent, the Berlin Bauhaus was
pressured to close in April 1933. Emigrants did succeed, however, in
spreading the concepts of the Bauhaus to other countries, including the
"New Bauhaus" of Chicago: Mies decided to emigrate to the United States for the directorship of the School of Architecture at the Armour Institute (now Illinois Institute of Technology) in Chicago and to seek building commissions.
The simple engineering-oriented functionalism of stripped-down
modernism, however, did lead to some Bauhaus influences living on in Nazi Germany. When Hitler's chief engineer, Fritz Todt, began opening the new autobahns
(highways) in 1935, many of the bridges and service stations were "bold
examples of modernism", and among those submitting designs was Mies van
der Rohe.
Architectural output
The paradox of the early Bauhaus was that, although its manifesto proclaimed that the aim of all creative activity was building, the school did not offer classes in architecture until 1927. During the years under Gropius (1919–1927), he and his partner Adolf Meyer
observed no real distinction between the output of his architectural
office and the school. So the built output of Bauhaus architecture in
these years is the output of Gropius: the Sommerfeld house in Berlin,
the Otte house in Berlin, the Auerbach house in Jena, and the competition design for the Chicago Tribune Tower,
which brought the school much attention. The definitive 1926 Bauhaus
building in Dessau is also attributed to Gropius. Apart from
contributions to the 1923 Haus am Horn, student architectural work amounted to un-built projects, interior finishes, and craft work like cabinets, chairs and pottery.
In the next two years under Meyer, the architectural focus
shifted away from aesthetics and towards functionality. There were major
commissions: one from the city of Dessau for five tightly designed
"Laubenganghäuser" (apartment buildings with balcony access), which are
still in use today, and another for the Bundesschule des Allgemeinen Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes (ADGB Trade Union School) in Bernau bei Berlin. Meyer's approach was to research users' needs and scientifically develop the design solution.
Mies van der Rohe
repudiated Meyer's politics, his supporters, and his architectural
approach. As opposed to Gropius's "study of essentials", and Meyer's
research into user requirements, Mies advocated a "spatial
implementation of intellectual decisions", which effectively meant an
adoption of his own aesthetics. Neither Mies van der Rohe nor his
Bauhaus students saw any projects built during the 1930s.
The popular conception of the Bauhaus as the source of extensive
Weimar-era working housing is not accurate. Two projects, the apartment
building project in Dessau and the Törten row housing also in Dessau,
fall in that category, but developing worker housing was not the first
priority of Gropius nor Mies. It was the Bauhaus contemporaries Bruno Taut, Hans Poelzig and particularly Ernst May, as the city architects of Berlin, Dresden and Frankfurt respectively, who are rightfully credited with the thousands of socially progressive housing units built in Weimar Germany. The housing Taut built in south-west Berlin during the 1920s, close to the U-Bahn stop Onkel Toms Hütte, is still occupied.
The Bauhaus had a major impact on art and architecture trends in Western Europe, Canada, the United States and Israel
in the decades following its demise, as many of the artists involved
fled, or were exiled by the Nazi regime. In 1996, four of the major
sites associated with Bauhaus in Germany were inscribed on the UNESCOWorld Heritage List (with two more added in 2017).
In 1928, the Hungarian painter Alexander Bortnyik founded a school of design in Budapest called Műhely, which means "the studio". Located on the seventh floor of a house on Nagymezo Street, it was meant to be the Hungarian equivalent to the Bauhaus. The literature sometimes refers to it—in an oversimplified manner—as "the Budapest Bauhaus". Bortnyik was a great admirer of László Moholy-Nagy and had met Walter Gropius in Weimar between 1923 and 1925. Moholy-Nagy himself taught at the Műhely. Victor Vasarely, a pioneer of op art, studied at this school before establishing in Paris in 1930.
Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Moholy-Nagy re-assembled in Britain during the mid-1930s and lived and worked in the Isokon housing development in Lawn Road in London before the war caught up with them. Gropius and Breuer went on to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and worked together before their professional split. Their collaboration produced, among other projects, the Aluminum City Terrace in New Kensington, Pennsylvania and the Alan I W Frank House
in Pittsburgh. The Harvard School was enormously influential in America
in the late 1920s and early 1930s, producing such students as Philip Johnson, I. M. Pei, Lawrence Halprin and Paul Rudolph, among many others.
In the late 1930s, Mies van der Rohe re-settled in Chicago, enjoyed the sponsorship of the influential Philip Johnson, and became one of the world's pre-eminent architects. Moholy-Nagy also went to Chicago and founded the New Bauhaus school under the sponsorship of industrialist and philanthropist Walter Paepcke. This school became the Institute of Design, part of the Illinois Institute of Technology. Printmaker and painter Werner Drewes was also largely responsible for bringing the Bauhaus aesthetic to America and taught at both Columbia University and Washington University in St. Louis. Herbert Bayer, sponsored by Paepcke, moved to Aspen, Colorado in support of Paepcke's Aspen projects at the Aspen Institute. In 1953, Max Bill, together with Inge Aicher-Scholl and Otl Aicher, founded the Ulm School of Design
(German: Hochschule für Gestaltung – HfG Ulm) in Ulm, Germany, a design
school in the tradition of the Bauhaus. The school is notable for its
inclusion of semiotics
as a field of study. The school closed in 1968, but the "Ulm Model"
concept continues to influence international design education. Another series of projects at the school were the Bauhaus typefaces, mostly realized in the decades afterward.
The influence of the Bauhaus on design education was significant.
One of the main objectives of the Bauhaus was to unify art, craft, and
technology, and this approach was incorporated into the curriculum of
the Bauhaus. The structure of the Bauhaus Vorkurs (preliminary
course) reflected a pragmatic approach to integrating theory and
application. In their first year, students learnt the basic elements and
principles of design and colour theory, and experimented with a range
of materials and processes.
This approach to design education became a common feature of
architectural and design school in many countries. For example, the
Shillito Design School in Sydney stands as a unique link between
Australia and the Bauhaus. The colour and design syllabus of the
Shillito Design School was firmly underpinned by the theories and
ideologies of the Bauhaus. Its first year foundational course mimicked
the Vorkurs and focused on the elements and principles of design
plus colour theory and application. The founder of the school, Phyllis
Shillito, which opened in 1962 and closed in 1980, firmly believed that
"A student who has mastered the basic principles of design, can design
anything from a dress to a kitchen stove".
In Britain, largely under the influence of painter and teacher William
Johnstone, Basic Design, a Bauhaus-influenced art foundation course, was
introduced at Camberwell School of Art and the Central School of Art
and Design, whence it spread to all art schools in the country, becoming
universal by the early 1960s.
One of the most important contributions of the Bauhaus is in the field of modern furniture design. The characteristic Cantilever chair and Wassily Chair designed by Marcel Breuer are two examples. (Breuer eventually lost a legal battle in Germany with Dutch architect/designer Mart Stam
over patent rights to the cantilever chair design. Although Stam had
worked on the design of the Bauhaus's 1923 exhibit in Weimar, and
guest-lectured at the Bauhaus later in the 1920s, he was not formally
associated with the school, and he and Breuer had worked independently
on the cantilever concept, leading to the patent dispute.) The most
profitable product of the Bauhaus was its wallpaper.
The physical plant at Dessau survived World War II and was operated as a design school with some architectural facilities by the German Democratic Republic. This included live stage productions in the Bauhaus theater under the name of Bauhausbühne ("Bauhaus Stage"). After German reunification,
a reorganized school continued in the same building, with no essential
continuity with the Bauhaus under Gropius in the early 1920s.
In 1979 Bauhaus-Dessau College started to organize postgraduate
programs with participants from all over the world. This effort has been
supported by the Bauhaus-Dessau Foundation which was founded in 1974 as
a public institution.
Later evaluation of the Bauhaus design credo was critical of its
flawed recognition of the human element, an acknowledgment of "the
dated, unattractive aspects of the Bauhaus as a projection of utopia
marked by mechanistic views of human nature…Home hygiene without home
atmosphere."
Subsequent examples which have continued the philosophy of the Bauhaus include Black Mountain College, Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm and Domaine de Boisbuchet.
A Bauhaus-style building with "thermometer" windows on Pines Street in Tel Aviv
The White City (Hebrew: העיר הלבנה, refers to a collection of over 4,000 buildings built in the Bauhaus or International Style in Tel Aviv from the 1930s by German Jewish architects who emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine after the rise of the Nazis.
Tel Aviv has the largest number of buildings in the
Bauhaus/International Style of any city in the world. Preservation,
documentation, and exhibitions have brought attention to Tel Aviv's
collection of 1930s architecture. In 2003, the United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) proclaimed Tel Aviv's White City a World Cultural Heritage site, as "an outstanding example of new town planning and architecture in the early 20th century."
The citation recognized the unique adaptation of modern international
architectural trends to the cultural, climatic, and local traditions of
the city. Bauhaus Center Tel Aviv organizes regular architectural tours of the city.
Centenary year, 2019
As the centenary of the founding of Bauhaus, several events, festivals, and exhibitions were held around the world in 2019. The international opening festival at the Berlin Academy of the Arts
from 16 to 24 January concentrated on "the presentation and production
of pieces by contemporary artists, in which the aesthetic issues and
experimental configurations of the Bauhaus artists continue to be
inspiringly contagious". Original Bauhaus, The Centenary Exhibition
at the Berlinische Galerie (6 September 2019 to 27 January 2020)
presented 1,000 original artefacts from the Bauhaus-Archiv's collection
and recounted the history behind the objects.
The New European Bauhaus
In September 2020, President of the European CommissionUrsula Von der Leyen introduced the New European Bauhaus
(NEB) initiative during her State of the Union address. The NEB is a
creative and interdisciplinary movement that connects the European Green
Deal to everyday life. It is a platform for experimentation aiming to
unite citizens, experts, businesses and institutions in imagining and
designing a sustainable, aesthetic and inclusive future.
Sport and physical activity were an essential part of the
original Bauhaus approach. Hannes Meyer, the second director of Bauhaus
Dessau, ensured that one day a week was solely devoted to sport and
gymnastics. 1 In 1930, Meyer employed two physical education teachers.
The Bauhaus school even applied for public funds to enhance its playing
field. The inclusion of sport and physical activity in the Bauhaus
curriculum had various purposes. First, as Meyer put it, sport combatted
a “one-sided emphasis on brainwork.”
In addition, Bauhaus instructors believed that students could better
express themselves if they actively experienced the space, rhythms and
movements of the body. The Bauhaus approach also considered physical
activity an important contributor to wellbeing and community spirit.
Sport and physical activity were essential to the interdisciplinary
Bauhaus movement that developed revolutionary ideas and continues to
shape our environments today.
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