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HARINI VENKATARAMANSpring 2014 • GLA 615 - HISTORY OF GRAPHIC DESIGN

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1849 - French Exposition at Champ de Mars - Need for an indutrial exhibition in England

1851 - The Great Exhibition of 1851 at the Crystal Palace, London

1852 - Reconstructed Crystal Palace - Icon of new ideas

1871 - Louis Sullivan - Carson Pirie Scott building

1889 - Eiffel Tower is opened in Paris - vertical challenges the horizontal

1890 - 1907 - Kaiser WIlhelm Society for Scientific research

1900s - Muthesius returns from England

1905 - Kaiser Wilhelm II - Muthesius form the Deutsche Werkbunde

1907 - Peter Behrens is appointed the Architect and Designer at AEG - harbinger of the profession of corporate design

1909 - Filipo Marinetti writes the first Futurist Manifesto

1909 - Behrens builds the AEG Turbine Factory

1911 - Behrens designs AEG Lamp Poster

1911 - Walter Gropius built the Faguswerk

1912 - Marinetti’s second Manifesto is released

1913 - Marcel Duchamp exhibits in New York

1913 - Marinetti translates manifesto into German - Futurism spreads all across Europe

1914 - World War I begins

1916 - Guillame Apollinaire coins the term “Surrealism”

1917 - Piet Mondrian starts the De Stijl Magazine

1918 - Dada movement begins in art and literature

1919 - Gropius opens Bauhaus at Weimar - State funded by North Germany

1922 - Bauhaus introduces Constructivism and De Stijl principles in curriculum

1922 - Le Corbusier develops Vers Une Architecture

1923 - Moholy-Nagy joins Bauhaus - Bauhaus exhibition

1923 - Man Ray designs his Rayograms

1924 - De Stijl architects build the ScrÖder House

1925 - Herbert Bayer designs Universum

1925 - Bauhaus moves to Dessau - opens new workshop block

1928 - Gropius leaves Bauhaus

1932 - Mies Van der Rohe moves Bauhaus to Berlin

1932 - Theo Van Doesberg dies, De Stijl journal ends

1933 - Nazis close Bauhaus - arrest everyone involved in modernism and avante-garde

LIST OF FACTS

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Arising out of the rebellious mood at the beginning of the twentieth century, modernism was a radical approach that yearned to revitalize the way modern civilization viewed life, art, politics, and science. This rebellious attitude that flourished between 1900 and 1930 had, as its basis, the rejection of European culture for having become too corrupt, complacent and lethargic, ailing because it was bound by the artificialities of a society that was too preoccupied with image and too scared of change. This dissatisfaction with the moral bankruptcy of everything European led modern thinkers and artists to explore other alternatives, especially primitive cultures. For the Establishment, the result would be cataclysmic; the new emerging culture would undermine tradition and authority in the hopes of transforming contemporary society.

Politics and the economy would also transform the way that modern man looked at himself and the world in which he lived. Science and technology were radically changing the means of production. Whereas in the past, a worker became involved in production from beginning to end, by 1900 he had become a mere cog in the production line, making an insignificant contribution. Thus, division of labor made him feel fragmented, alienated not only from the rest of society but from himself. One of the effects of this fragmentation was the consolidation of workers into political parties that threatened the upper classes. And, thus, the new political idealism that was to culminate in the Russian Revolution that swept through Europe.

But before the Twentieth Century began, the roots of Modernism had to be laid, and they were laid, deep embedded into the Victorian Era of the 19th century, hidden under the grotesque, ornamental and decorative art of the period—or if the correct phrase was to to be used, hidden around the ornamental decoration of the Victorian era.

This book explores the trail of Modernism from the Crystal Palace towards the architectural intelligence of the Bauhaus and De Stijl, and also unto the destructive typography of the Futuristic and Dada movements as they lead towards the greatest exponents of design and design ideology around Europe and, at some parts, the United States.

INTRODUCTION

“I haven’t changed my mind about modernism from the first day I ever did it... It means integrity; it means honesty; it means the absence of sentimentality and the absence of nostalgia; it means simplicity; it means clarity. That’s what modernism means to me.”—Paul Rand

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Industrial Revolution: The Beginning of Modernism

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain in the late 1700s, manufacturing was often done in people’s homes, using hand tools or basic machines. Industrialization marked a shift to powered, special-purpose machinery, factories and mass production. The iron and textile industries, along with the development of the steam engine, played central roles in the Industrial Revolution, which also saw improved systems of transportation, communication and banking. While industrialization brought about an increased volume and variety of manufactured goods and an improved standard of living for some, it also resulted in often grim employment and living conditions for the poor and working classes.

During the Industrial Revolution many art movements were created as a reaction to modernism and to socities changing landscape. Hector Guimard, who was a part of Art Nouveau, had many of his works built using the biomimicry style, a style which had man-made structures evoke a sense of nature. Joseph Paxton used properties of the biomimicry style to build the Crytstal Palace, which became a symbol of both Modernism and the Industrial Revolution.

At the same time, the Arts and Crafts Movement, a reaction to Modernism, advocated for less automated/mass-produced goods in favor for more ornamental, man-made products. William Morris, one of the figures of this movement created many products which were influenced by nature.

The Great Exhibition of 1851 at the Crystal Palace in London can be seen as the culmination of a society’s reaction to, and consequent progress from, the Industrial Revolution. It expressed a disregard for past opinions and promoted a design ideology that is adaptive to a changing world, which is why the Crystal Palace is seen as a symbol of early Modernism.

The Great Exhibition of 1851

The events leading up to the Great Exhibition of 1851 were prompted by the success of the French Industrial Exposition of 1844, when it was suggested to the English Government that it would be most advantageous to British industry to have a similar exhibition in London. However, the Government showed no interest.

It must be mentioned here that the French had already established a tradition of exhibitions - the Marquis d’Aveze had held a large one as early as 1798, in the grounds and interior of the Maison d’Orsay, Rue de Varennes. This was followed by a series of official Expositions, the first being on the Champ de

THE CRYSTAL PALACE

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Paxton’s Initial Design

Paxton’s developed Design

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Mars, through to the eleventh in 1849, all devoted to the glory of the art and industry of France, and increasingly large and successful.

When an ingenious civil servant named Henry Cole — The man who invented Christmas cards — told John Scott Russell (one of the leading engineers of the time), about the wonders of the Paris Exhibition of 1849, Russell saw the possibilities of a British fair of engineering and manufacturing arts. He discussed it with the Prince Consort, the unpopular Albert. The intelligent and catholically educated German was having a bad time in England.

The upper classes were suspicious of Albert’s erudition and the lower classes abhorred his stiff manners. The Queen, however, wanted Albert to be a success. John Scott Russell weighed these factors and sprang his coup one night in 1850. In the course of handing out medals at an art school exercise, Russell remarked cryptically, “There is now every hope of carrying out His Royal Highness Prince Albert’s plans for 1851.”

Albert summoned Russell to the Palace and they plotted the Great Exhibition. The Queen blessed Albert’s hobby and the Old Guard was outmaneuvered.

However, in England, few art-industry exhibitions were more than local affairs. The first building to be put up solely for the exhibition of manufactured goods was built in Birmingham in 1849, for an exhibition of the British Society. It included 10,000 square feet, and together with Bingley House, in the gardens of which it was erected, 12,800 square feet of exhibition space was available. In the same year, the first Exhibition of British Manufacturers took place, largely concentrating on precious metalwork.

Prince Albert was very much in favour of a self-financing Exhibition of All Nations. But even though this meant that the exchequer would have to pay no money, there was a lukewarm reception from Parliament. Albert’s plan was for a great collection of works in art and industry, ‘for the purposes of exhibition, of competition and of encouragement’, to be held in London in 1851. Such an Exhibition, he said,would afford a true test of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived in this great task, and a new starting point from which all nations would be able to direct their further exertions.

Design & Construction of the Crystal Palace

The Society of Arts pressed ahead at this point, negotiating with a building contractor to erect a suitable building, advance prize money of 20,000 pounds and pay preliminary expenses, all to be repaid from receipts at the gate of the Exhibition. Next, a deputation was sent around the country to

gather support, and the Government was persuaded to set up a Royal Commission.

The Royal Commission met for the first time in January 1850, and after digesting the concept that such an exhibition could make a profit, one of its first acts was to cancel the contract with the building firm, and call for voluntary contributions nationwide. In an attempt to whip up support, all the mayors from the whole country were invited to a sumptious banquet at Mansion House, to listen to Prince Albert argue the case for an Exhibition. Other big names were present to give support - Sir Robert Peel, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lords Russell and Stanley, and the French ambassador. The meeting was a great success.

Funding the Great Exhibition

The next stage was the setting up of ‘The Commissioners for the Exhibition of 1851’, and a total fund of 230,000 pounds was raised. The size of the Exhibition was decided at 700,000 ft - bigger than anything the French had ever managed - and the Government was persuaded to treat it as a bonded warehouse, so that goods imported for the Exhibition need not have import duties paid.

The engineers were running the world. The capitalists eagerly tried to keep up with their blueprints. The common people were prepared to go anywhere with the golden engineers. Royalty deferred to them. The applied mechanical mind would conquer everything. The Exhibition was the cachet of machine age genius.

The Commissioners set up a competition for designing the building, and 233 architects sent in designs: 38 from abroad, 51 from around England, and 128 from London. None were quite the right thing, thought the Commission’s Building Committee, who fortuitously had prepared and printed their own design. The building was sort of squatly Romanesque with a whiff of Byzantine.

Despite much condemnation from the competing architects and others on grounds of ugliness and vast expense, the Committee proceeded to ask for building tenders for their own design. These arrived at a cost somewhat more expensive than the Commission had envisaged - 120,000 - 150,000 pounds just for the building materials.

However, one contractor, Messrs. Fox and Henderson, presented costs for an amended design, one amended so much, in fact, that it bore no resemblance to the Building Committee’s original proposal, but with the compelling advantage of a better price. It was based on a design by Joseph Paxton, who had struck on the idea of a simple repeating structure so that one cross-section could be

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repeated indefinitely to make a whole building. Events moved fast - Paxton had drawn his original design on a sheet of blotting paper, yet managed to have a complete set of plans within nine days. He presented it the contractors Fox and Henderson on 22 June 1850, and the Illustrated London News published an engraving of it on 6 July. The plan was accepted by the Commissioners, after modifying it to include a domed roof, so that some rather large trees on the site in Hyde Park could be accommodated without trimming them.

I. K. Brunel was the first committee member to approve Paxton’s design and volunteered to design the great water towers to flank the Crystal Palace. Brunel had a generous scientific philosophy. He did not believe in patenting inventions, and protected none of his numerous ideas, saying, “Most good things are being thought of by many persons at the same time. If there were publicity and freedom of communication, instead of concealment and mystery, a hundred times as many useful ideas would be generated.”

Doubts were raised early on about the stability and safety of the structure - doubts which could not be ignored, as they were expressed by Professor Airey, the Astronomer Royal, and by Richard Turner, who had constructed the Palm House at Kew Gardens.

The amount of strain on the iron girders was calculated not to be a problem, as they were designed to take several times the expected weight. What was seen as a problem was resonance - the worrying idea that a large crowd, moving regularly inside the structure, could cause it to vibrate more and more until it collapsed. This had happened before on structures such as bridges.

An experiment was set up, with a test construction, on which 300 workmen walked backwards and forwards, regularly, irregularly, and then jumping simultaneously in the air. Finally, to induce the most regular oscillations possible, the army sappers and miners corps were called in, and marched repeatedly in step across the structure. The maximum girder movement was 1/4 inch, and building work was continued.

The whole building was enormous - 1,848 feet long and 408 feet wide (with an extra bit sticking out on one side 936 feet x 48 feet). The central transept was 72 feet wide and 108 feet high, and a grand avenue and upstairs galleries ran the whole length of the building. Altogether, 772,784 square feet (19 acres) were roofed over, not including the 217,100 square feet of galleries.

This was an area four times that of St Peter’s in Rome, or six times that of St Paul’s Cathedral. The total enclosed volume was 33 million cubic feet. Materials included 550 tons of wrought iron, 3,500 tons of cast iron, 900,000 superficial feet of glass and 600,000 feet of wooden planking to walk on.

There were 202 miles of sash bars and 30 miles of gutters.Remarkably, the complete edifice was ready on time, on 1st May, 1851, for Queen Victoria to open it. Best of all, worries about covering costs had been laid to rest - by the time the building was ready to open, without any day-by-day ticket sales at all, well over 100,000 pounds had been recovered: 64,344 pounds by public subscription, 40,000 pounds from sale of season tickets, 3,200 pounds from Messrs. Spicer and Clowes for the honour of printing the catalogues, and 5,500 pounds from Messrs. Schweppes for the privilege of supplying refreshments.

Contents of the Exhibition

During the Great Exhibition, the Crystal Palace housed the works of craftsmen, engineers and artists. The most popular of these exhibits was a crystal fountain made especially for the exhibition. The full 33,000,000 cubic feet of Crystal Palace was filled with displays and people crowding the aisles examining these wonders.

The Crystal Palace housed the most spectacular collection of artistic and industrial wonders ever assembled in one place thus far. Visitors came from all over the world to see this display of power at the “Exhibition of the Works of All Nations” which was organized by Prince Albert and Henry Cole.

There were some 100,000 objects, displayed along more than ten miles, by over 15,000 contributors. Britain, as host, occupied half the display space inside, with exhibits from the home country and the Empire. The biggest of all was the massive hydraulic press that had lifted the metal tubes of a bridge at Bangor invented by Stevenson. Each tube weighed 1,144 tons yet the press was operated by just one man.

Next in size was a steam-hammer that could with equal accuracy forge the main bearing of a steamship or gently crack an egg. There were adding machines which might put bank clerks out of a job; a ‘stiletto or defensive umbrella’– always useful – and a ‘sportsman’s knife’ with eighty blades from Sheffield – not really so useful. One of the upstairs galleries was walled with stained glass through which the sun streamed in technicolour. Almost as brilliantly coloured were carpets from Axminster and ribbons from Coventry.

There was a printing machine that could turn out 5,000 copies of the popular periodical the Illustrated London News in an hour, and another for printing and folding envelopes, a machine for making the new-fangled cigarettes, and an expanding hearse. There were folding pianos convenient for yachtsmen, and others so laden with curlicues that the keyboard was almost overwhelmed. There was a useful pulpit connected to pews by rubber tubes so that the deaf could hear, and ‘tangible ink’ for the blind, producing raised

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Opening of the Great Exhibition

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The Displays from around the world at the Great Exhibition if 1851

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characters on paper. A whole gallery was devoted to those elegant, sophisticated carriages that predated the motorcar, and if you looked carefully you could find one or two velocipedes, the early version of bicycles. There were printing presses and textile machines and agricultural machines. There were examples of every kind of steam engine, including the giant railway locomotives…In short, as the Queen put it in her Diary, ‘every conceivable invention’.

Canada sent a fire-engine with painted panels showing Canadian scenes, and a trophy of furs. India contributed an elaborate throne of carved ivory, a coat embroidered with pearls, emeralds and rubies, and a magnificent howdah and trappings for a rajah’s elephant. (The elephant wearing it came from a museum of stuffed animals in England.)

The American display was headed by a massive eagle, wings outstretched, holding a drapery of the Stars and Stripes, all poised over one of the organs scattered throughout the building. Although the general idea of the Exhibition was the promotion of world peace, Colt’s repeating fire-arms featured prominently, but so did McCormick’s reaping machine.

The exhibit that attracted most attention had to be Hiram Power’s statue of a Greek Slave, in white marble, housed in her own little red velvet tent, wearing nothing but a small piece of chain. This was of course allegorical.

The largest foreign contributor was France. She exhibited sumptuous tapestries, Sevres porcelain and silks from Lyons, enamels from Limoges and furniture. Unlike British exhibits in the same class, many of which were sadly lacking in taste, the visual impact of the French display was stunning. It was backed up by examples of the machinery used to produce these beautiful objects. France was a worrying competitor in the markets on which Britain prided itself, especially in textiles.

The Russian exhibits were late, having been delayed by ice in the Baltic. When they did arrive, they were superlative. They included huge vases and urns made of porcelain and malachite twice the height of a man, and furs and sledges and Cossack armour. Chile sent a single lump of gold weighing 50kg, Switzerland sent gold watches.Amid all these wonders, there were two which caught the public imagination. The first was the famous Koh-i-Noor diamond. It was supposed to be of inestimable value, but most people found it disappointing, although they crowded round to see it; the diamond refused to sparkle, even under special lights. Years later, the cutting of the diamond revealed its true splendor, which was then added to the Crown Jewels, of which it is a still a part.

The other was a collection of small stuffed animals arranged in whimsical tableaux, such as a set of kittens taking tea, sent

by the German Customs Union. (Germany was still at that time a collection of small states.) With that unerring bad taste that distinguishes the British public, admiring crowds were never absent.

Photography

Photography had been invented thirteen years before the erection of the Crystal Palace. By 1851 this new medium had gone through many improvements, and quickly became a documentary and artistic tool for all people. Photographs were used for artistic endeavors, documentation, and souvenirs. Many photographers flocked to the Great Exhibition to record the feats in architecture and engineering.

William Henry Fox Talbot (1820-1877) recorded the interior of the Crystal Palace while it was still in Hyde Park and did so on Sundays while the Exhibition was closed.

Another photographer, Philip Henry Delamotte (1820-1889) recorded the building after its move to the Sydenham location. He also photographed many English landmarks such as Yorkshire abbeys and Strawberry Hill.

Delamotte produced several sets of prints documenting the Crystal Palace, which he sold at a profit. A set of nine original albumen reprints is housed in the Special Collections room of the University of Maryland Architecture Library. The print on the screen exhibits the deep purple hues achieved through the albumen process and gold chloride solution. The characteristic color was protected from fading on the edges by mounting the prints and keeping them in a darkened collectible box.

There is little tonal separation, due to the nature of albumen printing. The geometric complexity of the structure is clearly shown, as well as its numerous galleries and the roof structure displaying the beautiful arched nave. Delamotte positioned his tripod along a side of the nave to achieve a perspective view that would capture the great depth of the building and convey the grand nature of the space. In the foreground Delamotte captured a large amount of detail in the vegetation and supports.

The photograph reflects the impression that the exhibits “inhabit” the building, allowing the viewer to see how replete the Palace was with displays. Delamotte did not need to use supplementary lighting; the building itself was perfect for photographs, a virtual skylight. All that was needed was a sunny day. Patches of sun can be seen on the floor. Delamotte could clearly sense the architectural beauty in his subject and captured it artfully. The hustle and bustle of the original building is not conveyed in this print, which

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possesses a serene quality due to the lack of human presence.Delamotte was able to capture the character of the Crystal Palace, and provided the public a peek into the famous structure. The Crystal Palace will live forever in his beautiful prints helping to influence artists and architects into the future. During its 85 years standing, the Crystal Palace appeared in millions of photographs, establishing it as a symbol of English power from both a political and architectural standpoint.

Reconstruction

The structure at Hyde Park was designed as a temporary building, able to be constructed and disassembled easily. Therefore, when the Fair closed the fate of the Crystal Palace was a topic of extreme importance.

Its popularity was obvious and Paxton suggested transforming it into a “Winter Park and Garden Under Glass” where visitors could see displays of botany, ornithology, and geology and at the same time enjoy the building as an indoor park. This proposal was opposed by Colonel Sibthorpe, a member of the Metropolitan Police Force who vehemently disapproved of the nature of the Exhibition and the preservation of the building as a cultural icon.

Knowing it would take some work to save his masterpiece, Paxton began raising money and eventually came up with over 500,000 pounds. He formed a company to purchase the building from its initial builders, the engineering firm of Fox and Henderson.

The site selected to re-erect the Palace was 200 acres of wooded parkland on the summit of Sydenham Hill. The rebuilding began in August 1852. By rebuilding the famous Crystal Palace and making it a permanent symbol of England’s success and role in the Industrial Revolution, the government created a cultural icon that would forever stand in testament to the grand nature of the first International World’s Fair.

A decision was made to alter the original plans and enlarge the structure, making the Sydenham Palace more massive than its predecessor. The most characteristic portion of the Hyde Park structure, the arched transept, was emulated throughout when the whole structure was rebuilt, creating an entirely arched nave and transept system.

These same arched transepts were considered awe-inspiring by the Victorians, who were deep in the Romantic Age and well versed in the eighteenth-century notion of the Sublime. The lunettes with the familiar spoke pattern provided a terminus for the long nave and served as an element of

continuity between the Hyde Park building and the one rebuilt in Sydenham.

The new Crystal Palace became a museum of world cultures, with “style courts” such as the Nineveh, Roman and Egyptian courts depicting ancient and modern civilizations for visitors.

Matthew Digby Wyatt and architect Owen Jones were “sent abroad to ransack the world’s great art collections” and find ideas for the courts.

Architectural Importance

In architectural histories, the Crystal Palace, whose sole purpose was to just house the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, has occupied an arbitrary, but nevertheless, significant hinge point in the middle of the nineteenth century. Its design represents architecture’s shift from one-off, hand-made artifacts to the on-site assemblage of machine-made and mass-produced building components, following industrialization in the other arts and sciences.

The success of the Crystal Palace that cost “a penny per cubic foot” brought Joseph Paxton much praise as well as a knighthood.

The Crystal Palace, an enormous construction of iron and glass, seemed to many one of the great wonders of the modern world — and to others, a monstrosity.

Although it seemed to offer the promise of a new era of iron and glass buildings, it had surprisingly little effect on architects and architecture. According to J. Mordaunt Crook, the Crystal Palace seemed to lie outside the world of architecture, outside even the world of engineering. The criteria by which it might be judged still awaited formulation.

In Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s words, Paxton’s scheme “owed its aesthetic qualities to factors hitherto unrecognised — the repetition of units manufactured in series, the functional lace-like patterns of criss-cross trusses, the transparent definition of space, the total elimination of mass and the sense of tensile, almost live, strength as opposed to the solid and gravitational quality of previous masonry architecture.” The vocabulary of a machine aesthetic had yet to be developed.

As architectural historians have long pointed out, it derived not from what architects considered architectural tradition but from greenhouses, for as Crook explains, “The Crystal Palace was really the climax of a long tradition of conservatory design: the hot-house at Kew Gardens (1844-8) by Turner and Burton being simply the best known example”. For this and several other reasons, therefore, this landmark, pioneering structure did not issue in an age of iron and glass architecture.

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The architectural simplicity of the structure of the Crystal Palace

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Paxton based the Crystal Palace on his earlier de-sign, the Victorian Regia Lily, a greenhouse based on the famed regia lily pads (below), which are said to be strong enough to hold up a person, but is supposed to be supported by only one long stalk.

Paxton transferred this theory of a strong, thin vertical support for a wide horizontal base, which both saved space and material cost.

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Similar buildings were erected in 1852 in Dublin, in 1853 in New York City, and in 1854 in Munich, all to house, as the original had, exhibitions of new technology. Later in the century, many of the first department stores in France, England, and the United States took elements from the Crystal Palace in the way that they displayed their wares. Another series of imitators, some of which are still in use, were city shopping arcades or galleries, in many ways the predecessors of today’s suburban malls. It was not until the 20th century, however, that the principles of the Crystal Palace came to be common in buildings designed to be occupied for work or for living quarters. The essence of all 19th-century versions of the idea was display.

A barrier to erecting livable or workable versions of the Crystal Palace was that the Victorians, while they admired its utility and speed of construction, failed to recognize the architectural beauty of the building. It was just too strange. Architecture was still thought of primarily in terms of churches and great houses, built largely of stone. An insubstantial thing of glass, iron, and wood might serve a purpose, but no one would want to have such a giant greenhouse as an office and certainly not as a home.

By analyzing Paxton’s design for the Crystal Palace, the start of Modernist ideas and techniques can be seen that are still practiced by today’s architects. Examples of some of the methods carried out by this ideology are the use of bio-mimicry in architectural design, the use of unconventional building materials, and the development of pre-fabricated architecture. The first of these, bio-mimicry, can be defined simply as studying nature as a source or inspiration for design. Paxton’s design for the Crystal Palace largely came from his investigation of nature, specifically, the Amazon Lily. By studying the underbelly of the amazons lily’s 6 feet long leaves, Paxton observed how the vein structure served as a cantilever that supported the weight that extended out from the center. Additional reinforcement by cross section ribs equally distributed the tension throughout its circular form. Paxton applied this kind of engineering to his Crystal Palace.

The Beginnings of Modernism

The beginning of the Enlightenment had been accompanied by political revolution, but the modern world was initiated by another kind of revolution; that of industry. The development of steam power at the end of the eighteenth century changed what had been a predominantly rural population to an urban one andthe cities at the heart of industry grew rapidly.

Coinciding with the industrial revolution, Modernism exploded in the 19th century as a cultural movement attempting to cleave people with the machine. The new

complexities of the modern world incited re-examination of nearly every facet of life. For creative professionals, the movement meant re-evaluation of themselves as individuals, and as producers. Strangely, it is the contradiction of Modernism that defines it best. The dissension between the notion to free the individual from an overly industrial world, yet promoting liberation through uniform collaboration essentially illustrates the clash of individualism versus collectivism

The new materials of the industrial revolution, such as wrought iron, glass and steel, were quickly transferred into construction applications. This development marked a paradigm shift from bespoke, heavy, load-bearing construction to lightweight factory-produced building elements. The world celebrated the new products of mass production through a series of trade exhibitions.

Most architecturally notable were, obviously, the Crystal Palace in London in 1851, and Paris in 1855.

As earlier discussed, designed by Joseph Paxton, the Crystal Palace used standard components of prefabricated cast iron lattice which was infilled with glass panels to form a greenhouse of enormous proportions. Paxton’s Crystal Palace used these newly available materials to their limit, borrowing traditional forms and structurally reinterpreting them.

As late as 1889 the exposed, iron skeleton of the newly erected Eiffel Tower in Paris was met with public outrage. Among all the symbols of the new technological sensibility, none was more ubiquitous than the Eiffel Tower.

Unlike the Galerie des Machines which (like Paxton’s Crystal Palace) was designed as an exhibition space, albeit a spectacular one, the Eiffel Tower served as a very different kind of space: its elevation of 1056 ft at the time of completion (the tallest man made structure) directed attention towards another, future frontier of discovery and exploration. Its vertical design symbolised both the technological aspirations of the time, but also a new conception of functional space which would no longer be tied to the earth, to horizontality. It suggested the limitless possibilities of upwards movement. As the poet Apollinaire wrote in his poem ‘Zone,’ in Alcools:

“At last you are tired of this old word. O shepherd Eiffel Tower, the flock of bridges bleats this morning You are through with living in Greek and Roman antiquity Here, even the automobiles seem to be ancient Only religion has remained brand new, religion Has remained simple as simple as the aerodrome hangers It’s God who dies Friday and rises again on Sunday It’s Christ who climbs in the sky better than any aviator He holds the worlds altitude record Pupil Christ of the eye Twentieth pupil of the centuries he knows what he’s about, And the century, become a bird, climbs skywards like Jesus.”

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“The most spectacular thing” about the Eiffel Tower in the 1890s, Robert Hughes tells us, “was not the view of the Tower from the ground. It was seeing the ground from the Tower.” While the photographer Nada had taken pictures of Paris from a hot air balloon in 1856, the most elevated view of Paris available to most Parisians before the opening of Eiffel’s monument, had been the gargoyle gallery of the Notre Dame. When the Tower opened to the public in 1899 nearly a million people rode in the elevators to take in the panoramic, aerial view, in which the “once invisible roofs and now clear labyrinths of alleys and streets” became suddenly available to the eyes of these new observers, and Paris became, as Hughes says, “a map of itself, a new type of landscape ... based on frontality and pattern, rather than on perspective recession and depth.”

In Chicago, William Le Baron Jenney pioneered the use of a complete steel skeleton for the urban skyscraper in his Home Insurance Building (1883–85).

His contemporary, Louis Henry Sullivan, first articulated the theory of functionalism, which he demonstrated in his numerous commercial designs. In 1871 a fire destroyed much of the city of Chicago, in the US, allowing Modernism to take a firm root in the west. Faced with a blank sheet for the city, architects again used the framing principle as a basis for construction but this time with steel, far stronger and proportionately lighter than iron. It was used to construct the first high-rise building in the world. Louis Sullivan, credited with the phrase ‘form follows function’, was perhaps the first great architect of the modern age. His Carson Pirie Scott building (in Chicago), was a simple frame structure that allowed clear expression without decoration. This was a radical break from the classical ornamentation that had previously characterized much civic building.

In addition, experiments in concrete construction were being carried out in France by François Hennebique and Auguste Perret, and in the United States by Ernest Ransome. As a result of these advances, the formal conception of architecture was also undergoing a profound transformation. Frank Lloyd Wright, a pupil of Sullivan, experimented with the interpenetration of interior and exterior spaces in his residential designs.

In Holland, where Wright’s work was widely admired, the architects of de Stijl sought to organize building elements into new combinations of overlapping and hovering rectangular planes. These efforts, coupled with the parallel movements like Dada, brought rise to a generation of artists-architects, who revolutionized the world and defined modern architecture as we see it today. These architects, mainly headed by Peter Behrens, built the most important modern buildings of all times: the AEG Turbine Factory, Faguswerk, and the Dessau School of Bauhaus building, all three of

which reflect the main ideas of modernist architecture, set off by and following the genius of the Crystal Palace and its principles of building materials, modular arrangement of space and functional aesthetics.

The Turn of the Century

The Victorian Era, lasting throughout the reign of Queen Victoria, emphasized on ornamentation and decoration—a movement which was brought to an end by the beginning of the twentieth century.

The new age of architecture, thus, began to emerge, almost half a century after the Crystal Palace was built, deriving the basest of principles from its construction. This implementation of modernism, which diverged in several directions—art, architecture and literature—traveled, as we can see, from England to Paris, and simultaneously, sprung its seeds in Chicago and New York, which were fast adapting to all the technological advancements in Europe at the period.

With the advent of the Industrial Revolution in its full force, we are able to trace the centre of Modern energy, which pulsates from architecture to art movements across France and Germany. The first and most noticeable influence of modernism came across in the field of architecture, though bringing the ideology of modernism across the world must be credited to the poets, writers and artists of the time, who brought attention to the difficulties of war, the dehumanisation of the labourer and the extreme social conditions the common people were forced to.

The 1900s were met with the rising middle class in England, who were rebelling against the ignorant, self-obsessed nobility, thus bringing about a stall in the productivity of the nation; this was almost about the time when Hermann Muthesius, under the orders of Kaiser WIlhelm II, formed the Deutsche Werkbunde for the new industry workers, to train the new generation of workers to use the new language of the era: the machine language. (There was, of course, a parallel strand of modernism in literature and the visual art, which we will be exploring at the later stage.)

From this point, the trajectory of modernism spiraled into the greatest innovations of architecture, and eventually, into art; the horizontal and vertical lines now became the new aesthetics, the glass and concrete the new tools, the building the new canvas; we shall be exploring the coming about of the Bauhaus, whose instructor, Walter Gropius, was an ardent follower of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture, and who, unwittingly, brought the modern architecture from the States back into the folds of Europe.

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The orientation of the Modernist movement could be said to belong to a particular technological moment, deriving from the Industrial revolution and form the subsequent shift in consciousness regarding concepts as fundamental as those of space and time, and also in regards to the more tangible consequences of mechanised production: from the industrial transformation of landscapes to the machine-formed environment of the modern city-the evolution of mass transit and transport, the development of new building styles (in particular the urban shopping arcade), the inventions of mass media and telecommunications, steam, internal combustion, electricity and so on.

The use of new building materials like glass and steel gave rise to Paxton’s monumental Crystal Palace (1851), to “functional” architecture like London’s Victoria and St Pancras Stations, and to seemingly impossible structures like the remarkable Galerie des Machines. This latter, a temporary exhibition space erected in Paris in 1889, and disassembled in 1910, was an enormous steel and glass pavilion, measuring 115 by 240 metres. Significantly, the Galerie des Machines was designed by a team comprising only one architect (Dutert) but three engineers (Contamin, Pierron and Charton). Along with the Eiffel Tower, also completed in 1889 for the Paris World’s Fair, and designed by the engineer Gustave Eiffel, “public” buildings such as these posed a challenge to artists at the turn of the century, whose priority it became to find a vocabulary capable of creatively engaging with a world of radically new forms. Artists like Robert Delauney, and writers such as Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, were amongst the first to grapple with these problems. Likewise the Italian Futurists Fillipo Marinetti and Giacomo Balla, and the Russian Constructivists, Suprematists and Rayonists.

The Influence of Technology

During roughly the second half of the nineteenth century, telegraphy, the telephone, photography, the typewriter, the rotary press and electro-magnetic power were developed (in 1844, Samuel Morse had successfully run a telegraph wire from Baltimore to Washington, while in 1870 a telegraph cable was laid between England and France; in 1876 Alexander Graham Bell developed telephony; in 1878 Edison invented the phonograph and in 1879 the incandescent lamp with a carbon filament). More followed: in 1880 Edison installed the first electric railway and in 1881 the first electric power plant. In 1882 the recoil-operated machine gun was invented, in 1883 the first synthetic fibre, in 1884 the Parsons steam turbine, in 1885 coated photographic paper, in 1888 the Tesla electric motor, the Kodak box camera and the Dunlop pneumatic tyre, in 1892 the Diesel engine, in 1893 the Ford car, and in 1894 the

THE NEW AESTHETICS

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cinematograph and the gramophone disc. In 1895 Roentgen discovered x-rays and Marconi invented radio telegraphy. By the turn of the twentieth century the Lumiere brothers had begun exploring moving pictures, Marie Curie discovered radium, Marconi completed the first transatlantic broadcast, the Wright Brothers developed powered flight (1903), Einstein articulated the Theory of Relativity and the law of mass-energy equivalence (1905), and Ford initiated a new phase in the history of mass mechanisation by developing the assembly line for the production of model-T automobiles.

As art critic Robert Hughes has put it, “one need not be a scientist to sense the magnitude of such changes. They amounted to the greatest alteration of man’s view of the universe since Isaac Newton.” Or, as the French writer Charles Péguy remarked in 1913, “the world has changed less since the time of Jesus Christ than it has in the last thirty years.”

By the first decade of the twentieth century the fact of this change and its impact upon all aspects of Western life was undeniable. In painting and literature these changes were also evident, no longer as points of resistance or a threatening spectres, but as the basic condition of the aesthetic apprehension of the world at large.

At this point technology shifted from being a mere spectacle or utility, to defining a basic experience of reality, both collective and private. The distinction between the prosthetic function of the machine, and a somehow “organic” function began to be blurred.

The Swiss architect Charles-Édouard Jeaneret (otherwise known as Le Corbusier), described dwelling spaces as “machines pour habiter.” The new “International Style” that grew out of Le Corbusier’s ideas focused upon efficiency: the efficiency of the working body translated into the mechanised efficiency of pre-fabricated houseing. “Je ferai des maisons,” Le Corbusier had exclaimed, “comme on fait des voitures!”

The Modern Conundrum

Several commentators have made various suggestions as to the origins of modernism. It has been claimed, for example, that the Red House, built for William Morris by Webb in 1859, was the source of the principle that ‘form follows function’, since its windows were organised to suit the internal layout. However, this doesn’t hold water, since this kind of fenestration is common to all Gothic buildings. Indeed, there’s no link between modernist designs and such a traditional house.

One concept is that of ‘functional tradition’, often apparent in industrial buildings and canal structures, especially those

created during the industrial revolution between 1740 and 1840. However, such designs were made that way to minimise work and to make life as easy as possible: there simply isn’t any connection between this and modernism.Up until the beginning of the twentieth century, architecture had evolved, new styles being created from elements in existing traditions. Although styles went in and out of favour, they remained much as they had always been. Modernism, on the other hand, was an artificial ‘style’ created by those architects of the time who sought something entirely new.

The search for a different form of architecture was triggered by the ‘Battle of the Styles’ during the latter part of the nineteenth century. This resulted in almost every kind of building, including classical, baroque, Queen Anne, Gothic and Tudor, all jostling with each other along the streets of British cities.

Today, many of these buildings, where they survive, are treasured as great architecture, but at the time of their creation they were often despised by the profession.The modernist’s rejection of the past presented a conundrum: how much should be discarded?

The Modernist Manifesto

Modernism was new, requiring different technology. Reinforced concrete, having been fully developed by the French in the nineteenth century, was successfully used in 1902 to build flats in Paris. Four years later, at Buffalo in the USA, Lloyd Wright completed his Larkin office block, a curious building without windows but provided with air vents at each corner.

However, the first really significant modernist building was the AEG Factory in Berlin, created by Behrens in 1907. In the same year, Hermann Muthesius formed the Deutsche Werkbund, which went on to create many other modern buildings. And by 1908, New York’s first reinforced concrete skyscraper had been completed.

The purists believed that everything had to go, including pitched (sloping) roofs, gables, pediments, ellipses and polygons, as well as traditional building materials such as brick, stone, wood and stucco. Conventional structural components, including arches and the trabeated forms used to create ‘box’ elements within a building, were similarly cast aside. Instead, cantilevered structures were employed, allowing the exterior of the completed work to be faced with a glass ‘curtain wall’.

The two main tenets of modernism were that of ‘form follows function’, also described as functionalism, and rationalism, the expression of a steel or concrete structure in a building’s

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Peter Behrens: Top and Left - The AEG Turbine Factory, outside and inside, 1911Bottom left - Behrens’ plan for his house on a slopeBottom right - Behrens’ house

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Le Corbusier’s Unite d’ Habitatione: Top - View from all directions; Bottom - “The Machine we Live in”

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outward form. In the latter respect, the new creed was based on the concept of using materials honestly, as expounded by Ruskin in Victorian times.The International Style

By 1910, a six-storey office block had been created in Leeds using reinforced concrete, whilst other large buildings began to employ fan-forced ventilation. However, the first building in the International Style, which used glass and steel over the front of cantilevered floors, was the Fagus Factory by Walter Gropius, construction of which began in 1911, the same year in which reinforced concrete was used by Loos at Vienna to create The Steinerhaus.

Another slightly later but significant building in this style was the Bauhaus School building at Dessau, started by Gropius in 1919, the year he established the Wiemer Art School, and completed in 1925. As in the Fagus Factory, he used a skeleton of reinforced concrete, asymmetrical massing and exteriors made of glazed ‘curtain walls’. The cantilevered form of construction meant that walls no longer performed a structural function. Gropius himself talked about ‘the abolition of the separating function of the wall’ and said that ‘the walls … [were] restricted to that of mere screens’.

In 1913, G Gilbert completed his Woolworth Building, New York’s first true skyscraper, with its 42 floors reaching 760 feet (232 metres). Meanwhile, Hermann Muthesius and his Deutscher Werkbund had created The Glass House for the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne. This had a glass brick and iron staircase, a prismatic dome and walls of glass bricks. Glass, which had rarely been used as a traditional structural material, was soon to become very popular with the modernists.

In 1922, Kandinsky and Klee, who were later to become influential in the International Style, arrived at the Bauhaus. Two years later, at Utrecht, Rietveld completed the first house to be built in this style. 1925 saw completion of the Bauhaus, as well as the arrival at the Paris Exhibition of a new style of architecture known as Art Deco. Although the Deco style of building was highly influential and very popular, it wasn’t favoured by many modernist architects, because of its ‘plebeian’ mass appeal and its frequent links with earlier building styles.

In later years the International Style became popular for office blocks, where continuous glazing provided good daylight and the lack of fixed walls accommodated various layouts.

Modular Architecture

The year 1914 saw the arrival of a pioneering and rather strange French modernist architect by the popular nickname

of Le Corbusier, who introduced a system for creating reinforced concrete houses, involving the use of slabs held apart by columns.

In 1917, Cubism had reached it’s zenith with the founding of the Dutch De Stijl movement, whose designs were once described as being ‘where comfort has yielded to geometry’. This obsession with cubes, held by Corbusier and other modernists, is difficult to comprehend, yet these young architects grasped it in both hands, thereby bestowing the twentieth century with a huge number of boxes. Le Corbusier’s interest in structural harmony led him to invent the “Modulor,” a measuring principle which combines harmonious mathematical relationships with the proportions of the human body. Judicious use of the Modulor scale would enable an architect to “harmonise” every element in a building with the whole. This fully integrated living space defined a prototypical virtual environment organised around the prosthetic-body interface: a modular, in which the building space constitutes an extension of the body’s own functional space.

Le Corbusier’s “modular,” as a metonym for the scale and dimensions of the human body, combined with a quasi-organic concept of functional topology, has come to resemble less an outer enclosure of the actual body (a projection of 1970s utopian bio-spheres and artificial environments) than a data-body interface which extends, rather than encloses, the functional body.

This modular environment no longer simulates a “pseudo” habitat, closed off from a technological exterior (as Jean Baudrillard at times suggests), rather it projected the body through a (quasi-prosthetic) technology, in what might be described as a moment of signifying substitution.

By the twenties, expressionism had reached its zenith and in 1920 Corbusier exhibited his ideas for redeveloping the city at the Paris Exposition. The following quotes, not necessarily made at this time, indicate his way of thinking:-

The city that has speed has success.

We must kill the street. We shall truly enter into modern town planning only after we have accepted this preliminary determination.

Looking beneath these statements we can see that Corbusier considered the city to be a machine, in exactly the same way as Marinetti in his Futurist Manifesto, not as a home for real human beings with human feelings. He apparently aspired to create an anthill full of rapidly-moving people who were never to make any contact.

Indeed, he actually said:-

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“Considerable sacrifices were demanded of the inhabitants of the machine in order that purely abstract formal development … might be carried as far as possible.”The Bauhaus Attitude

Whether utopianist, as in the 1909 Futurist manifesto of Fillipo Marinetti (“We will sing the midnight fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with electric moons; insatiable stations swallowing the smoking serpents of their trains, factories hung from the clouds by the twisted threads of their smoke”), or satirical, as in the Dadaist assemblages of Francis Picabia (Machine Tournez Vite) and Marcel Duchamp (La mariée mise a nu par ses célibataires, meme), or materialist, as in the works of the Cubists and Constructivists, the phenomenon of mechanisation permeated the arts.

Indeed, the very “technological” nature of much of this art could in itself be ascribed to a particular synthesis of ideas current amongst the European avant-garde at the time of the “modernist” experiment. This synthesis, in simplified form, was of several dominant oppositional tendencies, from idealism and materialism, to functionalism and expressionism, to lyrical and geometrical abstraction, and so on.

Figures such as Paul Cézanne and Adolf Loos, Ferdinand de Saussure, Werner Heisenberg, and Sigmund Freud, can all be seen as pioneers of this broadly synthetic approach to language, aesthetics, and the physical sciences. In the period between the two wars, this approach had come to be most fully embodied in the institution that was the Bauhaus.

It would be an understatement to say that the current state of the graphic design industry owes a lot to the Bauhaus movement. With modern design’s intrinsic nature as a combination of art and industry, we owe much to this German design school that persevered throughout a tough time of social and political upheaval to leave one of the biggest stamps on art, architecture and design in the 20th century.

The Bauhaus School (literally meaning ‘building house’ in German) was founded in 1919 by Walter Groupius in Weimar, then at Dessau, and lastly, at the capital of post WWI Germany.

At the time of the birth of the Bauhaus the world was very different to how it is today, the fine artist reigned supreme and other forms of design were considered inferior. Questions posed by the Bauhaus regarding how Arts and Crafts should be taught, the nature of good design and the effects that buildings and architecture have on their immediate surroundings are still being asked today. Walter Gropius suggested in his book ‘The New Architecture and the

Bauhaus’ that bridges from the past remain open and full of insight providing us with a glimpse into the future of art and design.

“A breach has been made with the past, which allows us to envisage a new aspect of architecture corresponding to the technical civilization of the age we live in.” —Gropius

Gropius continued to comment on how architecture was evolving. He argued that buildings are no longer containers, but are designed to be significant to status. The aesthetics of new architecture differ and the boundaries of design have been pushed out of their comfort zone.

“The morphology of dead styles has been destroyed; and we are returning to honesty of thought and feeling. The general public, formerly profoundly indifferent to everything to do with building has been shaken out of it torpor.”

The eventual merging of numerous styles of arts cleared the way for pure experimental practice and provided an opportunity for young aspiring artists and craftsmen to master the industrial processes. The Bauhaus workshops were described by Gropius as ‘laboratories’ and were used to devise cutting edge practicalities as well as enhancing mass production merchandise.

The Bauhaus workshops were really laboratories for working out practical new designs for present-day articles and improving models for mass-production. Once the Bauhaus had been established, Gropius began working out the fundamental aims that the Bauhaus had to achieve. The first aim was to combine the so called ‘isolated’ art forms and produce co-operative projects that would train craftsmen, architects, designers and artists to work in unity. It was the ‘co-operative’ nature that proved to be the foundations of what the Bauhaus represented.

In this era of change and disillusionment, the movement sought to embrace 20th century machine culture in a way that allowed basic necessities like buildings, furniture, and design, to be completed in a utilitarian but affective way. The school encouraged the embrace of modern technologies in order to succeed in a modern environment.

Intended by its first director, Gropius, as “a consultation centre for industry and the trades,” the Bauhaus exemplified the tensions that existed in northern European intellectual and artistic circles between quasi-Functional, geometrical abstraction and Expressionism, and between the concepts “applied” art and “pure” art.

The Bauhaus was a self-contained center of artistic instruction and culture with tremendous breadth of scope. The leading teachers, together with Gropius, were Feininger,

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Bauhaus Dessau

Fagus Werk

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Klee, Kandinsky, Schlemmer and Moholy-Nagy. Klee taught theory, then painting on glass and tapestry; Kandinsky gave lessons in general theory, but concentrated more on abstract composition and monumental painting. Schlemmer and Moholy-Nagy rejuvenated the techniques of working in metal and plastic, the arts of theater and ballet, photography, typography, publicity and so on. Initially very Expressionist in spirit, the Bauhaus aesthetic became increasingly Constructivist and geometric.“The ultimate aim of all creative activity is the building.”

According to Gropius, all human activity tends towards the concerns of architecture; towards building (an opinion which modifies, even as it seems to echo that of Hegel, who considered architecture to be the “origin” of art). In one way or another this is true, but it might also be expressed in terms of “making,” of poiesis. What is to be distinguished, however, is the act of making, or of construction, from that of creation and the metaphysics of origin or originality.

This notion in itself was revolutionary, and its consequences defined what has come to be referred to as the Modernist movement, and also carries over into what is often misleadingly referred to as post-Modernism.

The Bauhaus Industrial Design

While the Bauhaus school of thought believed that the building itself was the zenith of all design, they had their students focus on artistry and crafts across all mediums of design. Their school followed a regimented syllabus, which focused on the connection between theory and practice.

Because of Germanys social background, the fine artist was praised and seen as a higher authority when compared to the craftsman. Gropius saw no reason why craft work should not be appreciated in the same context as painting. Gropius himself devised the curriculum. He attempted to break down the barriers between craftsmanship, architecture and industrial production. Furniture designers, potters, silversmiths, and joiners were brought together, for the first time, to explore design. All the students would learn from each other. Boundaries that has existed in the past, were removed. All students were exposed to a vast range of materials, skills and disciplines. Students were encouraged to find new and improved ways of designing everyday items.

“There is no essential difference between the artist and the craftsman…the artist is an exalted craftsman…”—Walter Gropius

Frank Whitford mentions in his book how important it was for the school to break down the separation between the two art forms of painting and crafts:

“Let us create a new guild of craftsmen without the class-distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist.”—Whitford

One of the aims of the school was to encourage designers, to develop products that could be manufactured on an industrial scale. As far as Gropius was concerned, establishing a constant contact with the leaders of the crafts became a priority after the Bauhaus got underway in 1919. The school was being subsidized by the public and by selling its research into design and products to industry it hoped to obtain financial independence for the first time. Previous to the Bauhaus, very little thought had been put into the design of everyday items / products. However, the manufacture of many quality products relied on individual craftsmanship and skilled people . They were usually expensive, often purchased by the wealthy.

Alternatively, products were manufactured in a basic functional way, with little though being put into aesthetics. These products were for the general public. The Bauhaus, encouraged designers to develop products that could be manufactured on an industrial scale and yet be aesthetically pleasing to the eye.

The Bauhaus became the centre of new thinking. Functionality and simplicity were combined with aesthetics, to produce a purer form of design. Previously, Art Nouveau had been about creating ornate, complicated, decorative products. The Bauhaus reduced the complexity of design to simplicity, functionality and an pure form of aesthetics.

The Bauhaus promoted the use of materials such a tubular steel. Material that had not been used previously in furniture design or even considered as a suitable material for furniture. Tubular steel is light, versitile and cheap. It can be joined, shaped and formed in different ways, opening up new design possibitilites, which became a design philosophy of the Bauhaus.

This worked particularly well for furniture. Marcel Breuer’s ‘Wassily’ chair from 1925 is one of the most iconic pieces to emerge from the Bauhaus and illustrates beautifully the strength of this marriage between art, design and machine production. During the years of the Bauhaus regime the artist and craftsman became a highly respected entity, arts and crafts had become one. The artists and craftsmen worked together in studios producing work some of which were exhibited.

“We live in dreadfully chaotic times… and this small exhibition is the mirror-image…”—Gropius

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In July 1919 the first internal exhibition was held at the Bauhaus; however Gropius did not take kindly to what he saw from his students, because he did not believe in the fact that his students were trule passionate about refining the world as he did. In addition to the last quote above, he also expressed relief that a new set of passionate minds would join the cause of Bauhaus—which brings us exactly to the point in history when all modernist movements across Europe began to converge at the new Bauhaus establishment in Dessau, of which, we shall be exploring the influences of the Russian Constructivism and the Dutch De Stijl on the Bauhaus way of thinking.

Artists and architects such as Théo van Doesburg, Johannes Itten, Lázsló Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky at one time or another bore direct or indirect influence upon the emerging Bauhaus style, in which an Expressionist metaphysical approach gradually gave way to a more an austerely rational one, dominated by ideas originating in architecture and industrial design.

Constructivism in Bauhaus

Constructivism was an artistic and architectural movement in Russia from 1914 onward, and a term often used in modern art today, which dismissed “pure” art in favour of art used as an instrument for social purposes, namely, the construction of the socialist system.

Constructivism is regarded as the last and most influential modern art movement to flourish in Russia in the 20th century. It evolved just as the Bolsheviks came to power in the October Revolution of 1917, and initially it acted as a lightning rod for the hopes and ideas of many of the most advanced Russian artists who supported the revolution’s goals. It borrowed ideas from Cubism, Suprematism and Futurism, but at its heart was an entirely new approach to making objects, one which sought to abolish the traditional artistic concern with composition, and replace it with ‘construction.’

Constructivism called for a careful technical analysis of modern materials, and it was hoped that this investigation would eventually yield ideas that could be put to use in mass production, serving the ends of a modern, Communist society. Ultimately, however, the movement foundered in trying to make the transition from the artist’s studio to the factory. Some continued to insist on the value of abstract, analytical work, and the value of art per se; these artists had a major impact on spreading Constructivism throughout Europe.

The term Construction Art was first used as a derisive term by Kazimir Malevich to describe the work of Alexander

Rodchenko in 1917. Constructivism first appears as a positive term in Naum Gabo’s Realistic Manifesto of 1920.

The aesthetics of Constructivism is similar to the geometric abstract paintings of Kasimir Malevich, who also worked in the constructivist style, though he is better known for his earlier suprematism and ran his own competing group in Vitebsk. The movement was an important influence on new graphic design techniques championed by El Lissitzky.

Constructivism can also be considered as a departure from Russian Futurism that sought to break and destroy traditions (similar to Italian Futurism).

“The artist constructs a new symbol with his brush. This symbol is not a recognizable form of anything which is already finished, already made, already existing in the world - it is a symbol of a new world, which is being built upon and which exists by way of people.”—El Lizzitsky

El Lissitsky was important in spreading Constructivism beyond Russia. In 1922, he co-organized the Dusseldorf Congress of International Productive Artists, with Hans Richter and Theo van Doesburg of the Dutch group De Stijl, and here the International Constructivist movement was officially launched. The artists at the Dusseldorf Congress released a manifesto that claimed art as a “tool of progress,” turning Constructivism into a symbol of the modern era.

Germany became the center of the new movement due to the presence of El Lissitzky, who spent time in Berlin working on exhibitions at the Van Diemen Galerie and the Grosse Berliner Ausstellung in the early 1920s. He also collaborated on several publications. Hans Arp and Kurt Schwitters, were both attracted to the modern, technological qualities of Constructivism despite their involvement in the more anarchic movement Dada. Lissitzky’s Proun forms also influenced the work of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus, who developed an interest in technology and the machine.

With the added presence of Van Doesburg, who also came to teach at the Bauhaus, the popularity of Constructivism quickly overshadowed Expressionism in Germany, and spread throughout Europe.

In 1922 Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian painter and theorist, accepted a teaching position at the Bauhaus, where conducted the Wall Painting Workshop and Preliminary Course and taught at all three of the school’s sequential locations in Weimar, Dessau, and Berlin until 1933, when the Bauhaus was closed due to pressure from the National Socialist (Nazi) government. Kandinsky was one of the most influential artists of his time, and in 1913 (pre Bauhaus) he produced original work of total abstraction which appeared to have no reference to the world he lived in. His work was based around

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El Lissitsky’s Beat the whites with the Red wedge

Examples of Kasimir Malevich’s Constructivism

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“Around 1913 he began working on paintings that came to be considered the first totally abstract works in modern art; they made no reference to objects of the physical world and derived their inspiration and titles from music.”

Post World War 1 Kandinsky looked towards evolving his work; he substituted the loose forms and edges from his earlier work for hard, rigorous outlines, patterns and geometric shapes. For example the piece entitled Composition VIII 1923 (plate2). He did this by using straight and narrow lines overlapping and interlinking with triangles, circles, squares, rectangles and other shapes within the piece to form a collective composition which flows gracefully across the canvas as if he was painting from music itself.

Piet Mondrian - De Stijl Poster and Artwork

The usage of the primary color is strong, while the sans serif typography, too, stands out as the De Stijl’s modern outlook

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the non- physical, not what we can see, touch and feel, but what we hear, and sense within ourselves.

Kandinsky, at the Bauhaus, taught, among his other classes, “Colour”. In this course, Kandinsky taught the theory of color from the history of development of various color systems to modern psychology of perception of color. In his training course Kandinsky realizes a radically new approach to teaching about the color, based on the analysis of individual elements - a point, a line, a plane, and examining their relationships. The result of this analysis later became his work “Point and line to plane”. Geometric shapes came to play a dominant role in Kandinsky’s pictorial vocabulary at the Bauhaus; the artist, who was interested in uncovering a universal aesthetic language, increased his use of overlapping, flat planes and clearly delineated forms. This change was due, in part, to his familiarity with the Suprematist work of Kazimir Malevich and the art of the Constructivists. Kandinsky’s turn toward geometric forms was also likely a testament to the influence of industry and developments in technology.

The creativity Kandinsky’s Weimar period (1923-1925) is under the influence of ideas of suprematism and constructivism, which reign in this time in the Bauhaus. His main work in those years - a monumental “Composition VIII”.

The constructivist movement gained ground in England when Moholy-Nagy, Naum Gabo and others took refuge in London following the German invasion.

The De Stijl Link

In June 1917, In Holland, Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian made a journal called the De Stijl. This journal gave a chance to every artist, poets, sculptures and architects to show their work in this journal; later, the name became synonymous with the group of artists responsible for the material published in the magazine.

Like the suprematists and constructivists, many of the artists of De Stijl were committed to the idea of abstract art and to the view that it had a purpose beyond mere decoration. Art, they felt, had the power to change society and individuals and create a new kind of human environment; utopia. These politically based ideas were close to those of other European avant-garde artists and the aims have much in common with the Bauhaus, and with Russian Constructivism.

De Stijl movement was influenced by Cubist painting, as well as by the mysticism and the ideas about ‘ideal’ geometric forms (such as ‘the perfect straight line’). In general, De Stijl proposed ultimate simplicity and abstraction, both in

architecture and painting, by using only straight (horizontal and vertical) lines and rectangular forms. Their formal vocabulary was limited furthermore to the primary colours red, yellow and blue and the three primary values black, white and grey. The works avoided symmetry and attained aesthetic balance by the use of opposition.

The period between 1924 and 1928 was the most significant in the development of the Bauhaus, especially because Theo van Doesburg was particularly influential during this time. De Stijl advocated the use of flat primary colours, rectangular forms and straight, horizontal and vertical (never diagonal) lines. In 1922, Van Doesburg taught a course at the Bauhaus and these De Stijl principles are clearly reflected in the stark simplicity and functionalism of much of the Bauhaus output after that. It is interesting to note that a Bauhaus building in the ‘international style’ can be seen as a three dimensional version of a painting by Dutch artist and De Stijl member, Piet Mondrian.

In 1924, Piet Mondrian broke with the group after Van Doesburg proposed the theory of elementarism, proposing that the diagonal line was more vital than the horizontal and the vertical. Mondrian became the most radical abstractionist artist of his era. After studying cubism, Mondrian’s work became increasingly non representational, until his compositions such as Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue above, which consists of flat planes of the three primary colours broken by black lines. In this new art form (Neo plasticism) Mondrian’s goal was to eliminate all traces of representation in favour of balanced compositions of primary colour and vertical and horizontal lines.

In other words, Neo plasticism represents the absolute elements—primary colours and vertical and horizontal lines—that underlie all appearances. He used vertical and horizontal lines to show that the canvas was a place consisting of right angles. His achievement of balance between unequal parts affected the direction of art, architecture, and industrial design.

The New Typography

Among its other activities, the Bauhaus published the writings of artists like Mondrian and Malevich, and Gropius attempted to establish, after 1925, a basis for all design in the broad synthesis of the theories of de Stijl and Constructivism, which can be seen very well in the Bauhaus exhibitions of 1923 and 1925—but the next part of the Bauhaus attitude lay not only on the contents of their exhibitions, but on the posters they designed for the exhibitions themselves, which involved a new typography, one that took the name of the school for itself in the years to come.

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Before 1923 typographic design had not played a very big part in the programme, it began to after the appointment of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy who introduced to the school the ideas of new typography. Gropius appointed him as the successor to Johannes Itten, in 1923, an assignment which proved to be of great importance to Moholy-Nagy’s personal development and to the evolution of Bauhaus ideas and teaching methods.

In 1925, after relocating the Bauhaus to the industrial city of dessau, due to the loss of Weimar city’s financial support, the workshop for typography and commercial art was established. Herbert Bayer, a former student of typography at Weimar, was put in charge of the newly installed workshop at the Bauhaus Dessau, quickly turning it into a professional studio for graphic design. The innovations made in typography and graphic design by Moholy-Nagy and Bayer are among the most radical offerings to 20th century design.

The typography workshop, while not initially a priority of the Bauhaus, became increasingly important under Bayer and Moholy-Nagy. In the simplest terms, the typography they sought to create was to be a reflection of the ideologies of Gropius and what the Bauhaus itself signified; it must be clear communication in its most vivid form.

Studying under such masters as Kandinsky and later Moholy-Nagy Herbert Bayer acquired an passion for typography, envisaging a new alphabet that would simplify the representation of sounds. By 1925, he himself was a master of the printing and advertising workshop in the new complex in Dessau, for which he designed the signage. 1925 was also the year he, created universal, a geometric, all lower-case, san-serif typeface, known as the Universal Typeface.

“Why should we write and print with two alphabets? both a large and a small sign are not necessary to indicate one single sound. We do not speak a capital A and a small a. We need only a single alphabet.”—Herbert Bayer

The Universal Typeface was streamlined, utilised modest curves and mirrored the aesthetics of the new machine age. Bayer abandoned capital letters and removed ornaments such as serifs in order to increase the functionality in terms of legibility and space saving. Bayer’s intentions aligned itself with the De Stijl-influenced movement of new typography embodied by Jan Tschichold and fellow Bauhaus masters Moholy-Nagy and El Lissitzy.

“A new typographic language must be created, combining elasticity, variety and a fresh approach to the materials of printing, a language whose logic depends on the appropriate application of the processes of printing.” —Moholy-Nagy

With the intent to enhance communication, Moholy-Nagy used graphic elements such as rules and points in an autonomous way. In his title page for the Bauhaus prospectus in 1923 he employs these techniques. He was responsible for all but to of the typographic layouts on the covers of the Bauhaus books edited by gropius and himself. Moholy-Nagy’s style was epitomised by the combination of graphic, typographic and photographic material to create striking designs.

At the Bauhaus, typography was conceived as both an empirical means of communication and an artistic expression, with visual clarity stressed above all. Concurrently, typography became increasingly connected to corporate identity and advertising. The promotional materials prepared for the Bauhaus at the workshop, with their use of sans serif typefaces and the incorporation of photography as a key graphic element, served as visual symbols of the Avant-Garde institution.

The Legacy of Bauhaus

By 1927 the Bauhaus had a fully functional and credited architectural department and was now able to offer students courses in architecture alone, without having to learn a craft skill. Gropius appointed Swiss architect Haans Meyer as professor of architecture. Meyer immediately fell out of favour with other professors and students, most of all Nagy and Kandinsky.

During 1928 the architecture department collaborated with Gropius on an experimental housing project in Dessau, however by 1929 the project was beset with technical difficulties, cracks appeared in the walls, damp became an issue and the heating was insufficient. The houses though were cheap and offered families a house and garden at minimal prices. Gropius believed that if it was possible to build sections of housing in factories on a mass scale the buildings themselves could be slotted together on site.

“We are approaching a state of technical proficiency when it will become possible to rationalize buildings and mass produce them in factories by resolving their structure into a number of component parts… ready- made houses of solid fireproof construction, that can be delivered fully equipped from stock, will ultimately become one of the principle products of industry.”—Gropius

In 1928 Gropius was replaced at the Bauhaus by Mies Van de Rohe. However, his stay was rather short-lived, for in 1933 Hitler’s National Socialism (Nazi) arrived, modernism was banned and the school closed, never to open again.

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Top left: The Bauhaus poster using the Bauhaus type

Top Right : Book Cover for Bauhaus 1923

Bottom left: The Syllabus for Bauhaus designed by Gropius and Miholy-Nagy. Notice that it include subjects like metal, glass and fabric, which were the raw materials for the new language of form

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Cover of the Revue Foto-QUALITAT—László Moholy-Nagy, 1931

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Cover of the Revue Foto-QUALITAT—László Moholy-Nagy, 1931

The stylistic and technical aspects of this revolutionary style of building tends to lead to the conclusion that it is a direct descendant of the Crystal palace. The metal frame work and sheet glass construction are main features in both today’s modern buildings and the innovative designs of Joseph Paxton that bought London the Crystal Palace in 1851.

It is highly evident that both the Bauhaus and the De Stijl influenced modern art and architecture as we know it today. However, it is also understandable that in order to go forward and create the cutting edge, you must first look back and understand the fundamentals of what you are trying to achieve.

Rietveld may have taken influence from medieval furniture or more evidently from Beillini’s ‘St Francis in Ecstasy’ painted c. 1400, and came up with the revolutionary designs for the Schroder House, and who’s designs featured in an ‘up- to- minute’ kitchen advertisement. Gropius headed an organisation with the goal of uniting arts and crafts and his visions were carried forward resulting in multi- storey buildings and office blocks in Chicago, New York and now; all over the world.

Bauhaus also promoted simplicity, however it was simplicity in creation, not necessarily aesthetics (like De Stijl), although some of the products produced under the regime were often in their most minimal form.

For example the early production of objects such as tea- pots, bowls and cups were all created in the pottery around the early- mid 1920’s. The enormous office and apartment buildings were also simplistic, consisting of parts made in factories and slotted together on site and stated similar intent to that of the ‘Crystal Palace’ a century earlier. Simple materials, in their least complex state without jeopardizing the strength of the structure.

The past seems to influence everything new, nothing is entirely unique anymore and it is only when we learn from the past can we create the future.

The Bauhaus promoted the idea of mass production and off- site assemblage which is still present in many aspects of today’s society including the ready made buildings and mass produced shells for franchises such as Mc Donald’s.

The Bauhaus era also bought us the office buildings we see everyday, including tower blocks, full glass faced buildings and the idea of mass producing tools, machine parts, building infrastructure and furniture.

The legacy of the Bauhaus. hence, lies not in what was produced in the factory, craft and typographic workshops in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin, but in the world outside,

Buildings are continuously under construction all over the world; one of the latest influential is the Burj Dubai building in Dubai, which is the world’s tallest structure not only pushing the boundaries of design and architecture, but of the aspirations of mankind. Architecture is evolving, buildings will continue to rise in height and status and inevitably change the way we live our lives.

today, where we still use its priciples in artchitecture, art and graphic design.

“The history of the Bauhaus is a long story, an endless one, I could never reach the end, I have merely traced one strand – let’s drop the subject”—Oskar Schlemmer, Instructor at Bauhaus, 1923

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Antonio Sant’Elia. The New City and The Futurist Manifesto of Architecture. 1914

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Antonio Sant’Elia. The New City and The Futurist Manifesto of Architecture. 1914

In 1909, the Italian architect Sant’Elia began a five-year promotion of his ideas on Futurism and his plans for a multi-layered city. The principles of Futurism are best described by quoting Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto:-

The modern building like a gigantic machine…. Lifts must swarm up the facade like serpents of glass and iron. The house of concrete, iron and glass, without ornament — brutish in all its mechanical simplicity — must rise up the brink of a tumultuous abyss, the street … gathering up the traffic of the metropolis connected for necessary transfers to metal catwalks and high speed conveyor belts.

This is a frightening variation of expressionism, reminiscent of the film Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang in 1926 and depicting the world in the year 2000, or the book The Machine Stops, written in 1909 by E M Forster. In both of these, human civilisation is reduced to an ant colony and the individuals within it have lost all significance.

At this point, architecture moves from buildings to social engineering. After all, why would anyone want to create an unnatural world such as this? For only one reason, the suppression of individuality, the creed of communism.

While we took a circuit around Modernism by the way of Constructivism, De Stijl and Bauhaus, we barely touched upon the social unrest of the time—which was around the World Wars I and II.

Indeed, it is amazing to see what the Bauhaus, De Stijl and Constructivism have contributed to the fields of art and architecture, but we have only observed this from a crippled perspective—we have, until now, not considered the depairing poverty, nor the social pressures that permeated the time of all these changes. Perhaps, the best reflection of this chaotic time would be in the literature of this time, or, in direct terms, the lack of it.

The Science of Language

Machine metaphors abound in literature from the earliest times, but have proliferated in European literature since the time of the Industrial Revolution. Most importantly, however, machine technology has also had a direct and decisive impact not only upon modes of literary production but upon the literary temperament itself. Writers such as William Blake and Jonathan Swift early on responded to the new “mechanistic” view of the universe propounded by Newton and Laplace, developing a poetic sensibility that was incisive in its ability to critique as well as assimilate the new science and the philosophies born out of it.

THE LIBERATED TEXT

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Blake’s metaphor of the “infernal printing press” stood not only for a poetic idea, but also for a poetic practice. Blake literally engraved his poems by means of a caustic technique that seemed to fuse the energy of his writing, his revolutionary politics, and the sprit of technological transformation. In a seemingly direct outgrowth of the Blakean, Romantic idea, modern science and the resultant proliferation of applied technologies presented a world in which the old concept of reality as matter was being replaced by the concept of reality as energy. A

long with the experience of locomotive travel, telecommunications and mass media, this revolutionary architecture of the sky had a major impact upon the way in which ordinary people, as well as artists and philosophers, perceived the world. Not only the objects in the world, but the very manner in which the world was experienced, seemed to undergo radical changes.

At the same time artists sought to express this “new” reality in their work-a process beginning with the British industrial revolution and accelerated by each of the two world wars.

The French writer Marcel Proust, in his novel A la Recherche du temps perdu noticed, for example, the commonplace way in which the point-of-view of a passenger inside a train compartment as it moves through the countryside radically alters traditional assumptions of narrative continuity, or the objective unity of time and place. As Proust remarks:

‘There is never a totality of what is seen nor a unity of the points of view, except along the traversal that the frantic passenger traces from one window to the other, “in order to draw together, in order to reweave intermittent and opposite fragments.”’

Commenting on the impact of such “discoveries” upon modernist art in general, Arnold Hauser writes:

“The ... concept of time undergoes a new interpretation, an intensification and a deflection. The accent is now on the simultaneity of the contents of consciousness, the immanence of the past in the present, the constant flowing together of the different periods of time, the amorphous fluidity of inner experience, the boundlessness of the stream of time by which the soul is borne along, the relativity of space and time, that is to say, the impossibility of differentiation and defining the media in which the mind moves. I

n this new conception of time almost all the strands of the texture which form the stuff of modern art converge: the abandonment of plot, the elimination of the hero, the relinquishing of psychology, the ‘automatic method of writing’ and, above all, the montage technique and the intermingling of temporal and spatial forms of the film.”

Futurism

Parallel to the development of automobiles, airplanes, and Einstein ideas changing the perception of the Universe, artists were also part of this era of innovation and creative energy known as Modernism, grouping themselves under different banners and names: Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, Surrealism, among others, questioning and re-inventing their art.

If a language is going to support a highly literate culture, rhetoric scholar Richard Lanham has argued, then the language itself must be made of simple parts. That is, the characters that are the building blocks of language must be easy to comprehend and the caligraphy unobtrusive. This is because a reader must be able to internalize an alphabet and effectively look “through” the characters to the meanings they convey. For example, when reading a book, one is often not aware of looking at marks of ink on paper. One is much more aware of the ideas that live under the surface of the words. From all these movements, the Futurist philosophy challenged the conventions that dominated typography at the time: clarity, simplicity and readability.

Paraphrasing E.E. Cummings, the futurist used typography as a medium of meaning. Their goal was that people looked at the surface instead of “looking through words.” This typographical philosophy—simplicity, clarity, transparency—has dominated print culture since the advent of the printing press, Lanham argues. The twentieth century saw several movements in art and poetry that called this philosophy into question, using typography itself as a medium for meaning, preventing people from looking “through” words and forcing readers to look “at” them.

The Italian Futurists, led by F. T. Marinetti’s 1909 manifesto, began to reject traditional expressions of art and literature as “second-hand clothes.” Among their many targets was the book itself, which Marinetti called “stale” and “oppressive,” a symbol of the old guard that the Futurists were working against.

“In a literate culture,” Lanham wrote in The Electronic Word, “our concept of meaning itself...depends on this radical act of typographical simplification. No pictures; no color; strict order of left to right then down one line; no type changes; no interaction; no revision. In attacking this convention, Marinetti attacks the entire literate conception of humankind.” Marinetti began experimenting with unusual typography, creating poems that were simultaneously textual and visual, such as the 1919 work “SCRABrrRrraaNNG.”

The Futurist movement was born in Italy during the first decade of the 20th century amidst a technological revolution that was changing the nature of Western European society.

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Marinetti’s Futuristic Manifestor, 1909 (above), and pages from his book, “ScrabrrRrraaNNG” (below)

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Self-Portrait: Rarefaction of Corrado Govoni Francesco Cangiullo: Bello

Marinetti’s book: “Zang Tumb Tumb” Marinetti’s book: ChaiRrrrrrrR

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Italy had been in a weakened state for several decades before the birth of Futurism. It was unified as a nation-state only in 1863 and was under developed economically in comparison with France, Germany and Great Britain. Rapid industrialization was occurring and along with it, social unrest in the form of strikes and riots. Anarchists brought terror and riots to the streets, and with them posters and leaflets.

The bomb and the pamphlet were weapons used by the anarchist, syndicalist and communist in an attempt to overthrow the old order. Radical intellectuals and artists were exploring the problems of popular culture and the need for unification; it was among these contemplations at the turn of the century that Art began to weave itself into the fabric of social and political revolution.

Futurism is generally considered to be the first modern artistic movement that attempted to reach the masses and to create a social and political movement within the ‘avant-garde.’ The founder, Fillipo Marinetti, was a highly esteemed poet whose fierce energy and direction supported Futurism in becoming a phenomenon that would shape the history of 20th century art and culture.

Futurism was launched when the Italian poet Filippo Marinetti published his Manifesto of Futurism in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro on 20 February 1909. Marinetti’s stirring words established futurism as a revolutionary movement in which all the arts were to test their ideas and forms against the new realities of scientific and industrial society:

We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry. . . . We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed . . . a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samoth-race. . . . Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece.

The manifesto voiced enthusiasm for war, the machine age, speed, and modern life. The tone was considered outrageous and fanatical by most, yet its passion for shaking a deadened society was undeniably attractive for many. It shocked the public by proclaiming,

“We will destroy museums, libraries, and fight against moralism, feminism, and all utilitarian cowardice.”

A group of artists formed around this first manifesto and quickly began to express a multitude of aggressive ideas through Futurist literature, performance and visual art. Futurism was the first deliberately organized, self-conscious

art movement of the twentieth century. It quickly spread to France, Germany, Russia and the Americas, appealing to all who had tired of romanticism, decadence and sentimentality, desirious of something more vigorous and robust, something in keeping with the Machine Age.

Futurism, as opposed to Cubism--essentially visual movement, found its roots in poetry and in a whole renovation of language, and featured the concept of the New Typography. Speed, noise, machines, transportation, communication, information...and all the transient impressions of life in the modern city intoxicated Marinetti and his followers. They despised tame, bourgeois virtues and tastes, and above everything else, loathed the cult of the past. One Italian critic labelled them ‘art wiseguys’ calling them ‘the caffeine of Europe.’ In a series of manifestos designed to shock and provoke the public, they formulated styles of painting, music, sculpture, theatre, poetry, architecture, cooking, clothing, and furniture. The manifestos vividly preserve the flavor of the movement. They still provoke, irritate, and amuse while opening endless possibilities still under exploration today.

On 11 of February 1910, five artists from the futurists movement published a Manifesto of the futurist painters, Luigi Russolo, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, Giocamma Bella and Gino Severini declared their intent to destroy the cult of the past. This also included to elevate all attempts of originality, regard art critics as useless and dangerous and not to use any concept or themes that have been used in the past.

Marinetti and his followers produced an explosive and emotionally charged poetry that defied correct syntax and grammar. In January 1913, Giovanni Papini (1881–1956) began publication of the journal Lacerba in Florence, and typographic design was pulled onto the artistic battlefield.

The June 1913 issue published Marinetti’s article calling for a typographic revolution against the classical tradition. Harmony was rejected as a design quality because it contradicted “the leaps and bursts of style running through the page”.

The futurist poets believed that the use of different sizes, weights, and styles of type allowed them to weld painting and poetry, because the intrinsic beauty of letterforms, manipulated creatively, transformed the printed page into a work of visual art.

On a page, three or four ink colors and twenty typefaces (italics for quick impressions, boldface for violent noises and sounds) could redouble words’ expressive power. Free, dynamic, and piercing words could be given the velocity of stars, clouds, airplanes, trains, waves, explosives, molecules, and atoms.

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A new and painterly typographic design, called parole in libertá or “words in freedom,” was born on the page; in 1912 Marinetti published his Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature in which he urged writers to “banish punctuation, as well as adjectives, adverbs, and conjunctions.” Verso libero gradually evolved into parole in libertà (words-in-freedom) the purpose of which Marinetti outlined in his manifesto Destruction of Syntax - Imagination without Strings - Words-in-Freedom of 1913.

“I initiate a typographical revolution aimed at the bestial, nauseating idea of the book of passéist and D’Annunzian verse, on Seventeenth Century handmade paper bordered with helmets, Minervas, Apollos, elaborate red initials, vegetables, mythological missal ribbons, epigraphs, and roman numerals. The book must be the Futurist expression of our Futurist thought. My revolution is aimed at the so-called typographical harmony of the page, which is contrary to the flux and reflux, the leaps and bursts of style that run through the page. On the same page, therefore, we will use three or four colours of ink, or even twenty different typefaces if necessary. For example: italics for a series of similar or swift sensations, boldface for violent onomatopoeias, and so on. With this typographical revolution and this multicoloured variety in the letters I mean to redouble the expressive force of words.”

The mass production and distribution of the manifesto ensured an influence on typography internationally with, for example, the Russian El Lissitzky quoting Marinetti in his writings on new typography.

Marinetti’s own book, Zang Tumb Tumb (1914) typifies the style and feeling of words-in-freedom and is a milestone in typographic design. The book is an account of the Turkish Battle of Adrianopolis of 1912 in which Marinetti volunteered. Words-in-freedom are used onomatopoeically to graphically illustrate the explosions of weapons and grenades and the noise of battle.

Since the Futurist movement was born of the machine age, to the Futurists the design and production of a book was symbolic of that age.

Modern materials and methods were employed - for example Fortunato Depero’s famous 1927 Depero Futurista (also known as The Nailed Book) employed two aluminium bolts as a fastening method. Even if the method of bookbinding was new and innovative, the inside of the book was just as inspired. Printed on different colours and weights of paper, the text in words-in-freedom style, was a stimulating typographical experience.

There was no right or wrong way to hold the book and the layout necessitated turning the book around in order to read it.

Apollinaire—

Guillame Apollinaire was a French poet and a rivalry of Marintetti. Appollinare’s unique contribution to graphic design was the 1918 publication of a book entitled Calligrammes. Calligrammes was a collection of peoms in which the letterforms were arranged to form a visual design or figure. In these poems he explored the potential fusion of peotry and painting. The typography becomes a bird, a water fountain, and an eye in this expressive design.

World War One

To participate in the European modernity, the Italian public needed to become involved in the technological progress of the 20th century.

Marinetti felt that the only way to achieve this aim was through the World War I, which at the time was looming at the horizon. He thought, a Great War could bring about such changes. ‘We want to glorify war - the world’s only hygiene,’’ proclaimed the Futurist manifesto. Marinetti exalted the dynamism of the modern world, especially its science and technology. His aim was to detach completely from the history and look to the future, thus he asked for the destruction of all museums and libraries. He called for the creation of a new aesthetic of speed and energy through celebration of aggressive war machines.

Division in Futurism began in 1914. A faction in Florence, Italy resented the hold that the Milan group, led by Marinetti and Boccioni, had over the artistic philosophy of Futurism. Each group considered the other passé.

Along the way, threats of war inflamed Futurism’s zeal for violence in patriotism, and many Futurists fanned hatred for the Austro-Hungarian Empire and eventually enlisted when hostilities erupted. At this point, Florence withdrew from Futurism, weakening it considerably.

Reflecting this ardor for bloodletting, in the Futurist Manifesto, Marinetti declared, “We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for and scorn for woman.”

Futurists produced some war-inspired works, but soon Cubism became the impetus of the avant-garde. Tragically, Boccioni died in the war during 1916. Ironically, the War to End All Wars almost ended Futurism.

Marinetti kept Futurism going in some form or another until his death in 1944, though perhaps the future itself ended Futurism. Like old science fiction, the ideas therein can become hackneyed or at least uninspiring for new

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Guillame Apollinaire’s pages from “Calligrammes”

Fortunato Depero’s 1927 “Depero Futurista”: Cover (below), and two pages (right and right below)

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generations. Futurism did not succeed in destroying the past, but it hindsight, it was a reliable soothsayer for what was about to happen in the 20th century-- from the technological onslaught to the genocidal wars, from the globalized communications to the spread of multinational media.

Dada

Seven years after the second Manifesto, Switzerland would see the birth of Dada, another highly influential avant-garde movement. In contrast to the pre- and pro-war Futurists, the Dadaists were reacting against the war and against anything and anyone who supported it- including the Futurists. Despite this major difference between the two groups, the Dadaists were undeniably influenced by the Futurists in numerous ways. The typographic freedoms introduced by the Futurists as well as their stances on performance were clearly an influence on Dada, and were reflected in the Dadaists’ manifesto.

Dada emerged amid the brutality of World War I (1914–18)—a conflict that claimed the lives of eight million military personnel and an estimated equal number of civilians. This unprecedented loss of human life was a result of trench warfare and technological advances in weaponry, communications, and transportation systems.

For the disillusioned artists of the Dada movement, the war merely confirmed the degradation of social structures that led to such violence: corrupt and nationalist politics, repressive social values, and unquestioning conformity of culture and thought. From 1916 until the mid-1920s, artists in Zurich, New York, Cologne, Hanover, and Paris declared an all-out assault against not only on conventional definitions of art, but on rational thought itself. “The beginnings of Dada,” poet Tristan Tzara recalled, “were not the beginnings of art, but of disgust.”

Disgusted by the nationalism that had sped the course to war in 1914, the Dadaists were always opposed to authoritarianism, and to any form of group leadership or guiding ideology. Their interests lay primarily in rebelling against what they saw as cultural snobbery, bourgeois convention, and political support for the war. Dada events, including spontaneous readings, performances, and exhibitions, had been taking place for three years at Hugo Ball’s Cabaret Voltaire before Tristan Tzara claimed to have invented the word Dada, in his Dada Manifesto of 1918. Various explanations have been floated for the name of the group, but the most common is that put forward by co-founder Richard Huelsenbeck, who said that he found the name by plunging a knife at random into a dictionary. It is a colloquial French term for a hobbyhorse, yet it also echoes the

first words of a child, and these suggestions of childishness and absurdity appealed to the group, who were keen to put a distance between themselves and the sobriety of conventional society. It also appealed to them because it might mean the same (and nothing) in all languages - as the group was avowedly internationalist.

Also a rebellion against traditional art forms, Dadaists were concerned with spontaneity, automatic writing, and chance operations. Collage became an important element in both art and poetry, as did typography. Dadaist Tristan Tzara urged poets to cut words out of newspapers, while artist Kurt Schwitters designed poems with anthropomorphic letters—the character “B” with feet and arms, for example. Dadaists were also interested in poems that were ephemeral and erasable, such as poems written in sand or on a blackboard.While Futurism was an unstable mixture of anarchistic attitudes and militaristic passions, Dada on the other hand was thoroughly anti-establishment and opposed to military authority. Both Futurism and dada shared a disdain for tradition. Futurism became a classic example of justified rebellion discredited by misplaced idealism; Dada outlasted Futurism because it didn’t have that same weakness; nevertheless it didn’t take too long before even the dadaists themselves hated dada because the art was always secondary to the emotion -- rejection, alienation, and anger. Dada was largely a reaction to the bourgeoisie nationalist carnage and fratricide of the First World War. Dada is often referred to as ‘nihilistic art’, mostly because it was often devoid of rules and in direct conflict with many contemporary values.

“This dissolution was the ultimate in everything that Dada represented, philosophically and morally; everything must be pulled apart, not a screw left in it customary place, the screw-holes wrenched out of shape, the screw, like man himself, set on its way towards new functions which could only be known after the total negation of everything that had existed before. Until then: riot destruction, defiance, confusion. The role of chance, not as an extension of the scope of art, but as a principle of dissolution and anarchy. In art, anti-art.”

The question that everyone, including the dadaist, asks is, “what is dada?” This is because Dada is essentially a counter-movement, it founds itself upon mockery, mocking the world around it – which has truly gone mad in a war, and mocking itself, even mocking itself mocking itself.

To demonstrate this, consider Tristan Tzara’s “Dada Manifesto 1918”. “DADA – this is a word that throws up ideas so that they can be shot down,” at the outset it is plain that definite ideas are to be destroyed, it’s fine to throw things around, but don’t let anything settle: nothing definite, nothing solid. This finds further expression as Tzara relates the birth of Dada, “People who join us keep their freedom. We don’t accept any theories,” naturally if Dada professes to

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allow people to keep their freedom, Tzara is implying that other movements don’t, although the brief dada-surrealist alliance and surrealism’s emphasis on freedom might prove to mitigate such a comment. Furthermore, this freedom is bound up in the rejection of theories, not because they aren’t good theories, but because they are theories at all – meta-narratives have no place in Dada.

If you have nothing, if “there is no ultimate Truth,” then what does an art movement have left? Art, because “if life is a bad joke… the only basis of understanding is: art.”

Dada rejects everything and is forced to exult art, not for art’s sake, not anything intrinsic or extrinsic about art, but because art is all that is left. Dada can’t mock art, because although it mocks itself, it can’t mock the means of mockery.The result of this, which will be examined in its linguistic incarnation below, is an an art of destruction – “Every man must shout: there is a great destructive, negative work to be done. To sweep, to clean.” Only by destroying the tyranny of language can the tyranny of meta-narratives be destroyed.The cross-cultural possibilities of language were at the core of the movement’s belief in freedom of expression: Hugo Ball, in his early Cabaret Voltaire readings of sound-poems, underscored this by deconstructing words into a series of guttural sounds meant to be universally comprehended. Likewise, visual artists such as Hans Arp, used abstract compositions made by chance to express patterns in nature which were expressive regardless of one’s cultural background.

Dada artworks present an intriguing paradox in that they seek to demystify artwork in the populist sense but nevertheless remain cryptic enough to allow the viewer to interpret works in a variety of ways. Like the Cubists, some Dadaists portrayed people and scenes representationally in order to analyze form and movement. Other artists, like Kurt Schwitters, practiced abstraction to express the metaphysical essence of their subject matter. Both modes sought to deconstruct daily experience in challenging, rebellious ways.

Key to understanding Dada works lies in reconciling the seemingly silly, slapdash styles with the stringent anti-war message. Tristan Tzara especially fought the assumption that Dada was a statement; yet Tzara and his fellow artists became increasingly agitated by politics and sought to incite a similar fury in Dada audiences.

The end of Dada in Zurich followed the Dada 4-5 event in April 1919 that ultimately caused a riot. Soon after this, Tristan Tzara traveled to Paris, where he met André Breton, and began formulating the theories that Breton would eventually call Surrealism. Dadaists did not mean to self-consciously declare micro-regional movements, but as it happened, the spread of Dada throughout various European

cities and into New York can be attributed to a few key artists, and each city in turn influenced the aesthetics of their respective Dada groups.

In Berlin, Club Dada ran from 1918 to 1923, and included attendees such as artists Johannes Baader, George Grosz, Hannah Höch, and Raoul Hausmann. Closer to a war zone, the Berlin Dadaists made politically satirical paintings and collages that featured wartime imagery, government figures, and political cartoon clippings recontextualized into biting commentaries.

In Hanover, the Merz group, including Kurt Schwitters, made art that reflected inspiration from Constructivism. Schwitters’ works in particular examines modernist preoccupations with shape and color. In Cologne, Hans Arp made breakthroughs in collage during his collaborations with Max Ernst. And in Paris, under the influence of figures such as Francis Picabia and Tzara, the movement took on a more dandyish tone, before collapsing into internal infighting and ceding to Surrealism.As Arp, Ernst, and Tzara went to Paris, they were instrumental in bringing Dada interests in free expression and the deconstruction of both forms and conventional ideas to those who would become Surrealists. Dada’s tradition of irrationality led directly to the Surrealist love for fantasy and expression of the imaginary. Artists such as Max Ernst are considered members of both Dada and Surrealism since their works acted as a catalyst in ushering in a new era of art based on the unconscious.

By 1923 Dada was, for all practical purposes, dead as a movement. Most of its participants, however, continued to be active, artistically and otherwise, for the better part of the next 50 years. They took an astounding variety of social and artistic directions, from religious conversion (Hugo Ball) to direct action on behalf of political movements of the left and the right (John Heartfield, Wieland Herzfelde, Franz Jung, Julius Evola). Richard Huelsenbeck became a New York psychiatrist, George Grosz an American landscape artist.

Some went on to found new artistic movements (most notably the Paris Dadaists turned French Surrealists); others, like Hausmann and Schwitters, working in relative isolation, took independent, often eccentric artistic directions. But almost all of them were strongly shaped by the movement in which they participated between 1915 and 1923.

By the 1940s, mainly as a result of the Second World War, a large number of the former Dadaists had come to live in the United States, repeating the exile that had brought many of them together in Zurich and New York 25 years earlier.

Among those who remained as permanent residents were

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Kurt Schwitters Dada poster at Merz

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Marcel DuChamp’s most famous Dada Exhibits

1) the Urinal with a name (Top left)

2) Mona Lisa with a Moustache (bottom left)

3) A lone bicycle wheel (above right)

The ridiculous nature of these exhibits by far are the most accurate examples of the Dada Movement; they are senseless, meaningless and, to a point vulgar and irrespectful of the art that had always been revered. Such was the nature of Dada, which rejected the orna-mental in the face of the social adversity of the time the movement began in.

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Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, George Grosz, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Hans Richter. This coming together of the old clan marks the beginning of a surge of interest in the movement which had been largely forgotten even though its influence was present everywhere.

Duchamp and New York

Marcel Duchamp provided a crucial creative link between the Zurich Dadaists and Parisian proto-Surrealists, like Breton. The Swiss group considered Marcel Duchamp’s readymades to be Dada artworks, and they appreciated Duchamp’s humor and refusal to define art.

Duchamp, along with Picabia, Man Ray, and Guillaume Apollinaire, had already been in New York as early as 1917, and Duchamp served as a critical interlocutor, bringing the notion of anti-art to New York.

One of his most important pieces, The Large Glass or Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, was begun in New York in 1915 (and completed in 1923) and is considered to be a major Dada milestone for its depiction of a strange, erotic drama using abstract, mechanical forms. Duchamp’s disdain for bourgeois convention was shared by all members of Dada.

In a moment of Dadaistic uproar, Duchamp defaced a copy of Leonard Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, an iconic example of classical art, by adding a moustache and scrawling graffiti underneath. Among his other controversial works was “Fountain,” a urinal, disconnected from its plumbing system and signed by the non-existent “R. Mutt.” Yet, despite the repulsion it provoked, the movement spread throughout the ‘20s from Europe to America, where the philosophy took hold of cabaret and other art forms in New York.

Though he was not a Surrealist, he helped to curate exhibitions in New York that showcased both Dada and Surrealist works.

Historical Importance

The boundary-breaking, revolutionary nature of Dadaism led to surrealism, abstract art, performance art and “everything that defines what we loosely call the Avant-Garde.” By encouraging artists to break the rules and defy convention, Dada encouraged later artists to stretch notions of art. Contemporary art has its critics, such as Roy Harris.

The style of art pioneered by the Dada artists lives on today. Dadaists were the first to make collages and montages, for example, using materials, photographs and pictures to create a patchwork of images. Duchamp invented the concept of the “readymade,” using and modifying everyday, non-art objects into pieces of art, as he did with “Fountain.” Tracey

Emin’s “My Bed,” an exhibit that literally takes the form of the artist’s unmade bed, provides a famous modern example of this genre.

It is all too easy to dismiss Dada as a brief, nihilistic cultural moment born of the cynical aftermath of World War One in certain metropolitan centers (Zurich, Geneva, Berlin, Paris, and eventually New York). To some extent it was just that. But Dada also produced some of the most inventive, playful, unexpected formal experiments of all twentieth-century art. Furthermore, these experiments worked as important legacies in the unfolding of later twentieth-century movements. For example, the Dada rejection of polish, technique, reason, and the lofty seriousness of High Art, contributed directly to the irreverent, irrational playfulness of much Surrealism. So too, Dada artists first deconstructed the uncritical mainstream rhetoric extolling modern technology and the high civilization of the “machine age” and spurred the more extensive Surrealist imagery of irrational and erotic “machines”.

If Cubist and Dada collage playfully assimilated real things into collage without destroying higher notions of the art object as something conceived and materially produced by the artist, the Dada art of the “found object” suggested, subversively, that anything could become art. While this, too, was enormously important for some Surrealism, it was even more important later in opening the door conceptually for Pop art in the 1950s and 1960s, a movement which dwelled on mundane commercial objects. The same focus on idea rather than object was also crucial for the emergence of Conceptual Art in the 1970s where all art objects were banished in favor of ideas written on paper. Other Dada legacies deserve comment. The Dada love for street theater and theatricality helped pave the way for the art as theater movements of the 1960s (Happening Art) and the 1980s-90s (Performance Art).

A serious study of Dada art offers larger implications for a critical understanding of modern art as a whole. For Dada was an early moment of rupture within modernism, a moment when modernist artists ridiculed the inflated seriousness of modernism itself with its grandiose notion of artists as heroic visionaries, risk-takers and truth tellers working against the grain to create “timeless” or “universal” artistic forms.

In this sense, Dada was a brief but telling period when modernist artists explored the limitations, myths, and vulnerabilities of modernist culture itself. As such, Dadaism helped open the door, at least a crack, for the later crisis of modernism when it collapsed in the 1960s and 1970s and led to the diffused and ambiguous cultural moment known as post-modernism.

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Herbert Bayer’s type design for the Bauhaus Dessau

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At the end of this booklet, we have seen few works of poets, artists and architecture that influenced the Modernist movement more than a hundred years ago; yet, we find that the Modern art is not a thing of the past, but has, interestingly, stayed contemporary.

The effect of Modernism in the present world is, by far and most, the strongest influence that any art movement has had upon the minds of men. Perhaps, it may be because Modernism, as we can see across every stage, is not a set of theories defining a particular image, but rather a way of thinking; an attitude, a perspective of seeing the world. Therfore, for as long as the idea of Modernism lives, the movement will live, too.

The path of Modernism is hard to follow and demarkate to simple points in the timeline of history. For example, in the first Futurist Manifesto in 1909, Marinetti speaks of the “metalisation of the human body” and proposes a radical machine aesthetic to match the formerly “organic” with technological forms. In 1916 Hugo Ball performed sound poetry at Zürich’s Dada Cabaret Voltaire, dressed in a Cubist “spacesuit” designed by Marcel Janco. Around 1911, Le Corbusier dehumanises the society and designs houses for workers that are a still more than boxes on stilts. The path shifts between social and aesthetic lines, not to mention art or literature.

Not only is the trajectory had to follow, but also the number of people involved with these movements amount to a great number—more than the number of pages in this booklet, or even the number of words in it. To tackle a set of essays spanning over the main events in Modernism, one needs to be prepared to swallow and ignore the silence one condemns the rest of the movement into, for in the blank spaces of pages unattached to this booklet are the stories of Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism and the voices of the poor and characterless trapped in Berlin when Heartfield and Grosz took it upon them to illustrate the unsightly and perverse world they lived in.

CONCLUSION

“A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.”—John F. Kennedy

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Books & Articles:

Futurist Typography and the Liberated Text - Bartram, AlanAvant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed - Orton, Fred and Pollock, Griselda (Manchester University.)The New Yorker magazine : The Art WorldModernism - Dada - Postmodernism- Richard Sheppard, Northwestern Univ PressEncyclopaedia Britannica (“Le Corbusier.”)

Internet Sources:

The Museum of Modern Art website - www.MoMA.orgThe Art Story - www.theartstory.orgCalifornia State University Library network - www.csun.eduDesign is History - designishistory.comThe Victoria and Albert Museum digital archives

Citations by:

J. Mordaunt CrookRobert LanhamWalter GropiusF. L. MarinettiOskar SchlemmerTristan Tzara

BIBLIOGRAPHY