The Bauhaus, the school of art and design founded in Germany in 1919 and shut down by the Nazis in 1933, brought together artists, architects and designers--among them Anni and Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, Lyonel Feininger, Walter Gropius, Johannes Itten, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Lilly Reich, Oskar Schlemmer, Gunta Stolzl--in an extraordinary conversation on the nature of art in the industrial age. Aiming to rethink the form of modern life, the Bauhaus became the site of a dazzling array of experiments in the visual arts that have profoundly shaped the world today. "Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity," published to accompany a major multimedia exhibition, is The Museum of Modern Art's first comprehensive treatment of the subject since its famous Bauhaus exhibition of 1938, and offers a new generational perspective on the twentieth century's most influential experiment in artistic education. Organized in collaboration with the three major Bauhaus collections in Germany (the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau and the Klassic Stiftung Weimar), "Bauhaus 1919-1933" examines the extraordinarily broad spectrum of the school's products, including industrial design, furniture, architecture, graphics, photography, textiles, ceramics, theater and costume design, painting and sculpture. Many of the objects discussed and illustrated here have rarely if ever been seen or published outside Germany. Featuring approximately 400 color plates, richly complemented by documentary images, "Bauhaus 1919-1933" includes two overarching essays by the exhibition's curators, Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, that present new perspectives on the Bauhaus. Shorter essays by more than 20 leading scholars apply contemporary viewpoints to 30 key Bauhaus objects, and an illustrated narrative chronology provides a dynamic glimpse of the Bauhaus' lived history.

Jeanne Mammen's watercolour images of the gender-bending 'new woman' and her candid portrayals of Berlin's thriving nightlife appeared in some of the most influential magazines of the Weimar Republic and are still considered characteristic of much of the 'glitter' of that era. This book charts how, once the Nazis came into power, Mammen instead created 'degenerate' paintings and collages, translated prohibited French literature and sculpted in clay and plaster-all while hidden away in her tiny studio apartment in the heart of Berlin's fashionable west end. What was it like as a woman artist to produce modern art in Nazi Germany? Can artworks that were never exhibited in public still make valid claims to protest? Camilla Smith examines a wide range of Mammen's dissenting artworks, ranging from those created in solitude during inner emigration to her collaboration with artist cabarets after the Second World War. Smith's engaging analysis compares Mammen's popular Weimar work to her artistic activities under the radar after 1933, in order to fundamentally rethink the moral complexities of inner emigration and its visual culture. While Mammen's artistry is considered through the lens of gender politics to reveal her complex relationship with the urbanisation of her time, this book also highlights the crucial role played by a lost generation of inner emigre women artists as agents of German modernity. The examination of Mammen's life and work demonstrates the crucial role women artists played as both markers and agents of German modernity, but the double marginalisation they have nonetheless encountered as inner emigres in recent history. It will be of interest to students of German studies, art history, literature, history, gender studies and cultural studies.

The captivating tale of the plans and personalities behind one of New York City's most radical and recognizable buildings Considered the crowning achievement of Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan is often called iconic. But it is in fact iconoclastic, standing in stark contrast to the surrounding metropolis and setting a new standard for the postwar art museum. Commissioned to design the building in 1943 by the museum's founding curator, Baroness Hilla von Rebay, Wright established residence in the Plaza Hotel in order to oversee the project. Over the next 17 years, Wright continuously clashed with his clients over the cost and the design, a conflict that extended to the city of New York and its cultural establishment. Against all odds, Wright held fast to his radical design concept of an inverted ziggurat and spiraling ramp, built with a continuous beam-a shape recalling the form of an hourglass. Construction was only completed in 1959, six months after Wright's death. The building's initial critical response ultimately gave way to near-universal admiration, as it came to be seen as an architectural masterpiece. This essential text, offering a behind-the-scenes story of the Guggenheim along with a careful reading of its architecture, is beautifully illustrated with more than 150 images, including plans, drawings, and rare photographs of the building under construction.

This vibrant book tells the history of the Modernist design movement and how it completely revolutionized graphic design. Graphic Design as an artistic genre wasn't universally accepted until the early 20th century. This striking book focuses on the pivotal years of 1919-1933 to show how fifty artists redefined the field and helped create modern graphic design. Art historian and graphic artist Alston Purvis provides a concise and engaging overview of the dawn of modern graphic design and the artistic possibilities that were laid bare in a seismically shifting Europe. He explores how a variety of burgeoning and established movements contributed to the innovations of graphic design such as the German Dadaists, the Bauhaus School, and the European avant-garde artists. He looks at how groundbreaking trends in typography, the rise of consumerism, and a new focus on schools of graphic design combined to create a new language of design that is still in use today. Featuring the designs of 50 pioneering artists, such as Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, and El Lissitzky, this book shows how their work in color, typography, and composition broke conventions and set new standards in a seminal period of graphic design.

A new look at the interrelationship of architecture and sculpture during one of the richest periods of American modern design Alloys looks at a unique period of synergy and exchange in the postwar United States, when sculpture profoundly shaped architecture, and vice versa. Leading architects such as Gordon Bunshaft and Eero Saarinen turned to sculptors including Harry Bertoia, Alexander Calder, Richard Lippold, and Isamu Noguchi to produce site-determined, large-scale sculptures tailored for their buildings' highly visible and well-traversed threshold spaces. The parameters of these spaces-atriums, lobbies, plazas, and entryways-led to various designs like sculptural walls, ceilings, and screens that not only embraced new industrial materials and processes, but also demonstrated art's ability to merge with lived architectural spaces. Marin Sullivan argues that these sculptural commissions represent an alternate history of midcentury American art. Rather than singular masterworks by lone geniuses, some of the era's most notable spaces-Philip Johnson's Four Seasons Restaurant in Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building, Max Abramovitz's Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center, and Pietro Belluschi and Walter Gropius's Pan Am Building-would be diminished without the collaborative efforts of architects and artists. At the same time, the artistic creations within these spaces could not exist anywhere else. Sullivan shows that the principle of synergy provides an ideal framework to assess this pronounced relationship between sculpture and architecture. She also explores the afterlives of these postwar commissions in the decades since their construction. A fresh consideration of sculpture's relationship to architectural design and functionality following World War II, Alloys highlights the affinities between the two fields and the ways their connections remain with us today.

They were not only two of the outstanding artists of the Bauhaus, but also a well-known couple. Their many famous works and the artists they influenced as teachers and role models bear witness to their life and work. But that is not all, as another ingenious couple literally shows us. The photographer duo Lake Verea has joined forces with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation to trace the material and intellectual traces of their artistic creativity in their estate. Correspondence with Bauhaus colleagues, tubes of paint and fabric fibers are captured with an extraordinary feel and vividness. Seeing the objects gives wings to the imagination. For inevitably, one sees the hands of the artists at work, who formed their very own contribution to 20th century art history from these objects, conversations and trains of thought.

This book showcases and puts into historical context a host of sculpted works created in the 1920s and 1930s in the decorative vernacular defined loosely today as `Art Deco'. Whether designed as free-standing statuary for the domestic market or commissioned for some form of architectural placement, as a frieze on a building's facade or as a public monument or pool fountain, the works shown demonstrate a sometimes bewilderingly broad range of styles and stylistic influences: from the chevrons, sunbursts, maidens, fountains, floral abstractions and ubiquitous biche (doe) of the Parisian geometric style to the crisp, angular patterns of the zig-zag, jazz-age, streamlined aesthetic of the 1930s. Alastair Duncan organizes his subject into three main categories: the first features work by avant-garde sculptors (Csaky, Janniot, Pompon, etc), often as pieces uniques or small editions; the second shows commercial sculpture, comprising mainly large-edition statuary, commissioned as decorative works for the burgeoning 1920s domestic market; while a final, third category covers architectural and monumental sculpture from West and Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, North America, Brazil and beyond. With artists' biographies and details of manufacturers, a full glossary and a thematic index, this volume is the essential and authoritative guide for all those interested in the Art Deco style, from the amateur collector of animalier sculpture to professional historians of the period.