Gesamtkunstwerk, the German work for a 'total art work' The synthesis of all arts, including painting,
graphics, sculpture, decorative arts, architecture and performing arts, into a single expressive whole.
Nature and Design (England)
Charles Darwin in The Origin of the Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) theorized the evolution of man through natural selection. The influence of these popular works plus an influx of Japanese art inspired strong connections between art and nature. The connection is manifested in the work of The Century Guild, one of the most successful of the many guilds formed during the Arts and Crafts period. The Guild members integrated sensuous and natural motifs in early examples of the Art Nouveau style.
Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo founded Century Guild in 1882 "to render all branches of art the sphere no longer of the tradesman but of the artist...to restore building, decoration, glass-painting, pottery, wood-carving and metal to their right place beside painting and sculpture."
Art Nouveau (1880-1910)
Work of Century Guild members was featured in the fine press publication, The Hobby Horse, which introduced the Arts and Craft Movement to Europe in 1884. Although the Arts and Crafts period overlapped the Art Nouveau movement, it was Art Nouveau that took hold internationally, becoming the first popular art movement of the 20th century.
Art Nouveau reacted against the 19th century revival styles taught in the established art academy. It was expressed mainly in decorative arts and architecture, characterized by whip lash curves and the absence of any straight line or right angle. Artists integrated elements of living organisms (animals, insects and birds — especially swans, dragonflies, peacocks and swallows) all rich with symbolic meaning.
The term Art Nouveau first was used by a group of modern Belgian artists known as "The XX" in 1884. By 1895 the term was established and the "new art form" was displayed for the public in exhibitions at prestigious galleries such as Bing's Department Store in Paris. The French cities of Paris and Nancy (where Émile Gallé started the Academy in Nancy) were centers of Art Nouveau for artists Rene Lalique, Louis Majorelle, and the Daum Brothers.
In the US, Art Nouveau workshops such as the company of Tiffany and Wheeler (Louis Comfort Tiffany Studios and Candace Wheeler) adopted the French organic style.
Organic or Geometric?
Art Nouveau evolved into two distinct styles — organic and geometric. France, Belgium, Italy, Spain and the United States adhered to the organic style. In Scotland, Rennie Macintosh and his associates at the Glasgow College of Art developed a more geometric style which highly influenced artists in Vienna, Austria.
Art Nouveau
had different names in several countries ('Jugendstil' in Austria, 'Stile Liberty' in Italy, Modernista in Spain.) The streamlined designs favored by the geometric Art Nouveau paved the way for the abstraction and reductionism that would later dominate 20th century art and design.
Victor Horta Belgium
Architect Victor Horta interpretation of Art Nouveau into architecture included a revolutionary openness to the space, the inclusion of diffused light from walls and roof and integrating the curved lines of decoration with the structure of the building. See his work at the Horta Museum on line or visit it in Brussels.
Henry Van de Velde Belgium
Originally a painter, Van de Velde was inspired to turn to architecture by the Arts and Crafts movement. He adhered to William Morris's utopian ideal that artists could reform society through design. He believed that 'Ugliness corrupts not only the eyes, but also the heart and mind'. His Tropon Poster utilizes elements of the Ukiyo-e, flattened surface, contour lines and negative space. A perfect example of how style can trump content.
A true master of the Art Nouveau poster was Alphonse Mucha, his work is currently featured in the Belvedere Museum in Vienna or see the poster page on this site.
Aubrey Beardsley England
Dead at age 25, prolific illustrator Aubrey Beardsley left behind an extensive, albeit controversial body of work in the Art Nouveau style. His inked compositions featured large dark areas contrasted with large blank ones, and areas of fine detailed patterns and dots contrasted with areas with none at all. He was the first art editor of The Yellow Book, a leading English arts publication. Read more about Beardsley's life and art here.
In the United States illustrators emulated Beardsley's style. Ethel Reed, (the first American woman graphic designer )and Will Bradley (nicknamed 'The American Beardsley)
Candace Wheeler United States
Candace Wheeler was America's first important woman textile and interior designer. In 1879 Wheeler co-founded the interior-decorating firm of Tiffany & Wheeler, serving as the partner specializing in textiles. Wheeler was one of the first women to work in a field dominated by male upholsterers, architects, and cabinetmakers. She was asked to serve as the interior decorator of the Woman's Building at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, and to organize New York's applied arts exhibition. (Source quote Harvard Library Open Collections)
'Glasgow Girls'
Glasgow School of Art was unique in Scotland in the number and type of courses that it offered women — partly due to the support of Headmaster Fra Newbery and his wife Jessie. The school's enrollment in 1901 was 47% women. (quote source) Two of the most renown student, sisters Margaret and Frances MacDonald, enrolled in 1890. Their paintings combined Art Nouveau with Celtic mysticism demonstrated in the above work, The Pond, by Francis. After graduation the sisters set up an independent studio where they collaborated on graphics, textile designs, book illustrations and metalwork. Influences from William Blake and Aubrey Beardsley are reflected in the use of elongated figures and linear elements. The McDonalds sisters exhibited their work in London, Liverpool and Venice.Partial source and more information
Margaret McDonald
Margaret became the better known of the McDonald sisters due to her association with artist and husband Charles Rennie Macintosh. She is best known for her brilliant painted gesso panels that incorporated 3-dimensional or built-up linear elements which she frequently embedded with glass and semi-precious stones.
Macintosh derived much inspiration from Margaret and fully recognized the importance of her contribution to his work, “Margaret has genius, I only have talent.”
Margaret's collaboration on one of Rennie Mackintosh’s most famous commissions, Mrs Cranston’s Tea Rooms (shown above right), included much of the internal design including the famous paneling on ‘O Ye, all Ye that Walk in the Willow Wood.' She also designed the graphics for the menus and other printed works.
Link to the Glasgow School of Art
Mackintosh trained in architecture at the Glasgow School of Art. His early influences included the Pre-Raphaelites, Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley and Japanese art. In the 1890's a distinct Glasgow style was developed by Mackintosh in collaboration with three other Glasgow artists — Margaret McDonald, Francis McDonald and Herbert McNair. Linked by their similar artistic interests they established an international reputation as members of The Glasgow Four.
Mackintosh believed in the synergy of artist, designer and craftsman. He could not compromise his control of "total design" even though it resulted in severely limiting his professional practice. Many Glasgow residents looked upon his original styles as weird and consequently he did not garner the sort of recognition or acclaim at home as he did abroad. Today the Glasgow School of Art features his work in a large and permanent gallery exhibition.
Macintosh's Geometric Influence
Macintosh and McDonald were embraced enthusiastically by the Austrian Secessionist movement who quickly adopted their geometric style. Macintosh's designs, as seen above in a chair designed for the Willow Tea Room, was preferred over the Continental organic Art Nouveau Style. In 1900 the Mackintoshes participated in the 8th Vienna Secession, where they made a critical connection with designer Josef Hoffmann. The couple was awarded numerous important commissions including the Warndorfer Music Salon and a Macintosh room at the Turin International Exhibition.
Although today Mackintosh's original furniture is included in important design collections and there has been a resurgence in popularity of his style, by 1914 the Art Nouveau style had waned and Mackintosh's work was considered passé. A dejected Macintosh retired to France with Margaret where they spent their remaining days painting in the countryside.
The Emergence of Modernism
At the turn of the 20th century Vienna was in a state of unrest and change caused by the impending end of the Hapsburg Empire and a surge of intellectual energy in art, music and thought. Breakthroughs such as Sigmund Freud's study of the unconscious mind and Schnitzler's exploration of sexual and social conventions began to shape the modern psyche.
Artists questioned the established Art Academy which they argued was mired in stodgy Historicism. Additionally the limitations of what constituted fine art were tested — Was art limited to painting and sculpture or could it also include furniture, glass, textiles and functional items?
The Vienna Secessionist 1897
The Viennese Secessionists were artists who broke away from the conservative Austrian Association of Artists. They adopted the name, Union of Austrian Artists, taken in solidarity with artist unions in Paris and Munich. The Secessionists adopted many of the ideals of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, particularly in areas of art education and social improvements. They encouraged all artistic mediums and introduced the new art movements of Impressionism, Art Nouveau and artist-craftsmen in their exhibitions. Their priorities were to build relationships with artists abroad and to select art on the basis of merit, not marketability. ("Only the weak and false get sponsored")
Gustav Klimt was the first elected president of the group but left over artistic differences in 1905. Above, his famous painting, The Kiss, is closely aligned in style to Margaret McDonald.
Secessionist Building & Exhibitions
The Secessionists hoped to create a new art that owed nothing to historical influence — above all else they wanted to explore the possibilities of art outside the confines of academic tradition. In this way they were very much in keeping with the iconoclastic spirit of turn-of-the-century Vienna. Shown above is Gustav Klimt's poster announcing the first show of the Secessionist artists. Its spare reductive style and san serif lettering was wildly different than the Academy's posters. Klimt included the naked figure of Thesus which was immediately censored by the authorities. (image source)
The Secessionists were associated with the German Jugendstil style of Art Nouveau, evident in the decoration of their 'temple of art' built in 1898 directly across the street from the Austrian Fine Arts Academy. Designed by architect Joseph M.
Olbrich, it features 'double-filtered' light from the domed roof, the first 'white cube' of art history. Above its entrance is carved the phrase "to every age its art and to art its freedom' from art critic Ludwig Hevesi. Kolomon Moser covered the front facade with frescos of laurel bush canopy to articulate the "return of a paradisiacal era, to the unity of art and life. The laurel symbolizes the "fertility of the mind's subconscious."
Critics blasted the design, 'a bastard begot of a temple and a whore house, a temple for bullfrogs, a cross between a blast furnace and a green house." Despite extensive bombing damage during WWII it is was refurbished and is open to the public today. It continues in the the spirit of the Secession, presenting experimental work. See it here
To Ornament or not to Ornament?
The Power of Ornament
Ornament, so loved by the Victorians and The Art and Crafts guilds, loses favor in the 20th century. Especially influential against ornament was the Adolf Loos 1908 essay,"Ornament and Crime," in which he declares ornament merely an embellishment with superfluous deceit. In Loos's estimation ornament is criminal because it ties an object to a style and when the style is obsolete, so then is the object. He believed the time wasted on ornament held certain cultures back from advanced development, especially cultures that practiced tattooing. Loos influenced many 20th century designers, including 'less is more' Mies van der Rohe.
In the 2009 exhibit, The Power of Ornament at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna, curator Sabine B. Vogel, writes of ornament as "the harmonious intersection of both high art and folk lore, important because ornament encompasses history and the present, full of symbolism and allusions." Contemporary graphic design is full of heavily ornamented type, layered and complex imagery... will there be a Loos for the 21st century?
Wiener Werkstätte 1903-1932
Joseph Hoffmann and Koloman Moser left the Secessionist Movement to establish an association of artists and craftspeople working together to manufacture well designed household goods in the spirit of the British Arts & Crafts Movement. Funded by 1903, with backing from the industrialist Fritz Wärndorfer, artists in various workshops produced furniture, glass, metals, ceramics textile, fashion, graphic design and book design. Stylistically the Werkstätte found itself between the heavy ornamentation of the 19th Century and the functional aesthetic of the Modern design world. The early workshop design was greatly influenced by Rennie Mackintosh — simplified shapes, geometric patterns, and minimal decoration as created by Hoffman and Moser.
The workshops were a working partnership of designer and craftsman. Objects produced in the Wiener Werkstätte were stamped with a number of different hallmarks; the trademark of the Wiener Werkstätte and the monogram of the designer the craftsman who produced it.
Bertold Löffler, above, Below textiles, 1925
Josef Hoffmann
L: Writing cabinet for the Waerndorfer 1901
T:
Sitzmaschine Chair, 1905
B: Sketch for flatware, 1904
About 100 WW workers strove to provide good quality design but eschewed mass production. "Better to work 10 days on one product than to manufacture 10 products in one day" was their idealistic credo but the reality was that the work of the WW was only affordable by the wealthy. A New York shop was established for several years but the cost of running the venture could not be sustained.
Dress by Emilie Flöge. In 1910 textile and fashion workshops were added to the WW.
Werkbund Glass Pavilion, 1914
Deutsche Werkbund Germany
The German Union or German Association of Craftsmen was a state sponsored organization formed in 1907 in an attempt to reestablish the national identity and stature of German manufacturing. Germany wanted to compete against British and American markets by producing economic high-quality goods for mass consumption.
The Werkbund promoted the development of crafts skills that could be used to standardize and rationalize forms for machine production. Their challenge was to produce manufactured goods equal in quality to hand-crafted products.
The Werkbund originally included twelve architects and twelve business firms. The architects include Peter Behrens, Theodor Fischer, Josef Hoffmann and Richard Riemerschmid. The most famous member was Mies Van der Rohe.
Activities of the organization included holding exhibitions to educate the public consumer about good design as well as encouraging industrialists to employ professional designers.
There were two diverse factions in the Werkbund, one lead by Hermann Muthesius, and the other by Henri Van de Velde. Their differences were debated in a famous meeting at the Werkbund’s 1914 Cologne exhibition in which the merits of standardization were compared to those of the hand craftsmanship — "type vs individuality"
Muthesius prevailed with his argument that aesthetics could be independent of material quality, standardization could be a virtue, and that abstract form could be the basis of aesthetics in product design. He proposed ‘modernity’, opposing ornament and advocating for practicality as the basis for the expression of contemporary cultural values. He believed that beauty came through form not decoration, and that this was not achieved individually but by using standardized designs. Henry van de Velde unsuccessfully opposed Behrens with an argument that standardization compromised individual artistic creativity.
Ludwig Mies Van de Rohe
One of the most influential designers to emerge from the Werkbund was Mies van der Rohe. He eradicated ornament but retained a sense of richness by using the highest quality materials. Above, the Barcelona Chair, 1929, designed for the German exhibition in Barcelona.
Women in the Deutsche Werkbund
"Lilly Reich began her career as a designer of textiles and women's apparel, one of the few fields in design open to women at that time. In 1912 she became a member of the Deutsche Werkbund ...Before WWI she worked in the studio of Josef Hoffman and by 1915 she had developed a professional reputation sufficient enough to be placed in charge of a fashion show for the Werkbund held in Berlin.
Lilly partnered with Mies van der Rohe, professionally and personally for about a dozen years. They co-designed much of the furniture that become icons of modern design — still in production today although they are usually attributed solely to Mies. Imagine these chairs without the upholstery that was designed by Lilly?
In 1920 Reich became the first woman to be made director of the Deutsche Werkbund, an unprecedented achievement because women at that time were not expected to have the same abilities in the arts as men."
From A Chat with Lily Reich
The MR Chair, 1927, Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich. "It is interesting to note that Mies did not fully develop any contemporary furniture successfully before or after his collaboration with Reich." Albert Pfeiffer (Source)
Peter Behrens | Winning the Werkbund Debate on the Merits of Standardization
Peter Behrens, Typography
Originally a member of the Munich Secessionists and the Jugendstil school, architect, artist and designer Peter Behrens later became a major force in modern corporate identity and industrial design. Among Behrens's many talents was typography design, especially the design of sans serif type. He released a sans serif type with heavy blackletter overtones, Behren Schrift, through the Klingspor type foundry.
In 1900 the Duke of Hessen invited Behrens to join the Mathildenhöhe artist colony created to encourage a creative fusion of art and manufacturing. Each of the seven residents were granted land on which to build and design a home and entire contents - a Gesamtkunstwerk. Behrens's "Haus Behrens" was a sensation.
Peter Behrens, Modern Design Educator
Behrens was appointed director of the Dusseldorf School of Arts and Crafts in 1903. His vision to create a studio pedagogy of geometrically-based systems lead him to search for faculty in Holland where mathematical systems were emphasized. Dutch architect J.L Mathieu Lauweriks was hired as head of the Dusseldorf architecture department.
Behrens was deeply influenced by
Lauwerik's proportional system of arithmetic arrangements of cubes, squares, and rectangles based, in part, on the theories of ancient Roman Vitruvius.
Behrens developed an introductory course for the modern study of art in which students analyzed organic natural forms and reconstructed them into universal forms of harmony. Behrens courses and studio were a training ground for important Modernists Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. The Dusseldorf course of study would influence Gropius when he started the Bauhaus school in 1919.
The AEG Corporate Standardization
In 1907 Behrens was appointed artistic director for AEG, (manufacturer of electrical machines). Behrens oversaw the design of the company, from architecture to product design to graphics. The work was all done in a neutral and standardized style, undecorated and without reference to class or history. The AEG program's "standardization" was the perfect manifestation of Mathesius’s ideal of collaboration between the artist and major industry. The program is one of the first examples of a complete corporate identity.
Behrens pioneered and defined the field of modern industrial design with his product design for AEG. His innovation was expressed in the design of electric tea kettles that utilized standardized and interchangeable components. Pardoxically his standardization actually allowed for economical variations, in the case of the tea pot, 80 different affordable variations. See one of the teapots at the MOMA.
The AEG high tension factory 1910
The factory had special meaning for the Modernists. It was a site of production —associated with the worker. The purpose of a factory was clear: it housed, or was, a product of the latest technology. In his design for the AEG factory, Behrens appreciation for Classical architecture was synthesized with Modernist ideals in a new style—Neoclassical Modernism. Particularly striking was his use of external steel columns, at once referring to the classical past yet also to Modernism, exposing the steel skeletal structure to create a metaphorical Greek temple to industry.
(Behren's source link)
7. El Lissitzky : Linking Geometric Abstraction With Graphic Design
Above: Cover of Die Kunstismen/Les isms de l'art/the isms of art, 1925
Lissitzky's used his art to promote his beliefs in the political and social issues of the turbulent early 20th century. His revolutionary typographical layouts were a synthesis of the composition of the Proun style and his understanding of page layout in his earlier book designs.
In 1920 he created The Story of Two Squares, a symbolic narrative in which the protagonists are a red square and a black square, the setting is the earth (a red circle), and the enemy is chaos (a jumble of geometric shapes).
The Story of Two Squares is a powerful demonstration that art could be used as a graphic means of communication. When it was first published in Berlin in 1922, About 2 [Squares] presented a radical rethinking of what a book was, demonstrating a new way of organizing typography on a page and relating it to visual images. It marked the beginning of a new graphic art and is among the most important publications in the history of the avant-garde in typography and graphic design. (encarta.msn.com)
See all of the pages of The Story of Two Squares on ibiblio.org
Kazimar Malevitch & El Lissitzky
In 1915 Kazimir Malevich introduced an abstract, non-objective geometric painting style he named Suprematism. Malevitch's explorations of Impressionism and Cubo-Futurism (also a fascination with aerial landscape photography) inspired his 1915 manifesto From Cubism to Suprematism.* (Black Square,1915 above)
Lazar Markovich Lissitzky trained as an architect but started his career illustrating Yiddish children's books. In 1919 he met and was greatly inspired by Malevitch and the Suprematist style while they were both teachers at the People's Art School. El Lissitzky adopted the reductive geometric style, producing in 1920 his famous poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (above)
*Julia Bekman Chadaga
Proun
Lissitzky went on to develop his own variant of Suprematism, Proun (an acronym for "Project for the Affirmation of the New) Proun was Lissitzky's exploration of the visual language of Suprematism but with 3D elements, existing half-way between painting and architecture, utilizing shifting axes and multiple perspectives. Prouns, initially paintings, were later expressed as fully dimensional works.
In 1920 he moved to Berlin as an artistic ambassador for Russian art, bringing the language of Constructivism and Suprematism to Europe. He began experimenting heavily in typographic design and photographic montage. For a very complete site on the work of El Lissitzky visit this link at the Getty Museum.
Program sheet, Victory over the Sun, 1923
Victory Over the Sun, 1923
Performed in 1913, the "first Cubo-Futurist opera" Victory over the Sun was the basis for the a 1923 German commission for a series of lithographic prints. Lissitzky analyzed the text as a celebration of man's technological capabilities: 'the sun as the expression of old world energy is torn down from the heavens by modern man, who by virtue of his technological superiority creates his own energy source.'
The cover sheet is composed with a compositional arrangement of bold and light type aligned on a grid. Horizontal and vertical bars are balanced with the type in a vocabulary of space and organizational relationships that will be emulated by many designers in the following decades.
Lissitzky's Influence in Europe
Lissitzky's fluency in German helped him advance his theories in Europe through lectures, articles, and commercial graphic design. Dada artist Kurt Schwitters commissioned Lissitzky to work on a special issue of the Dada journal Merz. His work had a great deal of influence over the Bauhaus school through his relationship with Walter Gropius and the New Typography of Jan Tschichold. He also influenced the De Stijl movement.
Lissitzky fell ill to tuberculosis in 1923 and went to Switzerland for treatment. He financed his recovery by designing advertisements for Günther Wagner's Pelikan division, an office supply company.
With this assignment he combined his new typographic techniques with Proun spatial composition to create a new visual vocabulary for advertising.
Designing Communism
Lissitzky aligned his art with the social and political goals of state—the core purpose of the Russian Constructivist Style. He promoted his country's optimism for social welfare and Communism via print and exhibition design. His designs for USSR in Construction, a propaganda magazine begun by Maxim Gorky, featured the Stalinist Constitution, Soviet Georgia, and the Red Army. Published in several languages, it provided foreign audiences with information about Soviet industry, economy, and culture.
Lissitzky's poster above, designed for the Russian Exhibition in Zürich in 1929, depicts the egalitarian status of women and men in the new society. His photomontage style featured startling juxtapositions of real objects with naturalistic and abstract forms.
Alexander Rodchenko, another Russian Constructivist, broke new photographic ground with his innovative use of the Leica camera. See his work on Utube here or Rodchenko Montage.
10 De Stijl : The Horizontal The Vertical (+ To Some the Diagonal)
The Bolted Book (1927)
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According to art historian Irina D. Costache, Futurism (largely an Italian movement) sought more than a stylistic change but rather to redefine art. At the core was a desire to transform the arts into a process rejecting the value of individual objects and instead emphasizing a harmonious fusion of the modern environment and man.
The Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was the first to produce a manifesto of Futurist philosophy in his “Manifesto del futurismo” (1909), first released in Milan and published in the French paper Le Figaro. Marinetti summed up the major principles of the Futurists, including a passionate loathing of ideas from the past, especially political and artistic traditions. He and others also espoused a love of speed, technology, and violence. Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism promised to celebrate and exalt all aspects of modern life (urbanity, industry, technology, electricity, speed, force, dynamism, action, violence, transport), and furthermore, it was hoped that this philosophical and artistic progress would be realized at the cost of everything that came before ("We will destroy museums and libraries" cried Marinetti – a cry which was more or less ignored in all but metaphorical context, thank goodness.) In short, if Marinetti had an enemy, it was The Past, and Futurism was seen as a way of liberating Italy from its Renaissance aesthetic, the world from its Classical tradition. The Futurists explored every medium of art, including painting, sculpture, poetry, theatre, music, architecture and even gastronomy. Futurists dubbed the love of the past passéisme. The car, the plane, the industrial town were all legendary for the Futurists, because they represented the technological triumph of people over nature.
Fortunato Depero was a Futurist painter who brought the Futurist vision to graphic design in posters and magazine design. He is most recognized for his "Bolted Book," a publication bound with metal bolts to link the work to the industrial age.
He worked for a number of commercial clients believing that "Art of the future will have a strong advertising feel." His international reputation brought commissions from as far as the United States.
He also produced a number of posters for Campari and designed their soda bottle.
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Piet Zwart did not adhere to traditional typography rules, but used the basic principles of Constructivism and "De Stijl" in his commercial work. His work can be recognized by its primary colors, geometrical shapes, repeated word patterns and an early use of photomontage.
He created a total of 275 designs in 10 years for the NKF Company (a cable company in the Netherlands), almost all typographical works. He resigned in 1933 to become an interior, industrial and furniture designer
