Part 5: The Bauhaus

​ The essay “The Theory and Organization of the Bauhaus” (1923), also known as “The Bauhaus Manifesto,” by Walter Gropius is a directive for artists to learn and find the ideal of creativity in opposition to the well-preserved formats of the past. In his manifesto Gropius explains that the academies of the past have failed artists and industrialists by shutting them off from the world, by telling them what to think and how to make art.  Gropius believed that the academies had locked their students in and pure life out. The academies’ format for art production based on theory and a rigorous set of techniques was seen by Gropius as destructive; in defense he formed a new kind of art school, an art school that allowed its students to think freely, to experiment with objects, mediums and ideas never before used for the production of art.

​The Bauhaus gave a firm ground for the visual arts to flourish by teaching building, not theory, as the foundation of new designs. Through the investigative efforts of experimenting with new forms and honest materials to create new designs, the manifestation of the ideas is in the work not merely theory on paper. With this in mind Gropius established as the goal of the Bauhaus to teach interdisciplinary knowledge to the students as they worked with different materials in the process of creation.  The Bauhaus originally produced mainly one-of-a-kind works. As time went on the focus transformed from individual expressions of art to radical new designs for products that could be mass produced. Without this shift in thinking it is likely that the ideas and the art of the Bauhaus would not have survived the inevitable Nazi destruction. As Hitler’s armies began to overtake Europe, successful Bauhaus faculty, including Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Josef Albers immigrated to the United States.

Part 4: Mondrian's Squares

From the 1920’s to the end of his life Piet Mondrian made a series of stylistically similar purely abstract compositions. These compositions generally are comprised of horizontal and vertical black lines set on a grid with gray, white and primary-colored squares and rectangles that appear flat with no field and depth or surface texture. These asymmetrically-balanced grid compositions with primary colors and shapes found in ideal nature are Mondrian’s signature contribution to Modern art and architecture.

​Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow (1930, in private collection) has become one of Mondrian’s most famous works of this style. This work features a dominant large red square in the top right corner; the red square is unusually larger than any other field. It is formed by the top right edges of the canvas and two equally thick black lines, one running vertically and the other running horizontally across the entire width of the canvas. In the opposite corner of these two crosshairs a strikingly blue field, approximately one-ninth the size of the red field, contains the artist’s initials “PM” and the year of its creation. Above the blue field a white field, the height of the red and the width of the blue, is divided in two by a thick, black horizontal line. Running perpendicular to this white field is another field of white. The horizontal bands of white are almost the length of the red squares but are stopped short by a vertical black line. To the right of this line is a small yellow square below a small white square; the two are divided by a horizontal line.

​Mondrian sought for a complete separation of story or narrative in his work; this is in itself the creation of a story.  To grasp a clearer understanding of Mondrian’s work it is necessary not only to understand the context in which it was created but also the aesthetic attributes it possesses.  Through his clear structure and non-representative language Mondrian believed that his art was in equal partnership with science and technology and could contribute to the realization of a utopia. His visionary mind foresaw his master works one day losing their function and being absorbed into the clear patterns of universal architecture not just a composition of lines and squares, but a new form to depict a new way of life where technology and art are combined. This desire for a combination of form and function was shared by Walter Gropius in his Bauhaus art school.  

Part 3: van Doesburg's Cow

​Abstract art does not overtly resemble anything in the world. While an abstraction, it refers to using the parts of an object to represent the whole of the given object or idea. While abstract art may seem like a radically new art form, the process by which it is created is based on concepts of abstraction used by artists for hundreds of years. The conditions by which abstract art began were not based solely out of the Parisian art culture, but had their roots across Europe with the conditions of human life as they related to the First World War.  Issues such as mass production, capitalism, poverty, psychological depression and prostitution with its inherent problems were all common topics among pre-World War I works of art. Just as passionately as they sought to expose the problems of society, literary works like The Futurist Manifesto by Marinetti invited society to reject the past and embrace the future age of modern technology and speed, with its innate violence and problems.

​Artists such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Theo van Doesburg attempted to systemize the process of abstract art. By paring down recognizable images to their essential forms, the works of the Abstracts could then be more easily accepted by the general society.  This explanation raises the question of how abstract art is interpreted. Is it important for the viewer to be able to find the object in an image? Or, is the importance of the true message found in the pure abstraction of the image?  

Part 2

​The Garden at Sainte-Adresse (1867, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) by Claude Monet depicts an informal scene of four people enjoying the ocean view amongst a pristinely manicured seaside garden terrace. While its flowers and shrubbery seem rich with a bacchanal life, this space has been formulaically landscaped. Crisp edges form clear boundaries of concrete and green grass. A circle of grass and flowers is mathematically centered to the square of the patio. In the center of the work a woman, wearing a flowing white dress with pink ribbons stands against the foliage-filled lattice railing with her parasol. The woman faces away from the viewer toward a gentleman in a black top hat, a brown leisure suit and a walking cane. In the foreground a well dressed man in a grey suit with shiny shoes, a walking stick and a tan hat is sitting on a cane-backed arm chair. His patriarchal age is assumed by his grey-white beard. Seated next to him is a woman with a white parasol and a cream dress that flows over either side of her arm-chair. The two are presumed to be the artist’s father and his sister. The group bask in the sun as they watch the great feats of technology in the brilliant emerald sea. A short distance from the terrace a small boat with three white sails, one large and two smaller to either side, remind the contemporary viewer of leisure hours of the past, in contrast to the large fleet of steam boats that nearly dominates the paintings horizon line. For Monet in 1867, the steam boat was the notable pinnacle in marine technology. The wispy clouds of the lilac sky, like the ocean and the terraced garden, span the entire width of the painting creating three distinct bands. The clarity of the bands or stripes is accentuated by the two vertical flag poles on either side of the couple at the railing. The flag poles fly the flags of France and Le Havre. Aesthetically, however, they create distinct crosshairs forming crisp right angles with the ocean’s horizon. This scene of calculated aesthetics and flat bands of space is a nod to the artist’s study of geometry in nature and the techniques of Japanese wood block prints. Monet himself said this work is a “Japanese painting with flags.” The flag poles also invite vertical movement in the space. Through The Garden at Sainte-Adresse Monet captured the essential balance of tradition and modernity in a cultural context, juxtaposing the sail boats with the modern industrial steamer and the crisp geometric forms and lines of the flag poles. Still, the key subject is human life, people who have the advantages of technology, the time and means to enjoy the leisure of a fresh afternoon basking in the sun. From the clear narratives of Monet, Manet and Renoir, artists of Modern Art sought to move away from the realistic depiction of natural life. The bleak realities of life and the looming world war in the first decade of the twentieth century in Europe sparked an abstraction in art.

Finding Life in Modern Architecture

Cold, austere and unforgiving are all adjectives to describe Modern art and architecture. Through this essay this perspective will be dispelled with the close examination of three works of the Modern art movement with the intent to understand the balance of traditions function in the building of a modern world. Artists and architects of the modern period, like their predecessors, created work to speak to the world they lived in and to the future to prompt a state of soul.

​The advancements of the Industrial Revolution brought new ideas to a growing and expanding world that contributed to the conditions of modernity. Technological advances including the locomotive, the steam boat, structural steel, photography, new forms of politics (including Nazism in Germany, Communism in the Soviet Union and Capitalism in the United States), and the urbanization of modern cities helped to produce a modern mindset. Cultural changes brought on by the two world wars had compelling affects as well. Artists desired to find a new way to describe the changing world around them; their response to the conditions of modernity gave way to Modern art.

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