Bauhaus / Albers&Moholy-Nagy exhibition

Bauhaus is a school of art, design and architecture, founded in Germany by architect Walter Gropius in 1919 when the school “les Beaux Arts” and “les Arts décoratifs”

The goal of this movement is to remove all the details from the art and crafts and bring out the creation specifically useful.

The Bauhaus is the symbol of renewed vitality, just eight years after the disasters of the First World War.

Josef Albers and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy were two of the most famous artist of the Modernism during the 20^th century. They opened an exhibition: “From Bauhaus to the new World” that pointed out their conversion to abstraction. The exhibition highlights the creative explosion of Bauhaus and the evolution of modernism.

The exhibition gathered more than 200 works as paintings, sculptures, photography, movies and design. There are lots of photography from Moholy-Nagy, famous ones, and unknown ones too. There was also some test presented with new materials as rhodoïd or aluminium.

Both Albers and Moholy-Nagy were teachers at the Bauhaus; they had the same reflexions, like the importance of the experimentation, the limits of different forms of art.

The exhibitions starts right after the First World War, and both of the artists stops the abstraction approach to focus more on their engagement in Bauhaus, the centre of modernism in Weimar’s Germany. They want to improve their way of working with new materials, new industrial process of creation.

The second part of the exposition is about the evolution after they left for the United States. Albers teaches at Black Mountain College then at Yale while Moholy-Nagy tries to relive the Bauhaus experience in the New Bauhaus of Chicago. He creates his own school, the school of design, that became The Institute of Design in the future.

Deconstructivism / Libeskind

Deconstructivism found his name in the literary movement of the déconconstruction. This contemporary movement is opposed to the movement of Modernism . This movement is about creating a break with history, society , the site and the technological traditions. 

Architects seek an opportunity to build another space, a space formally expressive , to reveal and not conceal.  The architect Daniel Libeskind has been associated with this style.

Daniel Libeskind creates an architecture that does not simply construct space and shape of space, but that is almost literally built out of space.

This style is a fundamental principle of creating new spaces, seeking expressive formality. Indeed, if we take the example of the Jewish Museum in Berlin space and shape can beings interpreted by their irrationality and the ability to disturb the usual way of perceiving spatial configurations.

The goal of the architect is to move from the Jewish Historical experience to a sensory and emotionally experience thanks to different steps in the museum that you have to pass in order to continue the visit. The broken line is the concept of this project. Indeed Libeskind defends the values ​​of deconstructivism with its high walls, its forms examined, and the style that comes out of the space.

This monument has to my mind so many ways to represent the history of the jewish people. Like A sinuous path between room which is troubling or even exhausting for the visitor. A succession of empty spaces which give an impression of distortion of time and space , caused by the confusion of the spaces that we travel . Underpasses that puts evil visitor at ease. Spaces with virulent forms are used, with low ceilings , floors awry , non- vertical walls of artificial light . The crossing of this exhibition can be considered a required physical test by the architect. It created an aggressive and confusing building, not trying to seduce the visitor but to push him , surprise him.

Constructivisme / Shukhov Tower

At some point some artists were more interested in the idea of build rather than decorate. This practice linked to a time is called constructivism.

Constructivisme in architecture was perhaps the most concrete application and the most revolutionary of the spirit of the “Avant Gardisme” this artistic movement born of the 1917 events, the Soviet constructivist architecture inspired the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier, the most famous spectacular contemporary constructions and new forms of collective housing in all the major capitals.

The engineer Shukhov had a hard time to accept the Revolution, and the nineteenth-century Reformation. Yet he offered his most brilliant discoveries in the socialist power, without ever denying his personal beliefs, he has always served the country. Shukhov tower in the Moscow district of Shabolovka is only the most spectacular creations of the engineer, who also revolutionized the transportation and processing of black gold. Order of Lenin to spread the socialist message to the world, the Shukhov tower, like most constructivist buildings, has since the construction had to revise its ambitions disproportionate in the light of various shortages of time. This piece of art continues to serve emitter today, even threatened with destruction.

Arts & Crafts / Mackintosh

During the era of Victoria of England, a reformer artistic movement has born, considered as the english equivalent of the French Art Nouveau.
The movement is about all the concerns of the artists through progress, the need of individualism, new values…

The main “names” of this movement:

John Ruskin (1819-1900): poet and writer, fascinated by medieval and Gothic eras. For him, the artistic ideal is born from the meeting of competencies and not their competitors.

William Morris (1834 -1896): manufacturer of furniture and art objects he designed them, but it is primarily a business leader

Walter Crane (1845 -1915): illustrator and promoter of Decorative Arts , he practiced his art in many areas : illustration, painting, ceramics , wallpaper , upholstery, etc.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868 -1928): British architect and designer whose simple and functional style had a strong influence on architecture and interior design

For those artists it was urgent, not only to rehabilitate the handmade work, but to save and re invent traditional techniques. Soon they were the initiators of new schools to train artisans, tapestry, embroidery, printing on the board with enamelling, brassware, pottery, natural dyes woven textiles with the trades, the marquetry and cabinet.

Another of their ideas was that we couldn’t do a good job, if we live and work in a healthy and pleasant environment. In their works, arise plants and animals, symbols of nature, but more or less stylized. It is the Fine Art.

In Europe, many artistic movements were inspired by those ideas about the relationship between the arts and crafts, on simplicity and use of natural materials.

Arts and Crafts inspired movements such as the Viennese Secession movement and the Bauhaus movement. It can also be seen as an introduction to Modernism, where its pure forms, stripped of historical associations, have been applied to new industrial production.

Realisations:

According to Mackintosh furniture contributes to the unity of the room.

The furniture that we know the most was developed as part of interior design: Catherine Cranston teahouses, the House of Amateur Art, Hill House, his private etc. It is supposed to participate in this overall unit holds dear, without imposing individually.  

Mackintosh designs furniture with simple lines, stripped upholstery and a proliferation of expensive details in the Victorian era of the times. The furniture is lacquered white punctuated with a few buttons purple, green or silver on the ground. The lacquered furniture end up not standing the white walls, the space becomes immaterial. Mackintosh breaks completely with the overloaded style of his time.

Its high back chairs seem to represent thrones symbolic traces dear to Mackintosh. We also have to appreciate his taste for the system partition of the Japanese interior design because this high back gently separates us from our neighbors. For one of the teahouses of Catherine Cranston, he invented the curved mesh back chair. 

I can see at first in his furniture a skeletal appearance, vertical, straight and rigid compared with rounded shapes, welcoming and padded his time but I rather see those lines as a solution to the partition of the space, expression of an architect.