📝 Penn Week 3a Notes

📗An abridged look at Modernism in design

The Crystal Goblet was written in 1932. What else was going on around this time?

Concrete Art

“Concrete Art” is a bucket term regarding various abstract art movements of the 20th century. The term was coined by Theo van Doesburg in his 1930 Manifesto of Concrete Art.

Theo van Doesburg – Composition VIII (The Cow), c.1918

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Theo van Doesburg, Arithmetic Composition, 1929-1930.

“We speak of concrete and not abstract painting because nothing is more concrete, more real than a line, a color, a surface” – Theo van Doesburg

Blast Magazine (1914)

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Bauhaus

Walter Gropius, Herbert Bayer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers, Paul Klee, Mies van der Rohe

The Bauhaus was a school/collective founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany. The Bauhaus theory was utopian and combined form, function, technology and proposed an alternate lifestyle following similar ideas as the previous mentioned movements. Herbert Bayer and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy were responsible for the typography workshops at the Bauhaus and explored the relationship between communication and artistic expression.

It is reported that this is where the idea of modernist typography comes from.

Front and back pages of bauhaus 1, 1926, design by László Moholy-Nagy.

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Example of Bauhaus typography

WWII

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Nazis using their traditional blackletter typography

International Style

This style was guided by an ideology that the design should be hidden from the content, and that the touch of the designer should be removed. The “content” should shine and design should be the container.

By the midcentury, Modernist graphic design shifted to being used for corporations and advertising.