by Jeanne Willette | Apr 10, 2020 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
As English speaking and English writing people, we tend to hear more about the brief American Experience in this war and we are familiar with the British anti-war poetry and the legend of the well-born and the well-bred, the flower of English manhood dying on the...
by Jeanne Willette | Apr 3, 2020 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Le Corbusier sought totality or at least compatibility between the modern open space, the design of the pavilion and the furnishings through his own designs. These designs were, like the modular spaces themselves were cubic. In the 1920s, modern furniture was being...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 27, 2020 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Not until 1968 were all the adjectives of the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes swept away in favor of two signifying words “art deco” coined by the historian Bevis Hiller in his book Art Deco of the 20s and 30s. The fact that...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 20, 2020 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Years in the making, the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes finally opened during the Spring and Summer of 1925. Because the chief goal, in the minds of the host nation of France was to display the superiority of all things “French”...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 13, 2020 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
While evoking the memory of Lenin, Stalin wiped out evidence of his accomplishments, suppressing or killing artists and architects along with other political dissidents. Only recently have there been cautious and reluctant gestures towards what remains of avant-garde...
by Jeanne Willette | Mar 6, 2020 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Artists Liubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova entered into the new world for women in post-Revolutionary Russia as designers for a new way of life for the liberated woman. But beneath the jaunty new outfits and the vivid fabrics was the actual lived existence of real...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 28, 2020 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Women are and always have been half the world’s population so it stands to reason that half the artists in the world are women. But as in so many other disciplines, there is a marked absence of women in art and design. It is well known that until the twentieth...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 21, 2020 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Alexander Rodchenko and Vavana Stepanova were lucky to live out their lives peacefully. In the brutal period of Stalin’s Russia, artists were suppressed. Starting in the late 1920s, the mood of the government became less tolerant of avant-garde efforts and the turn...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 14, 2020 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956), formally a painter, retired from painting in 1921 and became a designer of posters that became iconic of the brief period of favoritism and freedom. A patriot, loyal to this new Russia he stated, “We had visions of a new world,...
by Jeanne Willette | Feb 7, 2020 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
What the Communist regime, headed by Vladimir Lenin, inherited was a vast sprawling nation, nearly completely landlocked, weakened by a negligent monarchy, torn apart by the Great War and a revolutionary struggle. Having laid waste to centuries of autocratic rule, the...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 31, 2020 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
The 20,000 visitors a day who came to the building that topped the Weissenhof hill to view the apartments designed by Mies van der Rohe would have seen not just a new kind of living space but also a new spiritual consciousness. From the exterior, the apartment...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 24, 2020 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Weissenhof Exhibition In 1927, the Nazis, ambitious for power and early simmering with racist hatred for all things un-German, didn’t know what to make of the shining white city on a hill in Stuttgart. So utterly alien to the fascists was the blinding bright...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 17, 2020 | Other
When the mayor of Dessau, Fritz Hesse, asked the Bauhaus to take residence in his industrial city, part of his promise was not only land for the school but also a site for faculty housing. The city provided Burgkühnauer Allee, quite close to the school itself, in a...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 10, 2020 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
The Dessau building of the Bauhaus displayed many controversial markers of modernist architecture, betraying liberal socialist thinking that would make it a doomed institution for the up and coming Nazis. The “Battle of the Bauhaus” had begun in Weimar when attacks by...
by Jeanne Willette | Jan 3, 2020 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
It was true that closing the Bauhaus was not the first political act by Hitler once he finally gained power in March of 1933. He opened concentration camps that month, stocked with political opponents, organized a day of boycotting Jewish goods, and then in April he...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 27, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
For Europeans, New York was the cradle of modernity, which in their eyes was characterized by the machine and by the skyscraper. Only in New York did such buildings exist and the 1927 German movie Metropolis was inspired by New York. As its maker, Fritz Lang said,...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 20, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
Placing American photographers within New Vision photography reveals the difference in the cultures of, for example, the artists in Moscow, the photographers in Germany at the Bauhaus in Dessau, and Old Guard and their followers in New York and those in the f/64 group...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 13, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
In his own way August Sander, also used the close-up in the sense that, like Blossfeldt, he too put his subjects under a microscope of scrutiny. The objects of Sander’s relentlessly gaze were human beings currently living in Weimar Germany subjected to taxonomical...
by Jeanne Willette | Dec 6, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
The term Neue Sachlichkeit was introduced in 1925 an exhibition of realist painting in Mannheim in 1925. Realist should not be confused with realistic and the artists had various styles and various approaches in examining life in the Weimar Republic. The art historian...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 29, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
The theme of disturbing the universe of expectations was evident in the photographs of László Moholy-Nagy, which expressed the same New Vision. If Moholy-Nagy redefined photography he did so from the inside out. The Eiffel Tower the pinnacle and the predictor of...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 22, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
The experiments of Moholy-Nagy encompassed what he termed an “entire field of optical expression,” combining painting, which was traditional, photography which was industrial, and film, which was characterized by moving images. In one of the early books, Painting,...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 16, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
László Moholy-Nagy returned to one of the first manifestations of “writing with light” in his “photograms,” a term he coined, in which chemicals and light interact upon a support. The result of the strange ghost like prints captured and frozen by light was what he...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 8, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
The wife of the designer, László Moholy-Nagy, Lucia, photographed the engineer-artist at the Bauhaus in the garments of a worker, marking his identification, not with artists, but with engineers. In the new Soviet Union, art was “dead,” the artist ceased to exist and...
by Jeanne Willette | Nov 1, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
By the early 1920s, László Moholy-Nagy began to find his own voice and became one of the most eloquent inventors of new art for a modern age. Digesting the artistic ideas of the post-war decade, he absorbed the penchant for the machine emerging in Berlin with the...
by Jeanne Willette | Oct 25, 2019 | Modern, Modern Aesthetics, Modern Art
One of the most interesting assemblages to come out of the infamous 1920 Dada Messe in Berlin was a strange headless figure, whose graceful lines recall Greek bronze statues of young gods and victorious athletes. This black mannequin referenced the Russian artist,...
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