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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
