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Another really important aspect of those kinds of formal studies,
which has to do with the language developed by students in their work
at the Bauhaus, can be seen in a book that Paul Klee
wrote about his teaching methods, called the Pedagogical Sketchbook.
And in the Pedagogical Sketchbook,
he demonstrates the idea that the simplest of forms, like on this
page that I'm showing you, that line that looks like an âSâ lying on it's side,
he calls it âAn active line on a walk,
moving freely without a goal, a walk for walk's sake.â
And then he talks about how by adding things to it,
like a curlicue line interacting with that âSâ or straight lines emanating from that âSâ,
how you get a completely different nature of understanding that form.
He saw that kind of formal language as literally a way
of developing a language that would replace not words,
but which could indicate ideas - almost a symbolic language.
And you see it in the work that he made during that period where
the simplest indications of form with straight lines, and circles,
like this great drawing from his period called the Twittering Machine,
indicates a kind of whole universe of these funny creatures
making noise through this totally simplified formal language.
And that simplicity and that boiling down a form into the contrast
between negative space and positive space, between line and
solids, between the indication of movement versus the indication of stillness.
All of this works toward creating that almost clichéd
vocabulary in our minds now of what the Bauhaus looked like, and
how it really influenced the 20th century.
I mean, the humorous thing is you can, to this day, go into
a museum store and find Bauhaus-influenced products, and
they still look like things that we recognize as being modern.
In part, it's because of this simplicity of form,
the way that the formal language was boiled down to the simplest of shapes.
This is another,
it's actually the cover of a document of a studio run by Oskar Schlemmer.
This is attributed to Schlemmer,
but the way the word utopia is rendered by hand,
as a sort of set of letter forms made through these kind of simple lines and
solids and the use of really clear straightforward color, is, again,
another example of the simplicity and strength of this form.
Actually Schlemmer used the same kinds of forms
to design amazingly inventive costumes for
dance productions that he staged at the Bauhaus and in other places.
One of the famous ones was called The Triadic Ballet.
These are just the poster and some quick costume pictures from the ballet.
But you see the sort of expansion of that
simplified set of forms into three dimensions,
and then aided and abetted by this incredible wit and imagination about
the kind of creation of new forms of beings out of this formal language.
Although I think one of the most interesting is this famous
image of him performing something called the pole dance whereby just simply
adding these kind of straight-forward, extended poles to the lines of his
body he turns his own body into something that looks like an abstract drawing.
Another important faculty at the Bauhaus was Josef Albers.
This is a picture of him sitting in a bent tubular steel chair
designed by Marcel Breuer.
Albers took over parts of the Bauhaus that had to do with graphic design,
although again, his own work ranges from media as wide as drawing and
painting to incorporating things like this stained glass sculpture
where sort of chicken wire and a grid of metal create
a structure to do this beautiful color study in colored glass.
This promotional photograph for
the Breuer chair using a student wearing a Schlemmer mask,
again links that idea of a kind of both a humor but a serious
look at what the future might bring that is essentially part of the Bauhaus brand.
Louise SandhausFaculty, Program in Graphic Design
Lorraine WildFaculty, Program in Graphic Design
