Theo
Van Doesburg - Composition in Three
Panels, 1927
f all the arts that Van Doesburg touched perhaps his greatest influence lay in the area of architecture and design. Together with the architects JJ Oud and Gerrit Rietveld, it was he who took the flat, geometric painting of the De Stijl group and burst it out into the third dimension. Indeed he even tried to inform his work with a fourth dimension, although with what success is a matter of debate. Certainly he was fired with a thrilling spatial imagination. His axonometric projections of ideal houses, created in conjunction with the young architect Cornelis van Eesteren, are crucial in understanding this concept so it is a shame that they do not form part of this otherwise comprehensive exhibition. A plastic model of one of the proposed buildings (the "Maison Particulière") gives some idea but a 3-D model is not as striking as the original drawings. A model is too literal. In the drawings perspective is ambiguous; walls are no longer supporting structures but floating, intersecting planes of primary colour; rooms are not static boxes but conceptual spaces hovering in the air. The volumes of the buildings seem to explode from an inner core, as though erupting into the third dimension and straining for that elusive fourth.
In 1921, armed with such architectural visions (he had been talking of the fourth dimension since 1917), Van Doesburg set off for Weimar, apparently with the intention of mounting an assault on the portals of Walter Gropius's newly founded Bauhaus. Whether or not he expected to be taken on to the staff of the Bauhaus is not clear; what is certain is that his presence was a yeast in the ferment that swirled around the design school. Some, such as Gropius himself, were alienated by Van Doesburg's dogmatic and aggressive views; others, such as the young Mies van der Rohe, were inspired. In June he was publishing De Stijl from Weimar and the next year he began his own De Stijl architecture course, poaching students from the Bauhaus itself. This was a crucial time in the development of the Bauhaus, when it was in the process of moving from its individualistic arts and crafts origins to embrace the uniformity and austerity of style that was soon to be given the epithets "modernist" or "international"; the first architectural style for almost a thousand years not to imitate something else. Van Doesburg's contribution to this shift in emphasis was crucial. He preached geometry and the use of primary colour and the submersion of the individual in the collective, things that later became an integral part of the Bauhaus philosophy.
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I particularly like Theo Van Doesburg's work, his influence with constructivism is very important to design, the grid system mirrored in his work above is very similar to Newspaper Grid Systems.
Max Burchartz - Internationale
Ausstellung Kunst der Werbung, Essen, 1931
Although Burchartz can be considered the pioneer of modern design and can be compared to older artists such as Peter Behrens and Anton Stankowski, he never received the same fame. Many of today's communication designs, such as the color control system, are based on the work of Max Burchartz.
In 1924 Burchartz moved to the Ruhr District where he set up the first modern advertising agency in Germany with Johannes Canis on November 1, 1924. He dedicated himself to the new typography and color design of the building. Artistic and economic success soon followed. The first customer of the agency was the Bochumer association. Burchartz developed a new layout style that blended typography, photography, and photo collages.
In April 1927, Burchartz finally received a degree in typography at the Folkwang Schule. Later that year he joined the architect Alfred Fischer, who built churches and the Hans Sachs house. Burchartz developed a color control system for the corridors of the house and thereby created the (presumed) first example of applied Signaletic in a public building. In other words, each floor is assigned one of the primary colors and labelled 'red floor, green floor, etc...'. After World War II they were painted over and forgotten and the style was not 'rediscovered' until the 90's.
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Max Burchatz work, is most definitely a fine example of how columns work within grid systems in newspapers. His minimalistic style is really inspiring and the negative space that makes up nearly all of the works content above, something that is usually really hard to pull off if not done correctly.
László
Moholy-Nagy - Dynamic Of The Metropolis (Sketch For A Film), 1921/1922
Except for a very brief hiatus at the end of the 1920s, Moholy considered himself a painter, first and foremost. His short autobiography, Abstract of an Artist (1944), gives an account of how his art evolved. He wrote that at first his work was figurative because he found the contemporary art of his day chaotic. He didn't understand Cubism, Fauvism, or Futurism. He studied the drawings of artists like Rembrandt and van Gogh and became fascinated by the expressive power of lines alone without half-tones.
Then he began to study composition and, finally, the effects of color on composition. He made collages of juxtaposed colored paper strips and carried these configurations over into paintings of agricultural fields. By 1919, if not earlier, he was also experimenting with Dadaist compositions.
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Lazlo has such a unique style, look at the way his work flow is operated.. His work above shows the way his page is completely split up via a grid, it's an unconventional grid and is something that experimentation and unique. This is exactly how i want to convey my newspaper design.
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