This painting, Expansion in Four Directions (1961 – 62), shares its lozenge shape and geometric divisions of color with many paintings by Piet Mondrian, whose work Max Bill (1908 – 1994) collected and in whom he was greatly interested. Bill trained at the Bauhaus in the 1920s under Josef Albers and was an architect and graphic designer as well as an artist. In his work, he aimed to transcend personal artistic expression to achieve universal communication, and to this end he used mathematics as a neutralizing compositional device. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Expansion in Four Directions By Max Bill→
Installation View with Eames Shelving Unit (All Photos By Gail)
This cane side chair was the product of a team research project led by Marcel Breuer (1902 – 1981), a celebrated architect and émigré known for his tubular metal furniture, and designer of the original Whitney Museum Building on Madison Avenue in NYC. Collaborating with the US Forest Products Laboratory, Breuer applied knowledge accumulated over fifteen years of experimentation, as well as new developments in high-frequency gluing, to plywood construction. Continue reading Eye On Design: Cane Side Chair By Marcel Breuer→
Following an influential career at The Bauhaus school in Wiemer, Germany (1919 – 33) Josef Albers fled the Nazi regime and emigrated to the United States, where he taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and then at Yale in Connecticut. Beginning in 1949 and continuing over the next twenty-five years, he created his celebrated Homage to the Square series, which is composed of more than a thousand works including paintings, drawings, prints, and tapestries. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Josef Albers, Homage to the Square: On Near Sky→
The Bauhaus, an art and design school founded in Germany in 1919, trained it students to work with industrial producers to manufacture affordable household objects that exemplified efficient design. Bauhaus designers found inspiration in pure geometric forms, and American designers quickly adopted this aesthetic, radically paring objects down to basic shapes that were easy to fabricate mechanically. Continue reading Eye On Design: Bauhaus Table Lamp→
Tower Furniture for the House with the Little Chinese Girl, Mario Tchou Residence, Milan (All Photos By Gail)
Ettore Sottsass (1917 – 2007) designed the interiors of Mario Tchou’s Milan apartment and named the project for Tchou’s daughter, who captured his heart as she attempted to scale the Tower. The latticework, dowels and cubic proportions suggest the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement, the Wiener Werkstatte, and the Bauhaus. Continue reading Eye On Design: The Tower Cabinet for Mario Tchou Residence, By Ettore Sottsass→
