With Ellen Lupton, Elizabeth Otto and Greg D’Onofrio
Ellen Lupton shows how Herbert Bayer and László Moholy-Nagy used graphic design.
(screenshots from the talk)
Ellen Luptons talk presented some beautiful visuals, showing the development of Graphic Design in Bauhaus teaching. The talk explained the different attitudes to teaching and how graphic design was developed by Herbert Bayer
Bauhaus night notes..
-Based in Weimar, Germany
-Founding director, Walter Gropius left in 1928
-First leader of basic school, Johanes Itten brought students into a whole body experience of learning, loose and expressive. He was replaced by Moholy Nagy in 1923
-Herbert Bayer was a young student in 1921 and started the school with no previous knowledge. He worked a lot with type and walked 258km to the school from Darmstadt!
-The print shop in the early years was for artistic purposes and not for graphics.
Nagy and Bayer made a Bauhaus book (blue, black and red cover). Gropius and Nagy went on to create a series of Bauhaus books and in turn started to learn about graphic design.
Bayer, the young student returned as a young master and was tasked to set up a modern day letterpress print shop and to create ephemera about the Bauhaus
-Joost Shmidt also worked alongside the two and was an unsung talent
-Bayer had an obsession about only using lowercase, abandoning the uppercase associated with power and hierarchy
-Bayer created a universal font, made of all lowercase letters. It was revolutionary at the time
In 1975 Ed Benguiat made his own interpretation of the alphabet, ITC Bauhaus. It included uppercase letters and was sometimes confused that it had been made at the Bauhaus
-In 1928 a lot of leaders left the Bauhaus, Bayer for example went on to create beautiful Photomontage pieces in his later years
-Very interesting when looking at the hierarchy of letters and how I could develop this in my work, to look at text that isn't powerful or 'shouts' too much.
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