Bauhaus poster finished

Bauhaus poster development

Bauhaus

Bauhaus

The Bauhaus movement is a very famous German art movement that happened across 14 years, 1919 until 1933. Bauhaus was actually a design school. Responsible for teaching design in many forms, such as, furniture, architecture, art and many others. What made this school stand out though was how it taught. One of its main principles of design was to design with the idea of mass production, because up until then this had never been done before, so was very revolutionary. The name Bauhaus is actually an inversion of Hausbau which in Germen roughly translates to House Design.

The school was situated in Weimar and was created by Walter Gropius. The schools philosophies were extremely controversial for the time and frowned upon by the very right winged people of Weimar. So the school was moved to Dessau in 1925. It remained here until 1932 when the city was taken over by the Nazi party, the school them escaped to Berlin. It was only a year later that the Nazi Party surrounded the school in Berlin and arrested 32 of the students who unfortunately ended up in Nazi concentration camps.

It was due to the work of students and teachers who fled Germany and continued to develop the art style.

Notable Artists of the Bauhaus movement are:

Marcel Breuer

Lyonel Feininger

Paul Klee

Josef Albers

Marcel Breuer

Born 21/05/1902, Marcel Breuer become a student and a teacher at the Bauhaus school in Germany. During the war he fled to London and joined Gropius (Gropius formed the Bauhaus school). He was one of the most famous designers in Europe by this stage, made famous for his invention of tubular steel furniture, one big residence, two apartment houses and some shop interiors.

From London he and Gropius revolutionised American house design while teaching a whole generation of soon-to-be architects, not to mention famous ones. He and Gropius then went their own ways and Breuer expanded into institutional buildings. He designed the UNESCO Headquarters mission in Paris in 1952. Other famous buildings that he designed are, New Yorks Whitney Museum, and IBM’s La Gaude Laboratory.

Lyonel Feininger

Feiniger was the child of two American musicians and naturally at the beginning of his life learnt and studied music in particular the violin. It wasn’t until 1887 when he moved to Germany that he became interested in art. Feininger attended multiple schools in Germany and begun to get a name for himself by doing cartoons in various German newspapers.

In 1918 he meet Walter Gropius who appointed him as a Master and the then newly formed Bauhaus school. He was widely responsible for the teachings of wood cut-outs as he had devoted 6 months to the medium in 1918. He remained a teacher for the school for most of its 14 years with fleeting visits to surrounding European country’s.

It wasn’t until he had left Berlin in 1933 and then returned in 1936 that he became depressed about the political and cultural climate of Germany under the Nazi rule. So he accepted an invitation to teach at the Mills College in California. Feininger lived in America for the rest of his life.

Feininger was remembered for hid abstract seascapes and urban scenes. He generally used light hearted subject matter and had also had a strong interest in Germanic Woodcutting.

Paul Klee

Borne in Switzerland, Klee went to Germany to study fine arts in Munich. He developed a very distinct style heavily influenced by art done by young children and other artist like Van Gogh and Matisse. He used watercolours a lot and concentrated in nature and man maid buildings and machines as subjects.

In 1921 till 1931 he was a teacher at the Bauhaus where he wrote The Thinking Eye known to be one of the most detailed books on the science of design. Klee thought of the world as a place that could be unrealistic hence his toy like style and his beliefs that the world could be represented in the freest style and with wit. He set out to portray the world this way.

Josef Albers

Josef Albers started out as a teacher in general studies. After he studied art he returned to elementary school as an art teacher. While teaching he developed as a figure artist and printmaker. He decided to leave teaching and enrolled as a student and the Bauhaus school in 1922. He worked with stained glass and sandblasted glass primarily but also designed furniture, household objects and typeface. He also had a strong interest in photography. It was in 1925 that he became the first student from Bauhaus to be asked to become a master at the school. By the time the school closed he had become one of Bauhaus’s most famous artists.

After getting married Josef moved to America where he explored abstract painting and had multiple jobs in American colleges. He was the first living solo artist to be honoured at the Metropolitan Museum if Art in New York.

Having looked at and researched the Bauhaus movement and the above artists I now have a good idea of what Bauhaus is about and believe I can create a poster incorporating one of Jenny’s truisms.

Post mod work in progress

FINAL PICTURE!
Starting to add Background
Coloring in Photoshop

Second Drawing
First Drawing

Postmodernism

Postmodernism

What is Postmodernism?

Postmodernism is effectively after the modernism movement. So roughly from the 1960’s on wards. It has a lot of movements in it such as.

Conceptualism

Performance

Installation Art

Video Art (animation is included in here)

Minimalism

Photo Realism

And the list goes on. Andy Warhol made a great quote and in paraphrase is “anyone can be famous for 15 minutes”. This has somewhat been how postmodernism artists work. They take the nonsense and experiment with it. So postmodernism is art that hasn’t had a great amount of thought put into it but still has a meaning…sometimes.

For example. In Britain in 2002 when Keith Tyson won the Turner Prize for his creation of a large black monolithic block filled with discarded computers. Not a single painter had been seen as possibly winning the prize.

Although art has always been some sort of entertainment it never has been entertainment as it is today as part of postmodernism. Due to the growth of consumerism and the love of TV and instant satisfaction people tend to want to be entertained quickly. Art has moved with this ideal and is shown in the form of video art, and shock tactics eg. UnAustralain by Azlan Mclennan, which was simply a burnt flag. Something to grab the audience’s attention and draw them in as quickly as it can.

Key factors in Postmodernism is:

Relativism

no universal narrative

social constructivism

Key Artists are:

Andy Warhol

Barnett Newman

Roy Lichtenstein

Andy Warhol was made famous by his Campbell’s soup can series that was shown at the Ferus Gallery in L.A in 1962. He became an icon of pop art until he was shot dead in 1968. Although he had a short career his artworks forged away forward in the new art movement of Postmodernism. It was quick and drew attention. Almost to simple that some argued that it wasn’t art.

Barnett Newman’s paintings come across as simple paintings. Gernerally bars and tones of colors, nothing more nothing less. He was well known for “opening” the doors to what painting could be. His paintings gernally represented something for example his piece “adam” is a representation of man’s intimacy with the earth. As the Hebrew words adom (red) and Dam (blood) are close to those of Adam who is labelled as the first man of mankind. You can see by its simplistic approach and its lack of detail and narrative how his work fits into postmodernism.

Finally Roy Lichtenstein. Lichtenstein has been compared to the great Andy Warhol with his bright pop art style of paintings. Know most for his comic book style paintings which came from his son, picking up a comic with Mickey mouse on it and saying, “I bet you couldn’t paint as well as that”.

Truism 1

This is the final image for my first truism. I went for the hypnosis wheel as i believe it is a symbol of your consciousness. It also fits the psychedelic movement well.

Part two of Psychedelic truisms

Pink Floyd I believe need a mention as psychedelic artists. They would have to be one of the most influential bands for the movements. They used there huge stage shows as a means to express not only audibly but visually their love for psychedelic art. They where the first band to use a traveling light show along with pyrotechnics, projections, moving images and psychedelic patterns on a large circular screen known as "Mr Screen".

The band is well known to be users of LSD drugs, drugs that alter your state of mind and create a psychedelic experience. It was these drugs that ruined the life and caused the separation between Syd Barrett and the band in its early years, but can given merit to some of his best writing. Just listening to the Dark Side of the Moon record, one of their most famous albums, shows how much of a psychedelic band Pink Floyd is. The bands music influenced a lot of the posters and album artwork for the band and as you can see has a very strong psychedelic influence.

Alex Grey

Alex Grey is an American artist who works across several mediums as a spiritual/psychedelic artist. Such mediums are, Live performance, sculpture, process art, visionary art and installation art.

Grey attended a couple of different universities but never finished his degrees, but experimented with LSD drugs, a drug used commonly by psychedelic artists. Through the use of psychedelic drugs Grey met his wife now of 33 years. Both experimented with LSD's and say that through the use of the drugs became spiritually connected. It was when Grey was tripping he came up with the idea for the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. A place he puts his work on permanent display. It took him 10 years to paint the pieces and has since added more of his own artwork and that of other artists.

Chapel of Sacred Mirrors.

Greys work has been influential on many bands such as, Tool, Navarna, Beastie Boys and many more who use his artwork in there album booklets or as there cover art.

Grey is a leading psychedelic artist and much of that has to do with his experiences with LSD's and other drugs. He has said though that it has been sometime since he has done drugs as he is now using meditation and yoga as he is trying to be a leader within his community.

Referances.

http://www.arthistoryclub.com/art_history/Salvador_Dali

http://www.psychedelicartists.org/

http://www.pinkfloydonline.com/history/

http://www.alexgrey.com/

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/03/24/findrelig.DTL

The Psychedelia Movement

I have chosen to use the first of Jenny Holzers truisms to inspire a Psychedelia piece of work. Why? Because as I was reading them one jumped out at me and said hypnosis, that truisms is, "At times your unconscious mind is truer than your conscious mind." So i started looking at optical illusions as a source of inspiration

I think optical illusions are a great part of psychedelia art. They generally aren't recognized but share most of the elements that define psychedelia art. These elements are Bright colors or contrasting colors. Lots of in-depth detail, Kaleidoscopic, paisley or fractal patterns and the morphing of objects or themes.

Psychedelia art was at its largest during the period of 1965 - 1975 and is said to be initiated through the use of psychedelic drugs. Though during this period a lot of artists working in the psychedelic area where on drugs it isn't to be said that it is necessary to be on drugs to develop and produce such stylistic art pieces in todays times. The art work really started to break through as a accompaniment to psychedelic music, such as backgrounds and cd covers and music posters. Such as Woodstock, or from the music of Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd.

Salvador Dali is more commonly regarded as a surrealist artist, but it isn't uncommon for some of his works to pass across into psychedelia art. He used the morphing of bodies and objects a lot and also contrasting colors. Influenced strongly by Freud and said to be the reason why he morphed his animals and human figures, linked with Freuds ideas of sexual representations. other influences where Luis Bunuel (a surrealist film maker), Garcia Lorca (an avant garde poet) and even Hitler (mainly his figure).

Dali used a lot of contrasting colors and morphing in his work which is why he can cross over into the psychedelia realm even though the time of his work was well before and mainly outside of the psychedelic period as he died at the end of it. Here are some examples of his work

To be continued.............