Max Bill Exhibition Museu De Arte De Sao Paulo in 1950

Article

A Bauhaus Domesticated in São Paulo

• EN

On ten March 1950, Pietro Maria Bardi, director of the São Paulo Art Museum (MASP, which opened in October 1947), signed letters addressed to several American educational institutions. His purpose in writing was to request the curricula of these schools as an help to developing the start design course in Brazil—the Institute of Contemporary Art (IAC), which, slated to open the following year, was to be run as a part of the museum and would also exist the country's first blueprint school. Despite being brief and objective, his missives did not neglect to mention the "spirit of the Bauhaus," explicitly linking the constitute he hoped to institute with a pedagogical lineage whose objectives and approach he aimed to share:

An Plant of Gimmicky Art has been founded past this Museum especially to teach architecture and industrial pattern such every bit pottery, glass, graphic art, iron, work, weaving, photography, piece of furniture, mosaics, plastics in general.
Artists and well known architects accept been invited to teach in the School; Max Bill, Piccinato, Nervi, Ruchti and others take already accepted the invitation.
We would similar very much to cheque our activities with yours which, since along fourth dimension nosotros highly appreciate.
We should like to attain something similar to what you are doing, always into the spirit of the Bauhaus. Therefore we should remain most grateful to you if y'all could transport us some publication referring to the curriculum of your University of Art.
Looking frontward to hearing from you we remain at your full disposition for whatsoever information and we give thanks you in advance.

Believe us very sincerely yours.

P. M. Bardi – manager¹

Letters were sent to the board of directors of the Cranbrook Academy of Fine art equally well as to Blackness Mountain College, where Josef and Anni Albers taught. Not only was at that place an explicit reference to the Bauhaus, merely also the intention, as noted in Bardi's letter, to invite the artist Max Bill to teach at the schoolhouse.

An Italian art critic and merchant based in Brazil since 1946, Bardi had been entrusted by the Brazilian communications magnate Francisco de Assis Chateaubriand with the chore of forming an art museum in the city of São Paulo soon subsequently his arrival. The city had modernized rapidly in the years after the Second World State of war and, with the foundation of the International Biennial in 1951, immediately became an international hub of the arts. Bardi was non only the managing director of MASP. Together with his wife, the Italian builder Lina Bo Bardi, he edited Habitat, a magazine dedicated to architecture, the arts and design. The IAC opened on one March 1951, the aforementioned appointment that Max Bill, former Bäuhausler and future manager of the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm, opened an exhibition of his work at MASP.

Bardi's appetite to reference Bauhaus methodologies in his new schoolhouse was corking and sustained. The archaic Europe he had abandoned was in the process of reconstruction; the continent' population was still healing from the wounds suffered during the Second World State of war. In the postwar flow, South America, and Brazil in particular, had emerged as a force of renewal that, unburdened by the weight of the antiquarian past, expressed its ambitions through a period of steady industrialization, an outcome of the import substitution policies the war had made necessary.

Bardi's task in the years after the state of war had been to take advantage of depression prices on the world art market² in order to build up a collection at MASP that would rival any First World fine art museum.³ At the same time, by juxtaposing works from the remote past with items from contemporary industry, MASP launched itself as an institution of an entirely new graphic symbol. The Museum showed graphic design and industrial objects, such as, for example, Thonet chairs, including them within this artistic set—a concatenation reverberating, ane might say, with Bauhaus teachings. Moreover, given the famine of educated design professionals to piece of work in São Paulo's burgeoning industries, founding a school of industrial pattern was an absolute necessity. This was likewise a reason, as Bardi wrote in numerous texts, why the school would continue the historic mission of the Bauhaus.

However, if in the letters sent to American schools Bardi fabricated mention of a generic Bauhaus, in other texts Bardi referred explicitly to the Dessau Bauhaus—specifically, the period directed by Walter Gropius. This reference is key to how Bardi envisioned the IAC: he never mentioned Weimar or Hannes Meyer, nor Mies van der Rohe and the short-lived Berlin Bauhaus:

The famous "Bauhaus" was built-in with Gropius, Breuer and others, the school of industrial blueprint creating numerous new solutions familiar to the states today similar steel-tube chairs, steel furniture, etc. Then the Americans continued and developed this experience at the well-known Institute of Design in Chicago, headed by Moholy-Nagy, former Bauhaus professor … All these initiatives cannot be ignored in Brazil, specially in São Paulo, a large industrial center. Today fine art can no longer exist seen as a specialty of a closed grouping. It has to meet this transformation of the face of the world made by industry and in the aforementioned proportions.⁴

Or in this excerpt from a newspaper article published in Diário de São Paulo, one of the city's main newspapers:

The Establish has a plan that has not been tried past any of our artistic organizations upward to now—it repeats in proportions that must of course be kept, the didactic plan formulated by Walter Gropius and his squad in the largest art school that Deutschland has produced in this century: the Bauhaus of Dessau.⁵

Ane tin can also read an explanation of the Bauhaus and the Plant of Design in Chicago, written by one of the most important teachers of the IAC, Swiss builder Jacob Ruchti:

The I.A.C. form in São Paulo is an adaptation to our weather condition and possibilities of the famous grade of the Establish of Design in Chicago, directed by the architect Serge Chermayett (sic), and founded in 1937 by Walter Gropius and Moholy-Nagy every bit a continuation of the famous Bauhaus of Dessau. … The I.A.C. therefore represents in São Paulo—in an indirect fashion—the main ideas of the Bauhaus, after its contact with the Northward American industrial system.^{half dozen}

There is also an affinity between Pietro Maria Bardi's pick and that of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in its presentation (exhibitions, publications, etc.) on the Bauhaus Dessau and Gropius. The community of artists and artisans created in Weimar was out of the question for a school that had set out to construct a vision of design São Paulo industrialists might emulate, for whom "artisans" were upholsterers, reproducing historicist styles in their manual and decorative work for the city'southward elite.

At the same fourth dimension, from early in its history some IAC teachers looked to the material and symbolic product of Brazil's rural peasantry, urban poor and Indigenous populations, in some cases appropriating elements of the handicraft produced past these groups in the design of certain objects.

A like concern was evinced in the thematic exhibitions of quotidian objects organized at MASP (one of the first didactic exhibitions of the museum had to do with the history of the chair), with objects consecrated past the history of art used to validate a de-hierarchization of cultural production. This conception probably derives, among other sources, from the theories of the art historian Alois Riegl, an of import reference for the starting time Bauhaus, who inherited his influence from Henry van de Velde, founder of the school's predecessor, the M-Ducal Schoolhouse of Arts and Crafts: for Gropius, for Pietro Maria Bardi and Lina Bo, also as for the Italian intellectuals who gathered around MASP, Riegl remained a key thinker. The intention to flatten the bureaucracy between the major and small-scale arts, likewise as Riegl'due south appreciation of the decorative arts^seven and the decoration practices produced in the various crafts media, are included in the concept of Kunstwollen (a term first introduced in the mid-nineteenth century by the German language archaeologist Heinrich Brunn to describe the characteristics and boundaries of aesthetic design in a given epoch), assuasive one to see deep traces of universality in everyday objects. This line of thinking opened upwards a space for the symmetrical coexistence of so-called cult art and popular productions, creating affinities and overlaps betwixt the cultured arts and practices of craftsmanship. A foundational thought for the Bauhaus in its first phase in Weimar, Kunstwollen also strongly informed the concepts of Pietro Bardi, Lina Bo as well as a number of intellectuals and teachers associated with the IAC.

Exhibition view of Vitrine das Formas with typewriter Olivetti.
MASP Research Center / Instituto Moreira Salles / photograph: Peter Scheier.

This view of art reached new heights not but due to the Bauhaus but as well cheers to Le Corbusier, who although harshly critical of decoration and the decorative arts, brought artisanal and industrial production closer to an expressive synthesis.⁸ Bardi had possessed an affinity for Le Corbusier's thinking since the time of the fourth CIAM convention, which produced the Athens Lease.⁹

The propinquity between brainy fine art and art closer to and so-chosen colloquial culture appears clear on posters produced for MASP, especially those designed past Roberto Sambonet, an Italian painter and professor of drawing at the IAC, who designed graphics both for the museum and the school.¹⁰

The endeavor to elucidate this theoretical connection through MASP exhibition strategies is as well clear from the juxtaposition of technical objects, quotidian objects of the contemporary moment and commonsensical objects, such as ceramics and glassware dating from centuries past. Such was the conception of the exhibition Vitrine das Formas (literally "showcase of forms") mounted at MASP, which included the Olivetti typewriter designed by Marcello Nizzoli and a Brazilian copy of the Vigorelli sewing machine displayed next to historical objects. The strategy was so innovative for São Paulo's provincial environment that one of the city'southward leading newspapers of the time commented that the director had "forgotten" a typewriter in the shop window.¹¹

Pietro Bardi explained the exhibition this way:

They are displayed in this display example from the curious root of a tree to the last type of Olivetti typewriter, passing through vases that are Egyptian, Greek, Florentine, etc. The typewriter is a typical instance of the artful possibilities of an industrial product, which was properly designed by an industrial designer.¹²

It can also be unequivocally stated that the IAC was in line with the practices of the Institute of Design in Chicago, which was led until 1947 past erstwhile Bäuhausler Lazlo Moholy-Nagy. The Chicago Institute and the North American industrial manner of production itself were likewise of import models. In several writings by Pietro Maria Bardi, it is as if the IAC and the school founded by Moholy-Nagy in North America shared the same conceptual cradle. Similarly, we can come across how Lina Bo's own do equally a designer resonated with the Due north American Bauhaus school—for instance in her piece of furniture designs made from cut-out plywood. Like industrial design itself, the notion of serial reproduction was inherent in Lina Bo'south furniture pattern from this flow.

The approximation of the IAC'south pedagogical contents with the Bauhaus, a connection well established by Adele Nelson,^xiii is unequivocally evident in the workbook prepared by the aforementioned Jacob Ruchti, who taught composition at the school. Information technology contains, amongst other things, the teachings of Wassily Kandinsky, based on his book, Point and Line to Plane.¹⁴

However, information technology would exist a mistake to believe that the IAC was a faithful re-create of the Bauhaus Dessau or the Chicago Plant of Design, for Bardi'due south appreciation of the Italian Futurists instilled a degree of originality in the Brazilian school. For instance, fashion was emphasized in the IAC curriculum, expressed not but through the products of the weaving workshop and printing classes—which created designs for womenswear, fabrics produced on mitt looms and printed fabric created by teachers and students—but also in parades organized by the museum, such as the celebration of haute couture demonstrated by the museum's hosting of a parade of Christian Dior fashion.

Pietro Bardi's admiration for the Futurists likewise explains his appreciation for Raymond Loewy, the French-born American designer fought by Bäuhauslers in the Usa.¹⁵ Loewy opened an office in São Paulo in 1948, taking on as an amateur one of the IAC's first students, Alexandre Wollner, who would later study in Ulm—an internship arranged thanks to Bardi's intervention.

Nathan Bernard Lerner and Hin Bredendieck, Plywood chair, ca. 1949. Milwaukee Art Museum, Purchase with funds from the Demmer Charitable Trust M2015.10, photo: John R. Glembin.

Lina Bo Bardi, plywood chair, Palma – Art and Architecture Studio, undated. © Instituto Bardi / Casa de Vidro, photograph: Peter Scheier.

From left to right: Pietro Maria Bardi, Dior's models, Lina Bo Bardi and Mr. Paulo Franco, 1951.
Photo: Unknown – MASP Research Centre.

The IAC was an amalgamation of theoretical matrices, resulting in a schoolhouse of nifty originality, and which, despite Bardi'due south eclecticism, not simply took its pedagogical model from the Bauhaus but also a means of cultural legitimation. Understanding the importance of this lineage, the school'southward founder did everything he could to establish links between the Bauhaus and the IAC. He published a text where he erroneously stated that the painter Lasar Segall (president of the schoolhouse congregation) was a Bäuhausler, when he simply visited the school and maintained a correspondence with Kandinsky.¹⁶ Bardi also similarly claimed that IAC weaving teacher Klara Hartok had been a educatee of Anni Albers at the Bauhaus.¹⁷ However, this kind of foundation myth-making does not invalidate the piece of work done at the schoolhouse, which, in fact, was in dialogue with both cultured, European forms of production at the same fourth dimension as it embraced the diverse production techniques particular to Brazil—whether these were divers, equally Lina Bo would term them years later, as "pre-artisanship" or as exemplary of the ornamental strategies used by Brazil'due south indigenous populations.

If there was a kind of cult to industrial methods and forms—equally evidenced by the museum's permanent display furniture based on aluminum tube supports, designed by Lina Bo Bardi—the school's curriculum as well clearly departed from those used at the Bauhaus and HfG Ulm. History was taught in the IAC, while at the Bauhaus (and at Ulm) history did not affair.¹⁸ And here, the weight of Italian instruction and, to a higher place all, an astonishing lack of education in the areas of art and architectural history in Brazil were stiff incentives for introducing these within the IAC curriculum.

Left: Wearing apparel by Roberto and Luisa Sambonet with experimental fabric based on basketry, cotton and raffia patterns, keeping the tradition of minimal decoration, which Anni Albers also followed, in the configuration of the structural threads of weft and warp, 1952.
Photo: Unknown – MASP Research Middle

Correct: Roberto and Luisa Sambonet, A women's garment based on Mondrian—well before a similar dress was designed by Yves Saint-Laurent.
MASP Research Middle / Instituto Moreira Salles / photo: Peter Scheier.

In my opinion, the IAC as a design schoolhouse tried to merge some practices and concepts, but this effort was premised on mistaken data. Pietro Bardi, Lina Bo and Jacob Ruchti started from mechanical reasoning, maybe wishing to transpose to Brazil the Italian postwar reality, in which pocket-size-scale industries successfully gained a asymmetric share of the international market through superior design.¹⁹ They understood that São Paulo, as an industrial metropolis where companies merely copied foreign models, needed designers and it would be upwardly to the school to railroad train these new professionals. Merely the companies of this catamenia were not at all interested in what the young people of the Constitute could offer. But copying European and/or North American standards was what São Paulo industrialists of the fourth dimension desired.

The Bauhaus of the Törten housing complex, and of practices based on a democratizing vision of bringing intellectuals and artisans together, was far removed from what the São Paulo elite wanted. Bardi, on the other hand, upheld the banner for a certain cultural updating of the industrials themselves. At no point in his soapbox almost the IAC was at that place any reference to the utopian grapheme of blueprint or its democratizing role—a standard that was held aloft past the leaders of the Ulm school and affirmed past Moholy-Nagy in Chicago.

If the dissimilar iterations of the Bauhaus, despite their curt duration, are still discussed to this day, with their multiple facets revisited by numerous researchers, the Bauhaus phenomenon in Brazil remains piffling studied. Certainly the Establish of Gimmicky Art at MASP is one of these disputed historiographical sites in which certain conceptions of the Bauhaus were presented and reformulated. This has allowed for very wide readings of the appropriations of the German school in peripheral parts of the globe, far from its European origin.

Common Threads — Approaches to Paul Klee's Carpet of 1927

Sarah McGavran

Paul Klee's Carpet, 1927, creates a puzzler for scholars equally information technology does not neatly fit the existing theoretical models apropos how European artists appoint with not-Western fine art and civilisation, while at the same time opening upward exciting new avenues for research. → more

Jun. 10 2018

Paul Klees bildnerische Webarchitekturen

Fabienne Eggelhöfer

Für die Entwicklung seiner abstrakten Bildsprache und seines Bauhaus-Unterrichtes bediente sich Paul Klee unterschiedlicher Quellen, die er im Alltag, auf seinen Reisen oder in Büchern entdeckte. Das Studium nicht-europäischen Designs von Gebäuden und Stoffen, die Fantasiearchitektur der aus Tunesien mitgebrachten Aquarelle oder die auf Papier entworfenen Stoffmuster der Weberinnen bildeten dice Grundlage für Werke wie Teppich, 1927, 48. → more

Apr. 8 2019

Weltkunstbücher der 1920er-Jahre — Zur Ambivalenz eines publizistischen Aufbruchs

Susanne Leeb

Um 1900 erschienen dice ersten Kompendien und Handbücher über sogenannte Weltkunst. Nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg explodierte dann die Anzahl der Publikationen über außereuropäische Künste. Diese fanden auch sogleich Eingang in die 1919 neu etablierte Bauhaus-Bibliothek. Diese Buchreihen lassen erkennen, unter welchen Bedingungen nichteuropäische Kunst in den 1920er-Jahren rezipiert wurde: als Inspirationsmaterial, als Ausdruck der Kanonkritik an einer europäischen Hochkunst und als Plädoyer für die Aufhebung zwischen Kunst und Kunsthandwerk, aber vor allem auch welches Verständnis von „Welt" hier reproduziert wurde. → more

Sep. thirteen 2019

Dry Time — Anni Albers Weaving the Threads of the Past

Maria Stavrinaki

When the Bauhaus was formed it was meant to be the reversed image of gimmicky history and society. If the outside globe was a field where opposing forces, in the form of class and national struggles, raged, the Bauhaus aimed to extricate itself from these conflicts in order to establish an culling primordial community. In this essay, Maria Stavrinaki comments on what seems to exist Anni Albers'southward problematic relationship to the past in general and to history in item. Anni Albers is non a unique case though, but rather a case study, which despite its particularities, tin can be considered as analogical to the Bauhaus in full general. → more than

Apr. two 2020

Working From Where Nosotros Are — Anni Albers' and Alex Reed's Jewelry Collection

Brenda Danilowitz

Not past nature acquisitive and certainly non art collectors, Josef and Anni Albers began in 1936 to collect Mexican figurines and other artifacts unearthed from that land's retentiveness. They described the state, which they starting time visited in 1935, equally "the promised land of abstruse art." Returning to Black Mountain College Anni Albers and Alexander Reed began experimenting with everyday articles to create a foreign and beautiful collection of objects of personal adornment inspired by their visit to Mexico. → more than

Dec. 11 2018

Andean Weaving and the Appropriation of the Ancient By in Mod Fiber Art

Elissa Auther

Ancient and Ethnic fabric cultures of the Americas played a critical role in the evolution of the work of fiber artists who came of historic period in the U.S. in the tardily 1950s and 1960s. Anyone who has studied fiber art of this flow, myself included, knows this well. They openly professed an admiration for traditions ranging from Navaho weaving, to the use of the backstrap loom in Mexico and Central America, to the aboriginal weaving techniques of Republic of peru. → more

Jun. viii 2018

Anni Albers and Aboriginal American Textiles

Virginia Gardner Troy

At the time Anni Albers wrote On Weaving in 1965, few discussions of Andean textiles "equally art" had appeared in weaving textbooks, simply in that location were numerous publications, many of which were German books published betwixt 1880 and 1929, that documented and described their visual and technical properties. Albers most single-handedly introduced weaving students to this ancient textile fine art through her writing and her creative work.  → more

Jun. 7 2018

Josef Albers and the Pre-Columbian Artisan

Joaquín Barriendos

In his countdown manifesto for the Staatliche Bauhaus, Walter Gropius proposed a new artistic agenda and pedagogical practice based on craft and artisanal principles. This commodity analyzes how prominent Bauhaus teacher and creative person Josef Albers, entered into dialogue with a very specific kind of artisanal aesthetic: the pre-Columbian crafts he encountered on his many trips to Mexico. Revisiting his lecture "Truthfulness in Fine art" delivered in 1937, later on his third trip to the state, the article studies the style in which Albers learned from the abstract tradition of pre-Columbian artisans, incorporating their noesis into his own artistic and pedagogical practice. → more than

Feb. three 2020

"Every Moment Is a Moment of Learning" — Lenore Tawney. New Bauhaus and Amerindian Impulses

Mona Schieren

"I felt as if I had made a step and perchance a new form. These evolved from a written report of Peruvian techniques, out of twining and twisting. Out of that came my new style of working, of dividing and separating the piece." Lenore Tawney'south "Woven Forms" are not purpose-built in a (Western) crafts sense; they move beyond traditional European rules of weaving and attempt to approach an indigenous attitude towards arts and crafts and technique. This essay shows how Tawney charted her own unique path in fiber fine art by linking Amerindian impulses with Taoist concepts of space and Bauhaus ideas. → more

Nov. 14 2018

Questions about Lenore Tawney — An Interview with Kathleen Nugent Mangan, Executive Director of the Lenore Thousand. Tawney Foundation

Kathleen Nugent Mangan, Erin Alexa Freedman

The search for the spiritual characterized Lenore Tawney'southward long life, and was reflected in both the iconography and materials she used in her work. She was a regular diarist and her journals provide valuable insight into this deeply personal search.bauhaus imaginista researcher Erin Freedman interviews Executive Manager of the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation, Kathleen Nugent Mangan, about Tawney's approach and work. → more

Mar. 10 2019

kNOT a QUIPU — An Interview with Cecilia Vicuña

Cecilia Vicuña, Sabrina Gschwandtner

In this recorded interview, Vicuña describes how afterward she first learned most quipu, she immediately integrated the arrangement into her life. Quipu, the Spanish transliteration of the give-and-take for "knot" in Cusco Quechua, is a system of colored, spun and plied or waxed threads or strings fabricated from cotton wool or camelid fiber. They were used by the Inca people for a variety of authoritative purposes, mainly record-keeping, and besides for other ends that take now been lost to history.  → more

Aug. three 2018

Diagonal. Pointé. Carré — Goodbye Bauhaus? Otti Berger'southward Designs for Wohnbedarf AG Zurich

Judith Raum

Gunta Stölzl. Anni Albers. These are the most prominent names today when one thinks of actors in the Bauhaus textile workshop. Both had been involved in the textile workshop since Weimar times, shaping it through their understanding of textiles and their didactics. Otti Berger did not join the workshop until Dessau. Stölzl and Albers succeeded in leaving Federal republic of germany in 1931–32. And they succeeded in standing to work every bit material designers and artists. Berger succeeded in doing this, too, just accompanied by an ongoing struggle for recognition and fair remuneration. → more

Feb. 12 2019

The World in the Province from the Province to the Globe — Bauhaus Ceramics in an International Context

Hans-Peter Jakobson

In this commodity Hans-Peter Jakobson presents the various influences, both national and international, and direct and indirect, influencing the views on ceramics taught in the Ceramic Workshop of the State Bauhaus Weimar Dornburg. Based on the life paths, inspirations and influences of the few ceramists who emerged from the Bauhaus workshop in Dornburg, he traces possible worldwide developments in ceramics to the present day. → more than

May. 27 2019

Reading Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Native Genius in Anonymous Compages in Northward America, 1957

Center For Postcolonial Knowledge and Civilisation, Berlin (CPKC)

In the 1960s, the involvement in a regional and colloquial architecture evolved into a sort of counterculture against the prevailing modernism in the Usa. Sybil Moholy-Nagy'due south volume is an early document of this motion and today a classic of architecture history. Information technology features buildings and construction techniques that emerge from social practices and whose builders remain bearding. They include Amerindian settlement forms, Mexican pueblos and churches, every bit well every bit barns and houses of the first European settlers. → more

Jan. 24 2019

Vernacular Compages and the Uses of the Past

Hilde Heynen

In sending out the manuscript of Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture to a publisher, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy added a note on the "Genesis of the manuscript," which is quite revealing most the intellectual trajectory that gave rise to it. She positioned herself as outset and foremost a traveling observer, learning from direct contact with artefacts and buildings, curious about their histories and willing to translate cloth testify and local narratives. → more

January. 11 2019

The "Workshop for Popular Graphic Art" in Mexico — Bauhaus Travels to America

Karoline Noack

The global developments that led in 1942 to the appointment of Hannes Meyer, second Bauhaus managing director, as head of the workshop for popular graphic art, Taller de Gráfica Popular (henceforth referred to as the TGP), fabricated information technology a focal indicate for migrating Europeans in flying from fascism. This essay aims to shed lite on how the TGP was influenced past Europeans granted aviary by Mexico earlier and during World State of war Two, and, conversely, to explore the degree to which these exiled visual artists, writers, and architects' ideas came to exist influenced by their contact with artists agile in the TGP. → more

Oct. 19 2018

Lena Bergner — From the Bauhaus to Mexico

Viridiana Zavala Rivera, María Montserrat Farías Barba, Marco Santiago Mondragón

The story of Lena Bergner is relevant to the history of architecture and blueprint on business relationship of her career passing through different ideological and cultural contexts. Here nosotros will hash out her life and work, focusing on her training in the Bauhaus, her time in the USSR and her time in Mexico, where, along with her hubby the architect Hannes Meyer, over a ten-year menstruation she undertook cultural projects of great importance. → more

Oct. 19 2018

Of Art and Politics — Hannes Meyer and the Workshop of Pop Graphics

Raquel Franklin

The Mexico of President Lázaro Cárdenas del Río was a fertile ground for the evolution of ideological questions, especially those originating from the left. The expropriation of oil fields, mining and large estates in 1938, the refuge granted Spanish republicans and members of the International Brigades in 1939, and the accord of common support between the government and syndicalist organizations all favored the formation of artistic and cultural groups willing to have role in the consolidation of revolutionary ideals which, until that betoken, had fabricated fiddling progress. Among these organizations was the Taller de Gráfica Popular, the Workshop of Popular Graphics. → more

Nov. xx 2018

bauhaus imaginista — and the importance of transculturality

Toni Maraini

What bauhaus imaginista has documented thus relates to a particular historical phase, 1 that opened a path to the renewal of the art situation in Morocco. And still, although more than recent generations of Moroccan art historians and critics often mentioned the period as a determinative and unavoidable reference point, they never really deepened study of that period. It somehow remained in the shadows of other phases and realities. Merely cultural memory has its rhythms, and the moment arose when the years of the Casablanca Group called for attending, enervating its artistic accomplishments be better understood. In this regard, the bauhaus imaginista projection came at the correct moment and has had of import repercussions. → more

Apr. 21 2020

I was 16 years old when I undertook my first journey into finding a professional vocation, first in Asilah, then in Fez followed by Tétouan. 1952. Tangiers was, to me, an open up book, a window on the world. The freedom of seeing, of discovering and of feeling, of weaving the narratives of my dreams. → more than

Mar. 27 2018

The Bauhaus and Morocco

Toni Maraini

In the years when Western nations were committed in new projects of partnership, with what was then chosen the "3rd World", young artists and students from the Maghreb had grown up in the passionate climate of the struggle for independence, were talented, open up to modernity, and eager to connect with twentieth-century international art movements, which were different in product and spirit from colonial ideology and culture. → more

Apr. iii 2018

École des Beaux-Arts de Casablanca (1964–1970) — Fonctions de l'Prototype et Facteurs Temporels

Fatima-Zahra Lakrissa

Utopie culturelle vécue, posture éthique et préfiguration de la modernité artistique et culturelle marocaine, 50'École des Beaux-arts de Casablanca est, de 1964 à 1970, le lieu de cristallisations d'aspirations sociales et artistiques portées par un groupe d'artistes et enseignants responsables d'une restructuration des bases pédagogiques. → more

October. 18 2018

Les Intégrations: Faraoui and Mazières. 1966–1982 — From the Time of Art to the Time of Life

Maud Houssais

Les Intégrations exemplified a specific conceptual motif, one that acted not inside a single field merely rather implied a human relationship of interdependence between dissimilar media (visual arts and architecture) and techniques (those of graphic arts and architecture). They thus immune for the emergence of disciplines that were not static in formation but evolving in relation to ane some other. The intermedial relationship they created between art and compages raises the question of what lies "between" these disciplines: how practise they communicate with each other? What are the elements of language common to this "spirit of the times," to the item atmosphere of the late 1960s? → more than

October. 18 2018

Chabâa's Concept of the "3 Equally"

Nadia Chabaâ

"Architecture is one expression of the fine arts" (Mohamed Chabâa, in:Alam Attarbia,No. ane, p. 36, 2001.)

Mohamed Chabâa's consciousness of his national heritage and his interest in compages both emerged at a immature age. His concept of the "3 A's"—art, architecture and the arts and crafts—grew out of his discovery both of the Italian Renaissance and the Bauhaus School during a period of report in Rome in the early 1960s. From and then on, bringing together the "3 A's" would become a central interest, a concept Chabâa would utilise in diverse ways and fiercely defend throughout his long and varied career. → more

Oct. 18 2018

Don't Exhale Normal: Read Souffles! — On Decolonizing Civilization

Marion von Osten

The need for a synthesis of the arts and, with this, a alter of pedagogical principles, was non but present at the get-go of the twentieth century (forces that prompted the Bauhaus'due south foundation), only after WWII as well, during the "Brusque Century" of decolonization. This second modern movement and its relation to modernism and the vernacular, the paw made, and the everyday was vividly expressed through texts and art works published in the Moroccan quarterly magazine Souffles, published commencement in the mid-1960s by a group of writers and artists in Rabat, Casablanca and Paris. → more

Aug. 5 2018

In the Footsteps of the Bauhaus — Its Reception and Impact on Brazilian Modernity

Joanna Bialobrzeska

Through the strong German-speaking minority and its agile work in the creation and mediation of civilisation in the spirit of modernity, the awarding of Bauhaus formal linguistic communication, particularly in the first stage of Brazilian modernity, has played a considerable role. It was only with the equation of German language culture with National Socialism and the ensuing intolerance of German protagonists that these architectural and cultural activities were severely disrupted. In Brazil during this flow, a style of modernism based on the principles of Le Corbusier finally gained acceptance. The impulses of the Bauhaus, however, which were non perceived for many years, were also reinterpreted and further adult within Brazil, although they remained occulted in comparing to the public reception of Corbusier. → more

May. 6 2019

Ivan Serpa, Lygia Clark, and the Bauhaus in Brazil

Adele Nelson

The art school of the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro was established in 1952, led past Ivan Serpa, who gave classes for both children and adults—including artists who would go on to form the Grupo Frente (1954–56) and afterward the neo-concrete move (1959–61). Author and critic Mário Pedrosa described the "experimental" character of these classes, simply the fact this experimentation was structured through study of color, materials, technique and limerick has encouraged art historian Adele Nelson to claim Serpa's education method was substantially based on the Bauhaus preliminary class. → more than

Sep. ix 2019

Walking on a Möbius Strip — The Inside/Outside of Art in Brazil

Luiza Proença

This text investigates how the topological figure of the Möbius strip, famously propagated by Bauhaus proponent Max Bill, was used in Brazil within dissident artistic practices of the 1960s and 1970s as a tool for reflection on the subject, alterity and public space. The Möbius strip is revisited in this essay as a conduit for thinking critically about possible subversions of Eurocentric forms, as well as various appropriations of traditional popular culture past modern and gimmicky art in Brazil. → more

Feb. 19 2019

The Poetry of Design — A search for multidimensional languages between Brazilian and German modernists

Ilana Tschiptschin

In the 1950s and 1960s, intense debates and exchanges took place between Brazilians and Germans working in the fields of design, fine art, and their various manifestations—from architecture and painting to music and poetry. These intertwined lines are identifiable in myriad events: journeys, meetings, exchanges of letters, exhibitions, lectures, courses, and publications. Common modes of production emerged out of these unlike encounters where, more than relations of influence, one can observe how entangled realities led to a questioning of the directionality of the flow betwixt heart and periphery. → more

Jun. 8 2020

The Latent Forces of Popular Civilisation — Lina Bo Bardi's Museum of Popular Art and the School of Industrial Design and Crafts in Bahia, Brazil

Ana Carolina de Souza Bierrenbach

This text deals with the experience of the Museum of Popular Fine art (MAP) and the Schoolhouse of Industrial Design and Handicraft, designed by the Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, in Salvador (capital of the state of Bahia), Brazil. Such a "school-museum" is based on the capture and transformation of latent forces that exist in Brazilian popular culture. → more than

Feb. 14 2019

Teko Porã — On Fine art and Life

Cristine Takuá

Cristine Takuá is an Indigenous philosopher, educator, and artisan who lives in the village of Rio Silveira, land of São Paulo, Brazil. She was invited to present a gimmicky perspective on questions and tensions raised past interactions between the Indigenous communities and the mainstream art organization, as well as to address Brazil's specific social and political context. → more

Jun. 8 2018

Times of Rudeness — Pattern at an Impasse

Lina Bo Bardi, Sol Camacho

In 1980, Lina Bo Bardi began working on a book concerning her time in the northeastern role of Brazil. With the help of Isa Grinspum Ferraz, she captioned the illustrations, revised her contributions to the book and drafted the layout and contents. The latter also included texts by her collaborators who, in a truly commonage try, had tried to envision the project of a true Brazil—an unfettered and costless country with no remnant remaining of the colonial inferiority complex which had plagued the country earlier in its history. Bo Bardi discontinued her work in 1981. In 1994, the Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi published this project as Times of Rudeness: Design at an Impasse. → more than

Apr. 17 2019

Connecting the Dots — Sharing the Space betwixt Ethnic and Modernist Visual Spatial Languages

Nan O'Sullivan

Ever increasing numbers of design institutes note the merits of cultural diversity within their pedagogy and practice. Rather quixotically, however, Eurocentric modernist ideals remain dominant within blueprint curricula. This ambiguity results in non-Western social, cultural and creative practice, remaining side-lined, albeit while still being lauded as of peachy value. Critical of this duplicity, this paper introduces three Ethnic visual spatial languages, identifying a number of correlations and contradictions these offer to the institution and implementation of Bauhaus pedagogy and subsequent examples of modernism adopted beyond Europe. → more

Dec. 17 2019

+ Add this text to your collection!

gillencounto.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.bauhaus-imaginista.org/articles/5684/a-bauhaus-domesticated-in-sao-paulo

Share this post