BAUHAUS Programmes
Researching Bauhaus was particularly interesting to me, I find myself completely impressed by the imprint that the institution has left on past and modern graphic design.
Students and directors at the world-famous design school, Staatliches Bauhaus, have produces a variety of magazines, books and catalogs that have become graphic design landmarks.
Edited by Bauhaus founder, Walt Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy, Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar 1919–1923 was a catalogue produced to accompany the Bauhaus’s first exhibition of 1923. Herbert Bayer, then a student, designed the cover, while its interior and radical format (25 x 25 cm) was created by Moholy-Nagy, who had joined the Bauhaus that year to run its photography and typography courses. The catalogue acted as a showcase for the Bauhaus itself, announcing its shift in emphasis from fine art to applied art.
Moholy-Nagy and Gropius also edited the first issues of the Bauhaus magazine, Bauhaus; Zeitschrift fur Gestaltung. Bayer’s cover for the fifth issue. Published in 1928, has become an icon of twentieth-century design; a photograph represents various items of stationery, which cast their shadows over a previous issue of the journal folded at the corner. The radical composition would be the only cover that relied solely on a photographic image.
In 1925, two years after becoming a Bauhaus Master, Moholy-Nagy, along with Gropius, produced Bauhausbucher, a series of 14 books to promote the institution. The prospectus used to promote Volume 14 has became a symbol of the Bauhaus philosophy of combining craft and technology as well as a manifestation of ‘typophoto’ (the term Moholy-Nagy used to describe photograms combined with sans-serif type).
In 1926, Bayer, now director of the school’s Druck and Reklame (printing and advertising) workshops, had established a modernist approach to typography in printed material for the school. Bayer’s new approach is apparent in his 1926 Staatliches Bauhaus in Dessau’s catalogue cover (the school having moved to Dessau the previous year) with it’s sharp angles, simple lower-case text and clean use of colour.
The emigration of many of the Bauhaus’s important members, including Gropius, Moholy-Nagy and Bayer, to the US in the 1930s disseminated Bauhaus ideas in a new context. Today, graphic design continues to look back to Bauhaus as one of the first modernist versions of the discipline.
