In a fleeting fourteen year period, sandwiched between two world wars, Germany’s Bauhaus school of art and design changed the face of modernity. With utopian ideals for the future, the school developed a pioneering fusion of fine art, craftsmanship, and technology to be applied across painting, sculpture, design, architecture, film, photography, textiles, ceramics, theatre, and installation. As much an intense personal community as a publicly minded collective, the Bauhaus was first founded by Walter Gropius (1883–1969), and counted Josef and Anni Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, Gunta Stölzl, Marianne Brandt and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe among its members. Between its three successive locations in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin, the school fostered charismatic and creative exchange between teachers and students, all varied in their artistic styles and preferences, but united in their idealism and their interest in a “total” work of art across different practices and media. This book celebrates the adventurous innovation of the Bauhaus movement, both as a trailblazer in the development of modernism, and as a paradigm of art education, where an all-encompassing freedom of creative expression and cutting-edge ideas led to functional and beautiful creations. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN’s Basic Architecture series features: an introduction to the life and work of the architect the major works in chronological order information about the clients, architectural preconditions as well as construction problems and resolutions a list of all the selected works and a map indicating the locations of the best and most famous buildings approximately 120 illustrations (photographs, sketches, drafts, and plans)
it seems I generally find Taschen books disappointing, and this one was no exception; I don’t have a good sense of Bauhaus after reading; I can’t understand why it remains worth knowing about; is the influence simply downstream of the thing itself? is it simply because of the people beyond the thing itself? having read the book, I don’t have a good sense of why Bauhaus matters
Interesting to compare with the other bauhaus book recently read (both gifts). The text is more serious and initially better but the translation seems to collapse as it goes on and it becomes a bit of a drag to read.
Good foundational book about the Bauhaus and its cast of characters, and how the school and the people involved changed throughout its brief but momentous history.
First of all, the edition of 2021 has a lot of typos! I was underwhelmed by this book because I expected from a book about a school of design to talk more about the actual design, but it turned out to be almost entirely the description of the management of the school, the classes’ organization and different internal conflicts among the staff throughout the years of its existence. Of course, I still have learnt something about Bauhaus from this book, but the focus of it is definitely not what I would want it to be on: the design itself is only touched briefly. Overall, I would probably not recommend this book, unless you want to learn about the historical environment surrounding the school, rather than about the school of design itself.
A good summary. Enough photos with enough text. Not overly detailed but not vague either. Towards the end the grammar fell apart in a few places. I learned a lot and now have a list of names to look up.
Nádherné spracovanie edície Taschen predchádza text, ktorý je pri najlepšej vôli statický. Inými slovami, dočítal som knihu, ktorá robila všetko preto, aby sa tak nestalo.