 So I'm really excited to welcome Ellen Lofton to this event. She is a writer, curator, educator, designer. She is the Betty Cook and William O. Steinmetz design chair at Micah in Baltimore. She serves as senior curator at Cooper Hewitt and Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City. And also she's just someone that I look up to as a writer and curator. Those are two things that I'm still always learning. And some of the best things I've learned have come from her books and her work. If you haven't had an opportunity to check out the Bauhaus book that we published the catalog for that goes along with Bauhaus at 100, please do. Her introduction is really an important part of that book and really sets the stage for what we tried to do with that show. So, so excited to welcome Ellen to the stage and really excited about this kind of collaborative event with Cooper Hewitt. Thanks for joining us, Ellen. Thanks, Steve, and I learned so much from you too. It's amazing. I'm delighted to be here. Greetings from Cooper Hewitt. I'm Ellen Lofton. I'm curator of contemporary design at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. And we are really delighted to be doing this program with you at the Letterform Archive. In the service of accessibility, I'm going to describe myself. I'm a white woman with dark blonde hair. I'm wearing a dark t-shirt and a modern pearl necklace designed by Betty Cook. And behind me are two of my favorite places in the world, the Letterform Archive and Cooper Hewitt Museum, and both galleries are overflowing with Bauhaus. And that makes me super happy. I'm a Bauhaus fan girl. And I'm so delighted to be able to nerd out about all things Bauhaus tonight with you. On behalf of Cooper Hewitt, this program is presented by the Parsons School of Design Cooper Hewitt MA program in the history of design and curatorial studies. Our lecture series, Graphic Design History, is part of our spring graduate seminar, which I'm teaching every week with a wonderful group of grad students. And some of our events are public, including tonight's talk. So welcome grad students. It's so great to have you here in the audience. Our lecture series was created by the curators at Cooper Hewitt to celebrate the work of our community of scholars and curators. So in 2019, Cooper Hewitt opened our exhibition, Herbert Bayer Bauhaus Master, which features pieces from our collection, and from the amazing collection of Meryl C. Berman. Last, the pandemic forced us to close our exhibition short. We didn't get to share it as much as we had hoped to. At the letter form archive you have a few more weeks to come and see the amazing exhibition Bauhaus typography at 100. And if you can't see it in person. Please check out the amazing book that Steven just mentioned. So full of new things and new photography of our favorite stuff up close and personal. And Cooper Hewitt also published a book about Herbert Bayer featuring a lot of pieces from our collection and Meryl Berman's collection. There's so many ways to enjoy the Bauhaus. And tonight is going to be one of them. It was a life altering experience for me to be able to walk through this exhibition, live and in person with Rob Saunders, who curated the show and his director of the letter form archive. And it's been 11 hours with me going through the extraordinary pieces that he assembled for this show. And so we're going to go on a quick little run through. There's early Bauhaus. There's high Bauhaus. There's some pre Bauhaus. And there's Bauhaus influencers. One of the favorite pieces in the exhibition is this weird little book cover by a German designer named Walter Dexel, and he's representing the human body here, the parts of the body with just lines and circles. Another theme we can kind of follow tonight is some of this anatomy of the Bauhaus body and sort of explore a rather strange and reduced sense of what the human form can be. Now Walter Dexel himself had rather mixed opinions of the Bauhaus and he was working at the same time and creating quite similar work to what people were doing at the Bauhaus. And it was rather annoying to him and he thought the Bauhaus was quite overrated and dependent on a never failing flow of publicity. And that my friends is exactly the point. The Bauhaus people knew from very early on that they needed graphic design and lots of it in order to get the word out and keep people interested in this little art school that was always struggling to stay open and graphic design was there as a subject matter and a medium, but also simply as a tool for survival. The exhibition also has a section called Beyond the Bauhaus that shows us what people did after they left, like the radical pedagogy of Max Bill or the influence of the Bauhaus on corporate modernism and corporate identity standards. And on a corporate note, one of my favorite pieces in the exhibition is this extraordinary poster by Vanessa Zuniga Tnitsere, who's a designer from Colombia, and she studies the graphic language of pre-Columbian pottery and analyzes it to uncover and present the modular language of representation found in those pieces and so beautiful and imaginative abstractions of human forms and animal forms and abstract decorative forms. And then that study of these indigenous design languages informs her own invention of her own language for her time and place. Let's dive in to the Bauhaus and start at the beginning, once upon a time in Weimar, Germany, a little art school opened. And the first director of the Bauhaus was the architect Walter Gropius. And by the time he left in 1928, just really a short time later, it was the most famous art school in the world. And in his opening statements about creating the school, he spoke of the devastation in his country and across Europe, wrought by World War One. He said, the ruined world, visible and invisible, will be resuscitated from our brains and from our hands. And it is with that kind of grand statement of utopian possibility that he started a school of art and design in Weimar. And the school has left us many things, many legacies. And one is his idea of a basic course of preliminary experience for incoming students that plunges everybody into a direct engagement with materials and form with the goal of erasing all the bad habits and all the received ideas that young artists might have brought with them to the school. And this idea remains in use in schools around the world. And here we see Gropius's very famous diagram translated into English of the Bauhaus curriculum with that basic course at the edge. I was really interested recently to find this more casual drawing by Paul Clay, who taught in the basic course at the Bauhaus, that takes that same content and renders it in a kind of different hand. And here at the top of the circle, two little flags have been planted. And one of them seems to say something like propaganda, and the other says Verlag or publishing. And so there at the edges in the outskirts in the suburbs of the Bauhaus mind was graphic design and publicity, making its little steak, right. And he was offering perhaps a lifeline to the school. The first leader of the basic course was Johannes Itten. He was a painter, a Swiss painter, he wore long robes and he studied an esoteric philosophy called Mazda, Mazda Zan. And he had many followers who actually came with him to the Bauhaus who already embraced his teachings which are very much based in expressionism and spirituality and principles of vegetarianism and celibacy and the work that his students did there in his classroom was very controlled and physical and raw. It may not be what many people associate with the Bauhaus when they think of sort of clean and perfect geometries. A beautiful project that it initiated and worked on is this portfolio of prints called utopia documents of reality. The cover is designed by Margie Terry Adler, who was a student of it and it's full of these extraordinary lithographic type studies or lettering studies by it and that are directly based on the teaching that he was doing in his basic course, where he would have just contemplate an image of an old master painting or a medieval painting, and attempt to chart their inner emotional response to the work and he got very angry if people didn't look really into it and really appropriately distressed by the emotional content of the first trigger warning in the early Bauhaus. And then this beautiful drawing here we see he's created this esoteric geometric diagram on top of the typography and that also flips over and lays on top of the image. It's another theme that we'll see in Bauhaus graphic design, these kind of networks of lines that make visible, invisible energies, life forces, ideas, thoughts, we could call them thought lines or theory lines. And it's something that we'll see many of the artists and designers at the school create, regardless of their particular ideological outlook. One of it and outstanding students was a young woman named Friedel Dicker, who followed it and to the Bauhaus and worked with him in his classroom, and created works like this extraordinary watercolor, in which he's exploring letter forms, not unlike those we saw it in his portfolio. And Dicker also studied with Kandinsky and clay, who were teaching in the basic course as well. And she was the first student to be invited to help teach that course. And she very early on took a leadership role and a pedagogical role at the school. And here we see some postcards designed by Kandinsky and clay for the first Bauhaus exhibition in 1923, where they're translating their drawings into kind of graphic advertisements for the energy and ideas of the Bauhaus. And we can see some of those energy lines at work in their graphics as well. Dicker collaborated with it on the utopia portfolio, which included not only those lithographic hand drawn letters by it, but this extraordinary series of letterpress prints, where Dicker worked with a printer to translate it and text into letterpress. A process that she spent several weeks on. It was very rigorous ongoing work. She wrote letters about it to her friend about the process of creating this typography for it. And we can come in and see the extraordinary typography, the use of much more decorative typefaces than you might associate with the Bauhaus. And attempting to translate some of that energy and ox from it and hand handmade letters into something distinctly typographic. And it's quite wonderful that a page proof exists from one of these prints, where we can see Dicker and or it and writing sketches and notes to the printer, and the printer would then go and make those corrections which are reflected as you see in the final print. So it's really fun when we get to get little scraps of the working process of our favorite designers. These, these traces of the real these traces of the thought process. After the Bauhaus Dicker worked as a designer artist and teacher between 1943 and 1944, she taught art to children in the Teresa and stop concentration camp ghetto. She herself was murdered in Auschwitz Poland in 1944, several of her students survived and became founders of the new discipline of art therapy and child psychology. So if we think about the legacy of Bauhaus teaching and Bauhaus pedagogy. This is one beautiful vein of this idea of art as experience and art as access to inner knowledge that carries forward today, and has survived in this most extraordinary manner. The worst experiences of human history. Dicker was able to save over 4000 of the drawings created by these children, and they are preserved today in the Jewish Museum and Prague Czech Republic. And you can see here the influence of clay and kandinsky and it and and Dicker herself carried forth into these extraordinary works. It's kind of heavy so I just want to take a moment for us all to think about that, especially in this time of war spirit Bauhaus. That's the thing. I think we all just experienced some of it together, the spirit of the place, carrying forward. Early years at the Bauhaus were very much embedded in an expressionist point of view. They were very interested in the other worldly Lothar Schreyer was an avant garde theater director. His work celebrated sound and movement and gesture over the traditional focus on literature in the theater. The 1921 play crucifixion is documented in this woodcut book which is in the exhibition and in the collection at the letter form archive, and which I had only ever seen little black and white images of it in various Bauhaus publications. And it's so extraordinary to be able to encounter it up close and to see the real thing and how big and rich and material. Schreyer was director of the stage workshop at the Bauhaus and by more from 1921 to 1923 those early years those spirit years. And here is our theme of weird anatomies at the Bauhaus. These are some representations of the players on the stage and how they might have been dressed in a very abstracted way. This one is called Mutter or mother, and the mother here is a bunch of rectangles with circles for her eyes her face her mouth, her breasts, her womb, and inside the book perhaps it's most extraordinary element or influential element is this visual score that Schreyer created that was an attempt to translate the sounds words movements and tones of the theatrical performance into a kind of score, based on the linear layers of a musical score. He knew that most people would not be able to really recreate any kind of performance for it. And he saw it as something much more esoteric that would reach those with the special talent to understand what it was about. Schreyer was forced to leave the Bauhaus in 1923 as Gropius craved a new direction for the school. And he was replaced by Oscar Schlemmer as director of the theater workshop, who ushered in a new period of Bauhaus experimentation with bodies and space. And here we see a diagram of a player on a stage enveloped by a network of these thought lines or theory lines piercing the body turning the stage into a kind of space thickened by geometry. And then he moved into constructivist Bauhaus, a different time, a different place. It was also forced to resign in 1923. Gropius was fed up with the eccentricity. It was not a good luck for the people of Weimar a quite conservative town. Gropius was committed to moving the school in a new direction, more towards technology and industry. And he hired someone to replace it. A young artist named Laszlo Maholinage, who was Hungarian. He was only 28 years old when he started working at the Bauhaus. And he often was mistaken for a student because he was so youthful. And the other faculty, Clay, and Kandinsky, and Muka, other people who were teaching at the time are really a different generation from Maholinage. So Maholinage arrives as this young blood, full of energy, an immigrant who didn't speak German clearly, and full of a passion to really live out and create the vision imagined by Walter Gropius. And so they quickly became very close collaborators. And Maholinage was really licensed to do it, to make it happen, to make this new Bauhaus happen. In this portrait, he is by his wife, Lucia Maholi, he's shown wearing a engineer's cover all over his suit and tie, his shirt and tie. So he's really representing a very new image of the artist, who is not, not wearing long flowing robes like it, but is dressed as a kind of worker of the future and an intellectual worker of the future. He had already an established career before coming to the Bauhaus. As he traveled across eastern Germany to Berlin in 1920, he earned money for his train tickets by doing lettering and sign painting. So there is this survival instinct with graphic design. On his way to Berlin, he contracted the Spanish flu and nearly died, survived that pandemic. And he belonged to the Hungarian avant garde group MA, which means today, and continued throughout the magazine's publication to be the Berlin correspondent for the journal. Lucia Maholinage, his wife, was a photographer and writer. And before meeting Laszlo in 1920, she was working in the publishing industry and quite a bit of knowledge of how books and magazines are published. And she was also a photographer and began studying commercial photography while at the Bauhaus. If you're ever curious what their apartment looked like. Well, here you are in the actual dining room of Lucia and Laszlo, fitted out with Bauhaus furniture and Bauhaus artwork. Lucia Maholinage's photographs of people and objects and Bauhaus buildings became part of the visual bedrock of the Bauhaus myth, both during the time the school was opened and after the school closed. These pages from the Bauhaus journal, she is credited for her photography, but that would end later and Walter Gropius took her negatives with him when he emigrated to the United States and really use these glass negatives that she had created to help build the Bauhaus and spread the myth of the Bauhaus in the US and kind of cut her out of that process, something that she fought hard against for decades to come. Maholinage and Herbert Byer designed this catalog for the big 1923 exhibition in Weimar, which is sort of a last stand event to prove the value of the school. And this beautiful book which is available in a gorgeous facsimile that came out in 2019 really gets you inside the mind of the school at that moment. The cover is designed by Herbert Byer, the interior pages are designed by Maholinage, who worked with Gropius to make the book happen to edit the book as well as lay it out. So when we talk about designing a book, it isn't just someone being handed some files but really the whole conception of how it could happen. The book is Square, which reflected the philosophy of geometry that was being espoused by Kandinsky at that moment. And that was part of this kind of creation of a visible scientific image for the school, the yellow triangle, the red square, the blue circle, a kind of elementary sentence of visual geometry. Square book is hard to design. We can see Maholinage kind of struggling there with it with these very long lines. But here he is launching the new typography. And this is considered the first essay to use that phrase. And it would go on to have a huge influence on typography in the 1920s. Gropius and Maholinage also decided to publish an entire series of books, the Bauhaus book series, which are beautiful little slim volumes they were not meant to be big or imposing or expensive. They were written by leading artists and designers of the day, they were the voice of the avant garde written by people both at the Bauhaus and across Europe. And Maholinage designed these books often with the assistance of Lucia Maholi together they wrote Bauhaus book number eight painting photography film, although Lucia is not credited for the book. And the cover features an abstract photograph, which is a technique that Lucia and Maholi developed together in her dark room at the Bauhaus. Here's another beautiful printers proof. This is from painting photography film. And we can see here where Maholinage has told the printer that he wants these black bars to run off the edges of the page to bleed to be more dynamic and he's adding an arrow to create more sense of motion to the page. And that's how it got printed. So again, I just, I just love seeing that process taking place and imagining this, this young artist figuring it out, and kind of learning on the job how to create the new typography, something he had written about, but didn't quite get what it would be. And then really making it happen in essays like this and painting photography film. He's creating a score for a movie. So the idea of how to use typography and grid lines and photographs and repetition and symbols to create a visual translation of the action and unfolding of a film. And we can see the influence of Maholinage here and this beautiful book, which is featured in the exhibition at the letter form archive. The author took out a to Gaki visited Europe in the 20s and is very directly creating an homage here to Maholinage in this gorgeous book cover. He also looked at the idea of graphic notation in Bauhaus book for the theater of the Bauhaus, which he co authored with Oscar Schlemmer and Farcus Molnar. The cover here is by Schlemmer. Inside the book is this incredible piece of information design that folds out of the book, and is a score for performing on stage and Maholinage was deeply interested in theater and performance, and created many designs related to theatrical space and how it could develop the audience and engage the audience and use new new technologies of light and projection and stage design. So here we are at the top of this long graphic, and we can see Maholinage's diagram of the stage, which includes moving panels. And it includes a screen for projecting films and light on a lower visible stage for musical instruments and sound making of all kind. And underneath are these vertical bands showing the simultaneous creation of of form and light and music and movement. You can travel through the piece and see this beautiful diagrammatic design that for example the color bars are showing different intensities of light and simultaneity of light. So this is quite an interesting and elaborate system. And of course, we saw it earlier as similar interest in the more expressionistic woodcut work of Lothar Schreyer. Sometimes art historians and theater people say, well, these things are interesting experiments, but did they really work? Aren't they just too obscure for someone really to make sense of? And there's some truth to that. But really, if we think about time based media from a distance perspective from today, there are incredible parallels in the software we use in the interfaces for animation or video editing, which use these timelines and layers to help the creator work out camera movements and transitions and timing and sound all in simultaneous form. So I think the Bauhaus is always there inventing something and perhaps it's real use changes over time. And Maholi Naj's students was Mariana Brant, a German artist who came to the Bauhaus. She abandoned a career as an expressionist painter. It said that she burned all her paintings to start over and immerse herself in this new experience at the school. And she entered Maholi Naj's metal workshop, and she was the only woman in that workshop, and quickly became one of the most influential product designers with the Bauhaus, creating many of the school's most memorable and iconic objects. She ultimately became acting director when Maholi Naj left in 1928. And this self-portrait, we see her holding a camera up to a mirror to take an image of herself. And these are some of the incredible products that she made in the metal workshop. Her teapot from 1924 is one of her first products and was created in Weimar. It shows her fascination with these perfect geometries, which we'd seen throughout the course of the school, whether it was expressionist wounds and screaming faces of the mother, or a more rational geometry in the pedagogy of Kandinsky. Later, her work would become more functional, less founded in craft and sculpture, and more in the function within the home. So her hanging glass lamps were designed so that it would be easy for someone to adjust the height of the lamp as it hangs over, say, the dining room table or work area. And these lamps are still in production. They really work for people. The teapots not in production, but is one of the world's most coveted objects for sure. Mariana Brant also created photo montages. And most of these were done in a short period where she took a leave from the Bauhaus and did some traveling. And photo montages for many Bauhaus designers and artists and many artists of the era were kind of an outlet for personal expression. And they were cheap, because you could make photo montages by just cutting up magazines that you happen to have around. So we can imagine Mariana Brant with her favorite magazines, creating images of what it was like to live at that time. This image on the left shows a kind of liberated Bauhaus body, you know, body in space, wearing, you know, minimal clothing to exercise and have freedom of movement. But then on the right is another kind of reality where we have a woman kneeling and these lines of thought or these theory lines connecting her hands to a sort of bourgeois man in a hat and a suit, who's really controlling society and controlling her destiny. This is a design she did for a journal cover in 1927 that was intended for reproduction. I don't think it was ever reproduced but that was its intention. And here we see this kind of joyous engineering figure, this guy in a jumpsuit, manipulating the lever of a giant machine. And that machine seems to be cranking out typography as all machines should. And if you were ever curious about Mariana Brant's work from home set up, well, here you have it. There she is catching some sunlight on her Bauhaus balcony, reading the latest issue of Bauhaus magazine. Practical Bauhaus. So I want to tell you about one of my favorite Bauhaus people who was Herbert Byer. And Herbert Byer came to the Bauhaus as a student in 1921. He was very young, he was 21 years old. He didn't have a lot of background in art, he'd done some studies but he was pretty green to it. And he had this copy of Kandinsky's book concerning this ritual and art. And there's a similar copy in the exhibition at Letterform Archive and I like to imagine in my fantasy that that's Herbert's copy of the Kandinsky book. And he was so taken with this little book that he was compelled to go and enroll in the Bauhaus. He didn't afford a train ticket, so he walked 258 kilometers from Darmstadt to Weimar, according to Google Maps, that's a 54 hour hike. I hope he had some cookies. And in those early years at Weimar, there was no graphic design workshop, there is no formal training in graphic design. But Gropius recognized that Byer was interested in graphic design and encouraged him to do this work. And he knew it would be good for the school too, that the school needed some publicity. So this postcard for the 1923 exhibition uses those kind of theory lines, the thought lines in a very practical way. Basically, this little postcard is a geometry lesson in how to draw a circle, a square, and a triangle. Everything in this postcard is drawn by hand. The Bauhaus did not have any typesetting equipment at the Weimar. The print shop there was really intended for artistic printing and not for commercial printing. So we come in close to this original maquette from Merrill Berman's collection, where we can see Byer working it out in Guache. In 1925, the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, a city near Berlin, in a brand new campus designed by Walter Gropius, with architectural lettering by Herbert Byer. And Byer returned to the school now as a young master, no longer a student, and he set up a modern letterpress print shop at the Bauhaus for printing publications and documents and ads and postcards, and students worked with him. He was a very practical guy, he was not much interested in doing theoretical lectures, and he preferred to simply be working there in the shop with students, rather than devising elaborate exercises and experiences for them. Among the many things printed there in that letterpress workshop were letterheads. Herbert Byer was interested in contemporary theories at the time and what business correspondence should look like. So he used the letterhead as a testing ground for new ideas in design. So he's distributed the text across the field of the letterhead, creating a kind of typographic grid, and creating spaces for a typist to add their content to the letterhead. And across the bottom of the letterhead is a manifesto about why capital letters should be banished from writing. He felt that capital letters were unnecessary, they were not functional because we don't hear them in speech. They were a waste of metal, they made fonts too big and too difficult to produce, and they were kind of hierarchical. Lowercase letters and printing entirely in lowercase was a more egalitarian kind of typography. Now it is very, very exciting to Bauhaus fan girls and fan people all around the world that the letter form archive has acquired Herbert Byer's original actual drawing for his universal alphabet of 1926. How cool is that? Amazing. So of course the alphabet is only lowercase and it is an alphabet designed on modular principles using parts of circles and straight lines. So abandoning the organic complexity of traditional fonts for this very purified geometry and it's so fun to come in close and see the little guidelines that he used to create the letter forms, the anchor points for the compass, the mistakes, the retouching, the perfecting of those circles, the overlapping arcs. I love to see a font that actually preserved all that element of making in Herbert Byer's letter forms. So cool. Herbert Byer eventually emigrated to the United States and this remarkable photo montage is in the collection of Cooper Hewitt Museum. We have over 500 works by Byer, mostly from his career in the US. And so we're so proud to have this material and to be able to study it and share it. Here we see a giant ham flying through the sky, escorted by war planes. And Byer has added those theory lines or thought lines to the trajectory of the plane to kind of dramatize the space and the action going on here. Why is the ham flying through the air? Well, it turns out that this montage was created for an ad for gas stoves and the gas industry in the US was fighting the electric stove industry. And they use this kind of wartime depiction of the ham to suggest that cooking with gas was more patriotic. This is 1942. And there's Byer standing in one of his exhibition designs with his theory lines turned into physical objects. He's been able to make it real to put those lines into space. He was part of a wave of European emigres who promoted modernist design in the US. And throughout his long career in the US he never stopped talking about the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus was his point of origin, a calling card, a magical word that brought all kinds of intrigue and respect to the work that he was doing. And this is one of my favorite Herbert Byer pieces created in 1939 in the US and it shows a uterus beautifully rendered in pinks and red and black and gray surrounded by the menstrual cycle and the phases of the moon. And emanating from the center are those thought lines or theory lines, bringing us, you know, to the core of human generation. This is an extraordinary piece and the brochure is actually about five inches tall. It's a very tiny little piece that he made this extraordinary image for, and it was used to promote a hormone based pharmaceutical product to doctors. The Bauhaus, the Bauhaus at the center of everything. This extraordinary diagram of the Bauhaus in Dessau depicts the school in relation to how far it is from other cities in Germany and France and beyond. There's notion of the Bauhaus being in the middle and projecting outward, selling itself, promoting itself, sending out its products, its postcards, its books, and making itself heard through often graphic design. And the curriculum with its center in architecture, but it's periphery in basic design, creating this system of pedagogy that was adopted all around the world and is still with us. Bauhaus bodies, look at this extraordinary drawing by Kandinsky from his book Point and Line to Plain, a Bauhaus book, showing this ecstatic, circular, concentric body kind of exploding into space. This Bauhaus business, it was always a business, the school was always trying to stay afloat, it never had enough money. This gorgeous logo by Maholi Naj was designed to advertise and brand that Bauhaus book series. And that idea of business, it carries on this beautiful logo by Paul Rand who loved the Bauhaus and took those ideas in his own direction. Or Tom Guy's Mars Identity for Mobile Oil Company, also on view in the exhibition at the Letterform Archive. And then finally this incredible icon found by Vanessa Zuniga Tanitsere in the pre-Columbian pottery of indigenous and finding the Bauhaus everywhere, taking it back, finding that geometry wasn't invented in the 20s. It's bigger than all of us, it's forever, it's infinite. Every generation discovers and destroys the Bauhaus for itself. The Bauhaus always had enemies. There are always people that wanted to shut it down, ultimately the Nazis did in 1933. When Laszlo Maholi Naj left in 1928, he said, ah, I want to get out of here. It's just gotten too commercial. It's too focused on utilitarian stuff. And leaving with him the same year were Marcel Breuer, and Walter Gropius, and Zanti Shabinski, and they all went to Berlin to be commercial designers. Right, enough of art school. Let's make some stuff out there in the world. So the Bauhaus, we keep finding it, we keep finding new things there. I keep loving it. I keep seeing new ways to understand it. And new people who were forgotten or erased or overlooked who were making things and making it happen. So, so thank you. I enjoyed talking with you all about the Bauhaus, and perhaps we can have a conversation. Thank you so much, Ellen. That was fantastic. You are such an excellent storyteller. And I've already, I mean, I thought I, well, never thought I knew at all about the Bauhaus, but there were a ton of things in there that were new to me. Thank you so so much for that. Really beautifully organized too. Thank you. We have a lot of questions, and probably won't get to them all, but I'll start picking out a few and I'll just do one. Now that just because it was, you were just talking about theory lines Craig Elias and asked, what was the source for that term. Similar forms referred to as lines of force in the context of futurist art, a label with a very different connotation for a very similar visual element. Yeah, I don't have an official word for it. I came up with theory lines. My friend Jenny Tobias and I have been bouncing like, what do you call this thing that recurs through so much Bauhaus design and yet is used sometimes in a very mystical way. Sometimes in a decorative way, sometimes in a functional way it's actually how something was made. But what they do is they visualize the invisible right so lines of forces is good too. And, you know, an American streamlining speed whiskers. So we're used to show objects moving and we're much maligned by the good modernists, because toasters don't actually move why do they need speed whiskers. So this this idea of trying to add a sense of movement but also I think of spirit or intellect to things like with these thin pencil lines they, they create relationships. They connect this to that. And so you see them and, you know, the paintings of my holy nudge, as well as his graphic design in Kandinsky, yes, and futurism, and lots of the artwork of the period. And I don't think there's any single point of origin. It's like a thing, a technique that gets used and it's all different meanings. I like coining our own terms whenever, whenever we can whenever we need to to help explain things and so I think that's an excellent one. Just answer a common question that's coming up often the chat that we will send the transcript of the chat to everyone after the event as well as a recording so don't worry you won't miss out on that if you had to come and go. Yeah, I mean, I'm an anonymous attendee. What are some common misconceptions people have about the house. I mean that the main one is that the Bauhaus is rational. And I know in my own writing I've said oh the rational period. I don't think the Bauhaus is very rational. You know, the Bauhaus is grandiose. It was theoretical. It was utopian. And there's that that expressionist period, the very spiritual period, which gets a bit buried and overshadowed and was deliberately buried by Gropius who became the spokesman for the Bauhaus and its afterlife right the main spokesman. So it's very that that period gets kind of brushed under the carpet and hidden away, and yet it is so much part of the school. And if you read the writings of Moholy nage and others who are associated with the so called rational Bauhaus. There's pretty wild stuff, you know about remaking man and this kind of reinventing the biology of human existence through design. It's not just rational. It's more than that. And I think sometimes people confuse the rational typography or what they see is rational typography with it with all of the ways that they were actually thinking but that's not necessarily the case. Yeah. Here's a question from hands cock. What were the inspirational and personal connections between Bauhaus designers and the Russian constructivists. Thank you for the wonderfully informative lecture. He traveled and lived in Germany during the early 1920s. And so he knew many of the Bauhaus people and they, and they knew him so there was a direct link there. Malavich, who was Ukrainian was hugely influential to the obviously the founding of constructivism but also to abstract art in Western Europe. And one of the Bauhaus books was a book by Malavich. There's a lot of influence there. But I think it's really important that there is also an avant garde in Poland and an avant garde in Hungary, and other Eastern European countries, and that part of the decolonization of the Bauhaus and the decolonization of modernism is really about looking at parts of Europe that kind of get squished between Germany and Russia by the sort of a hegemony of that constructivism is Russian and new typography is German. There are so many people working in other parts of Europe, and creating constructivist design and socialist inspired design. And, you know, I've been looking a lot just this week at Mahogany's career before the Bauhaus. So I had just had in my mind that, you know, Mahogany was so young and he had this opportunity to teach at the Bauhaus, and that created him. He actually had quite an interesting and extensive practice before he got to the Bauhaus, which frankly is why he got the job. And that some of those ideas like creating scores for a film. That entire project, he had already designed in Berlin in Hungarian in 1922. And, you know, those ideas are there before the Bauhaus. How young was he that was. Well he was 28 when he came to the Bauhaus. So he's not as young as Herbert Byer, who was really green Herbert Byer arrives, really is just a kid, you know, he was 21. And, you know, did not have his own voice as an artist, but Maholi Naj man. He came there with a voice and with knowledge, you know, Gropius didn't know what to do about constructivism. Maholi Naj brought that to the school. A quick question from Kevin Woodlands that asked if Maholi Naj coined the term, the new typography in that document you showed. Was that before anyone else chick hold of course is famous for using it but Well chick hold chick hold did not coin the term chick hold visited the Bauhaus exhibition and bought that book in 1923. Maholi Naj was a very close friend in Berlin with Kurt Schvitters, who we all know as a data, you know, artists but was also a graphic designer and very interested in typography and functional typography. Maholi Naj really got his typography bug from Schvitters, and was super interested in what Schvitters was was doing. Caroline Caroline or Caroline Hatch asks, it's interesting how much propaganda goes into the argument for the necessity of the school. We are at a time period now when so many pure art schools are suffering or closing or shifting focus to more marketable art programs like graphic design or design MBAs. What do you think current art schools could take from the bat house. Well, you know that communicating what you do matters. You know that a school isn't just what happens between faculty and students but the schools create knowledge, and that that knowledge can be shared and can can emanate and can can go further. The graphic design at the Bauhaus was not the most highly valued discipline, right. Far from it. It wasn't even in the curriculum at by my architecture was the most highly valued discipline, but grabbing design was there out of necessity. And part of the impulse to create that working print shop and death cell was knowing that they needed to print their own stuff. You know, so, you know, I love that about graphic design that it's necessary that we need it to communicate that we need it to explain who we are, and fine artists need it just as much as graphic designers do. We all need to communicate what we do. Beautiful. Thank you. Beppe Owen asks if you could share your thoughts on the Bauhaus's overlap or distinctions from the arts and crafts movement or more specifically for book design, the German private press movement Bremer, et cetera. Is it fair to say the spirit of the Bauhaus school looks forward into modernity while arts and crafts looks backwards. And I appreciate your insight. Well, there are whole books written on that. It's a huge topic. And the Bauhaus definitely came out of those reform movements, the reform of industry and so forth that arts and crafts represents. And the German work one, for example, is, you know, direct in a direct line with the Bauhaus. I don't want to speak in a scholarly way about it because there's just so much that's been written on that, but they are connected, not not this connected they're much more connected than they are separate. Susan Mantis asks, were they designing all non seraph typefaces. We actually posted an article on our blog. The letter forms designing most of the experiments in alphabets at the Bauhaus were just alphabets they weren't actually made into typefaces. But there was one typeface that the buyer designed that was a seraph. Any other answer to that question. You're the expert on that Steven I think you're forensics on Bauhaus typography. Right down to the fonts used by it and Friedel Dicker and their utopia book you know. That's pretty cool I know you have a good library. Yeah, but I to find that stuff. Yeah. That's just, it's often a misconception that they were designing typefaces there they were really experimenting with letter forms, but the typefaces that were used were the ones that were already in existence and they just did amazing things with them. For the most part, but they also use their lettering in things and you could consider those typefaces in a way. So Woodland asks, Hi Ellen to the designers of the Swiss typography movement, favor all lowercase settings for the same reasons that as buyer or is it for different reasons with fire really speaking for all the Bauhaus in that in that essay. Well first of all buyer did not invent this movement. It's one of many who espoused getting rid of capital letters and there's actually a management theory guy named, I think, Portsman, who really originated the notion of it. But yes, the Swiss designers also embrace the idea of lowercase letters as being more egalitarian and also more organic, which was very important to Max bill that typography be organic. And so those shapes were very desirable. And so, yes, the, the, the egalitarian quality of lowercase letters, I think was much better exploited by the Swiss designers later than they did at the Bauhaus. Neil Storsen asked, Can you touch on the balance of the Bauhaus idea of reducing things to their simplest form versus use of element and graphic design. Well, I think, I think the idea of reducing form is just one of the fundamental design principles explored at the Bauhaus, and I think it's important to acknowledge that people for all millennia have reduced to geometry right this is not owned by the Bauhaus it was articulated by the Bauhaus, but it is an incredible design principle, and one that has to be learned. I think we have impulse to make things more complex, and so that finding of the essence and removing what's extraneous is a, is a learning, you know whether you're a writer and learning to make a better sentence, or a designer, creating a layout. It's, it's a learning. Along with this Monica ready asked how can we take these, some of these Bauhaus principles to modern UX design. Hi Monica. Well, I mean it's the same idea of laying a field. I mean that letterhead that buyer did where the type is like points in a field, you know, like creating spaces for activity to happen. That's an interface idea. Maholi Nages score for theatrical performance is an interface idea. And so I just think that so much of what we see in these kind of mythical legendary works continue to inform what we do today and continue to have value as long as we have some kind of law that can't be broken. Right I think there's a history of the Bauhaus being seen as oppressive and creating a set of roles that are imposed on on people and that's to be avoided. I got one of the things I learned most and just experiencing this. I wasn't part of the curation process but just experiencing the exhibition and looking at the buyer exhibition is just how it was about experimentation more than rules that it was, there was all sorts of different things going on and not time to every one philosophy. Yvonne, this might be too long to answer for today but asked to explain the process of how hand drawn letters are transformed into something that can be used for printing. There might be some one that you would have multiple yeah there were multiple ways they could have done it through an engraving beginning plate that they would print from or later it could have been photographically reproduced but I'm not sure if they had that kind of technology yet. I'm not sure while making a photographic plate of type was very common logo or a headline or something. What art and design school today most embodies the philosophy and practice of the Bauhaus, can you comment on the institutional offspring of a house like home, which is a very important design school journey. That's a big one. I don't know. I mean I feel like art schools have become very corporate. But the Bauhaus wanted to be. You know the Bauhaus was trying to be a sustainable business. Do we see that kind of experimentation. I feel like a lot of art schools including where I teach we're focused on marketable skills and students want that and need that and they're paying a lot of money and you know want to work in the field. Often it doesn't feel like there's space to reinvent the world, you know, to create something radically new. You know how much time you have with this rep to get up at 15 after the hour. We have 21 more questions so we won't get to them all. How many two more scans good. So Omar asks if there any aesthetic hangovers from the Bauhaus movement movement that you notice regularly in design today. Oh dear. I don't think so I actually feel that people have in their mind that like Bauhaus typography was is better than it was. And when you look through like the Bauhaus books and Bauhaus posters and stuff there's something kind of homes fun about it. You know I think max bills generation really made it into something perfect. Right the Swiss design methodologies just so sleek and extendable and truly a system at the Bauhaus stuff is kind of raw. It's kind of messed up, you know, and I really love that about it that the imperfection and the seeking that you see in it. I think a lot of typography that we look at now and say oh that's so Bauhaus, it's really not people aren't looking closely. Yeah, absolutely that's another part of the thing I've learned from this exhibition is just how much expressionism there is in Bauhaus work and it wasn't necessarily again about, you know, following some sort of straight line set of rules. There's so many here I'm trying to pick like the best one we can close on random be random. Yeah okay. Well, this is, you know, kind of on topic for the moment but hands asks as a follow up to the Russian constructivists are there any interactions between Bauhaus and Rogchenko or stepanova. Um, Rogchenko never went to the Bauhaus he visited Europe once he went to Paris in 1925 for the art deco exhibition and installed his workers room there. And one of them never went to Europe. Of course their work was known. Why, because it was published in avant garde magazines, including you know my the Hungarian magazine there are just so many places that you could see this work. And so although they didn't have an opportunity to directly interact with designers in Germany or the Netherlands. Certainly their work was known as was tatling the great Ukrainian architect, his tower was never built. It was seen everywhere, because this plate this photograph of it was reproduced over and over again. Yeah, it's like without graphic design you have no avant garde. That is a tower existed, you know, there's a beautiful model of it but most people only ever saw the picture. That is a great way to close this what where would it be without graphic design. Ellen thank you so much for your generosity and your amazing scholarship and just making the stuff so accessible to so many people. It's really got to learn a lot from that and and I have personally to so thank you so much for this awesome event. It's been such a joy. Such a joy. Thank you. Thank you everyone and remember you will get a copy of the recording link sent to you and you'll be able to share that around as well as the chat. Thanks to you for Huwit thanks to manager for helping host this and Sarah who couldn't be with us and rest of lawyer from archive. Thank you again Ellen. Thank you. It was great fun. Thanks to Rob and Lucy Parker and everybody who made such a beautiful book and exhibition. It's been an honor to be part of it. So go check out the book everyone you will enjoy it and if you can come see us in person and see the show we will love to have you. All right. Take care. Thank you so much. Take care.