Journal 8 - Joseph Albers

Josef Albers was born in Germany in 1888. He was an artist and educator in both Germany and the United States. He taught at the Bauhaus in Dessau until it was closed under Nazi pressure. Then he emigrated to the United States. In 1950 Albers became a professor at Yale where he headed the department of design.

Albers was accomplished in different fields including be known as a designer, photographer, typographer, printmaker, and poet. However, he is most known for his work as an abstract painter and theorist. He painted hundreds of paintings in his series Homage to the Square between 1950 and 1976. In this series he painted chromatic interactions with nested squares. He often recorded the colors of paint used on the back of the piece.

Albers is also known for his work as a color theorist. In 1963, he published the book Interaction of Color. This book presents his theory that colors are governed by an internal and deceptive logic.

Resources:

Megg’s History of Graphic Design

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Albers

http://www.albersfoundation.org/

Journal 7 - Chapter 17: The Modern Movement in America

From this week’s reading I became interested in the design work supported by Walter P. Paepcke and the Container Corporation of America (CCA). After World War II, the CCA commissioned a series of paintings by artists from each of the then forty-eight states. These paintings advanced the Bauhaus ideal: the union of art with life.

When I saw the painting for Nevada in the book, I wanted to research these paintings further and see if there was an image for California. The image for California, from the United States Series, was created by Charles Howard in 1946. It is housed in the Smithsonian collection.

Charles Howard (1899-1978) was born in Montclair New Jersey and died in Bagni di Lucca, Italy. He was born into a family of architects, painters, and sculptors. He introduced the style of European surrealism and biomorphic expression to the American art world. Howard was a journalism graduate at Berkeley. Howard moved to Paris to pursue his writing, but was encouraged to take up painting. He returned to New York and began painting. He married a British painter, Madge Knight. They lived in New York, London, the Bay Area, Suffolk, England, and retired to Bagni di Lucca, Italy.

Resources:

Meggs’ History of Graphic Design

http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=10821

http://www.caldwellgallery.com/bios/howard_biography.html

Journal 6 Chapter 13

I’m not a huge fan of modern art, but one movement that I do enjoy is Surrealism. I find the paintings and drawings of Salvador Dali very interesting, humorous, and eccentric. Dali’s art appears as dreamlike sequences and the subconscious. Probably his most famous painting is the Persistence of Memory.

This is well known for the soft watches that are an unconscious symbol of the relativity of space and time. The watches are a theme that Dali uses again in later work.

When I was a student in college I did a summer study abroad in Spain. I had the opportunity to travel by train from Barcelona to Figueres in the Catalonia region of Spain. Figueres is the birthplace of Dali, and on the train ride to that town you get to observe the landscape of that region, which Dali paints in his paintings.

In Figueres there is a fabulous museum and theater dedicated to Dali. Those are eggs on top of the building. The museum is eccentric in true Dali style. It houses the biggest collection of his work.

Sources: Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, Wikipedia, http://www.salvador-dali.org/en_index/

Journal 5 - Chapters 11 and 12

The Moulin Rouge is a dance hall in Paris, which is featured in Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s 1891 poster “Moulin Rouge: La Goulue.” It is a lithograph. This poster started Toulouse-Lautrec’s poster career and made him famous overnight.

La Goulue is the can-can dancer who shows her petticoats. The figure in the front of the poster is the "boneless" acrobat (because he is very flexible) Valentin le Désossé. The audience appears in silhouettes in order to focus attention on the performers. The style of silhouettes is borrowed from the Japanese, which was popular at the time.

The Moulin Rouge opened on the boulevard de Clichy in 1889, in the Montmartre district of Paris. Moulin Rouge is French for red windmill, which is featured in front of the club. The Moulin Rouge is still open today and provides entertainment for tourists from all over the world.

There are two movies named Moulin Rouge from 1952 and 2001. The 2001 Moulin Rouge movie starring Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor is one of my favorite films. I love the musical numbers and the spirit of love and creativity.

Sources: Meek’s History of Graphic Design, http://metmuseum.org, and Wikipedia.

Journal 4

In general, the quality of book design and production declined in the nineteenth century. One notable exception is the books published by William Pickering. His book of Oliver Byrne’s The Elements of Euclid, 1847, is significant in book design. He printed in bright primary colors using wood blocks. In these geometry lessons, color was used to identify lines, shapes, and forms.

While looking at the design’s in Pickering’s book, they immediately reminded me of the work of the artist Piet Mondrian. Mondrian was a Dutch artist who moved to New York in 1940. His late works use bright colors and a grid-like patterns that imitate the fast pace of city streets in New York. Below is Mondrian’s painting Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow. 

Sources: Wikipedia, pietmondrian.com