MANILA, Philippines -Who is the German American artist and educator, whose work in Europe and the US formed the basis of some of the most influential and far reaching art programs of the 20th century?
He was born into a Roman Catholic family of craftsmen in Westphalia, Germany in 1888. Working as a teacher in his hometown, he received his first public commission, Rosa Mystica or pro nobis, a stained glass window for a church.
He studied art in Berlin, Essen, and Munich, before enrolling as a student of Johannes Itten’s basic course at the prestigious Weimar Bauhas in 1920. There, he worked primarily in stained and sandblaster glass, designing large stained glass windows for houses and buildings. He also designed furniture, household objects, and a typeface, and developed a keen eye as a photographer.
In 1925, he was the first Bauhaus student to be asked to join the faculty, and become a master there. By 1933, with pressure from the Nazis, he became one of the school’s best-known artists and teachers.
In 1933, he emigrated to the USA where he was asked to make visual arts the curriculum of the newly-established Black Mountain College in North Carolina. He remained at Black Mountain until 1949, continuing his exploration of a range of printmaking techniques, while also taking off as an abstract painter, as well as a captivating teacher and writer.
From 1950 to 1958, he was the chairman of the Department of Design at the Yale University School of Art. There, as guest teacher at art schools throughout the US and Europe, he trained a new generation of art teachers.
Meanwhile, he wrote, painted, and made prints, most famous of which is the Homage to the Square series. Consisting of hundreds of paintings and prints, the explored chromatic interactions with nested squares.
In 1959, his gold leaf mural, Two Structural Constellations, was engraved in the lobby of the Corning Glass Building in Manhattan. Two Portals, a mural of alternating glass bands in white and brown that recede into two bronze centers to create an illusion of depth, was made at the entrance of the Time and Life Building in 1961.
Other works include Manhattan, a giant abstract mural of black red, and white strips in the Pan Am Building; Growth and the Loggia Wall, a brick relief at the Rochester Institute of Technology; Gemini, a stainless steel relief for the Grand Avenue National Bank Lobby in Kansas City; and Reclining Figure, a mosaic mural for the Celanese Building in Manhattan.
He was known to meticulously list the specific manufacturer’s colors and varnishes he used on the back of his works, as if the colors catalogued components of an optical experiment. His work represents a transition between traditional European art and the new American art. It incorporates European influences from the constructivists and the Bauhaus movement, and its intensity and smallness of scale were typically European.
But his influence fell heavily on the American artists of the late ‘50s and ‘60s with his teaching and his innovative publication, The Interaction of Color. Hard-edge abstract painters drew on his use of palettes and intense colors, while op artists and conceptual artists further explored his interest in perception.
He died in New Haven, Connecticut in 1976.
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Last week’s question: Who is this Pritzker Prize winning Japanese architect who designed the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, and buildings for the 1960 Tokyo Olympics and 1970 Osaka Expositon?
Answer: Kenzo Tange
Winner: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy