Catherine Irwin
Seminar in Design
The Bauhaus exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art was an extremely varied one which featured works that employed many different types of medias, styles, and designs. The work displayed in the Bauhaus show were colorful and diverse, and included furniture, paintings, architecture, ceramics, photography, graphic design and more. The Bauhaus school’s broad range of mediums and focus seems to have lead the students to create works which were new, diverse, and set trends for the time in their respective fields. The complete diversity of the pieces from the Bauhaus exhibit causes them to conflict with many of William Morris’s ideals. The bright colors of many of the Bauhaus pieces certainly went against Morris’s discussed black and white color preference (“...the white should be white and the black black.”). Morris’s personal rules for book-making are very regimented, and he seems to have a particular formula that books all must follow. The works produced by the students and teachers of the Bauhaus, however, did not seem to follow rules or fit into a specific, pre-determined mold.
Amongst the works in the Bauhaus show were several font designs. These designs were of type which was curved and rounded, and the letters were very different and striking. These fonts, however, would almost certainly not be used by William Morris in one of his books. Though the fonts weren’t particularly difficult to read at a large size and in small sections, they would definitely not be easy on the eye when reading page after page of type. This font is, however, designed by someone Morris would approve of. In The Ideal Book, Morris explains this; “To be short, the letters should be designed by an artist, and not an engineer.” Also, these fonts were designed with one uniform, solid width. This is an aspect that Morris would certainly agree with, unlike the “…sweltering hideousness of the Bodoni letter, the most illegible type that was ever cut, with its preposterous thicks and thins…”
Also following Morris’s preferences for the use and design of letters and type were the graphic design pieces of the Bauhaus exhibit. Although it is a poster and not a book, Joist Schmidt’s poster design for the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition is one example of one of these pieces. Fritz Schliefer’s poster for the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition also followed suit and used text cleanly, in black and white. The twenty postcards from the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition were also pieces which used text in a way which was clean, legible, and definitely followed Morris’s guidelines for text.
Though William Morris’s The Ideal Book is discussing rules and practices which pertain to book-making and book design, I can imagine that he would approve of the cleanly designed furniture produced by Bauhaus students. Pieces such as Marcel Bauer’s “Chair” recall the design regiments of Morris. The chair’s black and metal color palette fall back into Morris’s desire for “black black” in books, and the clean lines and no unnecessary space used for the chair would certainly appeal to Morris as well.
