painting

Bauhaus color

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Here are some hard-to-find color renderings by Bauhaus students (Herbert Bayer, Farkas Molnár, Joost Schmidt, Peter Keler), with text by Tadeusz Peiper.
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Herbert Bayer, Design for kiosk and display boards, 1924, Gouache, ink, pencil, and cut-and-pasted print elements on paper, 57.7 x 48.4 cm

At the Bauhaus

Tadeusz Peiper
(1927)

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Bauhaus, the one in Dessau. So, off to Dessau. Three hours by passenger train from Berlin. We’re already there by 5 p.m. Even the feet on the stairs in the hallway of the station make it clear we’re in the provinces. But not in the Prussian provinces. Prussian towns differ only in the size of their population, not in their essence. There is almost no trace of Berlin left here. We are in the capital of the duchy of Anhalt. Small one- and two-story houses, almost like those in the Szweska district of Cracow or in the Elektoralna district in Warsaw. Around the city tall red smokestacks shoot up. We are in one of central Germany’s coal-mining centers.

A café. Frankfurters. Malevich has three cups of tea. Call Kandinsky, not home. Stop in front of every lighted store window. Sighs of longing from Malevich at overcoats, tablecloths, and suitcases. We pretend to purchase a bed. Call Kandinsky, still not home. Back into the street. Damned rain.

No time to lose. Call Gropius, the director of the Bauhaus. We go into a cafe. I call. He’s home! He is very pleased, offers us to let us spend the night at his home, drives up to the cafe in the director’s car. A noble face, veiled in fatigue, hardened by truth.

We are at his place. Entry hall. A wall that consists of a thin, sandy cloth curtain behind which stands — as we will see the following day — the dining room, which is directly connected to the kitchen, with a sliding window between the two. Continue reading →

PROUN

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The “way station” between
painting and architecture

Untitled.
Image: El Lissitzky,
PROUN 1-C (1919)
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From “Theses on the PROUN: From painting to architecture” (1920)

Not world-illusion
but world-reality

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1. We have named PROUN a station on the path to the construction of the new form. […] From being a simple depicter the artist becomes a creator (builder) of forms for a new world — the world of objectivity. This does not mean the creation of a rivalry with the engineer. Art has not yet crossed paths with science.

2. PROUN is understood as the creative construction of form (based on the mastery of space) assisted by economic construction of the applied material. The goal of PROUN is progressive movement on the way to concrete creation, and not the substantiation, explanation, or promotion of life.

The path of the PROUN does not lie within the narrowly limited, fragmented, and isolated scientific disciplines — the builder consolidates them all together in his own experimental investigation.

The path of the PROUN is not the incoherent approach of separate scientific disciplines, theories, and systems, but is rather the straightforward path of learned influence over reality. […]

El Lissitzky, PROUN retrospective (1923)
El Lissitzky, PROUN Hannover 6 (1920)
El Lissitzky, Study for PROUN 4-B (1920)
El Lissitzky, PROUN Hannover 7 (1920)
El Lissitzky, PROUN 1-C (1919)
El Lissitzky, PROUN The Bridge (1920)
El Lissitzky, PROUN Hannover 2 (1920)
El Lissitzky, PROUN Hannover 3 (1920)
El Lissitzky, PROUN Hannover 4 (1919)
El Lissitzky, PROUN 5-A (1919)

Continue reading →

Le Corbusier painting in the nude at Eileen Gray’s Villa E-1027

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Plus, the story behind
his nasty leg scar

Untitled.
Image: Le Corbusier painting a fresco in the nude
at Eileen Gray’s Villa E-1027 (Summer 1939)
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Shirtless Corbu relaxing at Villa E-1027

Shirtless Corbu relaxing at Villa E-1027

I didn’t know about this until just now.Le Corbusier apparently got the scar while swimming in Saint-Tropez bay in 1938. He’d been staying at the architect Eileen Gray’s Villa E-1027. He got trapped under a yacht’s propeller-blades as it passed over him. As he lated recounted the incident in a letter to his mother, in his characteristically clinical tone:

The motor going at 200 horsepower — a good clip.

Le Corbusier in Saint-Tropez bay (1938)

Le Corbusier in Saint-Tropez bay (1938)

Needless to say, his right leg got terribly mangled. Apparently he remained remarkably calm, however, even while losing a ton of blood. From that same letter:

After the first turn of the blades, I was thrown out of the circuit and seemed not to have been hurt. I reached the surface, and breathed air. I hadn’t swallowed a drop of water. I saw the boat gliding slowly away. I shouted: “Hey, wait a second, you went right over me, there may be some damage!” Quite automatically my hand went to my right thigh, my arm fitting nicely inside. I looked down: a big area of blood-red water, and half my thigh floating like a ray (the fish!), attached by a narrow strip of flesh: “Throw me a buoy, I’m badly hurt.”

The yacht headed toward me, throwing me a sort of rope knot too big to be held in one hand. The side of the yacht was too high for anyone to help me. “Throw a lifesaver.” It comes, and I sit inside it. And here are some fishermen coming into port; their boat is low, they hold out their hands, and I give them my left hand, because I’m holding my thigh together with my right; we reach the place I started from, on the breakwater; I get up on the jetty; a kind driver appears out of nowhere and helps me sit down beside him. The fisherman gets in the backseat. Hospital. They put me on the table and begin sewing me together. This lasts from six to midnight, in two sessions.

Le Corbusier and his wife along with Romanian architectural critic Jean Badovici at Villa E-1027, photographed by the Irish modernist Eileen Gray

Le Corbusier & wife w/ Romanian architecture critic Jean Badovici at Villa E-1027, photographed by Irish modernist Eileen Gray

After recovering, Le Corbusier set about making some “alterations” to Gray’s design at Villa E-1027. Gray was none too happy about the liberties he took with her visual and conceptual schematization of the villa. You can read more about it here.