Flang Metro Polis

Fritz Lang's Metropolis is a film produced in 1927 for the Universum Film AG. The film is reputed to be the most expensive silent film ever produced. It is also considered to be the crown jewel of Lang's extensive film career spanning over 60 years. The film is generally considered expressionist cinema but with the attention to detail and the sheer beauty it uses to represent the machinery that reigns terror in the film it could also be considered constructivist in nature. The inherent mistrust of the machinery (and also women) that is found in German Expressionism sprouted from the horrible carnage produced from WWI. It also came from the rise of industrialization that many feared would encumber jobs of the working class. If you add to this the rise of The Femme Fatale in late 19'th century art and you have a perfect recipe for the film's political leanings. The film has been considered to be only partially complete after many scenes were cut from it due to it's subversive nature. In 2008 a version of the movie was found that is thirty minutes longer than any known copy that was thought to have existed. Found in Argentina and restored in Germany it is now available in 2010 to the common viewer so they can take in Fritz Lang's original vision. The general feel of the film as it tackles the struggle between the working class and the ruling bourgeoisie lends a tense feel to the film. The cold and demonic characterization of the machinery is typical of the mistrust of technology but the beautiful manner in which it was executed is a great example of the onset of modernism.

Vignelli

Massimo Vignelli is an Italian designer from Milan. He is probably best known for his 1972 re-design of the New York subway map. Although the reinvigorated design was only used for 7 years it had a lasting effect on how good design can reorganize visuals and incorporate simplicity into our life in a manner that perpetuates ocular pleasure. Vignelli is a designer who is still working today. He runs the Vignelli Associates design firm in New York City with his wife Lella. The couple have perpetuated design with a modernist leaning from there since 1971. Before that Vignelli started the New York branch of Unimark international which was a standard in the ad industry for many years and came up with powerful logos such as the American Airlines logo. His extensive work in the fields of furniture design and even architecture have yielded his famous remark " If you can design one thing you can design anything." This has held true across the years as the Vignellis have dipped their hands into countless forms of design. One such example of this is the Stendig calendar which Massimo produced in 1966. The calendar starts on Monday (in keeping with European tradition) and is characterized by it's monochromatic typefaces which
alternate from black to white as the months change. The large bolded font is characteristic of Vignelli's love of typography and is still in use all these years later. Vignelli changed the paradigms of modern design in America if for other reason than he took something as widely used as public transit and conformed it to the laws of good design by ridding the world of unnecessary clutter with it's strict adherence to the literal. I think a strong correlation can be drawn between Massimo and Otto Neurath

Jugend Magazine

Jugend Magazine

Jugend was a munich based magazine that got its start in 1896 form the philosopher/artist George Hirth. The name comes from a term meaning youth and was taken from a magazine called "Die Jugend". The magazine held two distinct chapters. Before 1900 the style of the publication was laced with floral patterns and a strong influence from Japanese prints. After 1900 there was a strong leaning towards a more abstract form of artwork. The strong strokes and stringy lines were what gave birth to art nouveau in the early 1900's The magazine had a long run of publishing that lasted until the year 1914. The world wars and the extreme devastation they caused in Germany were to blame for the magazine's eventual demise. The artwork and the contributing artists that Jugend helped foster were capacious. Artists such as the overtly sensual Aubrey Beardsley had work in the periodical.The ever popular Gustav Klimt,who painted such pieces as the kiss and The Beethoven Frieze used the publication as a forum for his secession from the traditional Vienna Künstlerhaus which was the traditional art school of the time. The aspect of Jugend magazine that set it apart from other publications of the time was that it employed a high level of graphic design and also yielded four stronf fonts in the jugend style, or "Jugendstil". Those four fonts were Jugend, Campobello,Munich, and Phaeton. The integration of type style into the artwork was not necessarily a trait only used by Jugend but the innovative WAYS in which they incorporated the two is what made it a milestone in the area of graphic Design as well as art and Art Nouveau in general.

Marianne Brandt

Marianne Brandt

Marianne Brandt was a German expressionist painter and sculptor who studied at the Grand-ducal College of Fine Arts in Weimar before becoming a student at the Weimar Bauhaus in 1924. She became head of the metal workshop in the year 1929 after being an understudy to Laszlo Maholy-Nagy. Brandt Brandt produced many pieces during her years a the Bauhaus including her famous Teapot and Sieve of 1924. Moholy-Nagy recognized her aptitude early on and fostered her talent through her studies. The metal workshop was also one of the few branches of the school which aided the financial income by producing various incorporated designs to such companies as the lighting firm of Körting & Mathiesen. Despite hard work and the general free-spirited nature of the school Brandt faced a large amount of adversity in the form of sexism among the students who thought little of women in an industrial setting. When you couple that with the general contempt shown to the school by the reigning political regimes you can see the difficulty she encountered to make her mark on the art world that we today take for granted ( i.e. the prevalence of modernism in good design.) After leaving the Bauhaus in 1929 she worked for a short period at Walter Gropius' architectural firm in Berlin designing furniture and working on interior design. She also worked at Ruppelwerke Metalware Factory in Gotha as the head of the design department until 1932. The Nazi party stifled much of her work until the end of WWII and then in 1949 she was provided an opportunity of a teaching position at the Institut für angewandte Kunst in East Berlin. She taught there from 1951-1954 and reputedly went back to her original love of painting after abandoning it years before for the allure of sculpture and design. In later years much of her work in photomontage was hailed for it's provocative accounts of Germany and the Bauhaus.