During the twentieth century, between the First and Second World Wars, a myriad of new movements in art and design began to emerge. A crucial movement was the Bauhaus, a German school of art, which played a pivotal role in modern design. Founded by Walter Gropius in 1919, Bauhaus encompassed a variety of art forms. Gropius sought to create Gesamtkunstwerk (‘comprehensive artwork’) by unifying various art forms–from fine art to architecture, from graphics to interior design. Nowadays, Bauhaus design continues to influence contemporary artists and designers in fields such as graphic design.

The Basic Curriculum

Students at the Bauhaus took a six-month preliminary course that involved painting and elementary experiments with form, before graduating to three years of workshop training by two masters: one artist, one craftsman. They studied architecture in theory and in practice, working on the actual construction of buildings. The creative scope of the curriculum attracted an extraordinary galaxy of teaching staff. Among the stars were Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Schlemmer, the painter and mystic Johannes Itten, László Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers and Marcel Breuer. Bauhaus students were in day-to-day contact with some of the most important practicing artists and designers of the time.

Typography is a tool of communication. It must be communication in its most intense form.

— László Moholy-Nagy.

The Bauhaus set forth elementary principles of typographic communication:

1. Typography is shaped by functional requirements.
2. The aim of typographic layout is communication (for which it is the graphic medium). Communication must appear in the shortest, simplest, most penetrating form.
3. For typography to serve social ends, its ingredients need internal organization – (ordered content) as well as external organization (the typographic material properly related).

The Black Mountain College

Black Mountain College (BMC) was a private liberal arts college in Black Mountain, North Carolina. It was founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier, and several others. In 1933, the Nazi Party shut down the Bauhaus in Germany, a similarly progressive arts-based educational institution. Many of the school’s faculty left Europe for the US, and a number of them settled at Black Mountain, most notably Josef Albers, who was selected to run the art program, and his wife Anni Albers, who taught weaving and textile design.