Page 60 - Studio International - September 1968

Between
1923-1931
14 Bauhaus
books
actually
appeared out
of an intended
list of 50

hand-made quality apparently contradicting all that `Typography as a means of communication .. . must be clear
the Bauhaus stood for. in its most vivid form. Clarity must be especially
It was, in fact, the cult and encouragement of personal stressed, for clarity is the essence of modern printing
eccentricity to an extreme that led to differences be- in contrast to ancient picture writing.
tween Gropius and Itten that finally resulted in Itten Therefore, first of all: absolute clarity in all typographical
leaving. This may sound paradoxical when remembering work. Communication ought not to labour under
that Itten was responsible for the highly analytical preconceived aesthetic notions. Letters should never be
and disciplined Vorkurs. But Gropius firmly believed squeezed into an arbitrary shape—like a square.
that the 'anonymous' machine style could only be based A new typographic language must be created, com-
on a complete self-awareness and ultimately that the bining elasticity, variety and a fresh approach to the
designers' personality must control the machine as his materials of printing, a language whose logic depends
servant. The right balance was struck in the work and on the appropriate application of the process of printing.'
teaching of Klee, whose 'survival' at the Bauhaus is ( Bibliog. No. 8.)
something of a mystery if one imagines the school to be
the centre of a mechanistic rather than machine-based Moholy-Nagy put a stop to the output of chaotic printed
design education. ephemera issuing from the printing shop, and the
In 1921 Theo van Doesburg, the philosopher of the graphic design material for the 1923 Bauhaus
Dutch De Stijl group which rejected anything outside Exhibition was unified into a strong constructivist
its own rectilinear and rational purity, visited the framework. In particular Herbert Bayer, who had been
Bauhaus and formed a De Stijl 'cell' in Weimar. Although a student in the mural decoration workshop, transferred
he approved of the Bauhaus aims—in theory they were to graphic design full time, eventually becoming a
identical with those of De Stijl—he was apparently master. The occasion of the Bauhaus Exhibition saw
shocked by much of what he saw and said so. It is no the first official Bauhaus publication. The Bauhaus
coincidence that the Bauhaus 'seal' designed by Oskar Verlag was specially founded for this purpose, but it
Schlemmer and showing strong De Stijl influence dates soon became clear that it was more practical to hand
from this visit. over book production on this scale to an outside press,
In 1923 Itten left the Bauhaus and was replaced by and the Bauhaus Verlag was merged into the Albert
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Moholy took over the Bauhaus Langen Verlag of Munich.
printing and typography, clearly expressing his inten- The Bauhaus book series was to have been of fifty
tion in a manifesto : titles ; in fact, between 1923 and 1931 fourteen actually