Page 61 - Studio International - September 1968
P. 61
appeared. Beginning with the first Bauhaus book of
1923, an extended catalogue of Bauhaus achievement
coincident with the Exhibition, the series at last put
Bauhaus principles into typographical practice that
both reflected and advanced the 'hard' form and Con-
structivist principles.
The titles included Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook, the
essays From Material to Architecture, and Painters,
Photography and Film by Moholy-Nagy, Kandinsky's
Point and Line, Gropius' International Architecture,
and also works by non-Bauhaus staff members, Albert
Gleizes on Cubism, Oud on Dutch Architecture, and
others by De Stijl members, Mondrian and Van
Doesburg.
Within their severe framework of heavy rules and
justified blocks of letterpress the Bauhaus books
combine a strong family likeness, within which close
inspection discloses to be a wide variety of type faces.
These are not all chaste sans serifs either, but include
rogue faces of both the nineteenth century and the
twenties : blobby, coarse variations of old faces, Bodoni
letters fattened out of all recognition, and even the
despised German 'gothic' of everyday life.
The book was no longer the neutral medium for the
message between its covers, but the message itself, a
poster-book. The careful design of each page, the
underlining of the statements by a psychological choice
of the mental 'sound' of the typeface lent itself well to
Advertisement by Herbert Bayer for the the aphoristic and polemic style of writing so character-
first 8 Bauhaus books istic of the time and of the world of art and architecture.
