THE IMPACT OF BAUHAUS ON
ADVERTISING
HIST 140- History of Advertising
October 15, 2013
Bauhaus: Influence of Modern advertising
It is the intention of this paper to illustrate a historical timeline, with connections to the Bauhaus movement and its impacts on the pedagogy of the advertising industry. The
German word Bauhaus essentially means “House of Building”, and was given birth in 1919 in the city of Weimar, by architect Walter Gropius. The institution curriculum was established to compliment aesthetics of fine art theory with the empirical knowledge of practical applied arts (Eskilson, 229). These methods and ideologies placed by the school are often overlooked, but are the utmost important reasons for why Bauhaus is an early model and a revolutionary one of the twentieth century modern art. In advertising, the teachings of Bauhaus were an impact through the philosophy “form follows function” which is a reference to functional elements and “less is more”. This reasoning is what illuminated Bauhaus as the modern movement.
The school of art, architecture and design existed for a short period of 1919 to 1933 due to the newly elected members of the extreme right-wing National Socialist party who had shut down the school forever (Eskilson, 245). The school emerged through the influence of the old Arts and Crafts movement (work of Arbeitsrat), and Gropius’ faith in the machine aesthetic. His belief was to fill the bridging gap between craftsmen and artisans, and to bring the two practices together to create a new meaning.
“Let us create a new guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artists! Together le us desire, conceive, and create a new building of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting into one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal
References: Eskilson, J.S. (2007). Graphic design a new history. England: Yale University Press. Tschichold, J. (1995). The new typography: A handbook for modern designers. England: University of California Press. Graphic design history. (2011). Retrieved October, 12 2013, from http://www.designhistory.org/Avant_Garde_pages/BauhausType.html Murray, A. (2013). Visual.ly: Six lessons from the Bauhaus. Retrieved October, 12 2013, from 1.4 Paul Schuitema, Toledo—Berkel, 1930s. Brekel advertisement.