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The Bauhaus years in Weimar were intensely visionary and drew inspiration from expressionism. Characterized by the utopian desire to create a new spiritual society, early Bauhaus sought a new unity of artists and craftsmen to build the future. Gropius was deeply interested in architecture’s symbolic potential and the possibility of a universal design style as an integrated aspect of society. Advanced ideas about form, color, and space were integrated into the design vocabulary when Der Blaue Reiter painters Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky joined the staff in 1920 and 1922 respectively. Klee integrated modern visual art with the work of non-Western cultures and children to create drawings and paintings that are charged with visual communication. Kandinsky’s belief in the autonomy and spiritual values of color and form had led to the courageous emancipation of his painting from the motif and from representational elements. At the Bauhaus, no distinction was made between fine ...

Aldous Huxley stated in 1928, that the machines are here to stay. He said:” Let us then exploit them to create beauty - a modern beauty, while we are about it”. Ideas from all the advanced art and design movements were explored, combined, and applied to problems of functional design, and machine production at a German design school - the Bauhaus. Twentieth century design and graphics were shaped by the work of its faculty and students, and a modern design aesthetic emerged. Belgian art nouveau architect, Henri van de Velde, who directed the Weimer arts and Crafts School, resigned his position in on the eve of the war in 1914. Thirty-one-year-old Walter Gropius was one if three possible replacement. During the war years the school was closed. By the end of the war Gropius, who had already gained an international reputation for factory designs using glass and steel in new ways, was confirmed as the new director of an institution formed by merging the applied arts-oriented Weimer Ar...

This movement was launched in the Netherlands. Painters Piet Mondrian joined its founder and guiding spirit, Theo van Doesburg. Working in an abstract geometric style , he sought universal laws of equilibrium and harmony for art, which could then be a prototype for a new social order. Mondrian’s paintings are the wellspring from which De Stijl’s philosophy and visual forms developed. He rid his art of all representative elements and moved cubism toward a pure, geometric abstraction. M.H.J. Schoenmakers, who decisively influenced Mondrian’s thinking, defined the horizontal and the vertical as the two fundamental opposites shaping our world, and called yellow, blue and red the three principal colors. Mondrian began to paint purely abstract paintings composed of horizontal and vertical lines. This was the evolution of abstraction towards its ultimate goal - the expression of pure reality. He believed that true reality in visual art “is attained through dynamic movement in equilibriu...