Week 5

Bauhaus:

Syllabus of the Weimar Bauhaus (English version)
The divergent trajectories students might follow at the Bauhaus were represented together in the curricular diagram. The singularity of the circle suggests the holistic nature of a Bauhaus education, in which individual students representing diverse disciplinary backgrounds were to come together in pursuit of a shared mission to reform art, design, and society.

I’ve always had a keen interest in the Bauhaus movement, and the fundamentals behind the design process. I have started looking at Paul Klee, who explored colour theory and the marriage of colour in design.

Paul Klee’s sketchbook – these sketches are very visually exciting. There is a clear thought process that Klee developed when planning a piece of artwork. The faint pencil lines show a mathematical process, almost like a grid which has been used as a baseline for the colourful sketches. This artwork for me personally highlights how beneficial having a structured, methodical approach to work can be – Klee clearly maps out his geometric artworks beforehand.

Klee’s illustrations really interest me as they are very geometric. Influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism, he was also a student of orientalism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually mastered colour theory, and wrote extensively about it.

“As part of the early 20th-century avant-garde, Klee formulated a personal abstract pictorial language. His vocabulary, which oscillates freely between the figurative and the nonrepresentational, communicates through a unique symbology that is more expressive than descriptive.” Source

Klee’s work is noticeably colourful. So much so that the artwork is making me think about the role that colour has in art and design, and how colour can communicate persuasively and emotionally.

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