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BEaux Art
BEaux Art
It was
popular from 1880-1930. This lesson will focus on the definition, characteristics, and style of the
Beaux-Arts period.
Beaux-Arts Architecture
More than any other style (except perhaps the Chateauesque), the
Beaux Arts expressed the taste and values of America's industrial
barons at the turn of the century. In those pre-income tax days, great
fortunes were proudly displayed in increasingly ornate and expensive
houses.
The Bauhaus was arguably the single most influential modernist art school of the 20 th century. Its
approach to teaching, and to the relationship between art, society, and technology, had a major
impact both in Europe and in the United States long after its closure under Nazi pressure in 1933.
The Bauhaus was influenced by 19th and early-20th-century artistic schools such as the Arts and
Crafts movement, as well as Art Nouveau and its related styles, including
the Jugendstil and Vienna Secession. All of these movements sought to level the distinction
between the fine and applied arts, and to reunite creativity and manufacturing; their legacy was
reflected in the romantic medievalism of the Bauhaus ethos during its early years, when it
fashioned itself as a kind of craftsmen's guild. But by the mid-1920s this vision had given way to a
stress on uniting art and industrial design, and it was this which underpinned the Bauhaus's most
original and important achievements. The school is also renowned for its extraordinary faculty, who
subsequently led the development of modern art - and modern thought - throughout Europe and
the United States.
Key Ideas
The origins of the Bauhaus lie in the late 19thcentury, in anxieties about the soullessness of modern
manufacturing, and fears about art's loss of social relevance. The Bauhaus aimed reunite fine art
and functional design, creating practical objects with the soul of artworks.
Although the Bauhaus abandoned many aspects of traditional fine-arts education, it was deeply
concerned with intellectual and theoretical approaches to its subject. Various aspects of artistic
and design pedagogy were fused, and the hierarchy of the arts which had stood in place during
the Renaissance was levelled out: the practical crafts - architecture and interior design, textiles
and woodwork - were placed on a par with fine arts such as sculpture and painting.
Given the equal stress it placed on fine art and functional craft, it is no surprise that many of the
Bauhaus's most influential and lasting achievements were in fields other than painting and
sculpture. The furniture and utensil designs of Marcel Breuer, Marianne Brandt, and others paved
the way for the stylish minimalism of the 1950s-60s, while architects such as Walter
Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe were acknowledged as the forerunners of the similarly
slick International Style that is so important in architecture to this day.
The stress on experiment and problem-solving which characterized the Bauhaus's approach to
teaching has proved to be enormously influential on contemporary art education. It has led to the
rethinking of the "fine arts" as the "visual arts", and to a reconceptualization of the artistic process
as more akin to a research science than to a humanities subject such as literature or history.
How to Recognize the Influence of Bauhaus Style?
Silka P
The Bauhaus school was the most influential art school of the 20th century, one
whose approach to teaching, and understanding art’s relationship to society and
technology, had a major impact both in Europe and the United States long after it
closed. The Bauhaus style of looking at art and seeking new developments is seen to
lay in the 19th century and in the anxieties about the soullessness of manufacturing
and its products, and in fears about arts’ loss of purpose in society. The Bauhaus, a
German word meaning ‘ house of building ‘, founded in 1919 in Weimer, Germany, by
the architect Walter Gropius, aimed to merge the two schools of Fine Arts
and Applied Arts in perfect harmony, and to reconcile the art and craft while
producing the new aesthetics that we now know as design. Even though the Bauhaus
abandoned much of the old academic tradition of fine art education, it emphasized
intellectual and theoretical pursuits, seeing the medieval crafts guild as an important
method of teaching as well. Viewing the school first and foremost as an artistic
community, it was bound by the idea of creating a total work of art, Gesamtkunstwerk,
blurring the hierarchy of Fine Arts and Arts and Crafts Movement.
Curiculum Wheel of the Bauhaus School. Image via cramertolboe.com
The original and the influential curriculum was central to the school’s operation, and it
was described by Gropius in the manner of a wheel diagram. The outer rings described
the preliminary courses focused on the practical formal analysis, in particular on
the contrasting properties of forms, color, and materials. The middle rings
represent the research on the problems related to form, emphasizing the practical and
technical workshops. These programs offered the best-known element of the Bauhaus
style, and that is functionality through the simplified,geometrical forms, minimal
embellishment, that let the new designs be reproduced with ease. At the center of
the curriculum were classes that specialized in the practicality through technological
reproduction, with the aim on craft and workmanship that was lost in technological
manufacturing.