Modern Design Movements
Organizations and theories formed early in the twentieth century to settle how art should relate to mass production, split between the workshop and the standardized type.
Dictionary entry
- AEG Corporate Identity 1907-1914 / Style
Products, factory and printed matter all handed to one architect, so that a company looked as though a single hand had made it. The lettering, objects and buildings Behrens drew for AEG from 1907 became the prototype of corporate design.
- Wiener Werkstätte 1903–1932 / Style
The workshop founded by Hoffmann and Moser designed buildings, furniture, tableware and clothing to a single geometry and a single standard of handwork. It practiced the total work of art, treating all of daily life as one piece, inside a commercial enterprise.
- Purism 1918–1925 / Style
A movement that attacked Cubism's drift into decoration and called for a return to forms fit for the machine age. Standardized objets-types such as bottles, glasses and guitars are painted within a horizontal-vertical order and a restrained palette. Through the journal L'Esprit Nouveau it became a norm for modern architecture and graphics.
- Machine Art 1934 / Style
The name of an exhibition the Museum of Modern Art held in New York from March to April 1934. Springs, pots and pans and scientific instruments, all factory made and all utilitarian, were placed on pedestals and treated as sculpture. Philip Johnson screened the walls and ceilings of the museum's nineteenth century brownstone to hide its mouldings, so that undecorated objects could be seen against nothing.