EVERYDAY ART QUARTERLY No. 3
A Guide To Well Designed Products
Hilde Reiss [Editor]
Hilde Reiss [Editor]: EVERYDAY ART QUARTERLY [A Guide To Well Designed Products]. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, Winter/Spring 1946 - 1947, Number 3. Original edition. Slim quarto. Stapled photo illustrated thick wrappers. 16 pp. 53 black and white images. Articles and advertisements. A very influential publication, quite uncommon. White wrappers rubbed and vertically creased throughout [from mailing?]. A nearly very good copy.
8.5 x 11 softcover magazine with 16 pages and 53 black and white images. A magnificent snapshot of the blossoming modern movement after World War II, and a desirable vintage publication in terms of form and content: high quality printing and clean, functional design and typography and excellent photographic reproduction.
- L. Moholy-Nagy And The Institute Of Design. 3 pages and 27 photographs of work by Moholy and his students at the New Bauhaus/ Institute Of Design. Includes samples of student work in furniture, textiles, industrial design, sculpture, product design, jewelry and more.
- Useful Gifts For The Home. 6 pages and 20 photographs. Includes work from Raymor, Emerson, Haskelite, Tepping, Telechron, Ficks-Reed, Dan Cooper, Borgfeldt, Blenko, Kosta, Cambridge Glass, Viking, etc.
- Product Review: Barwa Chair By Bartolucci-Waldheim; Grasshopper Chair by Eero Saarinen for Knoll Associates; Letter Tray by Florence Knoll for Knoll Associates; Hangers from the Stratohanger [!] Company.
- Everyday Art in the Magazines: The Usual Suspects
- Everyday Art on Exhibition
- Books: Review of Elizabeth Mock, Robert C. Osborn (illustrator): IF YOU WANT TO BUILD A HOUSE. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1946. “Modern architecture isn't just another imitative style. It is an attitude towards life, an approach which starts with living people and their needs, physical and emotional, and tries to meet them as directly as possible, with the best procurable means. Otherwise there are no rules. The results will be as various as the range of materials offered, the human problems posed, and the creative talent employed in solving them . . . The most delicate part of your job as client will be the selection of an architect.”
- Addresses: Designers, Manufacturers and Retailers
- Advertisements from Chas. A. Anderson & Co.; Northwestern National Banks; Thiss; H. G. Knoll Associates; Home Furniture Company; Alex Anderson & Son; The Book Corner At The Walker Art Center; Northern States Power Company; and Dunbar [For Modern].
Everyday Art Quarterly was published by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis starting in 1946. The editorial focus aimed to bring modern design to the masses through thoughtful examination of household objects and their designers. Everyday Art Quarterly was a vocal proponent of the Good Design movement (as represented by MoMA and Chicago's Merchandise Mart) and spotlighted the best in industrial and handcrafted design. When the magazine became Design Quarterly in 1954, the editors assumed a more international flair in their selection of material to spotlight.
László Moholy-Nagy [Hungarian, 1895 – 1946] was a born teacher, convinced that everyone had talent. In 1923, he joined the staff of the Bauhaus, which had been founded by Walter Gropius at Weimar four years before. Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger and Schlemmer were already teaching there. He was brought in at a time when the school was undergoing a decisive change of policy, shedding its original emphasis on handcraft. The driving force was now "the unity of art and technology.” Moholy-Nagy was entrusted with teaching the preliminary course in principles of form, materials and construction - the basis of the Bauhaus's educational program. He shared teaching duties with the painter Josef Albers, whose career was to develop in parallel with his.
The hyper-energetic Moholy-Nagy also ran the metal workshop at the Bauhaus in Weimar and later in the purpose-designed buildings at Dessau. The metal shop was the most successful of departments at the Bauhaus in fulfilling Gropius's vision of art for mass production, redefining the role of the artist to embrace that of designer as we have now come to understand the term. The workshop experimented with glass and Plexiglas as well as metal in developing the range of lighting that has almost come to define the Bauhaus. The lamps were produced in small production runs, and some were taken up by outside factories. The royalties made a welcome contribution to the school's always precarious finances.
Although always a painter and designer, Moholy-Nagy became a key figure in photography in Germany in the 1920's. In 1928 Moholy-Nagy left the Bauhaus and traveled to Amsterdam and London. His teachings and publications of photographic experimentations were crucial to the international development of the New Vision.
In 1937 former Bauhaus Master László Moholy-Nagy accepted the invitation of a group of Midwest business leaders to set up an Industrial Design school in Chicago. The New Bauhaus opened in the Fall of 1937 financed by the Association of Arts and Industries as a recreation of the Bauhaus curriculum with its workshops and holistic vision in the United States.
Moholy-Nagy drew on several émigrés affiliated with the former Bauhaus to fill the ranks of the faculty, including György Kepes and Marli Ehrman. The school struggled with financial issues and insufficient enrollment and survived only with the aid from grants of the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations as well as from donations from numerous Chicago businesses. The New Bauhaus was renamed the Institute of Design in 1944 and the school finally merged with the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in 1949.
In Chicago Moholy aimed at liberating the creative potential of his students through disciplined experimentation with materials, techniques, and forms. The focus on natural and human sciences was increased, and photography grew to play a more prominent role at the school in Chicago than it had done in Germany. Training in mechanical techniques was more sophisticated than it had been in Germany. Emerging from the basic course, various workshops were installed, such as "light, photography, film, publicity", "textile, weaving, fashion", "wood, metal, plastics", "color, painting, decorating" and "architecture". The most important achievement at the Chicago Bauhaus was probably in photography, under the guidance of teachers such as György Kepes, Nathan Lerner, Arthur Siegel or Harry Callahan.
Moholy-Nagy served as Director of the New Bauhaus in its various permutations until his death in 1946.