PÄDAGOGISCHES SKIZZENBUCH
Bauhausbücher 2
Paul Klee
Walter Gropius and L. Moholy-Nagy [Series Editors]
Paul Klee, Walter Gropius and L. Moholy-Nagy [Series Editors]: PÄDAGOGISCHES SKIZZENBUCH. Munich: Albert Langen Verlag, 1925 [Bauhausbücher 2]. First edition. Octavo. Text in German. Original decorated wrappers over plain card boards. 51 pp. Illustrated with black and white drawings and elaborate typographic design throughout by Moholy-Nagy. Front wrapper panel neatly separated at spine juncture, with small triangular chip to upper corner. Light wear to edges and spine heel lightly rounded. A superior copy of a rare Bauhaus document from Paul Klee, here in an interesting collaboration with his colleague, Moholy-Nagy, responsible for the arresting dustjacket and book typography. A very good copy.
The 1925 first edition is frequently misattributed as a second printing because of the colophon reference to 1924 date and a 1925 Publishers copyright. “Dieses buch wurde im Sommer 1924 zusammengestellt. Technische Schwierigkeiten verhinderten das rechtzeitige Erscheinen. / Das Personengremium des bisherigen Staatlichen Bauhauses hat seine Tätigkeit in Weimar abgeschlossen und setzt sie unter dem Namen: Das bauhaus in Dessau (Anhalt) fort.” This book was compiled in the Summer of 1924. Technical difficulties prevented the timely appearance. / The staff of the former state school Bauhaus has completed its activity in Weimar and continues it under the name: Das Bauhaus in Dessau. The second edition of Bauhausbücher 2 was published in 1928 [Wingler p. 628].
7.25 x 9 softcover book with 51 pages of illustrated text designed by Moholy-Nagy. The original cover design and interior typography by László Moholy-Nagy serves as a valuable reminder of the graphic design pioneered at the Bauhaus by Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer. The layout of the pages designed by Moholy-Nagy in 1925 -- bold sans-serif captions floating in white space; compositions composed of arrows, dots and heavy ruled lines -- is much more like a movie storyboard or a musical score.
“. . . typography is an instrument of communication. It has to be clear communication in the most penetrating form. Clarity must be particularly emphasized since this is the essence of our writing as compared with pictorial communication of ages ago. Our intellectual approach to the world is individually precise in contrast to the former individually and later collectively amorphous. Foremost, therefore: absolute clarity in all typographical works. Legibility—communication, that is, must never suffer from a priori assumed aesthetics. The letter types must never be squeezed into a pre-determined form.” — László Moholy-Nagy, 1923
Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy served as Editorial Directors for the 14 titles in the Bauhausbücher [Bauhaus Book] series published in Dessau from 1925 to 1929. The series served as an extension of the Bauhaus teaching tradition with volumes by Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, Adolf Meyer, Oskar Schlemmer, László Moholy-Nagy or as as anthologies of work produced by a select group of contemporaries such as Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, J. J. P. Oud, Kasimir Malewitsch and Albert Gleizes.
Prior to the 20th century, when artists were called upon to illustrate texts or provide posters for advertising, their function was to provide visual images that bore no formal relationship to the message. In other words, the illustration was simply a diversion.
More than any other group, the expositional, programmatic set of Bauhaus Bücher engineers one of the most consistently remarkable episodes in the history of the art of the book. A series of 14 volumes (1925–1930) edited by Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy, the books rigorously demonstrate format as a systematic support of content and are discussed in Jan Tschichold’s classic and influential Die Neue Typograhie of 1928. In the Bauhaus Books the precepts and sense of content are palpably clear in the logic and decisions of design and format. Content is not so much conveyed by as in the carefully considered means and methods of presentation. Nowhere is the book more completely accomplished as a mental instrument; form and content virtually assume the operation of a mathematical proposition, arriving at a language in which everything formal belongs to syntax and not to vocabulary.
"A dot goes for a walk . . . freely and without a goal."
In the fall of 1920 Paul Klee received a telegram from Walter Gropius inviting him to teach at the Bauhaus. Klee's decision to join the avant-garde school in Weimar was to have profound implications for his art. By the first of the new year Klee was installed at the school, working in a studio spacious enough to house his twelve easels.
During the years Klee taught at the Bauhaus he developed the theoretical foundations of his art. In his role as pedagogue he faced new challenges. "When I came to be a teacher," he later wrote, "I had to account explicitly for what I had been used to doing unconsciously." As one critic observed, Klee's "theory of art is the outgrowth of the practice, not the other way around."
Klee, whose official title was Forrnmeister or master of forms, used the cube as a prop while lecturing on the nature of space. "What he wanted to give his students," one observer wrote, "were basic clarities and points of departure." Klee's detached manner earned him the nickname "the Buddha of the Bauhaus."
In Pedagogical Sketch Book, the second of the Bauhaus manuals edited by Gropius and designed by Moholy-Nagy, Klee developed a primer for his students. Based on his extensive 1921 lecture notes on visual form, Klee divided his artistic sketchbook, first published in 1925, into sections on the line and dimensions and symbols of movement such as the spinning top, the pendulum and the arrow. The artist's world, it has been pointed out, was not static; it was in the process of becoming. In Klee's vernacular, an active line moves freely. It is "a walk for a walk's sake, without aim." Klee's textbook and his friend Wassily Kandinsky's Point and Line to Plane, published in 1926, became Bauhaus classics.
Felix Klee, the painter's son, was only fourteen when he started studying at the Bauhaus. He knew his father's lectures were not for nonbelievers. "He had only a small circle of enthusiastic followers," Felix Klee wrote, ". . . those who could understand him. Not everyone could." Paul Klee put it best when he said, "I am not graspable in this world."