Graduate Summer School in Art Education
Institute of Design
Institute of Design: “Graduate Summer School in Art Education.” Chicago, IL: Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, 1955. Tri-folded self mailer brochure machine folded as issued. Faint wear to edges, but a very good uncirculated copy.
8.5 x 11-inch folded brochure with details for Graduate Summer School in Art Education at the Institute Of Design of Illinois Institute Of Technology, featuring course descriptions taught by Richard Koppe, Ray Pearson, Cosmo Campoli, John Waddell, and Harry Callahan.
Features design and typography reminiscent of Professor Frank Barr, who passed away in 1955. Barr was born in Chicago and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. He was active in Chicago's Society of Typographic Arts, with published work dating back to the mid-thirties. Barr was one of nine artists represented in the legendary Advance Guard Of Advertising Artists Exhibition held at the Katharine Kuh Gallery in October, 1941. Barr shared the exhibition with Herbert Bayer, Lester Beall, György Kepes, E. McKnight Kauffer, Herbert Matter, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Paul Rand and Ladislav Sutnar. That's a pretty big deal.
One of Chicago's great cultural achievements, the Institute of Design was among the most important schools of photography in twentieth-century America. It began as an outpost of experimental Bauhaus education and was home to an astonishing group of influential teachers and students, including László Moholy-Nagy, Harry Callahan, and Aaron Siskind.
In 1937 László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), a Hungarian Jew fleeing Nazi Germany, was brought to Chicago by the city's industrial leaders to establish a school of industrial design to be modeled after the original Bauhaus in Germany, the pioneering school of art, design and architecture where Moholy had taught previously. Although the New Bauhaus lasted only one year (1937-1938), it was quickly reorganized as the School of Design (1939-1944) and eventually became the Institute of Design (1944-present). The photographs produced in the ID's early years were controlled studio experiments, more concerned with form and materials than with imitating works by photography's masters or documenting the world. Moholy's photograms, for example, are elegant light studies that reveal the complete scale of gray between black and white and illustrate photography's abstract potential.
Along similar lines, faculty member György Kepes (1906-2001) produced an extensive series of photographs of his wife in which he explored solarization and negative exposure and even painting on the picture's surface. Nathan Lerner (1913-1997), a student and later teacher at the ID, worked with refractive lenses and photomontage and used his light box to test the pictorial effects of pure light. Another student, Milton Halberstadt (1919-2000), produced a triple -exposed portrait to showcase photography's capacity for simultaneous vision. At a moment when American photography was largely confined to more conventional portraiture, landscape or documentary reportage, these experimental and abstract pictures revealed the enormous creative potential of the medium.
As the school grew, Moholy hired Arthur Siegel (1913-1978) and Harry Callahan (1912-1999) to lead a new, four-year program in photography. After Siegel resigned, Callahan hired Aaron Siskind (1903-1991), and the two formed a superbly effective teaching team that is now legendary. Under their leadership, the program's emphasis shifted from experimentation toward the development of individual vision and subjective expression.