While it is popularly appreciated that Art Nouveau in its various dialects was, at least partly, inspired and informed by the natural world, for all the floral world, and also popularly appreciated that the move to more objective, sober, less decorative positions, and dialects, throughout the first decades of the 20th century resulted in a rationalisation of the natural influences of Art Nouveau that tended to remove the direct natural/floral references — if keeping many of the forms such
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Reflecting back on the summer of 1923 Xanti Schawinsky recalled, "one day, during a break, a tennis coach named Niels Peterson asked me if I knew a school in Weimar called 'Bauhaus'". Xanti Schawinsky didn't. Niels Peterson explained. "My curiosity was fully ignited, and the very next day, I took a leave of absence and, with financial help from my father, traveled to Weimar"1 With Play, Life, Illusion. Xanti Schawinsky the Kunsthalle Bielefeld explore what happened next....... Play, Life,
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The cover of Walter Gropius's 1919 Bauhaus Manifesto, that rallying call for what would become the three Bauhauses, is famously graced by Lyonel Feininger's woodcutting Kathedrale, an ideogram for the "Wundertat der gotischen Kathedrale"1, the 'miracle of the Gothic cathedral', that archetype Gropius borrowed from John Ruskin to explain what good architecture is, why it is, how it arises, and thereby to visualise the path to the 'building of the future' via a 'new guild of craftsmen'2 Gropius
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In his ca. 75 CE work The Life of Theseus, the Greek biographer, historian and Delphi priest Plutarch notes that the ship with which Theseus returned to Attica having slain the Minotaur in its labyrinth on Crete, "was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place", meaning that over time the ship of Theseus "became a standing example among the philosophers, for the
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