Design Movements

Objective: Understand the

transition from crafted products to
mass production, and the effect on
styling.

The Arts and Crafts Movement

The Arts and Crafts Movement was one of the
most influential, profound and far-reaching design
movements of modern times. It began in Britain
around 1880 and quickly spread across America
and Europe before emerging finally as the Mingei
(Folk Crafts) movement in Japan
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/t/the-artsand-crafts-movement/

Art Nouveau
Art Nouveau was a movement that swept through the decorative arts and
architecture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Generating
enthusiasts throughout Europe and beyond, the movement issued in a
wide variety of styles, and, consequently, it is known by various names,
such as the Glasgow Style, or, in the German-speaking
world, Jugendstil. Art Nouveau was aimed at modernizing design,
seeking to escape the eclectic historical styles that had previously been
popular. Artists drew inspiration from both organic and geometric forms,
evolving elegant designs that united flowing, natural forms with more
angular contours. The movement was committed to abolishing the
traditional hierarchy of the arts, which viewed so-called liberal arts, such
as painting and sculpture, as superior to craft-based decorative arts, and
ultimately it had far more influence on the latter. The style went out of
fashion after it gave way to Art Deco in the 1920s, but it experienced a
popular revival in the 1960s, and it is now seen as an important
predecessor of modernism

Modernism
An artistic movement during the early twentieth century,
modernism responded to stifling Victorian conventions
and nineteenth century realism. The many branches of
modernism illustrate the unstable, self-aware zeitgeist of
the early twentieth century. New social movements and
The Great War created a need for new forms of
expression that broke from standard poetic form,
aesthetics, and representation of time, space, and
gender. Modernists broke from artistic conventions yet
embraced tradition as a body of works rich with
possibilities for revision and allusion. They captured
harsh truths and framed them in forms as various and
conflicted as their times.

Bauhaus
The Bauhaus was the most influential modernist art school of the
20th century, one whose approach to teaching, and understanding
art's relationship to society and technology, had a major impact
both in Europe and the United States long after it closed. It was
shaped by the 19th and early 20th centuries trends such as Arts
and Crafts movement, which had sought to level the distinction
between fine and applied arts, and to reunite creativity and
manufacturing. This is reflected in the romantic medievalism of
the school's early years, in which it pictured itself as a kind of
medieval crafts guild. But in the mid 1920s the medievalism gave
way to a stress on uniting art and industrial design, and it was this
which ultimately proved to be its most original and important
achievement. The school is also renowned for its faculty, which
included artists Wassily Kandinsky, Josef Albers, Lszl MoholyNagy, Paul Klee and Johannes Itten, architects Walter
Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and designer Marcel
Breuer.

Art Deco
The story of Art Deco occurs against the backdrop of the Roaring
Twenties in the U.S. and a scarred Europe recovering from World
War One. While the U.S. wasnt faced with rebuilding after the
war, it did have to rebuild its economy after the Great Depression
of 1929.
Art Deco is a form of Modernism that flourished in the United
States and Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. The origins of Art
Deco began two decades earlier in Paris. La Societe des artistes
decorateurs or the Decorative Artists Society was founded
following the Universal Exposition of 1900. Early members,
including architect Hector Guimard, believed in the importance of
Frances decorative arts and marketing their achievements for
business purposes. These artists also displayed their creations at
the International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative
Art in Paris in 1925.

De Stijl
Influential movement in art, architecture, and design founded in
1917 in the Netherlands. The focus of the movement was an
attempt to simplify art to pure abstraction; form was reduced to
rectangles and other geometric shapes, while colour was limited
to the primary colours and black and white. The De Stijl group
wanted to bring art and design together in a single coherent,
simplified system. Its best-known member was the abstract
painter Piet Mondrian. The group's main theorist and publicist
was Theo van Doesburg (18831931), and his death in 1931
effectively marked its end.
The influence of De Stijl was deeply felt in architecture and
design during the 1930s. The architects Walter Gropius and Le
Corbusier, for example, were attracted by its
comprehensiveness and radical simplicity, and it stimulated the
direction of study at theBauhaus

Tasks:
1) Place the identified Design eras into a time
line, so you can see what order they came in.
You may find there are some overlaps.
2) Collect, present and label iconic images from
each era. Show how each era effected the
styling of the products made.