Photo: Elfriede Stegemeyer

Elfriede Stegemeyer Photographs

The poster is for an exhibition of photography by German photographer Elfriede Stegemeyer, 1908-88. Though never a Bauhaus student, her work reflects the experimental approach to photography championed there by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer.

There is no designer credit for this poster which has a symmetrical layout, completely at odds with the The New Typography it is based on. The same photograph appears on the cover of the catalogue for this exhibition, which has a less symmetrical or centred layout.

Rudolf Ortner (1912-97) was a celebrated artist and architect who trained at the Bauhaus in its final years, 1932-33, in both Dessau and Berlin. He later studied painting at the former Bauhaus in Weimar. As indicated by this 2006 exhibition poster, he was an exponent of Art Concret (Konrete Kunst).

Design: Ott+Stein

The design partnership Ott+Stein made several posters for the Bauhaus-Archiv, from the 1980s. This one is from 1986. The geometric shapes are based on the roof formation at the Berlin Bauhaus-Archiv, which was designed by Walter Gropius, founder of the original Bauhaus.

Design: Cyan

What is the Bauhaus worth [today]?

The poster is by the German design studio Cyan, one of the most innovative and influential studios of recent decades. It is typical of their Deconstructive approach to design: fragmented, busy, but with an underlying sense of structure. See their website here.

Poster: Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau 2001

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Design: Cyan

Buckminster Fuller: Your Private Sky. Design as a Scientific Art

Buckminster Fuller: the legendary American designer, inventor of the Geodesic dome and the Dymaxion car (pictured in the poster). He has a family of molecular structures named after him: Buckminsterfullerenes, after their geodesic forms.They have applications in nano technology.

Another Deconstructivist poster by the German design studio Cyan. See their website here.

Poster: Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau 2001

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Bauhaus 1919-1933

This is a very good example of The New Typography, the 1920s movement in graphic design that was promoted at the Bauhaus. Even though this poster was designed eighty years later in 2002, it shows the New Typography principles of asymmetry and grid layout. Note the alignments of text, the reversals of letters and numbers, and the contrast of type size and colour. These features create movement and energy – the eye moves freely around the design.

Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau 1998

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Designer unknown

The Bauhaus Weaves: the textile workshop at the Bauhaus.

Photograph of a young Bauhaus textile student, shot through the loom. The flatness of the subject matches that of the 2D poster itself. Note the extreme contrast between the scale of the photograph and the lettering. The text is in a period-looking font, set all in lower case, which was an innovation of the Bauhaus. The colours are Complementaries: blue and yellow.

Poster: Bauhaus-Museum Weimar 1999

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Designer, photographer unknown.

Bauhaus photography exhibition

Young Bauhauslers feature in a dramatic overhead photograph. The poster design is an adaptation of The New Typography principles of assymetry and contrast through type.

Poster: Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau 2003

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Design: Doppelpunkt

Bauhaus-Archiv Museum of Design

This is an elegant, minimalist design using only type and letterforms. Note the extreme contrast of type. The giant lowercase orange b extends beyond the edge of the poster, and the line of tiny white type runs edge-to-edge across the middle. The colour contrast is provided by blue/orange (Complementary Colours), and black/white.

The design is by Doppelpunkt (double point), a German design studio.

Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin 1996

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Bauhaus Dessau Workshop of Modernism

A simple eye-catching design, using a student photographic and large Futura letters. Futura was designed in the mid-1920s by Paul Renner and is the most successful typeface to come from this period, still very popular today. Though not created at the Bauhaus, it has all the properties of their technological approach to functionalism: geometric, modular, minimalist, like Marcel Breuer’s chairs.

Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau 2007

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