# data[].attributes.body
Some tips for taking great photos!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Take Your Digital Photography to the Next Level!

Whether you are a beginner or more experienced with photography, here are some of our favorite tips that will help you improve your photography!

This rule helps you take eye-catching pictures by using one of the most effective rules of composition.

If you want to take pictures that have a "wow" factor built in them, the Rule of Thirds is the composition secret you need to take advantage of!

To use the rule of thirds, imagine four lines, two lying horizontally across the image and two vertical creating nine even squares. Some images will look best with the focal point in the center square, but placing the subject off-center at one of the intersecting points of the imaginary lines will often create a more aesthetically composed photograph.

When a photograph is composed using the rule of thirds the eyes will wander the frame. A picture composed using the rule of thirds is usually more pleasing to the eye.

If you want to take great photos that you'd be proud of, by using the rules of composition, check out the easy-to-follow Incredibly Important Composition Skills Course!
Read our article on The Rule of Thirds to learn more.
Camera shake or blur is something that can plague any photographer and here are some ways to avoid it.

First, you need to learn how to hold your camera correctly; use both hands, one around the body and one around the lens and hold the camera close to your body for support.

Also, for handheld shooting, make sure that you are using a shutter speed that is appropriate for your lens' focal length. If you're shutter speed is too slow, any unintentional movement of the camera will result in your entire photograph coming out blurry.

The rule of thumb is not to shoot at a shutter speed that is slower than your focal length to minimize this problem:

1 / Focal Length (in mm) = Minimum Shutter Speed (in seconds)

So, as an example, if you're using a 100mm lens, then your shutter speed should be no lower than 1/100th of a second.

Use a tripod or monopod whenever possible.

Are you confused by any of the terminology? Do you want to easily control your camera and finally get rid of the confusion about focal length, aperture, shutter speed, and other settings?

If so, check out our most recommended course: Extremely Essential Camera Skills. It's the easiest and quickest way to learn how to take great photos while learning all the basics of your camera.

Learn to use the Exposure Triangle

To get your photos looking their best, you need to master the three basics: Aperture, Shutter Speed and ISO.

You also need to understand the relationships between these three controls. When you adjust one of them, you would usually have to consider at least one of the others, to get the desired results.

Using Auto Mode takes care of these controls, but you pay the price of not getting your photos to look the way you wanted them, and often disappointing.

It's a better idea to learn how to use Aperture-priority or Shutter-priority modes, and ultimately shoot in Manual mode. To easily learn how to do it, we recommend the Extremely Essential Camera Skills Course.

If you can only buy one filter for your lens, make it a polarizer.

The recommended type of polarizer is circular because these allow your camera to use TTL (through the lens) metering such as auto exposure.

This filter helps reduce reflections from water as well as metal and glass; it improves the colors of the sky and foliage and will help give your photos the WOW factor. It will do all that while protecting your lens. There's no reason why you can't leave it on for all of your photography.

We recommend Hoya Polarizer Filters for the best combination of performance and price.

When photographing landscapes, it helps to create a sense of depth, in other words, make the viewer feel like they are there.

Use a wide-angle lens for a panoramic view and a small aperture of f/16 or smaller to keep the foreground and background sharp. Placing an object or person in the foreground helps give a sense of scale and emphasizes how far away the distance is.

Use a tripod if possible, as a small aperture usually requires a slower shutter speed.

The simple approach is usually the best in digital photography, and you have to decide what needs to be in the shot, while not including anything that is a distraction.

If possible, choose a plain background - in other words, neutral colors and simple patterns. You want the eye to be drawn to the focal point of the image rather than a patch of color or an odd building in the background. This is especially vital in a shot where the model is placed off center.

Flash can look harsh and unnatural especially for indoor portraits. Therefore, there are various ways you can take an image indoors without resorting to flash.

First, push the ISO up - usually ISO 800 to 1600 will make a big difference for the shutter speed you can choose. Use the widest aperture possible - this way more light will reach the sensor, and you will have a nice blurred background. Using a tripod or an I.S. (Image Stabilization) lens is also a great way to avoid blur.

If you absolutely must use flash, then use a flash with a head you can rotate, and point the light to the ceiling on an angle.

To ensure you get the most flattering light for portraits, landscapes or anything else you want to capture - watch this great video here.

The ISO setting determines how sensitive your camera is to light and also how fine the grain of your image.

The ISO we choose depends on the situation - when it's dark we need to push the ISO up to a higher number, say anything from 400 - 3200 as this will make the camera more sensitive to light, and then we can avoid blurring.

On sunny days we can choose ISO 100 or the Auto setting as we have more light to work with.

If you want to capture a subject in motion, then use the panning technique. To do this, choose a shutter speed around two steps lower than necessary - so for 1/250, we'd choose 1/60. Keep your camera on the subject with your finger half way down on the shutter to lock the focus and when ready, take the photo, remembering to follow them as they move.

Use a tripod or monopod if possible to avoid camera shake and get clear movement lines.

Experiment with Shutter Speed

Don't be afraid to play with the shutter speed to create some interesting effects.

When taking a night time shot, use a tripod and try shooting with the shutter speed set at 4 seconds. You will see that the movement of the object is captured along with some light trails.

If you choose a faster shutter speed of say 1/250th of a second, the trails will not be as long or bright; instead, you will freeze the action.

Try shooting other compositions with moving objects or backgrounds such as waves on a beach, crowds of people walking, cars commuting, with different shutter speeds to either capture blurred movement or snapshots that freeze everything sharply in time.

Whenever using slow shutter speeds to blur movement, it is critical that the camera is stabilized to eliminate camera shake. We recommend the AmazonBasics 60-inch Portable Tripod as an excellent entry-level option for taking photographs with slow shutter speeds.

BONUS TIP: Invest More In Learning (and Less on Gear)

If you're thinking about spending thousands on new cameras and lenses, think twice.

People often end up disappointed that their shiny new toys aren't producing that "wow" factor they were expecting.

You can take stunning photos that you'll be proud of, even with a modest digital camera fitted with its standard zoom lens. But you need to have a solid understanding of the basics.

That's why it is critical to master composition and light, before spending anything on new gear.
We recommended the following course to dramatically improve your photography:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Top 10 Digital Photography Tips | ExposureGuide.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Take Your Digital Photography to the Next Level! Whether you are a beginner or more experienced with photography, here are some of our favorite tips that will help you improve your photography! This rule helps you take eye-catching pictures by using one of the most effective rules of composition.

# data[].attributes.body
The Netherlands-based De Stijl movement embraced an abstract, pared-down aesthetic centered in basic visual elements such as geometric forms and primary colors.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"We speak of concrete and not abstract painting because nothing is more concrete, more real than a line, a color, a surface."

"While the expressive possibilities of Neoplasticism are limited to two dimensions (the plane), Elementarism realizes the possibility of plasticism in four dimensions, in the field of time-space."

"Why should something that no one finds strange in music, be impossible in the art of painting/sculpture? By comparing works of art that do not represent an object, is in our experience, the most fruitful way of exercising our receptivity for them."

"The three principal colors are essentially yellow, blue, and red. They are the only colors existing ... Yellow is the movement of the ray (vertical) ... blue is he contrasting color to yellow (horizontal firmament) ... red is the mating of yellow and blue."

"There is an old and a new consciousness of the age. The old one is directed towards the individual. The new one is directed towards the universal. The struggle of the individual against the universal may be seen both in the world war and in modern art."

Theo van Doesburg, from his 1918 manifesto

Summary of De Stijl

The Netherlands-based De Stijl movement embraced an abstract, pared-down aesthetic centered in basic visual elements such as geometric forms and primary colors. Partly a reaction against the decorative excesses of Art Deco, the reduced quality of De Stijl art was envisioned by its creators as a universal visual language appropriate to the modern era, a time of a new, spiritualized world order. Led by the painters Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian - its central and celebrated figures - De Stijl artists applied their style to a host of media in the fine and applied arts and beyond. Promoting their innovative ideas in their journal of the same name, the members envisioned nothing less than the ideal fusion of form and function, thereby making De Stijl in effect the ultimate style. To this end, De Stijl artists turned their attention not only to fine art media such as painting and sculpture, but virtually all other art forms as well, including industrial design, typography, even literature and music. De Stijl's influence was perhaps felt most noticeably in the realm of architecture, helping give rise to the International Style of the 1920s and 1930s.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

Like other avant-garde movements of the time, De Stijl, which means simply "the style" in Dutch, emerged largely in response to the horrors of World War I and the wish to remake society in its aftermath. Viewing art as a means of social and spiritual redemption, the members of De Stijl embraced a utopian vision of art and its transformative potential.

Among the pioneering exponents of abstract art, De Stijl artists espoused a visual language consisting of precisely rendered geometric forms - usually straight lines, squares, and rectangles--and primary colors. Expressing the artists' search "for the universal, as the individual was losing its significance," this austere language was meant to reveal the laws governing the harmony of the world.

Even though De Stijl artists created work embodying the movement's utopian vision, their realization that this vision was unattainable in the real world essentially brought about the group's demise. Ultimately, De Stijl's continuing fame is largely the result of the enduring achievement of its best-known member and true modern master, Piet Mondrian.

Overview of De Stijl

Gerrit Rietveld said, "We must remember that sit is a verb too." In 1918 he had a poem incised on the underside of his Red and Blue Chair that read, "When I sit, I do not want to sit as my seated flesh likes, but rather as my seated spirit would sit, if it wove the chair for itself." The work and the philosophy it expressed became canonical to de Stijl.

Artworks and Artists of De Stijl

Composition A

Artist: Piet Mondrian

Composition A - whose title announces its nonobjective nature by making no reference to anything beyond itself - is a good example of Mondrian's geometric abstraction before it fully matured within the framework of the De Stijl aesthetic. With its rectilinear forms made up of solid, outlined areas of color, the work reflects the artist's experimentation with Schoenmaekers's mathematical theory and his search for a pared-down visual language appropriate to the modern era. While here Mondrian uses blacks and shades of grey, his paintings would later be further reduced, ultimately employing more basic compositions and only solid blocks of primary colors.

Oil on canvas - Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome

Mechano-Dancer

Artist: Vilmos Huszar

This early work employs the signature geometric shapes of the De Stijl aesthetic, yet its layering of shapes and forms, and combination of horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines--along with the absence of color - reflect a different approach from that of the movement's leading artists, van Doesburg and Mondrian. The work's suggestion of a human figure - accomplished by the arrangement of geometric forms and placement of a cube at the top, possibly representing a head - is also unique in De Stijl art. Mechano-Dancer's evocation of a hybrid man-machine, also implied by its title, suggests the influence of Dada and Italian Futurism.

Photomontage - Private Collection, New York

Red and Blue Chair

Artist: Gerrit Rietveld

Originally designed in 1918 but not fully realized until 1923, when it incorporated the characteristic De Stijl scheme of primary colors, Red and Blue Chair is one of the canonical works of the movement. Rietveld envisioned a chair that played with and transformed the space around it, consisting of rectilinear volumes, planes, and lines that interact in unique ways, yet manage to avoid intersection. Every color, line, and plane is clearly defined, as if each comprised its own work that just happened to be used for a piece of furniture. The simple assembly Rietveld deployed was quite intentional as well; he built the chair out of standard lumber sizes available at the time, reflecting his goal of realizing a piece of furniture that could be mass-produced as opposed to hand-crafted. Emphasizing its manmade quality, Red and Blue Chair also notably avoids the use of natural form, which furniture designers tend to favor in order to emphasize the idea of physical comfort and convenience.

Painted wood - Auckland Museum, New Zealand

Counter Composition V

Artist: Theo van Doesburg

First introduced in 1924, van Doesburg's Counter Compositions - his signature works - embody the artist's wish to move beyond the confines of De Stijl with his introduction of Elementarism. While van Doesburg continued to make use of horizontal and vertical lines, he now prioritized the diagonal line; he described Elementarism as "based on the neutralization of positive and negative directions by the diagonal and, as far as color is concerned, by the dissonant. Equilibrated relations are not an ultimate result." The titles of his Counter Compositions refer to the fact that the lines of the compositions are at a 45-degree angle to the sides of the picture rather than parallel to them, resulting in a newly energized relationship between the composition and format of the canvas. As in the present example, he repeatedly ventured beyond the three primary colors, including a triangle of grey in addition to the primary colors, white, and black. At the time he painted this composition, De Stijl was finding its own unique voice; paintings, furniture designs, and buildings produced by those associated with the movement communicated how lines and colors should interact, and how a work's appearance is just as essential as its function.

Oil on canvas - Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

Rietveld Schröder House

Artist: Gerrit Rietveld

The Rietveld Schröder House is an important precursor to the Bauhaus-inspired International Style, as well as the only building designed in complete accordance with the De Stijl aesthetic. The house was commissioned in 1924 by Truus Schröder-Schrader, who intended for the new home to be grand and open ("without walls"), a veritable manifesto for how an independent modern woman should live her life. Featuring the typical De Stijl palette of primary colors, black, and white, the building emphasizes its architectural elements - slabs, posts, and beams - reflecting the movement's emphasis on form, construction, and function in its architecture and design. In other ways, too, the design represents a major departure from architectural convention and precedent. Inside, the rooms are constructed as movable entities with portable walls. In addition, Rietveld's design makes no attempt to interact with any of the surrounding buildings or roadways, suggesting its presence as an isolated structure focusing inward instead of outward.

Concrete, brick, and plaster, wood, steel girders - Utrecht, The Netherlands

Arithmetic Composition

Artist: Theo van Doesburg

Made close to the end of van Doesburg's life, Arithmetic Composition reflects the artist's experimentation with abstract geometric shapes within a diagonal composition, resulting in a dimensional plane that would not have the same visual effect had the blocks been positioned vertically or horizontally. The work's diagonal configuration, combination of pure positive and negative space (black forms against white background), and incorporation of a curious backward "L" in the upper left corner, which consumes one block, create a sense of movement, making the shapes appear as if they are alternately moving toward and away from the viewer. However, unlike Mondrian's characteristic vertical-and-horizontal paintings, which lend themselves to the suggestion of figuration, van Doesburg here creates an abstract artwork totally devoid of the possibility of representation.

Oil on canvas - Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland

Beginnings of De Stijl

In 1917, Theo van Doesburg founded the contemporary art journal De Stijl as a means of recruiting like-minded artists in the formation of a new artistic collective that embraced an expansive notion of art, infused by utopian ideals of spiritual harmony. The journal provided the basis of the De Stijl movement, a Dutch group of artists and architects whose other leading members included Piet Mondrian, J. J. P. Oud and Vilmos Huszar.

Adopting the visual elements of Cubism and Suprematism, the anti-sentimentalism of Dada, and the Neo-Platonic mathematical theory of M. H. J Schoenmaekers, a mystical ideology that articulated the concept of "ideal" geometric forms, the exponents of De Stijl aspired to be far more than mere visual artists. At its core, De Stijl was designed to encompass a variety of artistic influences and media, its goal being the development of a new aesthetic that would be practiced not only in the fine and applied arts, but would also reverberate in a host of other art forms as well, among them architecture, urban planning, industrial design, typography, music, and poetry. The De Stijl aesthetic and vision was formulated in large response to the unprecedented devastation of World War I, with the movement's members seeking a means of expressing a sense of order and harmony in the new society that was to emerge in the wake of the war.

De Stijl: Concepts, Styles, and Trends

Pure Geometric Abstraction and De Stijl Visual Language

De Stijl was the first-ever journal devoted to abstraction in art, although the movement's artists were not the first to practice abstract art; other painters, perhaps most notably Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Hans Arp, had earlier created nonobjective art, often incorporating geometric forms in their work. But the artists and architects associated with De Stijl - painters such as Mondrian, van Doesburg and Ilya Bolotowsky, and architects such as Gerrit Rietveld and J. J. P. Oud - adopted what they perceived to be a purer form of geometry, consisting of forms made up of straight lines and basic geometric shapes (largely rendered in the three primary colors); these motifs provided the fundamental elements of compositions that avoided symmetry and strove for a balanced relationship between surfaces and the distribution of colors. In Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art, Mondrian explained: "As a pure representation of the human mind, art will express itself in an aesthetically purified, that is to say, abstract form. The new plastic idea cannot, therefore, take the form of a natural or concrete representation."

Neo-Plasticism

Neo-Plasticism refers to the painting style and ideas developed by Piet Mondrian in 1917, promoted by De Stijl. Denoting the "new plastic art," or simply "new art," the term embodies Mondrian's vision of an ideal, abstract art form he felt was suited to the modern era. Mondrian's essay Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art, which set forth the principles of the concept, was published in twelve installments of the journal De Stijl in 1917-18. Mondrian described Neo-Plasticism as a reductive approach to artmaking that stripped away traditional elements of art, such as perspective and representation, utilizing only a series of primary colors and straight lines. Mondrian envisioned that the principles of Neo-Plasticism would be transplanted from the medium of painting to other art forms, including architecture and design, providing the basis of the transformation of the human environment sought by De Stijl artists. In Mondrian's words, a "pure plastic vision should build a new society, in the same way that in art it has built a new plasticism."

The concept of Neo-Plasticism was largely inspired by M. H. J. Schoenmaekers's treatise Beginselen der Beeldende Wiskunde (The Principles of Plastic Mathematics), which proposed that reality is composed of a series of opposing forces - among them the formal polarity of horizontal and vertical axes and the juxtaposition of primary colors.

Neo-Plasticism was later promoted by the movement Cercle et Carre and three issues of its eponymous journal appearing in 1930. Following Mondrian's visit to the U.S. in 1940, the style spread to the U.S., where it was taken up by various American abstract artists.

Elementarism

While only horizontal and vertical lines were to be utilized in Neo-Plasticism, in 1925, van Doesburg developed Elementarism, which attempted to modify the dogmatic nature of the style by introducing the diagonal, a form that for him connoted dynamism - "a state of continuous development." In "Painting and Sculpture: Elementarism (Fragment of a Manifesto)," published in De Stijl in 1927, he wrote: "If all our physical movements are already based upon Horizontal and Vertical, it is only an emphasis of our physical nature, of the natural structure and functions of organisms if the work of art strengthens - although in an 'artistic manner' - this natural duality in our consciousness."

Prizing horizontal and vertical lines for their connotation of stability, Mondrian strongly disagreed with van Doesburg's newfound emphasis on the diagonal--a disagreement that famously prompted Mondrian to secede from De Stijl shortly thereafter. For Mondrian, van Doesburg's introduction of the diagonal amounted to artistic heresy; in Mondrian's view, the Elementarist diagonal repudiated De Stijl's efforts to fully integrate all the elements of the painting by creating tension between the composition and the picture plane.

Later Developments - After De Stijl

De Stijl-inspired architecture, particularly by Rietveld and Oud, was built in the Netherlands throughout the 1920s, all of which, interestingly enough, seemed to defy van Doesburg's theory of Elementarism, instead utilizing clearly defined horizontal and vertical lines. De Stijl also had a major influence on Bauhaus architecture and design; several members of De Stijl taught at the Bauhaus, perhaps most importantly van Doesburg, who lectured there in 1921-22. De Stijl's geometric visual language, along with its architectural concepts such as form following function and the emphasis on structural components, would reverberate in Bauhaus architectural practice, as well as the global idiom known as the "International Style."

With Theo van Doesburg's death in 1931, De Stijl lost its leader, and soon after faded from existence. However, the movement's key ideas of pure geometric abstraction and the relationship of form and function were maintained by many following van Doesburg's death, and represent a fundamental contribution to modern and contemporary art, design, and architecture. Many of Rietveld's buildings, for example, survive the longevity of the De Stijl movement, and inspired a great many 20 th-century architects, among them Mies van der Rohe.

Beyond the realm of architecture, the pared-down De Stijl aesthetic influenced many subsequent artists and designers of the 20 th century and beyond, among them the Abstract Expressionists Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, Hard-edge painters Frank Stella and Frederick Hammersley, and Minimalists Donald Judd and Dan Flavin.

Useful Resources on De Stijl

The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page. These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet.

Similar Art

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"We speak of concrete and not abstract painting because nothing is more concrete, more real than a line, a color, a surface." "While the expressive possibilities of Neoplasticism are limited to two dimensions (the plane), Elementarism realizes the possibility of plasticism in four dimensions, in the field of time-space."

# data[].attributes.body
Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) is world famous. Learn about his life, read his letters, or explore his paintings and drawings.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) is world-famous. Learn about Van Gogh's life, read his letters, explore his paintings and drawings, and other masterpieces.

# data[].attributes.body
Test out some of these accessible but highly creative art projects. Anyone can do them!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Easy Art Ideas - Art Inspiration Ideas That Everyone Can Try

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Maybe some are reluctant to try their hand at creating art, but we are all capable of producing some amazing things. Why not start with simple art projects, som

# data[].attributes.body
The Bauhaus was arguably the single most influential modernist art school of the 20th century. Its approach to teaching, and to the relationship between art, society, and technology, had a major impact both in Europe and in the United States long after its closure under Nazi pressure in 1933.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In his early career Walter Gropius worked for an international conglomerate designing everything from architectural and industrial projects to office lighting and stationery - this led him to envision a total design ethos, employing "a new guild of craftsmen," that he later embodied in founding the Bauhaus.

Red Balloon

Artist: Paul Klee

Paul Klee was one of the most talented and enigmatic artists to be associated with the Bauhaus, a visionary whose work combined stunning formal innovation with a curious kind of primordial innocence. In this canvas from 1922, delicate, translucent geometric shapes - squares, rectangles and domes - are picked out in gradations of primary color. A single red circle floats in the upper center, revealing itself, on inspection, to be the titular hot-air balloon. This illustrative flourish exemplifies Klee's whimsical, associative use of the geometric compositional arrangements for which the Bauhaus became famous. In the artist's unique idiom, emphasis shifts restlessly between the abstract and the figurative, between narrative association and esoteric symbolism. The glowing shapes, reminiscent of stained glass, are placed asymmetrically to create a visual rhythm, conducted by vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines, that seems both ordered and spontaneous.

Born in Switzerland in 1879, Klee had been associated with various Expressionist and modernist groupings in Northern Europe during the 1900s and 1910s, including Der Blaue Reiter group, before taking up a post at the Bauhaus in 1921, teaching mural painting, stained glass, bookbinding, and various other subjects. He published his art lectures in his Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch ( Pedagogical Sketchbooks) (1925) in the Bauhausbücher series. Famously beginning with the line "[a]n active line on a walk, moving freely, without goal," this work became hugely influential, establishing, as the critic Mark Hudson puts it, "[Klee's] reputation as one of the great theorists of modern art...[as] he attempted to analyze every last permutation of his wandering lines." For Klee, the line, developing from a single point, was an autonomous agent, spontaneous, which through its movement forged the development of the plane. This metaphor for the germination of compositional form became a fundamental tenet of Bauhaus design philosophy, influencing many of Klee's contemporaries, including Anni Albers and Klee's lifelong friend Wassily Kandinsky.

Klee's presence at the Bauhaus from 1921 until his resignation in 1931 gives the lie to stereotypes of the institution as overly preoccupied with rationality and dry, formal methods. Klee's work - both sophisticated and primitive, figurative and otherworldly - had a noted impact on later artists in America and Europe, including Jackson Pollock, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Nolan, Norman Lewis, and William Baziotes. As Clement Greenburg wrote in 1957, "[a]lmost everybody, whether aware or not, was learning from Klee."

Oil on chalk-primed gauze, mounted on board, - The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York

Yellow-Red-Blue

Artist: Wassily Kandinsky

This complex work is built up around three key visual areas, dominated by yellow, red, and blue shapes respectively. These in turn form two overall zones of visual attention, one on the right-hand side of the canvas, formed from the interlocking red cross and blue circle, and one around the yellow rectangle to the left, embossed against a deeper shade of ochre. Variance in visual weight and positioning in space is implied by effects of color and shading, as the buoyancy of the yellow contrasts with the darker red tones, deepening further into purple and blue. A meshwork of straight and curvilinear interact across the canvas, as if playing out the battle of energies established between the different primary colors.

Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow in 1866, and had settled in Germany before the close of the 19 th century, becoming a key figure in the development of Northern-European Expressionism over the following years; his 1903 painting Der Blaue Reiter was the inspiration for the Expressionist art group of that name. Following a six-year spell in Soviet Russia bookending the revolution (1914-20), Kandinsky returned to Germany and began teaching at the Bauhaus in 1922, by which time his work had moved towards a purer form of abstraction. As a tutor on the preliminary course, he introduced his students to the analysis of primary colors and the nature of their interaction. In 1923, hoping to establish an underlying qualitative relationship between particular shapes and colors, he developed a questionnaire in which participants were asked to fill in a triangle, square, and circle the most appropriate primary color. The resulting yellow triangle, red square, and blue circle became a classic Bauhaus motif, one which Kandinsky explored and subverted in this famous work, transforming it into a lyrical evocation of the relationship between visual and musical expression. The same ideas informed his famous text Point and Line to Plane (1926) influenced by new research on Gestalt psychology, a key discussion-topic at the Bauhaus at this time. Kandinsky was interested in how certain combinations of color, line and tone might have innate spiritual and psychological effects, which were in turn connected to certain musical motifs.

As the art historian Annagret Hoberg notes, however, the connotations of this painting extend beyond this, taking in more figurative realms: "[the] two centers...conjure anthropological associations. While in the yellow field one might see a human profile due to the structure of the lines and circles, the intertwining of red and blue form with the black diagonal is reminiscent of the theme of the battle between Saint George and the dragon" It is perhaps these more human associations which explain the iconic status of Kandinsky's abstract paintings in modern art history: as Hoberg notes, Yellow-Red-Blue "exerted an influence on later modernism, including, for example, Barnett Newman's series Who's Afraid of Yellow, Red and Blue (1966-69)."

Oil on canvas - Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France

Club Chair (Model B3) (The Wassily Chair)

Artist: Marcel Breuer

Marcel Breuer's classic Model B3 chair is a revolutionary take on the classic upholstered 'club chair' of the nineteenth century drawing room, a sleek amalgamation of curving, overlapping stainless steel tubes, with taut rectangular fabric panels floating like geometric forms in space. The artist himself described the chair as "my most extreme work . . . the least artistic, the most logical, the least 'cozy' and the most mechanical." But it was also his most influential, exemplifying the groundbreaking developments in functional design that were marking out the Bauhaus by the mid-1920s. Lightweight, easily moved, and easily mass-produced, it met all the requirements of the school's design philosophy, its components arranged with a clarity that made its structure and purpose immediately legible.

Born in Hungary in 1902, Breuer was amongst the youngest members of the original Bauhaus generation. Leaving his home-town of Pécs at the age of eighteen, he enrolled at Gropius's revolutionary new school in 1920, becoming one of its first students. Singled out as a prodigy, he was placed in charge of the woodwork shop, and after a sojourn in Paris returned to the Bauhaus as a teacher in 1925. A committed cyclist, Breuer saw the bicycle as the paragon of modern design, and was fascinated by his bicycle's curved handlebars, made of a new kind of tubular steel developed by the Mannesmann manufacturing company. He realized that the same material, which could be bent without breaking, might be used in furniture design: the 'club chair' is in part the result of this moment of inspiration. In order to produce his furniture on a large scale, Breuer started the company Standard Möbel in 1927. The colloquial name for the chair honors the painter Wassily Kandinsky, who admired the piece when he first saw it in Breuer's studio.

As the art historian Seamus Payne notes, Breur's was "the first ever chair to feature a bent-steel frame...it marked the beginning of a new era in modern furniture with a design that maintains a progressive look even today." After World War II the Italian firm Gavina began producing the chair, ensuring its longstanding influence on design history, and marketing it as the "Wassily Chair." In 1968 the American company Knoll bought out Gavina and began manufacturing the Model B3, which, as a result, can still be purchased today.

Chrome-plated steel, canvas upholstery - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Universal Bayer

Artist: Herbert Bayer

Herbert Bayer's Universal Bayer typeface, a classic of International Style typography, employs a minimal geometric design of the sans-serif type favored by the Bauhaus. At the same time, the simplicity of the design reflects Bayer's interest in enhanced legibility, generating a large amount of negative space between characters, in contrast to the cramped calligraphic scripts of traditional German typography. Describing typography as "human speech translated into what can be read," Bayer wanted written language to have the clarity of speech, and used only lower-case letters for this design since there was no phonetic distinction between upper and lower case. Each character has the same width, meaning that the letters represent interchangeable spaces on the page. The type was therefore extremely easy to work with and could be adapted to typewriter keyboards and typesetting machines. These aspects of the design perfectly sum up the Bauhaus emphasis on functionality and mass producibility.

Like Breuer, Bayer was one of the younger members of the Bauhaus's golden generation, born in Austria in 1900. He initially trained as an architect, and in the late 1910s was part of the Darmstadt Artist's Colony, falling under the influence of that group's Jugendstil or Art Nouveau principles, as well as its emphasis on the idea of the 'total work of art'. However, in 1920 Bayer became intrigued by Gropius's new endeavor, and in 1921 enrolled at the school, studying under Kandinsky, Klee, and Moholy-Nagy. Returning as a teacher in 1925, he was named the Bauhaus's director of advertising and printing during the Dessau phase. He developed the Universal Bayer typeface after Gropius commissioned him to create a typeface which could be used in all Bauhaus publications. At this time, German printers still generally favored Fraktur, a dramatic Gothic typeface designed in the 16th century for Albrecht Dürer's Triumphal Arch (1526) woodcut. By stripping out the ornamentation of German script, Bayer expressed the spirit of a new cultural movement that rejected backwards-looking nationalism and embraced cosmopolitan modernity, a movement spearheaded by the Bauhaus, and later snuffed out by the Nazis. His design was also intended to work within a classic Bauhaus compositional concept, wherein letters were arranged in diagonals lines thrusting upwards across the page, wrapping around objects and picked out in strong colors.

Bayer's typeface was never cast in metal, but its influence has been widespread and longstanding. As well as standing at the forefront of developments in International Style typography across the 1920s-50s, influencing the Architype Bayer and Architype Schwitters typefaces amongst others, it is also the inspiration for Google's Product Sans, and for Bayer Next, a typeface designed by Sascha Lobe for the Bauhaus-Archiv Museum in Berlin in 2014.

Typeface

Bauhaus building in Dessau, Germany

Artist: Walter Gropius

This iconic building, with its spare rectangular shape, glass-curtain walls, and distinctive vertical logo extending up one side, encapsulates the spirit of Bauhaus architecture, and predicts many of the developments that would emerge out of it in the years to come. As the architectural critic Lee F. Mindel wrote, Gropius's "innovative use...of industrial sash, glass curtain walls, and an asymmetrical pinwheel design forged an unforgettable path in the development of what we now call modernism and the International Style."

Born into a culturally and politically well-connected family in Berlin in 1883, Walter Gropius was a decorated war-veteran and avowed patriot, whose advocacy of modernist design principles would see him hounded from his home-country by the Nazis. Like fellow giants of modern architecture such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, he worked in his youth for the influential proto-modernist architect Peter Behrens, and in 1913 published an article on "The Development of Industrial Building", featuring pictures of utilitarian structures such as grain-elevators, which would become a classic statement of the 'form-follows-function' philosophy of modernist design and building. In forming the Bauhaus in 1919 from two existing schools - the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts and Weimar Academy of Fine Art - he redefined the Arts and Crafts aesthetic for the twentieth century. However, the famous headquarters above was created for the school's relocation to Dessau in 1925. The project was funded by the city council, which also provided the land for the site. At that time, the Bauhaus was seen as a vital part of the culture of Dessau, which was then in the process of reinventing itself as a modern industrial center.

Amongst the innovative features of the building are the new relationship it establishes between the viewer and the overall architectural space: the three wings, separated according to their functions, are adjoined asymmetrically, with no central view, so that the building can only be experienced by circumambulating it. The use of glass walls on recessed beams, meanwhile, not only creates light-filled interior but also allows for an outside view into the interior functions of the building, suggesting a spirit of openness and transparency. The succession of changing perspectives which the building affords reflected Gropius's vision for social evolution: for the emergence of a more egalitarian, rational, orderly culture. With the design of this building, Gropius laid down a blueprint for the minimalist functionalism which dominated twentieth-century architecture, predicting in particular the development of the so-called International Style - a kind of globalized variant of Soviet and Northern-European Constructivist architecture - during the 1930s.

Photogram

Artist: László Moholy-Nagy

In this cameraless photograph or "photogram", the artist's hand seems to materialize out of the darkness and float in space, behind a grid of burning white lines which intersect with his finger-tips. As if taking shape from the interplay of shadow and light, the forms seem not only to materialize on the page but also somehow like the dematerialized echoes of physical objects: they become, as the art historian Leah Dickerman puts it, "trace[s] of physical contact." Moholy-Nagy was amongst various European artists, including Christian Schad and Man Ray, who experimented with the photogram - a term coined by Moholy-Nagy - under various names during the 1910s-20s, but through the endeavors of Moholy-Nagy, these works of Abstract Photography became indelibly linked with the Bauhaus's revolutionary ethos.

László Moholy-Nagy was born in Hungary in 1895. In 1920 he emigrated to Germany, and in 1923, with his artistic reputation already somewhat in place, he was invited by Gropius to take over the running of the school's "basic course" or vorkurs from Johannes Itten. Though Moholy-Nagy worked across a range of media, his photograms became icons of Bauhaus experimentation. Created by placing objects on photo-sensitive paper exposed to ambient light, these works, in the artist's own words, made light "the medium of plastic expression". Though photography was not officially part of the school's curriculum, Moholy-Nagy operated as a photographic department of one, and his ardent enthusiasm inspired many of the Bauhaus's faculty and students to undertake their own photographic experiments. Fascinated by light, Moholgy-Nagy would continue to explore the possibilities of the photogram throughout his career, notably at the Chicago School of Design, which he founded in 1939 after moving to America. "Light laboratory" courses were fundamental to the curriculum at Chicago, and Moholy-Nagy's work influenced many subsequent North-American artists, such as Arthur Siegel.

Moholy-Nagy's photograms stand as monuments to the pioneering technological and creative spirit of the Bauhaus: in particular its commitment to exploring the elementary properties and aptitudes of different artistic media. In essence, they represent explorations of the principles of photosensitivity in their purest, most unsullied form, and thus sum up the 'form-follows-function' ethos now associated with the school, and with the broader movement of Constructivism.

Gelatin silver print - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Wall Hanging

Artist: Anni Albers

This striking wall-hanging employs lines, rectangles, and squares arranged in gradations of white, grey, black, and brown, creating a dynamic sense of spatial movement, as the forms seem to recede and leap out of the textile substrate. Vertical and horizontal planes come alive in the asymmetrical grid, as tonal associations between different sections of the chequerboard surface create an endlessly unfolding rhythm of momentary geometric configurations. Anni Albers was interested in reinvesting traditional crafts such as weaving with a sense of modern innovation by altering their basic functional principles. As she put it, "where the functional aspect of the basic structure is moderated, aesthetic qualities frequently move to the foreground - in fact, they often are the very reason for the structural change."

Anni Albers was born Annelise Else Frieda Fleischmann in Berlin in 1899 (in 1925 she married the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College teacher Josef Albers). The daughter of a furnituremaker, Albers briefly studied at a school of applied art in Hamburg in 1919, but soon left, and three years later enrolled at the Bauhaus. Weaving was one of the few workshops open to Albers as a woman, and she initially took it up reluctantly, though she would ultimately become a pioneer of the medium. She credited Paul Klee's 1927 weaving course as a key influence, especially "his repeated insistence that the ultimate form of the work was not as important as the process leading to it." She later recalled: "I heard [Klee] speak and he said take a line for a walk, and I thought, 'I will take thread everywhere I can.'" Taking an innovative and intuitive approach to her work, she interpreted the Bauhaus emphasis on form following function as a pretext to experiment with the basic tenets of the weaving process: this piece, for example, is one of the first examples of textile-work incorporating artificial silk. Combining synthetic and organic materials, patterns and spontaneous decision-making, hand-weaving and loom-weaving, "she provided," as art historian Virginia Gardner Troy puts it, "an alternative to the narrative and figural European tapestry tradition - in which a textile was produced by weavers based on cartoons often created by others - and allowed the modern weaver to compose directly on the loom."

In the introduction to her noted book, On Weaving (1965), Albers wrote that she hoped to "include in my audience not only weavers but also those whose work in other fields encompasses textile problems." Her hope has been borne out, and her work has become seminal not only to those working in textiles, but also within architectural and design fields. Theorist and designer R. Buckminster Fuller stated that "Anni Albers, more than any other weaver, has succeeded in exciting mass realization of the complex structure of fabrics." In 1949, Albers became the first textile artist to exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, and her work continues to receive contemporary critical interest, with major exhibitions at the Guggenheim Bilbao in 2017 and at the Tate Modern in 2018.

Two-ply weave silk - The Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University

Model No. MT 49

Artist: Marianne Brandt

This elegant and innovative teapot uses the interplay of geometric forms as the basis for a distinctively modern design, with its hemispheric body centered on crossbars and topped by a flat circular lid. The handle, a half-circle of ebony, and the cylindrical knop, are also made of ebony, and contrast vertically with the horizontal plane of the body, a juxtaposition complemented by the contrast in materials and colors. As the art curator Christian Witt-Dörring puts it, "[e]ach individual part - lid, handle, spout and base - can be clearly read. Brandt then put all of them together again by creating an abstract sculpture, which, at the same time, is a teapot. The flat and spherical shapes harmonize perfectly."

One of only a few women on the Bauhaus faculty during the 1920s, Marianne Brandt was responsible for creating many of the functional objects that we now recognize as quintessential works of modernist design. Born in Chemnitz, Germany in 1893 as Marianne Liebe, she enrolled at the Bauhaus in 1923, and began studying under Moholy-Nagy in the metal workshop in 1924, becoming the first woman admitted into his studio. Brandt made the prototype for her teapot the same year, subsequently producing six other prototypes, though the design was never marketed commercially. Standing at only three inches tall - a little larger than a teacup - the teapot was intended to create a concentrated tea extract. which could then be diluted with hot water to whatever strength was desired.

In 1928, Brandt would succeed Moholy-Nagy as director of the metal workshop, a testament to the esteem in which she was held by her peers. In the decades since her death, Brandt's designs have become icons of Bauhaus and Constructivist aesthetics. The curator of the Berlin Bauhaus Archive Klaus Weber has called Brandt's Model No. MT 49 "Bauhaus in a Nutshell", a work which exemplifies the school's industrial design aesthetic and emphasis upon functionality. One of Brandt's prototypes for the teapot set a record price for Bauhaus objects at Sotheby's in 2007.

Silver-plated brass and ebony - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Light Prop for an Electric Stage (Light Space Modulator)

Artist: László Moholy-Nagy

To design and realize this motorized sculpture - described by the art critic Peter Schjeldahl as a "twentieth-century utopian icon" - Moholy-Nagy collaborated with the engineer Istvan Sebok, the technician Otto Ball, and the theatrical lighting department of the German electric company AEG. The innovative use of modern materials to create the work, which was initially intended for commercial use in theatres, epitomizes the Bauhaus emphasis on mass production, the machine aesthetic, and the use of modern technology to make works of functional art. The artist himself said that his Light Prop was designed for "creating special lighting and motion effects". It also expressed Moholy-Nagy's interest in light itself as a creative agent, capable of forging new perceptions of space. He used the machine both for his own works of abstract theatre and in his short experimental film Lightplay: Black, White, Gray (1930), in which the Light Prop is the central 'actor,' casting reflections and shadows on a myriad of surrounding surfaces.

Moholy-Nagy onace stated that "to be a user of machines is to be of the spirit of this century." After he became the director of the Bauhaus's preliminary course in 1923, these ideas played a leading role in the school's development along the rationalist, Constructivist lines for which it is now remembered. He felt that the Bauhaus's early emphasis on Gesamtkunstwerk or the total work of art - influenced by the Expressionist philosophy of Itten - should be redirected toward an ideal of Gesamtwerk, a total work, which he identified with life's biological unity. Artistic experience was not to be partitioned off from life, but was to take its place as an integrated aspect of a broader, embodied perceptual process. Light Prop for an Electric Stage exemplifies this philosophy: Moholy-Nagy felt that its use of motion and time-bound light-patterns - dependent upon the viewer to create their own unique, narrative experience of the work - would transform his audience from passive recipients into active participants within an immersive creative environment.

The idea of an immersive artistic environment was highly attractive to the second-wave avant-garde movements of the 1960s, and sure enough, Moholy-Nagy's Light Prop received great interest during that decade. It was seen as a forerunner of the Kinetic Art movement which was by that point in full swing, and was included in several exhibitions of kinetic sculpture, as well as being exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1968. Two working replicas of the Light Prop were made in 1970, and the Tate constructed a third in 2006. The work therefore indicates the influence which Bauhaus themes and forms would have on the modern spirit of later avant-garde art movements.

Aluminum, steel, nickel-plated brass, other metals, plastic, wood, and electric motor - The Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University

Homage to the Square: Dissolving/Vanishing

Artist: Josef Albers

This canvas, one of hundreds created as part of Albers's vast Homage to the Square project, contains several squares, declining in size and oriented toward the lower edge of the pictorial frame. The red of the central square is, perhaps, only apparently red, as the viewer's perception of it is influenced by the hues of the outer squares: an example of what the artist called "the interaction of color". As Albers put it in his influential 1963 book of that name, "[i]f one says 'Red' (the name of a color) and there are 50 people listening, it can be expected that there will be 50 reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different." Due to the interaction of the color and the placement of squares within squares, the image can also paradoxically appear to both advance and recede, subverting the two-dimensional pictorial plane.

Josef Albers, born in Westphalia, Germany in 1888, initially enrolled to study at the Bauhaus in 1920, having previously worked as an art teacher. In 1923, Gropius asked him to take over teaching of the intermediary werklehre course focused on functional techniques, and Albers continued to work at the school until its closure, following it from Weimar to Dessau to Berlin. In 1933 he emigrated to America, where he became the director of Black Mountain College in North Carolina. He described Homage to the Square, which was made up of over a thousand paintings, as a set of "platters to serve color." He began the series in 1949, when he already was sixty-two years old, and continued to work on it until his death in 1976, by which point it had become the culminating achievement of his career.

Through his work at Black Mountain and subsequently at Yale, Albers was hugely responsible for the transferal of its creative principles to North America in the decades following the school's closure. Through his work at those two institutions, and through monumental late works such as Homage to the Square, Albers influenced a whole swath of late-twentieth-century art-movements, including Op Art, Conceptual Art, Color-Field Painting, Hard-edged Geometric Abstraction, and Minimalism, as well as artists such as Bridget Riley, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Frank Stella, and Robert Rauschenberg.

Oil on Masonite - Los Angeles County Museum of Art

The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page. These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In his early career Walter Gropius worked for an international conglomerate designing everything from architectural and industrial projects to office lighting and stationery - this led him to envision a total design ethos, employing "a new guild of craftsmen," that he later embodied in founding the Bauhaus.

# data[].attributes.headline
When Norman Rockwell Attempted to Paint Like Pollock

# data[].attributes.subject
When Norman Rockwell Attempted to Paint Like Pollock

# data[].attributes.body
Norman Rockwell played around with the technique Pollock pioneered: drip painting. Rockwell would emulate his abstract expressionist contemporaries through this painting.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
When Norman Rockwell Attempted to Paint Like Pollock | The Connoisseur

# data[].attributes.body
Characterised by bright colours and bold outlines, Kalighat painting evolved as a unique genre of Indian painting in 19th-century Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), in West Bengal.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Characterised by bright colours and bold outlines, Kalighat painting evolved as a unique genre of Indian painting in 19th-century Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), in West Bengal. From the depiction of gods and other mythological characters, these paintings developed over time to reflect a variety of themes. Kalighat 'patuas' (painters) produced these cheaply made works of art to make a living by selling to a mass market.

The V&A holds the largest collection of Kalighat paintings in the world. The collection, which numbers about 645 watercolour drawings and paintings, also includes line drawings and hand-coloured lithographs. The majority of works are similar to standard A3 paper size though the collection also contains 295 smaller, postcard-sized paintings (roughly 13 cm x 8 cm). Created and collected over a period of 100 years from the 1830s to the 1930s, the works vary in style, quality of workmanship, colour, composition and subject matter.

Origins of Kalighat painting

According to legend, Lord Shiva, the god of dance and destruction, was deep in meditation on Mount Kailasha when he received news of the death of his consort, Sati, an avatar (or human manifestation) of the goddess Kali. He wandered for days with her body draped across his shoulders and his inconsolable grief threatened to ruin the earth. Lord Vishnu, the Preserver, was called upon to intervene. To relieve Shiva's burden, he shattered Sati's body into 51 pieces. The little toe of Sati's right foot was said to have fallen at the site of the Hooghly River, and from this point on the area became associated with the goddess Kali. By the 1690s, when it became part of the city of Kolkata, it was already known as the sacred realm of Kali or Kalikshetra. The moorings ( ghat in Bengali) on the bank of the Hooghly River were known to pilgrims as Kalighat, and there was perhaps an early version of a temple at the spot in the 17th and 18th centuries. By the early 19th century, the temple was a popular destination for local people, pilgrims and interested European visitors.

As Kolkata developed into a busy and thriving industrial harbour city, migrants began arriving looking for new opportunities. Among these were various artisans, craftsmen and painters from various parts of India, including patuas, members of an artisan community from West Bengal. Kalighat, with its daily hordes of pilgrims, would have provided a perfect opportunity for the local artists to produce and sell small, cheap religious souvenirs. The patuas traditionally painted long narrative stories, often over 20 feet in length. Influenced by the different art forms around them and with a need to work quickly, the patuas abandoned their linear, narrative style in favour of single pictures involving one or two figures. The backgrounds were left plain, all non-essential details removed, and basic combinations of colours were used. This created the key characteristics of the Kalighat genre. The patuas' productivity was also helped by the import of cheaper readymade paints from Britain and mill-made paper.

The paintings attracted the interest of many foreign travellers who visited the city in the 19th century. As examples of 'oriental' or 'exotic' souvenirs, Kalighat paintings were perfect - easily portable and concise enough to explain to friends back home.

From 1879 onwards, the V&A acquired its Kalighat collection gradually through direct purchase or by gift. The earliest purchases were two paintings that were originally part of the India Museum collection. Both paintings depicted secular themes: a seated Bengali babu (a foppish male figure, with a mix of Bengali and Western style), and an illustration of Jackal Raja's court.

On 8 August 1917, John Lockwood Kipling 's collection of 233 works were donated to the museum by his son Rudyard Kipling. Kipling was a sculptor and teacher, and Curator of the Lahore Museum in the late 1870s. Another significant source was that of W.G. Archer, Keeper of the Indian Section at the V&A in the 1950s, who oversaw the acquisition of 90 Kalighat paintings.

The practice of Kalighat painting began to die out during the early decades of the 20th century following the increase in demand for cheaper, commercially produced images. Many patua families found themselves facing no option but to leave the city and head back to the rural districts where their ancestors had come from, or to look for other forms of employment.

Kalighat painting continues today in the rural districts of West Bengal. Medinipur and Birbhum are two such areas where the practice of Kalighat painting has been kept alive by contemporary artists. Using organic dyes, as the original 19th century patuas did, the paintings they create focus on secular themes and current events as well as a mixture of religions depictions, executed in a modern style.

Explore a selection of paintings and their various themes from our Kalighat collection in our slideshow below:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The V&A holds the largest collection of Kalighat paintings in the world.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Summary of Pop Art

Pop Art's refreshing reintroduction of identifiable imagery, drawn from media and popular culture, was a major shift for the direction of modernism. With roots in Neo-Dada and other movements that questioned the very definition of "art" itself, Pop was birthed in the United Kingdom in the 1950s amidst a postwar socio-political climate where artists turned toward celebrating commonplace objects and elevating the everyday to the level of fine art. American artists Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist and others would soon follow suit to become the most famous champions of the movement in their own rejection of traditional historic artistic subject matter in lieu of contemporary society's ever-present infiltration of mass manufactured products and images that dominated the visual realm. Perhaps owing to the incorporation of commercial images, Pop Art has become one of the most recognizable styles of modern art.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

By creating paintings or sculptures of mass culture objects and media stars, the Pop Art movement aimed to blur the boundaries between "high" art and "low" culture. The concept that there is no hierarchy of culture and that art may borrow from any source has been one of the most influential characteristics of Pop Art.

It could be argued that the Abstract Expressionists searched for trauma in the soul, while Pop artists searched for traces of the same trauma in the mediated world of advertising, cartoons, and popular imagery at large. But it is perhaps more precise to say that Pop artists were the first to recognize that there is no unmediated access to anything, be it the soul, the natural world, or the built environment. Pop artists believed everything is inter-connected, and therefore sought to make those connections literal in their artwork.

Although Pop Art encompasses a wide variety of work with very different attitudes and postures, much of it is somewhat emotionally removed. In contrast to the "hot" expression of the gestural abstraction that preceded it, Pop Art is generally "coolly" ambivalent. Whether this suggests an acceptance of the popular world or a shocked withdrawal, has been the subject of much debate.

Pop artists seemingly embraced the post-World War II manufacturing and media boom. Some critics have cited the Pop Art choice of imagery as an enthusiastic endorsement of the capitalist market and the goods it circulated, while others have noted an element of cultural critique in the Pop artists' elevation of the everyday to high art: tying the commodity status of the goods represented to the status of the art object itself, emphasizing art's place as, at base, a commodity.

Some of the most famous Pop artists began their careers in commercial art: Andy Warhol was a highly successful magazine illustrator and graphic designer; Ed Ruscha was also a graphic designer, and James Rosenquist started his career as a billboard painter. Their background in the commercial art world trained them in the visual vocabulary of mass culture as well as the techniques to seamlessly merge the realms of high art and popular culture.

Overview of Pop Art

From early innovators in London to later deconstruction of American imagery by the likes of Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist - the Pop Art movement became one of the most thought-after of artistic directions.

Artworks and Artists of Pop Art

I Was a Rich Man's Plaything

Artist: Eduardo Paolozzi

Paolozzi, a Scottish sculptor and artist, was a key member of the British post-war avant-garde. His collage I Was a Rich Man's Plaything proved an important foundational work for the Pop Art movement, combining pop culture documents like a pulp fiction novel cover, a Coca-Cola advertisement, and a military recruitment advertisement. The work exemplifies the slightly darker tone of British Pop Art, which reflected more upon the gap between the glamour and affluence present in American popular culture and the economic and political hardship of British reality. As a member of the loosely associated Independent Group, Paolozzi emphasized the impact of technology and mass culture on high art. His use of collage demonstrates the influence of Surrealist and Dadaist photomontage, which Paolozzi implemented to recreate the barrage of mass media images experienced in everyday life.

Collage - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom

Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?

Artist: Richard Hamilton

Hamilton's collage was a seminal piece for the evolution of Pop Art and is often cited as the very first work of the movement. Created for the exhibition This is Tomorrow at London's Whitechapel Gallery in 1956, Hamilton's image was used both in the catalogue for the exhibition and on posters advertising it. The collage presents viewers with an updated Adam and Eve (a body-builder and a burlesque dancer) surrounded by all the conveniences modern life provided, including a vacuum cleaner, canned ham, and a television. Constructed using a variety of cutouts from magazine advertisements, Hamilton created a domestic interior scene that both lauded consumerism and critiqued the decadence that was emblematic of the American post-war economic boom years.

Collage - Kunsthalle Tubingen, Germany

President Elect

Artist: James Rosenquist

Like many Pop artists, Rosenquist was fascinated by the popularization of political and cultural figures in mass media. In his painting President Elect, the artist depicts John F. Kennedy's face amidst an amalgamation of consumer items, including a yellow Chevrolet and a piece of cake. Rosenquist created a collage with the three elements cut from their original mass media context, and then photo-realistically recreated them on a monumental scale. As Rosenquist explains, "The face was from Kennedy's campaign poster. I was very interested at that time in people who advertised themselves. Why did they put up an advertisement of themselves? So that was his face. And his promise was half a Chevrolet and a piece of stale cake." The large-scale work exemplifies Rosenquist's technique of combining discrete images through techniques of blending, interlocking, and juxtaposition, as well as his skill at including political and social commentary using popular imagery.

Oil on masonite - Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

Pastry Case, I

Artist: Claes Oldenburg

Oldenburg is known as one of the few American Pop Art sculptors, notorious for his playfully absurd creations of food and inanimate objects. The collection of works in Pastry Case, I were originally displayed in the artist's famous 1961 installation titled The Store, located on New York's Lower East Side. For the project, Oldenburg created plaster sculptural objects including a strawberry shortcake and a candied apple. In addition to replicating consumer items, Oldenburg organized his installation like a typical variety shop and sold his items at low prices, commenting on the interrelation between art objects and commodities. Although sold as if they were mass-produced, the sculptures in The Store were carefully hand-built and the lavish, expressive brushstrokes that cover the items in Pastry Case, I seem to mock the seriousness of Abstract Expressionism, a common theme in Pop Art. Oldenburg combines the evocative expressionist gesture with the commodity item in a highly ironic environment.

Painted plaster sculptures on ceramic plates, metal platter and cups in glass-and-metal case - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Drowning Girl

Artist: Roy Lichtenstein

In the early 1960s, Lichtenstein gained renown as a leading Pop artist for paintings sourced from the popular comics. Although artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns had previously integrated popular imagery into their works, no one hitherto had focused on cartoon imagery as exclusively as Lichtenstein. His work, along with that of Andy Warhol, heralded the beginning of the Pop Art movement, and, essentially, the end of Abstract Expressionism as the dominant style.

Lichtenstein did not simply copy comic pages directly, he employed a complex technique that involved cropping images to create entirely new, dramatic compositions, as in Drowning Girl, whose source image included the woman's boyfriend standing on a boat above her. Lichtenstein also condensed the text of the comic book panels, locating language as another, crucial visual element; re-appropriating this emblematic aspect of commercial art for his paintings further challenged existing views about definitions of "high" art.

As with the rest of Pop Art, it is often unclear whether Lichtenstein is applauding the comic book image, and the general cultural sphere to which it belongs, or critiquing it, leaving interpretation up to the viewer. But in Drowning Girl, the ridicule of the woman's situation (as is made clear by her ridiculous statement) is evident.

Oil on canvas - Oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas, © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein

Campbell's Soup I

Artist: Andy Warhol

Warhol's iconic series of Campbell's Soup Cans paintings were never meant to be celebrated for their form or compositional style, like that of the abstractionists. What made these works significant was Warhol's co-opting of universally recognizable imagery, such as a Campbell's soup can, Mickey Mouse, or the face of Marilyn Monroe, and depicting it as a mass-produced item, but within a fine art context. In that sense, Warhol wasn't just emphasizing popular imagery, but rather providing commentary on how people have come to perceive these things in modern times: as commodities to be bought and sold, identifiable as such with one glance. This early series was hand-painted, but Warhol switched to screenprinting shortly afterwards, favoring the mechanical technique for his mass culture imagery. 100 canvases of Campbell's soup cans made up his first solo exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, and put Warhol on the art world map almost immediately, forever changing the face and content of modern art.

Screenprint - Fair Use

Bunnies

Artist: Sigmar Polke

After Polke co-founded Capitalist Realism in 1963 in Düsseldorf, Germany, with Gerhard Richter and Konrad Leug, he began to create paintings of popular culture, evoking both genuine nostalgia for the images and mild cynicism about the state of the German economy. He began simulating the dot patterns of commercial four-color printing (Raster dots) around the same time as Lichtenstein started replicating Ben-Day dots on his canvases. In Bunnies, Polke uses an image from the Playboy Club depicting four of their "bunnies" in costume. By recreating the Raster dot printing technique in this painting, Polke disrupts the mass-marketing of sexual appeal, because the closer the viewer gets to the work, the less they see. Bunnies and the rest of Polke's Raster dot paintings, do not invite a deep, personal identification with the image but rather the images become allegories for the self as it lost amidst the flood of commecial imagery. The dissonance between the inviting sexuality of the appropriated image of the Playboy bunnies and the distancing effect of the Raster dots echoes the interplay of feelings and emotions felt by the artist, both yearning for the mass-culture advertised life and repelled by it at the same time. Polke's vision of popular culture is far more critical than any of the New York artists, and is rooted in the skeptical attitude held by the Capitalist Realists. Rather than the "cool" detachment of New York, Polke cleverly critiques popular culture and how it affects the individual using the same mass-market image-making techniques.

Oil on cavas - Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., USA

Standard Station

Artist: Ed Ruscha

The printmaker, painter, and photographer Ed Ruscha was an important proponent of West Coast Pop Art that blended the imagery of Hollywood with colorful renderings of commercial culture and the landscape of the southwest. The gasoline station is one of Ruscha's most iconic motifs, appearing repeatedly in his book Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963), a documentation of deadpan photographs from a road trip through the American Southwestern countryside. In Standard Station, the artist transforms the banal image of the gasoline station into an emblematic symbol of American consumer culture. Here, through the medium of screenprinting, Ruscha flattens the perspective into a single plane to create an image that evokes the aesthetic of commercial advertising. The work also demonstrates Ruscha's early experiments with language and textual interplay, which would be a principal concern in much of his later, more conceptually oriented work.

Screenprint - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

A Bigger Splash

Artist: David Hockney

This large canvas, measuring approximately 94 by 94 inches, was derived from a photograph of a swimming pool Hockney had seen in a pool manual. Hockney was intrigued by the idea that a painting might recapture a fleeting event frozen in a photograph: "I loved the idea of painting this thing that lasts for two seconds: it takes me two weeks to paint this event that lasts for two seconds." The dynamism of the splash contrasts strongly with the static and rigid geometry of the house, the pool edge, the palm trees and the striking yellow diving board, all carefully arranged in a grid containing the splash. This gives the painting a disjointed effect that is absolutely intentional, one of the hallmarks of Hockney's style. The effect of stylization and artificiality draws on the aesthetic vocabulary of Pop Art.

Acrylic on canvas - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom

Beginnings of Pop Art

Great Britain: The Independent Group

In 1952, a gathering of artists in London calling themselves the Independent Group began meeting regularly to discuss topics such as mass culture's place in fine art, the found object, and science and technology. Members included Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton, architects Alison and Peter Smithson, and critics Lawrence Alloway and Reyner Banham. Britain in the early 1950s was still emerging from the austerity of the post-war years, and its citizens were ambivalent about American popular culture. While the group was suspicious of its commercial character, they were enthusiastic about the rich world pop culture seemed to promise for the future. The imagery they discussed at length included that found in Western movies, science fiction, comic books, billboards, automobile design, and rock and roll music.

The actual term "Pop Art" has several possible origins: the first use of the term in writing has been attributed to both Lawrence Alloway and Alison and Peter Smithson, and alternately to Richard Hamilton, who defined Pop in a letter, while the first artwork to incorporate the word "Pop" was produced by Paolozzi. His collage I Was a Rich Man's Plaything (1947) contained cut-up images of a pinup girl, Coca-Cola logo, cherry pie, World War II bomber, and a man's hand holding a pistol, out of which burst the world "POP!" in a puffy white cloud.

New York City: The Emergence of Neo-Dada

By the mid 1950s, the artists working in New York City faced a critical juncture in modern art: follow the Abstract Expressionists or rebel against the strict formalism advocated by many schools of modernism. By this time, Jasper Johns was already troubling conventions with abstract paintings that included references to: "things the mind already knows" - targets, flags, handprints, letters, and numbers. Meanwhile, Robert Rauschenberg's "combines" incorporated found objects and images, with more traditional materials like oil paint. Similarly, Allan Kaprow's "Happenings" and the Fluxus movements chose to incorporate aspects from the surrounding world into their art. These artists, along with others, later became grouped in the movement known as Neo-Dada. The now classic New York Pop Art of Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol emerged in the 1960 in the footsteps of the Neo-Dadaists.

Pop Art: Concepts, Styles, and Trends

Once the transition from the found-object constructions of the Neo-Dada artists to the Pop movement was complete, there was widespread interest on the part of artists in the incorporation of popular culture into their work. Although artists in the Independent Group in London initiated the use of "pop" in reference to art, American artists soon followed suit and incorporated popular culture into their artwork as well. Although the individual styles vary widely, all of the artists maintain a commonality in their choice of popular culture imagery as their fundamental subject. Shortly after American Pop Art arrived on the art world scene, mainland European variants developed in the Capitalist Realist movement in Germany and the Nouveau Réalisme movement in France.

Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi, and the Tabular Image

The Pop Art collages of Paolozzi and Hamilton convey the mixed feelings Europeans maintained toward American popular culture; both exalting the mass-produced objects and images while also criticizing the excess. In his collage, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? (1956), Hamilton combined images from various mass media sources, carefully selecting each image and composing the disparate elements of popular imagery into one coherent survey of post-war consumer culture. The members of the Independent Group were the first artists to present mass media imagery, acknowledging the challenges to traditional art categories occurring in America and Britain after 1945.

Roy Lichtenstein and Pulp Culture

Lichtenstein proved that he could fulfill demands for a "great" composition even though his subject matter derived from comic books. In addition to using the imagery from these mass-produced picture books, Lichtenstein appropriated the techniques used to create the images in comic books to create his paintings. He not only adopted the same bright colors and clear outlines as popular art, his most innovative contribution was his use of Ben-Day dots: small dots used to render color in mass-manufactured comics. Focusing on a single panel within a comic strip, Lichtenstein's canvases are not an exact facsimile, but are rather the artist's creative re-imaging of the composition in which elements may have been added or eliminated, scale could shift, and text might be edited. By hand-painting the usually machine-generated dots, and recreating comic book scenes, Lichtenstein blurred the distinction between mass reproduction and high art.

James Rosenquist and the Monumental Image

Rosenquist also directly appropriated images from popular culture for his paintings. However, rather than produce rote copies, Rosenquist exerted creative control through his surrealistic juxtapositions of products and celebrities, often inserting political messages. As part of his method, Rosenquist collaged magazine clippings from advertisements and photo spreads, and then used the results as studies for his final painting. Rosenquist's training in billboard painting transitioned perfectly into his realistic renderings of those collages expanded onto a monumental scale. With works often much larger and wider than 20 feet, Rosenquist imbued the mundane with the same status previously reserved for high, sometimes royal, art subjects.

Andy Warhol and Repetition

Andy Warhol is most famous for his vividly colored portraits of celebrities, but his subject matter has varied widely throughout his career. The common theme amidst the different subjects is their inspiration in mass consumer culture. His earliest works depict objects like Coca-Cola bottles and Campbell's soup cans, reproduced ad infinitum, as if the gallery wall were a shelf in a supermarket. Warhol transitioned from hand painting to screenprinting to further facilitate the large-scale replication of pop images. Warhol's insistence on mechanical reproduction rejected notions of artistic authenticity and genius. Instead, he acknowledged the commodification of art, proving that paintings were no different from cans of Campbell's soup; both have material worth and could be bought and sold like consumer goods. He further equated the mass-produced status of consumer goods with that of celebrities in portraits like Marilyn Diptych (1962).

Claes Oldenburg and Pop Sculpture

Renowned for his monumental public sculptures of everyday objects and his "soft" sculptures, Claes Oldenburg began his career on a much smaller scale. In 1961 he rented a storefront in New York City for a month where he installed and sold his wire and plaster sculptures of mundane objects, ranging from pastries to men's and women's undergarments, in an installation he dubbed The Store. Oldenburg charged a nominal fee for each piece, which underscored his commentary on the role of art as a commodity. He began his soft sculptures shortly after The Store, constructing large, everyday objects, like a slice of cake, an ice cream cone, or a mixer, out of fabric and stuffing so the end result collapses in on itself like a deflating balloon. Oldenburg would continue to focus on commonplace objects throughout his career, moving from soft sculptures to grand public art, like the 45-foot-high Clothespin (1974) in downtown Philadelphia. Regardless of the scale, Oldenburg's work always maintains a playful attitude toward re-creating mundane things in an unconventional way in order to upend viewer's expectations.

Los Angeles Pop

As opposed to New York City, the art world of Los Angeles was much less rigid, lacking the established galleries, critics, and hierarchies of the east coast; this openness is reflected in the styles of the artists who lived and worked there. The first museum survey of Pop Art, New Painting of Common Objects, was held at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962, and showcased Warhol and Lichtenstein as well as many artists living in Los Angeles including Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode, Phillip Hefferton, Wayne Thiebaud, and Robert Dowd. Other Los Angeles artists, like Billy Al Bengston, incorporated a different kind of aesthetic into their version of Pop, utilizing new materials such as automobile paint and referencing surfing and motorcycles in works that make the familiar strange through new and unexpected combinations of images and media. By shifting the focus away from specific consumer goods, these artists allowed Pop Art to move beyond replication to incorporate experience and evoke a particular feeling, attitude, or idea, while also pushing the boundaries between high art and popular culture.

Ed Ruscha and Signage

On the roster at Ferus Gallery, Ed Ruscha was one of the pivotal artists of Los Angeles Pop who worked in a variety of media, with the majority of these typically printed or painted. Emphasizing the omnipresence of signage in Los Angeles, Ruscha used words and phrases as subjects in his earliest Pop Art paintings. His first reference to popular culture was the painting Large Trademark with Eight Spotlights (1962), where he appropriated the 20 th Century Fox logo in a simplified composition with the hard edges and clear palette of a cartoon, echoing the similar billboards. His subsequent paintings of words further blurred the lines between advertising signage, painting, and abstraction, undermining the divisions between the aesthetic world and the commercial realm, some even incorporating three-dimensional objects like pencils and comic books on the canvases. Ruscha's work presages the Conceptual art of the later 1960s, driven by the idea behind the artwork rather than the specific image. Ruscha's exploration of a variety of commonplace images and themes went beyond merely reproducing them, but to examining the interchangeability of image, text, place, and experience.

Capitalist Realism in Germany

In Germany, the counterpart to the American Pop Art movement was Capitalist Realism, a movement that focused on subjects taken from commodity culture and utilized an aesthetic based in the mass media. The group was founded by Sigmar Polke in 1963 and included artists Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg as its central members. The Capitalist Realists sought to expose the consumerism and superficiality of contemporary capitalist society by using the imagery and aesthetic of popular art and advertising within their work. Polke explored the creative possibilities of mechanical reproduction and Lueg examined pop culture imagery, while Richter dissected the photographic medium.

Nouveau Réalisme in France

In France, aspects of Pop Art were present in Nouveau Réalisme, a movement launched by the critic Pierre Restany in 1960, with the drafting of the "Constitutive Declaration of New Realism," that proclaimed, "Nouveau Réalisme - new ways of perceiving the real." The declaration was signed in Yves Klein's workshop by nine artists who were united in their direct appropriation of mass culture, or in Restany's words, "poetic recycling of urban, industrial, and advertising reality." This principle is evident in the work of Villeglé, whose technique of " décollage" involved cutting through layers of posters to create a new image. While the movement echoed the American Pop artists' concerns with commercial culture, many of the Nouveau Réalistes were more concerned with objects than with painting, as is the case with Spoerri, whose "snare-pictures" used food, cutlery, and tabletops as artistic media. Other key proponents of the movement included Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Arman, François Dufrêne, Raymond Hains, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Christo and Jean-Claude.

Later Developments - After Pop Art

Pop Art would continue to influence artists in later decades, with artists like Warhol maintaining a larger-than-life presence within the New York art world into the 1980s. Pop fell out of favor during the 1970s as the art world shifted focus from art objects to installations, performances, and other less tangible art forms. However, with the revival of painting at the end of the 1970s and in the early 1980s, the art object came back into favor once again, and popular culture provided subject matter that was easy for viewers to identify and understand. One of the leading figures of the Neo-Pop movement was Jeff Koons, whose appropriation of pop culture icons such as Michael Jackson and mass-produced objects like Hoover vacuum cleaners further pushed the boundaries of high art. In Japan, the work of Takashi Murakami has been cited as a more recent example of Neo-Pop, due to his use of popular anime imagery in his Superflat style and his successful partnering with fashion labels like Louis Vuitton. Such artists continue to break down the barrier between high and low art forms, while reevaluating the role of art as a commodity in and of itself.

Useful Resources on Pop Art

Individual Artist Overviews:

Similar Art

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Pop artists celebrated everyday images and elevated popular culture to the level of fine art. Top works by Warhol, Lichtenstein, Johns, Dine, Ruscha++

# data[].attributes.body
Join Assistant Curator Catriona Gourlay inside the National Art Library as she walks us through the steps involved in having the artist's book Anansi Company photographed. Artist's books can take many forms, from luxury letterpress volumes with original prints to duplicated pamphlets, 3D constructions and 'altered' existing books.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Watch and listen as Assistant Curator Catriona Gourlay handles and prepares a puppet book for photography in this ASMR video.

ASMR stands for autonomous sensory meridian response - a pleasant tingling sensation beginning on the scalp and moving down the neck, which can be triggered by a delicate or satisfying auditory or visual experience.

Join Catriona inside the National Art Library as she walks us through the steps involved in having the artist's book Anansi Company photographed. Artist's books can take many forms, from luxury letterpress volumes with original prints to duplicated pamphlets, 3D constructions and 'altered' existing books.

The book consists of 13 delicate handmade wire and card rod-puppets. Watch as Catriona gently slides the puppets out of their paper slots, and shows us how they can be manoeuvred, wearing gloves to avoid getting fingerprints on the metal.

We use third-party platforms (including Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube) to share some content on this website. These set third-party cookies, for which we need your consent. If you are happy with this, please change your cookie consent for Targeting cookies. Cookie Settings

The book is based on the tales of Anansi, which spread from West Africa into Caribbean folklore as stories shared orally by enslaved people. Commonly known as a spider, Anansi can take on many different forms, adding to his reputation as trickster, helper and everything in between. This version of Anansi's stories has been created by artist Ronald King, and was published by Circle Press in 1992. It features poetry by Roy Fisher, based on material from Jamaican Song and Story, 1907.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Watch and listen as Assistant Curator Catriona Gourlay handles and prepares a puppet book for photography in this ASMR video. ASMR stands for autonomous sensory meridian response - a pleasant tingling sensation beginning on the scalp and moving down the neck, which can be triggered by a delicate or satisfying auditory or visual experience.

# data[].attributes.headline
Check out the National Gallery's Picture of the Month

# data[].attributes.subject
Check out the National Gallery's Picture of the Month

# data[].attributes.body
A new picture every month. Simple really.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Discover the painting that started our 'Picture of the month' tradition during the Second World War

# data[].attributes.body
The Raphael Cartoons are a set of seven full-scale designs for tapestry painted by Raphael (1483 – 1520), and are considered one of the greatest treasures of the Renaissance!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The Raphael Cartoons are a set of seven full-scale designs for tapestry painted by Raphael (1483 - 1520), and are considered one of the greatest treasures of the Renaissance. They were commissioned in 1515 by Pope Leo X for the Vatican's Sistine Chapel and depict the lives of the apostles Saint Peter and Saint Paul. The Cartoons have been on loan to the V&A from Her Majesty The Queen since 1865.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Raphael Cartoons are a set of seven full-scale designs for tapestry painted by Raphael (1483 - 1520), and are considered one of the greatest treasures of the Renaissance. They were commissioned in 1515 by Pope Leo X for the Vatican's Sistine Chapel and depict the lives of the apostles Saint Peter and Saint Paul.

# data[].attributes.headline
Get some pro tips on creating art from leading artists at the Tate

# data[].attributes.subject
Get some pro tips on creating art from leading artists at the Tate

# data[].attributes.body
Learn skills from casting to weaving, with art activities for adults and kids.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A series of how to make art instructional films inspired by artists like Rachel Whiteread, Turner, Andy Warhol, Frank Bowling, Anni Albers and more

# data[].attributes.body
The series explores a fantastical range of elements of the world of art.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Tune in to Tate's podcast, The Art of ... and hear about the lives of artists and the stories behind their work.

# data[].attributes.body
Explore the notorious art school's collection! You can view 500 works from all areas - furniture, ceramics, photographs, prints and much more!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Explore our collection from wherever you are! In our database you can view 500 works from all areas - furniture, ceramics, photographs, prints and much more.

You can also search important parts of the extensive estate of Walter Gropius. Our pilot project open archive walter gropius currently comprises 14,000 letters from the years 1910 to 1969, 3,500 photos of Walter Gropius' buildings and projects, 2,500 private photographs and his newspaper archive on the Bauhaus from 1917 to 1925.

A large part of our documents can be researched via Kalliope. Our specialist library on the Bauhaus is accessible via the KOBV and OPAC databases.

We would like to thank the State of Berlin, the Research and Competence Center Digitization Berlin ( digiS) and the European Fund for Regional Development ( EFRE).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Online collection - Bauhaus-Archiv | Museum für Gestaltung, Berlin

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Explore our collection from wherever you are! In our database you can view 500 works from all areas - furniture, ceramics, photographs, prints and much more. You can also search important parts of the extensive estate of Walter Gropius.

# data[].attributes.headline
Plan a visit: If in London visit one of the Tate Galleries

# data[].attributes.subject
Plan a visit: If in London visit one of the Tate Galleries

# data[].attributes.body
They're free!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Your safe visit

Book a timed ticket in advance

Timed tickets are required to enter our galleries for both the free collections and paid exhibitions.

All visitors, including Members, Patrons, Supporters and Corporate Partners, need to book online in advance.

Follow the one-way routes

One-way routes and safe distancing guidelines are in place throughout the galleries.

Prepare for a bit more walking than usual. You can find access information on each gallery page

Pay with card

We only accept card or contactless payments in the gallery to minimise touchpoints.

There are also protective screens in place at all desks.

Extra safety measures

All visitors are required to wear face coverings in our galleries, apart from those who are exempt.

Hand sanitiser is available in key areas, along with increased cleaning regimes in toilets and other high use areas.

Please only visit with people from your household or support bubble (maximum group size six).

Facilities

Routes will include the option to visit one of our shops. Face coverings are mandatory in the shops

There will be an opportunity to buy food and drink

Toilets remain open with increased cleaning regimes

All cloakrooms and lockers are currently closed and so please avoid bringing bulky coats or bags

Items larger than cabin bag size (55cm x 40cm x 22cm) are not permitted in the galleries. This includes scooters, skateboards and folding bikes

For more information on facilities, take a look at the accessibility section on the gallery page you are visiting.

Help us keep you safe

When you visit, please keep your distance from others and follow the one-way route you have booked. Act on any guidance our team may give you and use the hand sanitiser provided along with washing your hands regularly. Please only visit with people from your household or support bubble (maximum group size six). All visitors are required to wear face coverings in our galleries, apart from those who are exempt. Not all exemptions are visible so please be understanding of others.

Most importantly, if you or anyone you live with has COVID-19 symptoms, or if you have recently been in contact with someone who has COVID-19, please stay at home.

For more information on the changes we've made to keep everyone safe, take a look through our FAQs.

We have been awarded "we're good to go" status for our safety measures.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Book a timed ticket in advance Timed tickets are required to enter our galleries for both the free collections and paid exhibitions. All visitors, including Members, Patrons, Supporters and Corporate Partners, need to book online in advance. Follow the one-way routes One-way routes and safe distancing guidelines are in place throughout the galleries.

# data[].attributes.headline
Explore the past, present and future winners of the Turner Prize

# data[].attributes.subject
Explore the past, present and future winners of the Turner Prize

# data[].attributes.body
Find out about one of the best-known visual arts prizes. Each year the Turner Prize jury shortlist four artists for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
About the art prize the Turner Prize, its history and its connection to Tate