Word: gropius
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...traditional answer to this demand to accquire a reasonable comprehension of the arts has been the historical method, best exemplified by Fine Arts 13 and Music 1. Walter Gropius, famed professor emeritus, castigates this approach for an undue reliance upon "passive absorbtion" instead of upon active creation. As the 1956 Report of the Committee on the Visual Arts indicated, there is a valid and necessary place for such a verbal approach, but it should not be considered sufficient by itself to convey a deep understanding of the artistic processes--essentially non-verbal--which play such a widespread role in society...
...early luminary of Walter Gropius' Bauhaus in Germany, which developed such formgivers as Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Moholy-Nagy, Albers came to the U.S. when Hitler closed the Bauhaus, taught at Black Mountain College and later headed Yale's Department of Design. At 70, Albers has the granitic and yet sensitive face of a northern Dante; though recently retired, he still finds opportunities to teach. "To distribute spiritual possessions," he may say to one shy talent, "is to multiply them." To another, more flamboyant, he may murmur in passing, "Calm down...
Later, while teaching at Walter Gropius' Bauhaus in Germany, another childhood influence returned to shape the major part of Feininger's art: it was his passion for American precision, as expressed in Manhattan's illimitable grid of straight streets, its now-vanished els, old New York Central trains with diamond-shaped smokestack and steam domes of polished brass, and Hudson River sidewheelers and yachts, of which he used to build faithful models. There, working side by side with fellow fantasists, topped by Paul Klee. and fellow precisionists, notably Josef Albers. Feininger evolved the weird, airy, many-faceted...
...project got under way six years ago in the kind of comedy of confusion that all Frenchmen relish. A group of five architects, Les Cinq (France's Le Corbusier, Brazil's Lucio Costa, the U.S.'s Walter Gropius, Sweden's Sven Markelius, Italy's Ernesto Rogers), was picked by UNESCO to name Les Trois who would actually design the building. The site was changed twice to placate the jittery guardians of Paris' celebrated skyline. With that act over, the U.S.'s Marcel Breuer, Italy's famed master of concrete, Pier Luigi Nervi...
...should also attract a host of auditors on opening day, even from among those who have long transcended the elementary stuff. Clambering up the Gropius-bleachers in Burr A gives one a chance to view both Sputnik-spotting Dr. Hynek, and cigarette-dangling Payne-Gaposchkin, Harvard's first woman professor, world authority on variable stars, and beloved eccentric of the first order...