Max Bill: The last Leonardo
Three rectangular fir-shaped boards galvanized in U-shape, a stabilizing broomstick between the two ends - and this is supposed to be a design classic? Max Bill's so-called "Ulmer Stool" from 1954 is the minimalist piece of furniture par excellence. The students of the legendary Ulm School of Design used the tufa multifunctional as a seat, a small table or a tray. It was a time when the economy was booming in Germany, design was visionary and the "good form" was propagated at the university. Max Bill was the first rector of this institute, which in the post-Nazi period wanted to build on the teaching of the Bauhaus aesthetically and socially - but after 15 years had to close for lack of funds.
A new edition of the wristwatch brought out Junghans twelve years ago.
Nevertheless, the Swiss Max Bill many Germans just in conjunction with the Ulm College a term. The fact that he also designed wallpapers, height suns, hairbrushes, hangers, typewriters or electrical plugs for industry is something that almost only design insiders know. He is one of the designers whose designs have become even better because of their simplicity with the years. Of the fast-moving, colorful gimmicks of our time, the reduced formers would have held little. Luckily that some of his ideas are still unchanged or have been reissued: his wristwatches and kitchen clocks, which he designed in the fifties with elegant and reduced dials, attracted a lot of attention at that time and are since 1997 back from the company Junghans produces.
But Max Bill was more like a mere product designer - he even disdained the term "designer", which sounded too fashionable to him. He was a painter, architect, sculptor, graphic artist, typographer, theorist, teacher and even politician, an all-round genius. In 1924 he started a silversmith apprenticeship at the School of Applied Arts in Zurich. But a little later - after a lecture by Le Corbusier - he decided to become an architect and moved in 1927 to the Bauhaus in Dessau. There, especially Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Josef Albers had great influence on him. Whatever Bill designed in the period that followed, he understood his works of art as "objects for spiritual use". They should not be representational or abstract, but concrete. The simple, clear forms and precise proportions were based on basic mathematical forms, as the Bauhaus had taught him. Bill tried by his art "to set up a counter-world against (...) the confusion in which we live today (...)".
Max Bill
Max Bill was the first rector and the architect of the College of Design in Ulm.
In 2008 Max Bill would have been 100 years old; He died in 1994 after a heart attack in Berlin's Tegel Airport. The exhibition "Max Bill: Aspects of his Work" at the Wilhelm Wagenfeld Haus in Bremen honors the Swiss artist until 15 March 2009.
Information on Tel. 0421/338810 or www.wwh-bremen.de
