Man Ray.

 The life and photographic work.

Man ray was an artist unconstrained by rules who considered the medium in which he worked a mere convenience in the service of his ideas. Not only did he succeed in stretching  the boundaries of what we consider photography, but he also challenged our notions of beauty to an extent that still informs out outlook today.

Man Ray became one of the most inventive practitioners of photography in the twentieth century.

  The book begins with an introduction and a few paragraphs that contain information about his private life, work and life, which led the work.
Man Ray actually Rudzitsky Emmanuel (born August 27, 1890 in Philadelphia, died. October 18, 1976 in Paris) was an American photographer and director. His work is considered to Dadaism and Surrealism.

His first significant photographs made ​​in 1918, living in Philadelphia. Even then, he painted and created avant-garde films.Living in New York, with his friend Marcel Duchamp, created the American mainstream Dadaism, which began in Europe as a radical rejection of traditional art. He co-founded a group of artists known as the Others.After several unsuccessful attempts, particularly after the publication of one issue of New York Dada in 1920, Man Ray stated, "Dadaism can not live in New York because the whole New York is dada, " and in 1921 to live and came to France to Paris. He settled in the Montparnasse district. There he became a devotee of the French model Alice Prin (Kiki), often called "Kiki of Montparnasse, " which posed the then-known painters. Later, the same has become his favorite subject to photograph was a singer and cabaret.
Over the next 20 years, living in Montparnasse, Man Ray revolutionized the art of photography, and great artists such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau's posing for photos.
Along with Jean Arpem, Max Ernst, André Masson, Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso presented his work at the first exhibition of Surrealism at the Galerie Pierre in Paris in 1925. Meret Oppenheim in 1934, surrealist artist (known for his works, such as the fur-covered cup), posed for Man Ray which resulted in the creation of a series of photographs showing naked in a surrealist artist standing next to a printing press. Together with another photographer Lee Miller - his lover and collaborator - a photographic technique invented pseudosolaryzacji. Man Ray also created a technique he called the English rayographs.
Later in life, Man Ray for a few years he returned to the United States and settled in Los Angeles. However, as he used to say, it was his home in Montparnasse, and there he returned from the USA to spend the rest of his life. He died on October 18, 1976. He was buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris.
His epitaph can be paraphrased as: "Not interested, but not indifferent. " 
And that was enough about his life and achievements. In my opinion, Man Ray has been and will be the best photographer who inspired me to work on images such as nudes. The book is not so much which shows and describes his life and what he achieved but it also inspires and shows how developed and began to photograph.

Classics Of Design.

From industrial revolution to the modern movement.

Mini Car.

The first mini car created from the idea of ​​Sir Alec Issigonis in 1959 and existed under the name Minor.
Subsequent versions-Wolseley-Reilly and were produced three years later.
The car was a famous by Cooper's in the race in Monte Carlo.

In 1999 he celebrated his fortieth Mini birthday and the same year was also elected as the second car of the century.

  But let's start from the begining:

Mini's designer Alec Issigonis was born in 1906-1988 in Imir, Turkey. After graduation he took a job as an engineer in several places.
 
In 1936 he joined the Morris Motor Design Team, Kotra later changed its name to the BMC (British Motor Corporation) and assumed the position where the designer suspensions.
During World War II joined the design team a compact car, which was named Morris Minor'em-its production began in 1948 and a car odniusł great success. In 1950 Alec Issigonis experimented and changed work for three years.
After three years, worked at Alvis, Alec returned to the BMC for the post of chief designer.

After the crisis Alec was removed from working on other projects and got a warrant for the creation of a small passenger car with all available and during this time produced by the BMC car parts.

The first draft of Alec Issigonis sketched the handkerchief in the restaurant, then took the car a realistic dimensions.
After two years of development in 26 August 1959 year, the Morris Mini Minor was showed up to the magazines

Mini car from the beginning enjoyed the amounts of sold cars. Mini was bought by few people involved in motor racing, who quickly saw the potential in this car.

Genius Of Photography.

Documents for artists.

The first World War marked the triumph of the machine over the mereley human. The high explosives, the machine guns, the tanks and planes exposed the fallibility of humanity just as much as the folly of war had one. When the war ended, people wanted to become more machine like. Houses became machines for living, writers became enginners of the human soul, chorus lines were fine tuned like precision instruments and the rich and famous took on the sheen sports cars.
The Genius of Photography-Documents for Artists examines in detail the work of some of the greatest and most influential modern photographers.

In the age of the machine, photography was seen as a machine-like process manufacturing objective truths purged and emotion. But, for Man Ray, the camera was not a machine for making documents but an instrument for exploring dreams, desires and the medium's unconscious mind.

"He was such a natural maverick in the photographic medium that he almost effortlessly discovered all these ways to be a photographer that no one had thought of before. And they were so perfectly in tune with the moment of Dadaism and Surrealism. All these things like making photographs in the darkroom just by sprinkling and scattering interesting objects on photographic paper and then just switching the light on very briefly to allow these objects to imprint themselves on the paper and then just developing it out, no camera involved. He discovers the solarisation process inadvertently, in the late 1920s, and he makes people look as though their faces are of aluminium. They become sort of sleek and metallic like the mascots on the front of those rather swish, fast cars. They become these super-people, also slightly inhuman, slightly robotic." (Mark Haworth-Booth, Photo-historian)




so basically:

 

Man Ray was famous  for using different darkroom techniques such as photogram’s and photographs.

After the first world he created influential photos making people look machine like and metallic. Man ray took this as a form of documentation where as the rest of the world just saw photography and another form of machinery.

 

 

Alexander Rodchenko

Rodchenko was famous for his blacked out photos. He captured images men's form the amry. Afer that he became a public enemy and he was told  to destroy all the pictures but he decided that instead of destroying his own work he will cover their faces with black ink.

 

 

Bauhaus

 The Bauhaus masters on the roof of the Bauhaus building in Dessau. From the left: Josef Albers, Hinnerk Scheper, Georg Muche, László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer, Joost Schmidt, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Vassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Gunta Stölzl and Oskar Schlemmer.

 Bauhaus 1919-33

The Bauhaus began with an utopian definition: "The building of the future" was to combine all the arts in ideal unity. This required a new type of artist beyond academic specialisation, for whom the Bauhaus would offer adequate education. In order to reach this goal, the founder, Walter Gropius, saw the necessity to develop new teaching methods and was convinced that the base for any art was to be found in handcraft: "the school will gradually turn into a workshop". Indeed, artists and craftsmen directed classes and production together at the Bauhaus in Weimar. This was intended to remove any distinction between fine art and the applied arts.
The reality of technical civilisation, however, led to requirements that could not only be fulfilled by a re-evaluation of handcraft. In 1923, the Bauhaus reacted with a changed program, which was to mark its future image under the motto: "art and technology - a new unity". Industrial potentials were to be applied to satisfactory design standards, regarding both functional and aesthetic aspects. The Bauhaus workshops produced prototypes for mass production: from a single lamp to a complete dwelling.
Of course, the educational and social claim to a new configuration of life and its environment could not always be achieved. And the Bauhaus was not alone with this goal, but the name became a near synonym for this trend.The history of the Bauhaus is by no means linear. The changes in directorship and amongst the teachers, artistic influence from far and wide, in combination with the political situation in which the Bauhaus experiment was staged, led to permanent transformation. The numerous consequences of this experiment still today flow into contemporary life.

                                                                 Gropius-The Bauhaus

The Bauhaus school was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar. In spite of its name, and the fact that its founder was an architect, the Bauhaus did not have an architecture department during the first years of its existence. Nonetheless it was founded with the idea of creating a 'total' work of art in which all arts, including architecture would eventually be brought together. The Bauhaus style became one of the most influential currents in Modernist architecture and modern design. The Bauhaus had a profound influence upon subsequent developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography.
Bauhaus style is characterized by severely economic, geometric design and by respect to materials.



Artists.
Wassily Kandinsky. 
"Technically, every work of art comes into being in the same way as the cosmos - by means of catastrophes, which ultimately create out of the cacophony of the various instruments that symphony we call the music of the spheres. The creation of the work of art is the creation of the world." Wassily Kandinsky".

Composition VII,  Wassily Kandinsky, 1913.

Wassily Kandinsky was born in Moscow where he studied economics, law and ethnography there. In 1889, upon receiving a commission by the Russian Imperial Society of Friends of Natural History, Anthropology and Ethnography, Kandinsky embarked on a solo expedition to the remote Vologda province where he was impressed by native folk art. After being deeply moved by Monet's 'Haystack' in 1896, he moved to Munich to study painting. From 1901 to 1904, Kandinsky was heavily involved in the Phalanx exhibition society. After this he lived in a number of locations around Europe.           

In 1909 Kandinsky began what was to be his most powerful and ambitious project entitled 'Compositions'. The first seven were produced between 1909 and 1913 and the final three in 1923, 1936 and 1939.  

With the outbreak of the First World War, Kandinsky was forced to leave Munich and return to Russia where he became a respected teacher in various schools before taking up a post at the Bauhaus in 1922. Despite the geometrical precision that was the Bauhaus style, Kandinsky experimented with such forms as circles, triangles and uneven lines. In 1922 Kleine Welten was published containing examples of possibly Kandinsky's finest work as a graphic artist, and at this time he broadened his artistic range to designing stage sets, costumes and ceramic tiles. 


In both his writings and paintings, Kandinsky has been enormously influential. He was intrigued by the possibility of conveying a range of emotions through the variety of colours and lines he chose to use. Kandinsky was influenced by a great many styles throughout his career, such as Art Nouveau at the turn-of-the-century, Symbolism around 1910 in his interest in the similar effects caused by both colours and sounds, and Surrealism towards the end of his career in 'Sky Blue' (1940) for example. His many works continue to be exhibited in many galleries worldwide.

Composition X, painted during WWII. (Kandinsky 1939)

  

Paul Klee.

"Art does not render the visible, it makes visible." Paul Klee.

 

Paul Klee (18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) was born in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, and is considered both a Swiss and a German painter. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. He was, as well, a student of orientalism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually mastered colour theory, and wrote extensively about it; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are considered so important for modern art that they are compared to the importance that Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting had for Renaissance. He and his colleague, the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the German Bauhaus School of art, design and architecture. His works reflect his dry humour and his sometimes-childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.

Watercolour on pastel foundation on fabric (german description: "schirting", literally shirt material. Uncertain of what is really meant....) on newsprint on board.

      He settled in Munich to study art. During these early years his excursions into the domain of colour were rare as he devoted himself above all to drawing and inaugurated the very distinctive style, at once philosophical and satirical, which was to characterise his work until around 1913. After a visit to Italy, Klee discovered early Christian art and the works of Raphael, Leonardo and Botticelli. He left for Berne and underwent a deep revision of all his beliefs and theories about art.

In 1906 he married Lily Stumpf and had a son. His career at this point was a mixture of successes and failures. Five years later he met Kandinsky and other artists from the newly founded 'Der Blaue Reiter' group (The Blue Rider). Klee believed that they shared a deep-rooted impulse to transform nature into a spiritual and pictorial equivalent. The following year an even more influential meeting took place with Robert Delaunay who gave equal and independent importance to colour, light and movement in his work. In 1914 Klee's pre-occupation with colour was heightened during a trip to Tunisia. After World War One Klee's reputation was increasing. By 1920 he had joined the Bauhaus group where he was to teach for the next decade. Violently attacked and forced to move by the Nazis, Klee returned to Berne penniless after all his German funds had been confiscated.

He started to produce larger pieces with fine linear qualities and bold graphic strokes. 1934 not only brought him his first English exhibition but sadly, the onset of skin cancer. In 1937 he resumed work with a phenomenal drive and energy, but died three years later near Locarno. Klee was extraordinarily prolific, producing almost 9,000 works during his career. Working in a number of different styles and media he was extremely flexible in his techniques as he explored the human psyche through his art. Yet his work remains highly distinctive and he continues to be amongst the most popular artists of the 20th century.