Max Bill: No Beginning, No End

Book excerpt: Swiss artist, architect, designer, typographer, and theorist Max Bill (1908 94) was one of the most important exponents of concrete and constructive art and a key figure in European applied arts and design history. Educated by such prominent teachers as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandisky, and Walter Gropius at the Bauhaus, at the start of his career in the 1930s. In the 1950s he teamed up with Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher to found the legendary Ulm College of Design in Ulm, Germany, of which he became the first director. In his work, Max Bill carried on the legacy of the Bauhaus, both as an artist and a teacher, and made a decisive and lasting contribution to twentieth-century cultural life. "Max Bill" accompanies an exhibition at the Museum MARTa Herford in Herford, Germany, held to mark the centenary of this exceptional artist. The exhibition displays Bill s wide-ranging work, and it also sets him in the context of his cultural milieu by featuring works by his contemporaries, such as Kurt Schwitters, Wassily Kandinsky, and Donald Judd. Accompanying essays investigate Bill s influence on other artists and the lasting importance of his oeuvre in the present."