Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
Max Bill
German, born Switzerland (1908-1994)
UNTITLED from Homage to Picasso (1972)
lithograph
29.75” x 22”

STYLE: ABSTRACTION, CONCRETE ART, HOMAGE TO PICASSO

  

Max Bill studied at the Bauhaus, under Walter Gropius, as well as at the Arts and Crafts Academy in Zurich as a silversmith. He co-founded and directed the Ulm School of Arts and Crafts, then worked as an architect in Lausanne, then became a professor at the State School for Fine Arts in Hamburg. Bill exhibited his sculptures and paintings from 1928 to the 1990s in exhibition spaces worldwide, and also did important work in printmaking. His work is in most significant collections of contemporary art.

Bill was active as an architect, painter, graphic artist, and sculptor. The artist believed that sculpture should take clear, concrete forms, based on symmetrical growth from a generative core. He felt art should close the gap between the intellectual and the intuitive.

This print is a typical example of Bill’s deceptively simple use of geometrical patterns to express the psychological and expressive powers of color. Unlike other works in the Homage to Picasso portfolio, it does not literally reference Picasso.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Max Bill, "Concrete Art," Max Bill, Albright-Knox Art Gallery catalog, 1974
"Concrete Art is autonomous in its specificity. It is the expression of the human spirit, destined for the human spirit, and should possess that clarity and that perfection which one expects from works of the human spirit.
...The instruments of this realization are color, space, light, movement. In giving form to these elements, one creates new realities."
Richard Hollis, “A Monumental Talent [obituary],” in The Guardian, 12/31/94
"Bill's work and writings were to express an enduring debt to the founding fathers of abstract art who taught at the Bauhaus. Before the architecture department, he worked in Moholy-Nagy's metal workshop, with Oskar Schlemmer's theatre group, and in the classes run by Albers, Kandinsky and Paul Klee."