Avant-Garde versus Modernism
When in 1949 the Swiss artist Max Bill, a former student at the Bauhaus, was com-
missioned by the Scholl Foundation to design a group of buildings for a school in Ulm,
he persuaded his clients that the curriculum of the new school should be modeled
on that of the Bauhaus. After he built the school he was appointed its director. Bill
saw a direct line from the concerns of Morris and Ruskin via the Werkbund and van
de Velde down to the aims of the Bauhaus of Gropius—and thence to the system of
his own Hochschule für Gestaltung (School of Design). The theme running through
this tradition was the desire to achieve gute Form(good design): according to Bill, the
promise of a widespread distribution of high-quality articles for everyday use was in-
herent in the industrialization of society; this promise, he said, had not been ful-
filled—partly because of the bad taste of the public, continually reinforced by
advertising and publicity; and partly because of the inadequate links between exist-Beauty today
can have no other measure
except the depth
to which a work
resolves contradictions.
A work must cut
through the contradictions
and overcome them,
not by covering them up,
but by pursuing them.
Theodor W. Adorno, 1965