?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 7,000 - $ 10,000
JOHANNES MOLZAHN (1892-1965) WOHNUNG UND WERKRAUM. 1929. 23x32 3/4 inches, 58x83 cm. Friedrichdruck, Breslau. Condition B+: restoration along vertical and horizontal folds. Matted and framed. Molzahn was a painter, print maker, graphic designer, theorist and teacher. The first prominent exhibition of his work was held at Berlin's influential Der Sturm Gallery in 1917. Der Sturm was run by Herwarth Walden, who was considered the "most influential cultural impresario of the Expressionist decade." Through his gallery and eponymous art journal, he promoted the work of Europe's avant-garde artists, exposing the German public and the rest of the world to the most cutting edge artistic movements and artists. After World War I, Molzahn's association with Walden led him to an unofficial association with the Bauhaus. Although he was never officially a member of the faculty, his work did appear in the group's third portfolio. In addition to his teaching, which he did at the Magdeburg School of Fine Arts and the Academy in Breslau, he was also actively involved in designing for the Fagus Shoe Company. This included posters, shoeboxes, invoices, business cards and more. In 1926, he wrote an article entitled The Economics of Advertising Mechanics which "was an aggressively argued plea that advertising should be recognized not only as an engine of manufacturing turnover but also as a machine, in its functions and manner of operations" (Swiss Graphic Design p. 27). And in 1928 he wrote Stop Reading, Look! which hailed photography as the powerful new universal medium that would become a liberating means of communication. In 1929, he designed this, and one other poster, for an architectural and design exhibition in Breslau, "Dwelling and Workplace." It is a tour-de-force of photomontage, typography and layout in which all the elements of design and construction are represented. In 1938 Molzahn left Germany for America (seven of his art works had been put on display in 1937 at the German Degenerate Art Exhibition). He taught at Moholy-Nagy's School of Design, in Chicago from 1943-1947 and returned to live in Germany in 1959. Modern Poster p. 117.
