Preview our Spring 2024 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.
FUNDACIóN JUAN MARCH
Max Bill
Edited by Manuel Fontán del Junco, María Toledo. Text by Karin Gimmi, Jakob Bill, Manuel Fontán del Junco, Neus Moyano, Fernando Marzá, María Amalia García, Gillermo Zuaznabar.
The definitive illustrated monograph on 20th-century Swiss artist, designer, and architect Max Bill, whose work spanned from graphic design and advertising typography to product and furniture design and from painting to sculpture.
A true Renaissance man with a clear, unified aesthetic vision, the Swiss artist, designer, architect and writer Max Bill combined the virtues of homo faber and homo ludens throughout his intensely productive career, launching the Concrete art movement and establishing himself as the single most decisive influence on postwar Swiss graphic design. This gorgeously designed, hefty volume—the most thorough Bill overview ever published in English, and the only monograph in print—presents Bill’s oeuvre both chronologically and thematically, across every facet of his multifaceted oeuvre: painting, graphic art, sculpture, architecture, book and magazine design, industrial and furniture design, graphic design and advertising typography—from large-format posters to small inserts in periodicals—as well as his designs for exhibition spaces.
Bill stands out for his enormous influence on Latin American geometric art (through his 1951 retrospective at the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art), as well as for his essays, his work as an educator and his political and social concerns. All these aspects of his life and work are covered in this profusely illustrated catalogue, along with essays by scholars and a selection of previously unpublished essays by Bill himself.
Max Bill (1908–94) studied at the Bauhaus from 1927 to 1928 with Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer, after which he moved to Zurich. He cofounded the Ulm School of Design in Germany in 1951. He had his first US exhibition at the Staempfli Gallery in New York City in 1963 and was the subject of retrospectives at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1974, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City in 1988.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Aesthetica Magazine
Rubén Cervantes Garrido
Bill’s work exceeds painting and sculpture, his aesthetic ideas finding fruitful outlets also in architecture, graphic arts, industrial and furniture design, books, magazines and advertising. This shared interest both in visual and applied art was a distinctive characteristic of the Bauhaus school and, not surprisingly, we find out that Bill was a student there between 1927 and 1928.
Sight Unseen
Jill Singer
A new exhibition catalog from a retrospective on view earlier this year at the Fundacion Juan March in Madrid reminds us that the designer was the ultimate polymath — an architect, silversmith, painter, industrial designer, and, most stunningly, sculptor…. check out the monograph — the only one of Bill in print.
Metropolis
The only Max Bill monograph in print, this delightfully designed catalogue was published in conjunction with an exhibition on his life's work... The book highlights some particularly fascinating insights.
in stock $34.95
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Between 1936 and 1949, Swiss artist, designer, architect and teacher Max Bill wrote, "Concrete painting and sculpture are the result of giving form to the visually perceptible. Their creative tools are color, space, light and movement. By giving form to these elements, one creates new realities, abstract ideas which previously existed only in the mind and are made visible in a concrete form. In short, concrete art is the pure expression of harmonious measure and law. It organizes systems and gives life to these arrangements by means of art. It is real and spiritual; non-naturalistic while close to nature. It aspires to the universal yet cultivates the unique; it suppresses individuality in favor of the individual." Four Constructions on a Single Theme (1935-38) is reproduced from Fundacion Juan March's exceptional new overview. continue to blog
"To try to create order in a specific sphere, namely the design of our environment, is a difficult undertaking, yet it is not entirely hopeless. And above all it is not senseless. Both man's immediate and larger environment have always had an influence on his development. The things around us, their relationship to us—that is, the value we attach to them—consciously or unconsciously help shape us. This interrelationship between man and objects, between object and man, means that a certain order can be established between people and things." –Max Bill, 1964. Pictured here are Bill's 1951 Novelectric Sun Lamp and Ulm Stool, 1954. continue to blog
This 1932 poster for the nascent Zurich design manufacturer and retailer Wohnbadarf was created by Swiss polymath Max Bill four years after completing his studies at the Bauhaus and less than a decade before he co-founded the equally radical Ulm School of Design. It is reproduced from Fundacion Juan March's exceptional new overview, the most thorough Bill monograph ever published—spanning his work as an artist, architect, product designer, typographer, teacher and writer—and the only one currently in print. In 1951 Bill wrote, "The generation of the Bauhaus masters was still divided between artists and technicians. My generation has produced the type of designer for whom art is a vital issue, yet for whom collaborating on the tasks of society, on solving everyday problems, has become his life's work." continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 9.5 x 10.5 in. / 352 pgs / 170 color / 40 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $34.95 LIST PRICE: CANADA $45.95 ISBN: 9788470756320 PUBLISHER: Fundación Juan March AVAILABLE: 2/23/2016 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA LA ASIA AU/NZ ME
Published by Fundación Juan March. Edited by Manuel Fontán del Junco, María Toledo. Text by Karin Gimmi, Jakob Bill, Manuel Fontán del Junco, Neus Moyano, Fernando Marzá, María Amalia García, Gillermo Zuaznabar.
The definitive illustrated monograph on 20th-century Swiss artist, designer, and architect Max Bill, whose work spanned from graphic design and advertising typography to product and furniture design and from painting to sculpture.
A true Renaissance man with a clear, unified aesthetic vision, the Swiss artist, designer, architect and writer Max Bill combined the virtues of homo faber and homo ludens throughout his intensely productive career, launching the Concrete art movement and establishing himself as the single most decisive influence on postwar Swiss graphic design. This gorgeously designed, hefty volume—the most thorough Bill overview ever published in English, and the only monograph in print—presents Bill’s oeuvre both chronologically and thematically, across every facet of his multifaceted oeuvre: painting, graphic art, sculpture, architecture, book and magazine design, industrial and furniture design, graphic design and advertising typography—from large-format posters to small inserts in periodicals—as well as his designs for exhibition spaces.
Bill stands out for his enormous influence on Latin American geometric art (through his 1951 retrospective at the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art), as well as for his essays, his work as an educator and his political and social concerns. All these aspects of his life and work are covered in this profusely illustrated catalogue, along with essays by scholars and a selection of previously unpublished essays by Bill himself.
Max Bill (1908–94) studied at the Bauhaus from 1927 to 1928 with Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer, after which he moved to Zurich. He cofounded the Ulm School of Design in Germany in 1951. He had his first US exhibition at the Staempfli Gallery in New York City in 1963 and was the subject of retrospectives at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1974, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City in 1988.
