The first machine age - Essay Example

In addition, the development of the printing press technology meant that the public had a variety of sources to get information from, apart from the church – all these changes brought a lot of inspiration especially on the arena of aesthetic (Banham, 1980). Just like the Machine Age, the architects and other designers had an assortment of materials to choose from, unlike in the ancient times when this was limited. Designers started to adopt things that they could call their own, and this led to the development of various artistic movements such as purism, Nouveau, De Stijl, Constructivism, Bauhaus, and Scandinavian.

All these movements brought about a lot of impacts on different fields of visual worlds including architecture, furniture, graphic designs, art, life style, and so on (Banham, 1980). This paper will briefly discuss each of these movements and then delve into some of the symbolic examples from these movements, which have made a key impact on different kinds of contemporary designs. Purism Purism was an alternative of Cubism, and was an inspiration of mechanization. During the machine age, two French artists (Amedee Ozenfant [1886-1966] and Edouard Jeanneret [1886-1965]) provided a response to the fascination and perplexity of pure functionality.

The two artists expressed their belief in the significance of artistic rigour, impersonality and precision under the label of Purism. The two French artists who were later known as Le Corbusier sought a more rational elucidation of Cubism, beyond its symbolic and literary baggage and decorative or dynamic motivation. The aim of purist theory was to reinstate painting to an archaic purity in which case representation would be logical, geometrical and patently obvious. The aesthetic of industrial technology and machines was used to model this ideal of essentiality and efficiency in art, which Le Corbusier suggested as a possible repertory of plastic forms (Matteson Art, n.d). : Figure 1: Le Corbusier, oil on canvas, 1926 The major objective of their work was to provide an illustration of collective values such as asceticism, order and lucidity.

Part of their manifesto stated that the utmost pleasure of the human spirit was the recognition of order and the utmost fulfillment of humans was to be experienced in assisting in production, or being an essential part of this order. As shown in figure 1, their paintings were somewhat completely still life representations of domestic components including pipes, jugs, and glasses. Evidently described against a straightforward perspectives level surface, their works complied with a ‘a general grammar of sensibility’ that standardized creative relationships, simplified forms, and drew away emotivity and accident in replacement with chromatic fields and a synthesis of lines.

In October 1920, Le Corbusier together with the poet Paul Dermee introduced a review in order to publish their purist and rational principles. This led to publishing of L'Esprit Nouveau magazine for 5 years on a regular basis, until 1925. This publication, perhaps, succeeded in making an original contribution to the avant-garde European movements, which worked better than the earlier repetitive paintings that were produced by Le Corbusier (Marshall, 2008). Art Nouveau Art Nouveau was a movement that was associated with decorative architecture and arts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe.

This movement, which