Max Bill The Swiss former Bauhaus student whose talents crossed boundaries

Swiss precision

From art to watch design and typography, Max Bill might be the Bauhaus’ greatest polymath Words /Bertram James

Artist, architect, designer, typographer: the multiple talents of Max Bill (1908-1994) appeared as endless and inscrutable as one of his abstract sculptures, but outside of design circles he remains an almost unknown figure. And yet, in his peerless functionalist aesthetic, he realised the Bauhaus doctrine of beauty in the everyday.

As well he might, for despite never graduating – he accidentally knocked his teeth out and the subsequent dental bills meant he couldn’t pay his tuition fees – Bill was a prominent student at the design school, respected by his contemporaries as a free-thinking iconoclast. He left the Bauhaus in 1929, moving back to Zurich in his native Switzerland. Day-to-day he worked as a graphic designer, but it was during this period he developed his exacting geometric style of art, exhibiting his works alongside Piet Mondrian and Georges Vantongerloo as part of the Paris-based Abstraction-Creation group. In

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1936, Bill distilled his ideas into a manifesto, Principles of Concrete Design, which went on to kickstart the Brazilian Neo-Concrete movement of the 1950s.

In the post-war period, Bill’s influence grew further. He founded the influential Ulm School of Design in 1953, which he envisioned as the Bauhaus reincarnated. Sadly, not everyone in the faculty agreed, and he stood down in 1956, though not before designing the brilliantly simple Ulm stool, which was produced and used by the students. He continued to move seamlessly between disciplines: the mathematical and emotionally mute nature of his ribbon-like sculptures prompted a spell as a corporate artist for various banks, and he also designed a series of arresting posters for the 1972 Munich Olympics. Bill died in 1994, felled by a heart attack in Berlin airport – an uncharacteristically public demise for a man whose quiet precision continues to define Swiss design.

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