Bauhausmagazine

Color Colorand andForm Formby byItten, Itten,Kandinsky, Kandinsky,Klee Klee

Typography Typographyby bythe theMasters Masters HerbertBayer Bayerand andMoholy MoholyNagy Nagy Herbert

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MARCH 2009

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The TheBauhaus, Bauhaus,1919–1933 1919–1933 The TheBasic BasicCourse: Course:

TABLE

CONTENTS

OF DEPARTMENTS 8

Letters

10

Out There

14

In & Out

15

Over & Out

FEATURES 24 The Bauhaus, 1919–1933 the brief history of the movement 32 The Basic Course: Color and Form Itten, Kandinsky, Klee 40 Typography by the Masters herbert bayer and moholy nagy..!!

PLUS 52

Bauhaus Architecture

56

Bauhaus Textile

BOOKS 78 The Da Vinci Code 82

Submersion Journalism

84 Twilight book to the movie

CLUBS 88 Hold the Salsa 96

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Back Beat Boogle

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1919Bauhaus THE

by Alexandra Griffith Winton

The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 in the city of Weimar by German architect Walter Gropius (1883–1969). Its core objective was a radical concept: to reimagine the material world to reflect the unity of all the arts. Gropius explained this vision for a union of art and design in the Proclamation of the Bauhaus (1919), which described a utopian craft guild combining architecture, sculpture, and painting into a single creative expression. Gropius developed a craft-based curriculum that would turn out artisans and designers capable of creating useful and beautiful objects appropriate to this new system of living.

Gropius developed a craft-based curriculum that would turn out artisans and designers capable of creating useful and beautiful objects appropriate to this new system of living.

In 1925, the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau, where Gropius designed a new building to house the school. This building contained many features that later became hallmarks of modernist architecture, including steel-frame construction, a glass curtain wall, and an asymmetrical, pinwheel plan, throughout which Gropius distributed studio, classroom, and administrative space for maximum efficiency and spatial logic.

The cabinetmaking workshop was one of the most popular at the Bauhaus. Under the direction of Marcel Breuer from 1924 to 1928, this studio reconceived the very essence of furniture, often seeking to dematerialize conventional forms such as chairs to their minimal existence. Breuer theorized that eventually chairs would become obsolete, replaced by supportive columns or air. Inspired by the extruded steel tubes of his bicycle, he experimented with metal furniture, ultimately creating lightweight, mass-producible metal chairs. Some of these chairs were deployed in the theater of the Dessau building.

The textile workshop, especially under the direction of designer and weaver Gunta Stölzl (1897–1983), created abstract textiles suitable for use in Bauhaus environments. Students

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itself; light fixtures designed in the metalwork shop illuminated the Bauhaus building and some faculty housing. Brandt was the first woman to attend the metalworking studio, and replaced László Moholy-Nagy as studio director in 1928. Many of her designs became iconic expressions of the Bauhaus aesthetic.

Her sculptural and geometric silver and ebony teapot, while never mass-produced, reflects both the influence of her mentor, MoholyNagy, and the Bauhaus emphasis on industrial forms. It was designed with careful attention to functionality and ease of use, from the nondrip spout to the heat-resistant ebony handle.

studied color theory and design as well as the technical aspects of weaving. Stölzl encouraged experimentation with unorthodox materials, including cellophane, fiberglass, and metal.

Fabrics from the weaving workshop were commercially successful, providing vital and much needed funds to the Bauhaus. The studio’s textiles, along with architectural wall painting, adorned the interiors of Bauhaus buildings, providing polychromatic yet abstract visual interest to these somewhat severe spaces. While the weaving studio was primarily comprised of women, this was in part due to the fact that they were discouraged from participating in other areas. The workshop trained a number of prominent textile artists, including Anni Albers (1899–1994), who continued to create and write about modernist textiles throughout her life.

Metalworking was another popular workshop at the Bauhaus and, along with the cabinetmaking studio, was the most successful in developing design prototypes for mass production. In this studio, designers such as Marianne Brandt, Wilhelm Wagenfeld, and Christian Dell (1893– 1974) created beautiful, modern items such as lighting fixtures and tableware. Occasionally, these objects were used in the Bauhaus campus

Ghost Chamber with the Tall Door (New Version), 1925. Paul Klee (1879–1940)

The typography workshop, while not initially a priority of the Bauhaus, became increasingly important under figures like Moholy-Nagy and the graphic designer Herbert Bayer. At the Bauhaus, typography was conceived as both an empirical means of communication and an artistic expression, with visual clarity stressed above all. Concurrently, typography became increasingly connected to corporate identity and advertising. The promotional materials prepared for the Bauhaus at the workshop, with their use of sans serif typefaces and the incorporation of photography as a key graphic element, served as visual symbols of the avantgarde institution.

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At the Bauhaus, typography was conceived as both an empirical means of communication and an artistic expression, with visual clarity stressed above all.

Staatliches Bauhaus, Weimar, 1919–1923, 1923 Walter Gropius (German, 1883–1969) et al.

Bauhaus in 1933. During the turbulent and often dangerous years of World War II, many of the key figures of the Bauhaus emigrated to the United States, where their work and their teaching philosophies influenced generations of young architects and designers. Marcel Breuer and Joseph Albers taught at Yale, Walter Gropius went to Harvard, and Moholy-Nagy established the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937.

Gropius stepped down as director of the Bauhaus in 1928, succeeded by the architect Hannes Meyer (1889–1954). Meyer maintained the emphasis on mass-producible design and eliminated parts of the curriculum he felt were overly formalist in nature. Additionally, he stressed the social function of architecture and design, favoring concern for the public good rather than private luxury. Advertising and photography continued to gain prominence under his leadership.

Under pressure from an increasingly rightwing municipal government, Meyer resigned as director of the Bauhaus in 1930. He was replaced by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Mies once again reconfigured the curriculum, with an increased emphasis on architecture. Lily Reich (1885–1947), who collaborated with Mies on a number of his private commissions, assumed control of the new interior design department. Other departments included weaving, photography, the fine arts, and building. The increasingly unstable political situation in Germany, combined with the perilous financial condition of the Bauhaus, caused Mies to relocate the school to Berlin in 1930, where it operated on a reduced scale. He ultimately shuttered the

“B35” armchair, 1928–29. Marcel Breuer (1902–1981)

Photogram, 1926. László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946)

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THE BASIC COURSE

COLOR

by Frank Whitford

ITTEN KANDINSKY KLEE

&

FORM

The ideas behind the Vorkurs at the Bauhaus were indeed not new, and some other schools in Germany had already insisted on a probationary period for all students during which their suitability for final admission could be tested. What made the Bauhaus the preliminary course, both before and after Itten’s departure, unique was the amount and quality of its theoretical teaching, the intellectual rigor with which it examined the essentials of visual experience and artistic creativity.

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Itten studied at the Stuttgart Academy while Adolf Hoelzel was teaching there. Hoelzel was one of several German artists since Goethe to have made original contributions to color theory and, like Goethe, was more concerned with the emotional and spiritual properties of color than with its scientific aspects.

Itten’s theories are in turn indebted to Hoelzel.

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ITTEN

KANDINSKY

Itten thought it impossible to consider color apart from form, and vice versa, since one cannot exist without the other. A short essay which he wrote in 1916 gives the essence of this theory of color and form.

Kandinsky knew from an early age that he possessed the gift of synthaesthesia: when one of his sense was stimulated another reacted. In his case he usually heard something when looking at the scene or even a single color, or saw a single color or a scene when listening to music. What he heard was quite specific: a particular not played on a particular instrument for example.

"The clear geometric form is the one most easily comprehended and its basic elements are the circle, square and the triangle. Every possible from lies dormant in these formal elements.

They are visible to him who sees, invisible to him who does not.

Form is also color. Without color there is no form. Form and color are one. The colors of the spectrum are those most easily comprehended.

Every possible color lies dominant in them.

Visible to him who sees–invisible to him who does not…"

Colors and sound also evoke quite specific feelings, and although such emotional experiences were inevitably highly subjective, Kandinsky attempted to discover and define universal laws which explained them.

F. Dicker, 'dark-light study' from itten's pareliminary course, charcoal, c.1920 Opening page: Eugen Batz, from Kandainsky's color seminar, 1929-30.

Form is also color.

Without color there is no form.

Itten’s students therefore had to begin their studies of color and form by restricting themselves to the basic shapes and hues. Form could not exist without color and neither could exist independent of some context: some point of comparison was always necessary. Central to Itten’s theories, therefore, was the notion of contrast and tension.

Itten’s thoughts led him to design, not a color wheel, but a color sphere which he describes as ‘the most useful shape for the presentation and the orders of colors’. It also ‘permits the presentations of the law of complementarity and the illustration of all basic relationships to each other as well as their relation to black and white’. Moving from red to violet around the ‘equator’ and from white to black from ‘pole’ to ‘pole’, Itten’s sphere introduces four intermediate hues in addition to those of the spectrum and illustrates how complementaries relate to primaries, to secondaries and to each other at each point on a tonal scale.

Following Hoelzel, Itten took as his foundation seven distinct types of color contrast: a simple contrast between one color and another, a contrast between a color of a light and a color of a dark tone, between a warm color and a cold, and between contemporary colors. There

Itten’s thories were an uneven mixture of objective observation and subjective assertion.

In that, they were similar to much more detailed an elaborate theories of Kandinsky which were also concerned with the formulation of an elementary visual language.

"Geometric forms and the colors of the spectrum are the simplest, most sensitive forms and colors and therefore the most precise means of expression in a work of art."

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were also simultaneous contrasts and contrasts of quality and quantity. Each of them was designed to bring out the essential qualities of the colors concerned and employed them to the greatest effect.

Kandinsky’s contribution to the preliminary course was in two parts: analytical drawing and the theoretical consideration of color and form.

This was undertaken in carefully structured, almost scientific way. Color and form were examined at first in isolation, then the relation to each other and the finally in relation to the ‘ground’–the flat plane on which twodimensional images appear.

Fritz Tschaschnig, from Kandinsky's color seminar, 1931.

Kandinsky’s color theory derived from Goethe via the anthroposophist Ruolf Steiner, employed as fundamental distinctions the ‘temperature’ of colors–their apparent warmth or coldness–and their tone–their lightness and darkness. What Kandinsky synthaesthetically defined as four major sounds thus appeared: warm and bright, warm and dark, cold and bright, cold and dark.

... four major sounds thus appeared: warm and bright, warm and dark, cold and bright, cold and dark.

What determines temperature is the tendency of any color towards yellow (absolute coldness).

Each color not only has a temperature, however; it also has a meaning. ‘Yellow is the typical earthly color’ while ‘blue is the typical heavenly color’, qualities which give rise to many others. Yellow advances, exceeds limits, is aggressive, active, volatile; blue on the other hand retreats, remains within limits, is shy and passive. Yellow is hard and sharp; blue soft and yielding. Yellow is sharp to taste while blue evokes the taste of fresh figs. Trumpets are yellow, organs blue. Kandinsky made a further list of qualities for the ‘second great contrast’, that between white and black and for the third, that between red and green.

Since green is made by mixing the total opposites yellow and blue it creates the feeling of perfect balance and harmony, is passive and self-sufficient. The length to which Kandinsky was prepared to go when describing the qualities of colors is illustrated by this gloss on the meaning of green: ‘Absolute green occupies the place that the so-called bourgeoisie occupies in the human world: it is an immovable element, content with itself, limited in every direction’.

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Peter Keler, cradle, 1922. The object is painted in the primary courses.

Red in the other hand is vital, restless and powerful. When red is mixed with yellow the result is orange. Orange and violet (the mixing red with blue) from the last of Kandinsky’s ‘great contrasts’. What is true of yellow and blue is also true of orange and violet, albeit to a lesser degree. Red therefore bridges the gap between yellow and blue.

Kandinsky developed a system not only for the alleged relationships between colors and lines but for entire compositions. He began with the type of format employed. A horizontal format was cold, a vertical one warm. Compositions which force the eye upwards are free and light, those which force the eye down, heavy and depressive. Movementstowards the left and adventurous, liberating; their opposite are familiar and reassuring. Such ‘rules’ led to the creation of visual harmonies, dissonances, and compositions through which subtle feelings might be expressed.

Like Kandinsky and Itten, Klee identified numerous parallels between painting and music and exploited them in his theories. Unlike Itten and Kandinsky, Klee was an accomplished musician himself, a virtuoso violinist who had played with the Berne symphony orchestra when he was twelve. Klee had strong mystical leaning, and believed that the highest kind of artistic expression was an inexplicable mystery.

What could be explained and taught, however were the preliminary stages of that expression, and Klee developed a theory of color and form as elaborate and subtle and as reliant on scientific models as Kandinsky’s. His theoretical classes preceded those he gave on nature study as a source for creative form.

Like Kandinsky, Klee began his classes on a form with a discussion of the point and of the line which he defined as a point in motion. He discerned three basic principles of line: the active, the passive, and the ‘medial’. An active line was free, constantly moving, whether to a specific or not. A line became medial when it described a coherent form. If that form is colored then the line becomes passive for the color serves as the active element.

Instead of magisterially stating the qualities of each kind of line Klee would describe then metaphorically. A drawing, for example, is ‘a line going for a walk’ and the line changes its character in keeping with what happens on the way: whether the going is easy or tough, whether progress is impeded entirely.

The medial line describes two basic types of form: structural and individual. Structure is

KLEE Where Kandinsky was prescriptive and dogmatic Klee was tentative and hesitant.

Kandinsky’s rules seemed to have descended with Moses from the mountain; Klee’s were empirical, derived from ordinary experience.

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Students were therefore asked to deal with color only after they had mastered line and tone.

1912. Like Itten, Klee began with the colors of spectrum which he rendered as a circle–more conventional than Itten’s sphere. Color is the richest aspect of optical experience for, whereas line is only measurement, tone, measurement and weight, color adds a third factor: quality.

Margaret Leischer, exercise from Klee's preliminary courses, c.1929.

achieved if the same visual element can be repeated infinitely, whereas an individual form cannot have anything added or subtracted without changing its character. A fish is an individual form. Its scales are structural forms.

For Klee, the aim of each work of art was the creation of visual harmony, a balance between the ‘elemental male’ and ‘elemental female’ principles of mind and matter. A key image was therefore a scales on which line was balanced against color, from against tone and so on.

"The assumption that black is heavier than white is only true for as long as we are dealing with a white ground… In physics one talks of specific gravity relative to water, in our field there is a variety of specific gravities, relative to white, to black or to the average (and to each tone in between). Yet more relationships are thrown up by the world of color. Colors on a red ground… colors on a violet ground…"

Students were therefore asked to deal with color only after they had mastered line and tone. Using the metaphorical scale, Klee would ask them to weigh one color against another (red was heavier than blur, for example) and to consider various color progressions: from violet to red was one of them. In all of this Klee was concerned not to lay down the law, but to provide his students with material from which they might draw their own conclusions.

The theoretical aspects of the preliminary courses did, perhaps surprisingly, have an effect on what was produced in the craft workshops. The celebrated cradle was not the only object made from the primary geometric forms painted in the primary colors. The artistic guidance and formal inspiration which the individual Masters of Form were meant to provide came, in most cases, not for them but from the preliminary courses.

Klee’s color theory, like those of Kandinsky and Itten, has its roots in Geothe, and also draws heavily on the theories of Runge, Delacroix, Kandinsky himself, and Delaunay whose essay on light had translated into German in Structural form and individual from (the fish) in a sketch by Klee.

Paul Klee: the relationship between an image created from an active line and passive plane.

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by Herbert Bayer Frank Whitford

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BVS`ST]`S Âż`ab ]T OZZ( OPa]ZcbS QZO`Wbg W\ OZZ bg^]U`O^VWQOZ e]`Y

Bg^]U`O^Vg Oa O [SO\a ]T Q][[c\WQObW]\ Pg ;]V]Zg <OUg s

It must be clear communication in its most vivid form.

s

Clarity must be especially stressed for clarity is the essence of modern printing in contrast to ancient picture writing.

s

Therefore, first of all: absolute clarity in all typographical work.

s

Communication ought not to labor under preconceived esthetic notions.

s

Letters should never be squeezed into an arbitrary shape like a square.

s

A new typographic language must be a created, combining elasticity, variety and a fresh approach to the materials of printing, a language whose logic depends on the appropriate application of the processes of printing.

Moholy-Nagy. Prospectus advertising. Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar 1919-1923

:tahZÂ&#x201E; ;]V]Zg <OUg LĂĄszlĂł Moholy-Nagy, one of the leading figures in the Bauhaus, arrived to work in England in 1935, two years after that experimental school of art and design was closed down by the Nazis. His English was not fluent. Taken to a party in London by John Betjeman, he said smilingly to his hostess: "Thank you for your hostilities."

The remark was not entirely inappropriate: Moholy-Nagy's reception in this country was not an open-armed one.

Even so-called modernists found him baffling, the boilersuited technocrat with the magnificent grin. His sheer versatility was suspect in a country where they liked you to be one thing or another. Painter, sculptor, photographer, film-maker, industrial designer, typographer: what was Moholy-Nagy not? The Bauhaus itself, which placed great emphasis on programmes and production, seemed alien to a nation still steeped in the gentler traditions of the arts and crafts. London Transport's design impresario Frank Pick expressed a widely held artistic xenophobia in dismissing Moholy-Nagy as "a gentleman with a modernistic tendency who produces pastiches of photographs of a surrealistic type, and I am not at all clear why we should fall for this.

It is international, or at least continental. Let us leave the continent to pursue their own tricks."

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Through the 1920s, Moholy-Nagy was part of the new artistic movement sweeping across Europe, a revolutionary movement in which representational and story-telling art was jettisoned in favour of the abstract, primordial, elemental.

Moholy-Nagy was fundamentally a painter. "It is my gift to project my vitality, my building power, through light, colour, form. I can give life as a painter," he wrote at the end of that most destructive war. His early visual experiments took the form of a return to fundamentals, exploring the relations of colour, shape, position by glueing coloured strips of paper on to backgrounds of varying tones. One of the attractions that constructivism had for him was that it expressed the pure forms of nature: "the direct colour, the spatial rhythm, the equilibrium of form".

Moholy-Nagy's advertisement for the series of 'Bauhaus books', 1926.

Moholy-Nagy. Title Page. Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar 1919-1923

Opening Spread: Herbert's study on universal type.

Joost Schmidt, poster of the Bauhaus exhibition of 1923.

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He foresaw photography as the artform of the future.

As the discovery of one-point perspective gave creative impetus to the Renaissance, so Moholy-Nagy realised that technical advances in photography and film would transform social and cultural values as the 20th century progressed. He predicted: "It is not the person ignorant of writing but the one ignorant of photography who will be the illiterate of the future."

LĂĄszlĂł Moholy-Nagy (photo courtesy Lucia Moholy)

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Moholy-Nagy settled in Berlin in 1920 and married soon after. His Czech-born wife, Lucia, had trained as a photographer and they worked together in developing the photogram, a photographic image made without a camera when objects on coated paper are exposed to light. They developed photoplastics, fluent, lyrical and curious photomontages, sometimes with drawn additions, which had enormous influence on 1960s graphics. At the same time, Moholy-Nagy was one of the first designers to realise the potential of photography in advertising and commercial art.

In the first years of the Bauhaus at Weimar, typography did not yet play the central role it was later to take on.

For Johannes Itten and Lothar Schreyer, calligraphy was essentially an artistic means of expression. At first, practical fields of application remained seldom and were restricted to small, miscellaneous printed matters.

With the appointment of Moholy-Nagy in 1923, who was to introduce the ideas of "New Typography" to the Bauhaus, the situation radically changed. He considered typescript to be primarily a communications medium, and was concerned with the "clarity of the message in its most emphatic form". His influence is clearly visible already in 1923 in the advertising campaign for the large Bauhaus exhibition of Summer 1923. Moholy-Nagy designed the layout for the exhibition publication and further took over the typography of the "Bauhaus books".

From then on, typography at the Bauhaus was closely connected to corporate identity and to the development of an unmistakable image for the school. Characteristic for the design were clear, unadorned type prints, the articulation and accentuation of pages through distinct symbols or typographic elements highlighted in color, and finally direct information in a combination of text and photography, for which the name "Typofoto" was created.

In addition, the consideration of economic factors led to the usage of normed formats, a partly simplified spelling, and more particularly, the abolition of capitalization.

Design for newspaper kiosk, tempera, 1924.

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Lรกszlรณ Moholy-Nagy, The Railway Picture.

In Weimar, next to Moholy-Nagy, both Joost Schmidt and Herbert Bayer had also been concerned with typography.

In Dessau, Bayer took over the newly installed workshop for printing and advertising and rapidly transformed it into a professional studio for graphic design. He intensively developed Avant-garde typesetting and his posters and printed matters show a concern with contemporary themes from the psychology of advertising.

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/ + O ES R] \]b a^SOY O QO^WbOZ / O\R O a[OZZ O ES \SSR ]\Zg O aW\UZS OZ^VOPSb

Bg^]U`O^Vg Pg 6S`PS`b 0OgS` Why should we write and print with two alphabets? Both a large and a small sign are not necessary to indicate one single sound.

A=a We do not speak a capital A and a small a.

We need only a single alphabet.

It gives us practically the same result as the mixture of upper- and lower-case letters, and at the same time is less of a burden on all who write-on school children, students, stenographers, professional and business men. It could be written much more quickly, especially on the typewriter, since the shift key would then become unnecessary.

Herbert Bayer

Typewriting could therefore be more quickly mastered and typewriter would be cheaper, for fonts and type cases would be smaller, so that printing establishments would save space and their clients money. With these common sense economies in mind the Bauhaus began in 1925 to abandon capital letters and to use small letters exclusively.

This step towards the rationalization of writing and printing met with outraged protests, especially because in german capital initials are used for all nouns. Moreover, the Bauhaus had always used roman or even sans serif letters instead of the archaic and complicated gothic alphabet customarily employed in german painting, so that the suppression of capitals added fresh insult to old injury. Nevertheless the Bauhaus made a thorough alphabetical house-cleaning in all its printing, eliminating capitals from books, posters, catalogs, magazines, stationery and even calling cards.

Dropping capitals would be a less radical reform in English.

Indeed the use of capital letters occurs infrequently in english in comparison with german that is difficult to understand why such a superfluous alphabet should still be considered necessary.

Herbert Bayer's banknotes issued by the State Bank of Thuringia.

Poster for Kandinsky's 60th bithday exhibition by Bayer.

letterhead,1923

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6S`PS`b 0OgS` Of the Young Masters, Herbert Bayer (born 1900) was probably the most versatile. A painter and a graphic artist as well as a photographer, designer and typographer, Bayer was an Austrian who had arrived at the Bauhaus as a student in 1921. From 1919 until then he had been working in Darmstadt for an architect who introduced him to the then completely new business of designing packages.

In charge of the schools printing department from 1925 until 1928, Bayer became interested in advertising techniques of all kinds, in the design of exhibition stands, promotional literature, advertisement and the visual identity of a firm or product in general. He changed what in Weimar had been a workshop for the hand printing of lithographs, woodcuts and other graphics into a modern enterprise which employed movable type and mechanical presses.

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As a typographer, Bayer was sufficiently gifted to carry out commission while he was still a student, and in his use of simple typefaces, heavy rules and asymmetrical composition was much influenced by Moholy and De Stijl.

As a teacher of typography, Bayer was exercised above all of the problem of simplicity and directness. He considered serifs redundant, as he did capital letters.

The boldness â&#x20AC;&#x201C; some might say rashness â&#x20AC;&#x201C; of Bayerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s campaign against both serifs and upper case type is better understood if it is remembered that much German printing at this type employed â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Gothicâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; type-faces, and that German orthography demands the use of capital letters not merely for proper names and at the start of sentences but for the first letter if every noun.

Poster by Herbert Bayer.1968.

Bayer argued that lower-case alone was more economical because it required one alphabet instead of two, and would give perfectly legible texts once readers had grown used to it.

Bauhaus Magazine Cover,1927.

Resistance to such typographical radicalism was as great then as it is now, and in any case Bayer continued to use capitals in many of his projects. He did forgo serifs in his display-work at least, however, and his use of simple, elegant type-faces in a limited number of weights and sizes, together with his judicious introduction of heavy rules, sometimes in different color, probably did more than anything else to give the Dessau Bauhaus a clear visual identity. Today, the Bauhaus and sans-serif type seem inseparable.

Bauhaus products catalog pg,1925

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BOOK REVIEW

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Both have skill sets, not by accident, which allow for great success at solving puzzlesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;at least the type of puzzles presented here.

The Da Vinci Code is, in a manner of speaking, two books in one. The first is a very good suspense thriller. Author Dan Brown must either play or at least be aware of computer games; the plot has a computer game feel to it. The protagonists are dropped almost immediately into a situation of peril and must extricate themselves by solving a series of puzzles, with one puzzle's solution granting the privilege of looking at another puzzle, which also requires a solution.

There are two protagonists, Robert Landon and Sophie Neveuâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;Robert an expert on religious symbology and a Harvard professor, and Sophie a cryptologist and Parisian police agent.

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The opening chapter is a grabber.

Jacques Sauniere, the curator of the Louvre museum, is shot in the stomach by an albino monk named Silas and left to bleed slowly to death. Jacques Sauniere is, as chance and the author would have it, the grandfather of Sophie Neveu.

The time it takes Jacques to die is time enough for him to set up the first of the puzzles to be solved.

His body is found naked, arms and legs splayed, with writings (written by Jacques in his own blood)

which are meant to be secret coded messages to his granddaughter, Sophie. Robert Langdon is drawn into this murder (and its startling aftermath) as the Inspector on the case, Bezu Faches, believes he is the killer. Sophie, knowing Robert is innocent, helps him escape from the Musee du Louvre, and the chase (and puzzle solving) is on.

The plot turns are suspenseful, the mysteries and their solutions clever, even ingenious in some cases. This is a true nail-biter. The problem is with the "second" book incorporated into this first rate thriller. The plot here revolves around an intellectual belief that Jesus (yes, the Christian Jesus) had a love affair and/ or was married to Mary Magdalene, who was in fact pregnant with Jesus's child at the time of the crucifixionâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a fact supposedly known by the Church and covered up. The "thing" everyone is being chased and killed for, is the secret of the location of the holy grail, a location known to many who belonged to a secret society throughout history, including Leonardo Da Vinci. No, the holy grail is not, under this theory, the cup Jesus drank wine from during the Last Supper, but rather a metaphor for Mary Magdalene. She is the "cup" that held Jesus's child: she is the true holy grail.

Da Vinci (and many others in history, including Walt Disney) have made allusions in their

works to "the truth" of the grail.

Da Vinci "knew" the truth. How do we know? Dan Brown has a "grail expert" named Teabing tell us.

See Saint Peter in Da Vinci's great work "The Last Supper?" That is "clearly" not a man, but a woman.

Not only a woman, but it "must be" Mary Magdalene!

Sure, who else? Another of the author's expert characters says: "Finally," Teabing said [still in reference to Da Vinci's "The Last Supper"], "if you view Jesus and Mary Magdalene [formerly Saint Peter] as compositional elements rather than as people, you will see another obvious shape leap out at you." He paused. "A letter of the alphabet."

Sophie saw it at once...an enormous, flawlessly formed letter M. What does this compositional M mean? Does it stand for the other Mary (Jesus's mother)? No, does it stand for "Master of the Arts," which Da Vinci no doubt believed himself to be? Did Da Vinci divine the future, see Walt Disney's work, and create a great M as tribute to Mickey Mouse?

Or is this M merely a compositional element in a great work of art?

Anyone who has taken art history and art theory in college knows that X's and W's and, yes, M's are common compositional techniques to balance a painting. But this particular M must mean only one thing as far as Teabing is concerned. It means Mary Magdalene gave birth to Jesus's child and Da Vinci knew it!

This kind of conclusion is only possible when someone already has a conclusion and is looking to invent reasons to support it. Not very scientific, nor very logical. It is the intellectual equivalent of beer drinkers believing they were picked up by aliens and taken for a ride in a spaceship. The author might as well have had everyone running around searching for the secret location of a box of alien bones, proof of visitors from outer space.

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