Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar, 1919-1923 (1923) [German]

This work was published on the occasion of the major Bauhaus exhibition in August and September 1923 in 2,000 copies (another 300 were printed in English and 300 in Russian). The colour plates include nine original lithographs by Herbert Bayer, Marcel Breuer, L. Hirschfeld-Mack (2), R. Paris, P. Keler and W. Molar, K. Schmidt (2), and F. Schleifer. The texts are by Walter Gropius, Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, Gertrud Grunow, Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy, Oskar Schlemmer, Johannes Itten, Georg Muche, Lothar Schreyer, Gerhard Marcks, Adolf Meyer and others.

Publisher Bauhausverlag, Weimar and Munich, 1923
Typography L. Moholy-Nagy
Cover design Herbert Mayer
Print F. Bruckmann, Munich (texts), V. Lübecke, Erfurt (printing blocks for the 4-color prints), and Dietsch & Brückner, Weimar (colour plates)
225 pages, 20 colour plates, 147 halftone ills., 25 × 26 cm
via Bibliothèque Kandinsky

PDF (325 MB, updated on 2018-3-6)
See also Bauhaus publications on Monoskop wiki.

Walter Gropius, L. Moholy-Nagy (eds.): Bauhaus Books, 10 vols. (1925–1930) [German]

1. Walter Gropius, Internationale Architektur, 1925, 111 pp.
2. Paul Klee, Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch, 1925, 50 pp.
4. Die Bühne am Bauhaus, 1925, 84 pp.
7. Walter Gropius (ed.), Neue Arbeiten der Bauhauswerkstäffen, 1925, 115 pp.
8. L. Moholy-Nagy, Malerei, Fotografie, Film, 1925/27, 140 pp.
9. Kandinsky, Punkt und Linie zu Fläche: Beitrag zur Analyse der malerischen Elemente, 1926, 190 pp.
10. J.J.P. Oud, Holländische Architektur, 1929, 107 pp.
11. Kasimir Malewitsch, Die gegenstandslose Welt, 1927, 104 pp.
12. Walter Gropius, Bauhausbauten Dessau, 1930, 221 pp.
14. László Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zur Architektur, 1929, 241 pp.

Publisher Albert Langen, Munich, 1925-1930
via Bibliothèque Kandinsky

Download all 10 volumes through Monoskop wiki

Vítězslav Nezval: Abeceda (1926)

“In Nezval’s Abeceda, a cycle of rhymes based on the shapes of letters, I tried to create a ‘typofoto’ of a purely abstract and poetic nature, setting into graphic poetry what Nezval set into verbal poetry in his verse, both being poems evoking the magic signs of the alphabet.” – Karel Teige

The 1926 book Abeceda [Alphabet] is a landmark work of the artists’ collective Devětsil, active in Prague and Brno in the 1920s.

“The composition of Abeceda took place in three stages. Vítězslav Nezval wrote the poem in 1922 along the line of the grade-school syllabary, matching each letter of the alphabet with a single rhyming quatrain. Nearly every verse takes its lead from the visual aspect of its letter and proceeds as a sequence of fanciful associations: “A / let us call you a simple hut / Transport your tropics to the Moldau, o palms / A snail has its simple home with feelers sticking up / while people don’t know where to lay their heads.” For a celebratory Nezval evening in 1926 at the Liberated Theater in Prague, Milča Mayerová contributed a choreographed alphabet that complemented each quatrain with a sequence of poses. The composition concluded with Karel Teige’s addition of photo-montages that join photographs of Mayerová’s embodied alphabet with his own geometric letterforms.

Nezval’s verses follow from his conviction that poetry, as a game of language played at the level of its rudiments, provided a means of transforming the world directly. The photos of Mayerová illustrate in concrete terms this intimacy between language and reality; the poses have her almost trying the alphabet on for size. Teige’s photomontages organize that alphabetized figure with geometric letters according to the structure of the grid, which the artist regarded as an emblem of rational order. In setting Mayerová’s figure in gridded relation to the alphabet, Teige seemed to be insisting that readers consider the realities of life in relation to letters whose shapes they not only determine, but that in turn determine them.” (Source)

Abeceda. Taneční komposice Milči Mayerové
Publisher J. Otto, Prague, 1926
Illustrated with 25 black and white photomontages
57 pages
via V&A

Video adaptation (8 min, 2000, made at the Wolfsonian-FIU, Miami)

PDF (with Nezval’s poems in Czech, low resolution)
PDF (images only, low resolution)