The poster and its maker
Joost Schmidt was a German typographer and Bauhaus teacher. His best-known graphic work is the poster for the school’s 1923 exhibition in Weimar. He studied at the Bauhaus between 1919 and 1925, including training in its wood-carving workshop.
Schmidt was born in Wunstorf in 1893 and died in Nuremberg in 1948. Before the Bauhaus he studied art at the Grand-Ducal Saxon Academy of Fine Art in Weimar and received a diploma in painting in the winter semester of 1913/1914. After military service he was briefly a prisoner of war and returned to work in Germany in 1918. When he first came to the Bauhaus he began a sculpting apprenticeship with Oskar Schlemmer and a second teacher named Johannes Iiten, and over time he became very proficient in applied graphics. His poster was displayed at the Bauhaus exhibition in 1923.
Several forms of teaching
Schmidt subsequently taught lettering and led work in sculpture, advertising, printing and graphic design. His teaching addressed geometry, elementary forms and their relationships in space. He taught lettering from 1925 to 1932, led the sculpture workshop from 1928 to 1930, and led the department covering advertising, calligraphy, printing and graphic design from 1928 to 1932. In 1929 and 1930 he also taught life and figure drawing to upper-division students. He later became a professor at the College of Visual Arts in Berlin. That range places his graphic practice alongside experience in making and teaching three-dimensional work.
What to compare
Begin with the exhibition poster, then compare its organization with the problems involved in arranging letters and bodies in space. Treat this as a question to test through individual examples, rather than assuming a single geometric formula explains his output. His career is especially useful for studying how a school’s public graphic identity relates to what happens in its workshops.
He pursued graphic design despite much resistance from the Nazis, and in 1925 he married the Bauhaus student Helene Nonne.
