MAX BILL* (Winterthur 1908 - 1994 Berlin)
Square variation, 1971
color screenprint/paper, 65 x 50 cm
signature stamp Max Bill 1971

ESTIMATE °€ 60 - 100
STARTING PRICE °€ 60

Max Bill was an important Swiss architect and artist. However, he also worked as a university lecturer and served as member of the Nationalrat (the directly elected chamber of Switzerland’s federal parliament, 1967 - 1971). As a painter, he was one of the representatives of the Zurich Concrete School. Bill was the nephew of the painter Ernst Samuel Geige. From 1924 to 1927 he completed an apprenticeship as a silversmith at the Zurich School of Applied Arts. In 1925, at the age of 16, he was invited with his student works to the International Exhibition of Arts Decoratifs et industriels modernes in Paris, where he was particularly impressed by the works of Le Corbusier, Konstantin Stepanowitsch Melnikov and Josef Hoffmann. In the same year he won first prize with a poster design in an open competition for the Suchard chocolate factory. From 1927 to 1928 Bill studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau, where Josef Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy and Oskar Schlemmer taught. In 1929 Bill met the actress and variety artist Maria Benz, who was born in Muehlhausen. The planned marriage to Nusch failed due to resistance from Bill's father Erwin. In 1931, Max married the cellist and photographer Binia Spoerri, who died in 1988. Jakob Bill was the only child of this marriage. His son David was also an artist. From 1929, Max Bill worked both practically and theoretically as an architect, and from 1932 also as a sculptor, graphic artist and painter. From 1932 to 1937 he was a member of the Abstraction-Creation artist movement in Paris, and in 1935 he met its initiator, the artist Georges Vantongerloo, personally. In 1936 he defined his idea of “concrete art” in an exhibition catalog at the Kunsthaus Zurich and became one of its most important representatives in the Zurich "Schule der Konkreten" and the Vereinigung moderner Schweizer Kuenstler - Allianz, which was inspired by it and founded in 1937. From 1936 Bill was also active as a journalist. In 1941 he founded the Allianz publishing house. In 1938 he became a member of the Congres International d’Architecture Moderne. As head of the "Bilden und Gestalten" (design) department, he was architect for Expo64, the Swiss national exhibition in Lausanne, from 1961 to 1964. In 1991, Bill married the art historian Angela Thomas, who had curated various exhibitions with him since 1974. In 1944/1945 Bill received his first teaching position at the Zurich School of Applied Arts. During this time he became friends with František Kupka. From 1951 to 1953 he was a co-founder of the Ulm University of Design (HfG) with Otl Aicher and Inge Aicher-Scholl and designed its school building. From 1953 to 1956 he was its first rector. In 1957 he returned to Zurich. Between 1967 and 1974 Bill held the chair for environmental design at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts. In 1973 he became an associate member of the Royal Flemish Academy of Sciences and Arts of Belgium in Brussels and in 1976 a member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin. In addition to his teaching, he has written numerous books, given lectures on art, architecture, and design, and appeared at conferences around the world. His books include, in particular, those on Le Corbusier, Wassily Kandinsky, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Theory of Art. In addition to his painting work, which often consists of flat, geometric color fields, Bill created numerous sculptures and exhibited in galleries and museums. He was a participant in documenta 1 (1955), documenta II (1959) and documenta III (1964) in Kassel. His first exhibition in the USA took place in 1963 at George William Staempfli's gallery in New York, retrospectives in 1968 – 1969 at the Kunsthaus Zurich, in 1974 at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and at the San Francisco Museum of Art.

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The purchase price consists of the highest bid plus the buyer's premium, sales tax and, if applicable, the fee of artists resale rights. In the case of normal taxation (marked °), a premium of 24% is added to the highest bid. The mandatory sales tax of 13%, for photographs 20%, is added to the sum of the highest bid and the buyer's premium. The buyer's premium amounts to 28% in case of differential taxation. The sales tax is included in the differential taxation.