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Otto Julius Bierbaum. Der bunte Vogel von 1899. Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1898

“Some, like Peter Behrens, the designer of Otto Bierbaum’s 1899 almanach Der Bunte Vogel and of his Pan im Busch of 1900, and Henry van de Velde, who designed the deluxe Insel-Verlag edition of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, also achieved lasting celebrity as architects of major public and private buildings. Van de Velde designed the School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar (1907; he also directed the school until 1915), the Werkbund Theater in Cologne (1913–1914), and the Kröller-Müller Museum in Arnheim, Holland (1938). Behrens figures in all histories of modern design as the architect of the pioneering Berlin turbine factory of the AEG company (1908–1909). There was nothing unusual, incidentally, about Behrens’s and Van de Velde’s careers as architects. In line with the Gesamtkunstwerk ideal and the desire of many artists at the time to bring about a comprehensive reform of modern culture, through which every aspect of life —clothing, furniture, articles of daily use, houses, public buildings, entire cities—would be informed by the same principles of style, beauty, and appropriateness to their function, it was widely held that artists ought not to restrict themselves to a single medium but should be engaged in every aspect of artistic creation, from the form of a building to the smallest teaspoon used in it.”

Lionel Gossman. "Jugendstil in Firestone: The Jewish Illustrator E. M. Lilien (1874–1925)". The Princeton University Library Chronicle , Vol. 66, No. 1 (Autumn 2004)

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