Max Bill 
Quinze variations sur un même thème, 1938
Carpeta de 16 litografías, firmada y numerada por el artista.
Imprenta: París: Éditions des Chroniques du Jour. Ed.: 34/120

Max Bill (Winterthur, Switzerland, 1908 – Berlin, Germany, 1994) is a fundamental figure in the formulation of contemporary geometric abstract language. His activity as a theorist and teacher and his artistic practice were carried out during the course of the twentieth century and ranged from architecture and design to painting and sculpture. He studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts) in Zurich from 1924 to 1926, and among his teachers were Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Carl Fischer and Ernst Keller, all of whom were outstanding artists, sculptors and graphic designers. In his biography there are two decisive moments that marked his conception of art and its social possibilities. On the one hand, his first-hand acquaintance with the Soviet Union pavilion designed by Konstantin Melnikov and with Le Corbusier’s L’Esprit Nouveau pavilion at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes which was presented in Paris in 1925. On the other hand, the time that he spent at the Bauhaus in Dessau from 1927 to 1928, where he worked and formed close friendships with Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Josef Albers and Xanti Schawinsky, among others.
Quinze variations sur un même thème is a plastic experiment with the generation of forms and is one of the investigations that Max Bill carried out in accordance with the principles of Concrete Art. Thanks to Jean (Hans) Arp, Max Bill took part in the activities, exhibitions and publications of the Abstraction-Création group in Paris between 1932 and 1936. He was also acquainted with Georges Vantongerloo and the magazine Art Concret (1930), which in its only issue included an article by Theo van Doesburg, “Base de la peinture concrète” (Basis of Concrete Painting). In that context of a defence of concrete abstract art based on precision and clarity and an exact, anti-Impressionist technique, Max Bill embarked on a period of great plastic experimentation, resulting in ideas such as his formalisation of an “endless ribbon” based on the Möbius strip.
During the 1930s, Bill concentrated professionally on graphic design and advertising and was an active agent in working with Concrete Art and introducing it into areas beyond merely pictorial contexts, applying it to sculpture, architecture, everyday objects, the creation of environments, and so on. In this regard, the year 1936 was decisive: he was responsible for designing and constructing the Swiss pavilion in the Triennale di Milano, he presented his recent work in the exhibition Zeitprobleme der Schweizer Malerei und Plastik and he wrote one of his key texts, “Konkrete Gestaltung” (Concrete Design), which was an updating of the principle of Concrete Art as stated by Van Doesburg. In that text he attributed complete autonomy to concrete generation based on its own inherent laws, which were completely different from those of nature, and using colour, form, space, light and movement as the means of creation, always observing the principles of clarity and conciseness. The following year, 1937, he contributed to the founding of Allianz, a group of Swiss artists, who presented themselves as one of the plastic derivations of Concrete Art and attached prime importance to the possibilities of colour in the work of art. In 1938 Max Bill became a member of CIAM, the International Congresses of Modern Architecture, which had been founded ten years previously.
The portfolio Quinze variations sur un même thème is one of his first methodical works and it exemplifies the idea of the logical generation of forms. In the fifteen results we can also see the outcome of his experiments with the “endless ribbon” and the idea of figures with a single surface. The starting point for each variation is the movement to which a geometrical form is subjected, with a triangle leading to a square, a pentagon, an octagon, and so on, and with the image of the spiral dominating overall. It is an exercise in which he shows concrete design through transitions of form and colour, using prismatic colours combined with white, black and grey.
The political and artistic climate that prevailed in Europe in the years before and during the Second World War led Max Bill to consider the possibility of emigrating to the United States. In Zurich he continued working on the two complementary fronts that formed the basis of all his activity. He continued making art and curating, notably the exhibition Konkrete Kunst (1944) at the Kunsthalle in Basel, which was the first attempt to systematise that tendency; he also continued teaching: first at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich and then at the Institut für Progressive Cultur (Institute for Progressive Culture), of which he was a founding member in 1947. However, Bill’s most outstanding contribution in this field was the founding of the Hochschule für Gestaltung (School of Design) in Ulm in 1953; he also planned and designed its original infrastructure and was its first rector (1950–1956). It was a social and artistic project with strong echoes of the Bauhaus, in which the students worked with instructors in a horizontal system, designing everything that formed part of the everyday life of human beings.

References
Manuel Fontán del Junco and María Toledo (eds.): Max Bill. Fundación Juan March / Editorial de Arte y Ciencia, Madrid, 2015.
Max Bill: ohne Anfang, ohne Ende / Max Bill: No Beginning, No End. Scheidegger & Spiess, Zurich, 2008.
Angela Thomas: “Max Bill: The Early Years – An Interview”, in The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts, vol. 19, 1993, pp. 98–119.