MEZ (Central European Time), No. 1 (MEZ [Mitteleuropäische Zeit], Nr. 1)

Robert Michel’s fascination with modern machinery began in World War I when he volunteered as an air force test pilot. He later gave visual expression to the dynamism of the immediate postwar period in Germany through machine and aeronautic imagery. For him, as in this work, the clock represented the ideal synthesis of time, space, and dynamics.

MEZ was made soon after the German republic was declared in the new capital city of Weimar, where Michel was then living. Its mechanistic imagery, along with the print’s title (Central European Time), the handwritten notation "Weimar" at the bottom of the composition, and the date of the work (1919) all point to its origins in the roiling artistic and political currents in Weimar and in the vanguard artistic experiments of the city’s recently established Bauhaus art school.