Soup plate

Behrens worked as a painter and illustrator before he joined the Darmstadt artists colony in Germany, where he designed a house and all its furnishings. He trained as a graphic designer, and that can be seen in his complex, concentric designs seen here in the dinnerware for German firm Bauscher. It must have seemed extremely modern at the turn of the century. Behrens's designs were promoted in department stores as part of the ideal of broadly available, good modernist design. He went on to be the first individual to practice industrial design in the modern sense, creating a graphic identity and products for Berlin electric firm AEG as early as 1907.