In the Bauhaus metal workshop of tutor Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, students Marianne Brandt and Wilhelm Wagenfeld created a new style of unadorned light fitting with an elegance and beauty deriving directly from its function. In Walter Gropius's own office hung a Constructivist light fitting designed by the Dutch architect Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, revealing his links with the avant-garde De Stijl artists.

The reverberations of Bauhaus teaching were felt in Scandinavia, where a Scandinavian Modern movement in design, putting artists and craftsmen in touch with industry, took hold. In the 1920s Danish designers such as Poul Henningsen and Kaare Klint argued the case for change in the provocative journal Kritsky revy. Both Henningsen and Klint went on to create milestone light fittings which showed the accessible face of Danish Modern design, and laid the groundwork for great export success in the 1950s and 1960s. Henningsen in particular was a tireless polemicist who dubbed opponents of his theories on soft, indirect lighting 'light's blind book-keepers'. His PH 5 Light of 1958 remains an ubiquitous classic in Scandinavia.

THE MODERN MOVEMENT IN THE USA

WHen Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer fled the Nazis and arrived in the USA int he 1930s, they were able to stamp their brand of European Modernism on the prevailing Machine Age aesthetic movement which had been gathering momentum since they early 1920s.

But the pure design preoccupations of the Bauhaus were at odds with a more commercial school of design founded in the dark days after the 1929 Wall Street Crash by a pioneer group of American design consultants led by Raymond Loewy, Walter Darwin Teague, Henry Dreyfuss and Norman Bel Geddes. They believed in using streamlining and other styling motifs to appeal to mass markets. Design was a business tool to be exploited, rather than a social and moral instrument for change as Gropius argued.

Light fittings by Walter Dorwin Teague and his contemporary Donald Deskey, designer of the Art Deco Radio City Music Hall interior in New York, show this American preoccupation with 'styling'. Many industrial designers of the 1930s and 1940s where known as stylists. But the USA's most popular and widely used desk light from the early 1950s onward had very different antecedents.

In the early 1930s George Carwardine, a young English designer created a desk light based on the constant-tension principles of the human arm. The concept shared in its basis in nature and function a link with both Art Nouveau and the Bauhaus. The result was the famous Anglepoise Light which remains in production, scarcely altered, to this day.

In 1937 Jac Jacobsen, a Norwegian, saw the Anglepoise, bought the patent and renamed the light Luxo. After enormous success in Scandinavia, he took Luxo to the USA in 1951, where it became, and remains, a common sight in homes, offices and factories everywhere.

POST-WAR RECONSTRUCTION

Although Britain and the USA saw the invention of the light bulb, and Scandinavia contributed many classic light fittings, attention began to switch elsewhere after World War Two. In Japan in 1951, the mayor of a small town known for making paper laterns asked the artist and designer Isamu Noguchi to do something to revive the town's sagging economy. The result was the collapsible paper lampshade, popular around the world today, which diffuses light through its globe shape.

But it was in Italy that the idea of the light fitting as industrial sculpture and 'social metaphor' took hold. After 1945, as Italy struggled to build a new identity in the ruins of Fascism, the ricostruzione, as it is known, placed industrial design at the heart of economic and social regeneration. The Italians expressed their sense of a new beginning with the most vigorous outpouring of modern design. Domestic products such as furniture, tableware and lighting -- low-technology objects which could be rendered unique with a high degree of imagination and style -- became the medium by which Italians would signal their new position in world trade.