Modern Design

Graphic Design History

Art Deco

• The term art deco is used to identify popular geometric works of the 1920s and 1930s

• The term art deco was coined by British art historian Bevis Hillier in the 1960s and was derived from the title of the Exposition Internationales des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, a major design exhibition held in Paris in 1925 (design movement started in France, but spread worldwide)

• Major aesthetic sensibility in graphics, architecture, and product design

• To some extent, an extension of art nouveau (interest in decorative motifs)

• Influences of modern art (Futurism, Cubism, de Stijl, Suprematism) + ancient Egyptian, Aztec, and Assyrian motifs

• Streamlining, zigzag, moderne, and decorative geometry

• Reflected the modern machine age while still satisfying a passion for decoration

• Style relates to the Jazz age / Roaring 20’s / Great Gatsby era

E. McKnight Kauffer Poster for the London Underground 1918

E. McKnight Kauffer Poster for the London Underground 1918

• E. McKnight Kauffer (1890 – 1954) first studied in Chicago where he saw the Armory Show (an exhibition that introduced Americans to European avant-garde art), and then moved to Europe to study in Germany and France

• He was initially inspired by Cubist and Futurist art, but then his work took on art deco traits, including geometric forms and deco type

• Kauffer designed 141 posters over a period of several years for the London Underground

A.M. Cassandre, poster for the furniture store Au Bucheron, 1923

A.M. Cassandre, poster for the furniture store Au Bucheron, 1923

• A.M. Cassandre (1901 – 1968), who immigrated to Paris from the Ukraine, was commissioned to create many posters at the Hachard & Cie printing firm

• From 1923 – 1936 he revitalized French advertising art through a dramatic series of posters

• Bold, simple design that emphasizes two-dimensionality and composed of broad, simplified planes of color

• Love of letterforms allowed him to integrate words and images into a total composition

A.M. Cassandre Poster for the ocean liner “L’Atlantique” 1931

A.M. Cassandre Poster for the ocean liner “L’Atlantique” 1931

• Many of Cassandre’s finest works were for steamship lines and railways

• Cassandre exaggerated the scale difference between the ship and the tugboat to signify safety and strength of the ocean liner

• The ship is constructed on a rectangle, echoing the poster’s rectangular shape

• The severe geometry is softened by the smoke and fading reflection

A.M. Cassandre Poster for Dubonnet 1932

A.M. Cassandre Poster for Dubonnet 1932

• Cinematic sequence of word and image

• This poster was used to advertise Dubonnet liqueur for over 20 years

• Consumption of the beverage transforms the line drawing into a full-color painting

• The figure because a popular trademark used in formats ranging from notepads to press ads and billboards

• One unifying devise employed by Cassandre was the use of a contour line common to various spatial units. It refers to inside and outside space simultaneously

A.M. Cassandre, Bifur Typeface, 1929

A.M. Cassandre, Bifur Typeface, 1929

• Cassandre designed typefaces with daring innovations

• Quintessential art deco display typeface

• Strokes from each letter are omitted and a linear shaded area restores the basic silhouette. The eye is able to fill in the missing parts and read the characters

Jean Carlu Vanity Fair cover 1930

Jean Carlu Vanity Fair cover 1930

• Jean Carlu (1900 – 89) suffered from an accident where he fell under the wheel of a Paris trolley and lost his right arm. He taught himself to draw with his left hand.

• Carlu understood the modern movements and applied his knowledge to visual communication

• Carlu sought to convey the essence of the message with economy of line and concept

• To study effectiveness of communications in the urban environment, he conducted experiments with posters moving past spectators at varying speeds so that message legibility and impact could be assessed and documented

Paul Colin Poster for Lisa Duncan 1935

Paul Colin Poster for Lisa Duncan 1935

• Paul Colin (1892 – 1989) created posters and program covers for the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris

• He often placed a figure in the center with type above or below and with overlapping shapes and scale changes

• Vibrant color, informal compositions, and energetic linear drawings expressed joy in life

• Colin produced around 1500 posters and 800 set designs during his career

Heinz Schulz-Neudamm Poster for Metropolis 1926

Heinz Schulz-Neudamm Poster for Metropolis 1926

• Between the world wars, Germany became a cultural hub with advanced ideas in all the arts

• Geometric pictorial images inspired by cubism and French advertising art – along with typography, and spatial organization from the Russian constructivist and De Stijl movements

• Heinz Schulz-Neudamm (1899 – 1969) was a staff designer for motion picture publicity at Universum-Film Aktiengesellschaft

• Metropolis, a film about the future, was a pioneering science fiction film, the first feature length movie of this genre

The Influence of Modern Art

Cubism

• Cubism began a new artistic tradition and way of seeing that challenged the 400 year Renaissance tradition of pictorial art by introducing a design concept independent of nature

• Cubism involves depicting planes of the subject matter, often from several points of view, along with rhythmic geometric forms

• The emphasis was on using shapes, along with colors, textures, and values in spatial relationships. The new approach to visual composition changed the course of art and graphic design as well.

• Cubism has a strong relationship with the process of human vision: our eyes shift and scan a subject, and then our minds combine these fragments into a whole.

• Cubism’s visual inventions became a catalyst for experiments that pushed art and design toward geometric abstraction and new attitudes toward pictorial space.

Fernand Léger, The City, 1919

Fernand Léger, The City, 1919

• Léger created this artwork based on the colors, shapes, posters, and architecture of the urban environment.

• Léger known for his use of cylindrical forms and his work has been referred to as “Tubism”

• Flat planes of color and hard-edged precision inspired by the machine age.

• His four years of military service among working-class French citizens turned him toward a style that was more recognizable, accessible, and populist.

Fernand Léger Page from La fin du monde (end of the world) 1919

Fernand Léger Page from La fin du monde 1919

• Fernand Léger (1881 – 1955) created Cubist work that was more accessible with recognizable images and text

• His work evolved toward the use of pure color and shape relationships

• Page from an antiwar book (La fin du monde, or The end of the world) about God’s decision to destroy life on earth due to humans’ warlike nature

• Geometric letterforms that spell out “accelerated slow motion cinema”

Futurism

• Futurism was launched in 1909 by the Italian poet Filippo Marinetti when he published his “Manifesto of Futurism” in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro.

• Marinetti’s stirring words established futurism as a revolutionary movement in which all the arts were to test their ideas and forms against the new realities of scientific and industrial society.

• From the Manifesto: “We intend to sing the love of danger, the

habit of energy and fearlessness. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed…a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”

• Futurism became a major influence on other art movements, and its violent, revolutionary techniques were adopted by the Dadaists, Constructivists, and De Stijl.

Filippo Marinetti Cover for Zang Tumb Tumb 1912

Filippo Marinetti Cover for Zang Tumb Tumb 1913

• Futurist concept of writing and/or typography as a concrete and expressive visual form

• Noise and speed, two dominant conditions of 20th Century life, were expressed in futurist poetry and art

• Marinetti urged poets to liberate themselves from servitude to grammar and open new worlds of expression.

• In 1913, Marinetti published an article calling for a typographic revolution against the classical tradition.

• Harmony was rejected as a design quality because it contradicted “the leaps and bursts of style running through the page”

• Since Gutenberg’s invention of movable type, most graphic designs used a vigorous horizontal and vertical structure, but the futurists abandoned that conventional approach

Filippo Marinetti, A Tumultuous Assembly, 1919

Filippo Marinetti, A Tumultuous Assembly, 1919

• The futurists created a new painterly typographic design, called parole in libertá or “words in freedom”

• Futurists often combined different typefaces on the same page (sometimes as many as 20 different fonts) as well as variation of size and thickness of type

• Marinetti wrote that someone who has witnessed an explosion does not stop to connect his sentences grammatically but hurls shrieks and words at his listeners.

Fortunato Depero New Futurist Theater Company poster 1924

Fortunato Depero New Futurist Theater Company poster 1924

• Fortunato Depero (1892 – 1960) applied Futurist philosophy to graphic work and produced many posters, typographic designs, and ads.

• In this poster, Depero uses flat planes of vibrant color, diagonal composition, and angular repetitive forms to produce kinetic energy and movement

Fortunato Depero, page from Depero Futurista, 1927

Fortunato Depero, cover for Depero Futurista, 1927

• In 1927, Depero published his Depero Futurista, a compilation of his typographical experiments, advertisements, tapestry design, and other works.

• Depero Futurista is a precursor of the artist’s book, published by an artist as a creative expression independent of the publishing establishment.

Dada

• Dadaism started as a literary movement in 1917 in reaction against World War I.

• The movement started in Zurich, Switzerland but then spread to other cities in Europe, including Berlin, Germany.

• The Dada movement bitterly rebelled against the horrors of war, the decadence of European society, the shallowness of blind faith in technological progress, and the inadequacy of religion and conventional moral codes in a continent in upheaval.

• Dada writers and artists were concerned with shock, protest, and nonsense. The movement inspired innovation and rebellion.

• The movement claimed to be anti-art and had a strong negative and destructive element. Even so, the Dadaists produced meaningful visual art and graphic design.

• The Dada artists claimed to have invented photomontage, the use of photos cut up and rearranged in a composition.

Hugo Ball Dada Poem 1917

Hugo Ball Dada Poem 1917

• The Dada Movement started when the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Switzerland was opened. It was a gathering place for independent young poets, painters, and musicians.

• Named after Voltaire, the 18th Century French writer and philosopher of the Enlightenment who advocated freedom of expression

• A group of young poets, including Hugo Ball (1886 – 1927), who opened Cabaret Voltaire, explored various form of avant-garde poetry, involving sound, nonsense, and chance poetry.

• Karawane is a sound poem performed at Cabaret Voltaire. The variety of typefaces used adds to the sense of randomness.

Hannah Höch Da-dandy 1919 Collage and photomontage

Hannah Höch Da-dandy 1919 Collage and photomontage

• Hannah Höch (1889 – 1978) was a German feminist artist who had studied graphic design.

• Her work mocked and defamed a society gone insane.

• The title “Da-dandy” is a play on words and makes reference to Dada style and to a “dandy” which is an old-fashioned term for a man who is stylish, thus Höch is making a statement about gender.

• Images and materials are recycled with both chance juxtapositions and planned decisions contributing to the creative process.

Kurt Schwitters, Théo van Doesburg, and Kate Steinitz Page from Die Scheuche (The Scarescrow) 1922

Kurt Schwitters, Théo van Doesburg, and Kate Steinitz Page from Die Scheuche (The Scarescrow) 1922

• Kurt Schwitters (1887 – 1948) of Hanover, Germany created nonpolitical work, unlike many of the other Dada artists.

• His complex designs combined Dada’s elements of nonsense, surprise, and chance with strong design properties

• Schwitters wrote poetry which he defined as the interaction of elements: letters, syllables, words, sentences.

• Schwitters was invited to Holland to collaborate on this book in which typographic forms were depicted as characters.

• The Scarecrow is a modern fairy tale with type and image combined

John Heartfield Cover for Deutschland, Deutschland über alles 1927

John Heartfield Book cover for Deutschland, Deutschland über alles 1927

• John Heartfield (1891 – 1968) held strong revolutionary political beliefs and oriented many of his artistic activities toward visual communications to raise public consciousness and promote social change.

• John Heartfield is the English name adopted by Helmut Herzfelde as a protest against German militarism and the army in which he served from 1914 – 1916.

• Heartfield used the harsh disjunctions of photomontage as a propaganda weapon and introduced innovations in the preparation of mechanical art for offset printing

• He targeted the Weimar Republic and the growing Nazi party in book covers, magazine covers, illustrations, and a few posters

George Grosz “Work and do not despair” (Title page for Bloody Serious) 1920

George Grosz “Work and do not despair” (Title page for Bloody Serious) 1920

• The painter and graphic artist Geroge Grosz attacked a corrupt society with satire and caricature

• His illustrations project the angry intensity of deep political views in what he perceived to be a decadent, degenerate environment

Surrealism

• The Surrealist movement was formed in Paris in 1924 by a group of young French writers and poets searching for the “more real than real world behind the real.” Painters soon joined the group and created images with emotional content, symbolism, fantasy.

• Surrealism tapped into the world of intuition, dreams, and the unconscious realm explored by psychologist Sigmund Freud.

• Roots in Dadaism, however where Dada had been negative and destructive, surrealism professed a poetic faith in humanity.

• Humanity could be liberated from social and moral conventions, and intuition and feeling could be freed.

Réne Magritte Illustration for “Les Chants de Maldoror” (The Songs of Maldoror) 1937

Réne Magritte Illustration for “Les Chants de Maldoror” (The Songs of Maldoror) Etching, 1937

• Réne Magritte (1898 – 1967) was a Belgian figurative surrealist painter who used symbolism in his work

• Space, perspective, figures are rendered in careful naturalism, but the image is an unreal dreamscape

• Magritte maintained a poetic dialogue between reality and illusion, truth and fiction

• Les Chants de Maldoror is a poetic novel that inspired many Surrealist artists. Written between 1868-69, it does not have a specific plot, is non-linear, and often surrealistic. The main character Maldoror represents absolute evil and is opposed to God and humanity.

Joan Miró, from Le couritsan grotesque, 1974

Joan Miró, from Le Courtisan Grotesque 1974

• Joan Miró (1893 – 1983) was a Spanish artist who was part of the emblematics, a group of Surrealist painters who worked with a purely visual vocabulary.

• Visual automatism (intuitive stream-of-consciousness drawing and calligraphy) was used to create spontaneous expressions of inner life

• Miró intuitively developed his motifs into cryptic, organic shapes.

• Le Courtisan Grotesque, or The Grotesque Courtier is based on a 1621 play written by Adrian de Monluc.

• Edition of 110 books with 1 drypoint and 15 etchings with aquatint printed in color. Each edition signed by the publisher and the artist.

Man Ray Page from Facile (Easy) 1936

Man Ray Page from Facile (Easy) 1936

• Man Ray (born Emanuel Rabinovitch, 1890 – 1976) was an American artist who moved to Paris and joined the Dada / Surrealist movement

• During the 1920s, he worked as a professional photographer while applying Dada and Surrealism to photography, using both darkroom manipulation and bizarre studio setups

• He was the first photographer to explore the creative potential of solarization, the reversal of the tonal sequence in the denser areas of a photographic negative or print, which adds strong black contours to the edges of major shapes

• Here his solarized photo illustrates a book of poems by Paul Eluard

Man Ray “Gun with Alphabet Squares” rayograph 1924

Man Ray “Gun with Alphabet Squares” rayograph 1924

• Man Ray experimented with many photo techniques to achieve a Surrealistic, dreamlike quality with a new interpretation of time and space.

• Man Ray created his cameraless images by placing objects directly on photographic paper and manipulating the light to create various effects. He called these prints “rayographs”

• Symbolism of gun and stencil letters.

Constructivism

• Constructivism was born out of the political situation in early 20th Century Russia after World War I and the Russian Revolution.

• Constructivism called on the artist to stop producing useless things such as paintings and turn to the poster, for “such work belongs to the duty of the artist as a citizen of the community who is clearing the field of the old rubbish in preparation for the new life.”

• An early attempt to formulate constructivist ideology was the 1922 brochure, Konstrucktivizm. The brochure claimed that constructivism had moved from laboratory work to practical application.

El Lissitzky, Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, 1919

El Lissitzky, Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge, poster, 1919

• The Constructivist ideal was best realized by the graphic designer, painter, architect and photographer El Lissitzky (1890 – 1941)

• Lissitzky developed a painting style that he called PROUNS (“projects for the establishment of a new art”). Lissitzky called PROUNS “an interchange station between painting and architecture”

• Lissitzky saw the 1917 Russian Revolution as a new beginning for mankind. Communism and social engineering would create a new order, technology would provide for society’s needs, and the artist/designer (he called himself a “constructor”) would forge a unity between art and technology

• In his 1919 poster design elements are transformed into political symbolism (the “red” Bolsheviks against the “white” forces of Aleksandr Kerensky)

El Lissitzky Exhibition poster 1929

El Lissitzky Exhibition poster 1929

• Lissitzky used photomontage for complex communications messages.

• Poster for a Russian exhibition in Switzerland

• Powerful image with double portrait of anonymous cloned youth above the exhibition structure designed by Lissitzky

• The young male and the female figures are equal in scale, a symbolic gesture in a traditionally male-dominated society

El Lissitzky, exhibition design for Pressa, 1928

El Lissitzky, exhibition design for Pressa, 1928

• Starting in 1925, Lissitzky spent increasing amounts of time on large exhibition projects for the Soviet government

• In this exhibition design for the publishing industry, light, sound, and motion became design elements

• Belts symbolic of web printing (printing using rolls of paper) are in continuous movement

Alexander Rodchenko Cover for Novyi lef (“Left Front of the Arts”) 1923

Alexander Rodchenko Cover for Novyi lef (“Left Front of the Arts”) 1923

• Alexander Rodchenko (1891 – 1956) was one of the founders of the Constructivist movement.

• Rodchenko (like Lissitzky) brought an inventive spirit and willingness to experiment with typography, montage, and photography

• In 1923, Rodchecko began to design a magazine for all the fields of the creative arts.

• Design style based on strong, static horizontal and vertical forms placed in machine-rhythm relationships

• In this photomontage, the montage is crossed out, negating the old order; young children at the top symbolize the new society.

Alexander Rodchenko, paperback book covers, 1924

Alexander Rodchenko paperback book covers 1924

• In 1924, Rodchenko designed a series of ten book covers for the Jim Dollar (pen name for the well- known Soviet author Marietta Shaginian) books

• Rodchenko applied the concept of serial printing to these book covers, with an underlying structure. The standardized elements bring consistency and economy to the whole series.

• The title, number, second color, and photomontage change with each edition, conveying the uniqueness of each book

De Stijl

• The De Stijl movement was launched in the Netherlands in 1917.

• Abstract geometric style applied to painting, graphic design, architecture, product design / furniture.

• De Stijl artists sought universal laws of balance and harmony, which could then be a prototype for a new social order.

• The philosopher M.H.J. Schoenmakers influenced the De Stijl artists. He defined the horizontal and the vertical as the two fundamental opposites shaping our world, and called red, yellow, and blue, the three principal colors.

• In the Dutch language, schoon means both “pure” and “beautiful”. De Stijl artists believed beauty arose from the absolute purity of the work. They sough to purify art by banning naturalistic representation, external values, and subjective expression.

Vilmos Huszár title page for De Stijl 1918

Vilmos Huszár title page for De Stijl 1918

• Vilmos Huszár (1884 – 1931) was one of the founding members of De Stijl

• Huszár designed a logo for De Stijl with letters constructed from an open grid of squares and rectangles

• He also designed the title page of the De Stijl journal which helped spread the movement’s theory and philosophy to a larger audience.

Théo van Doesburg, cover for De Stijl, 1922

Théo van Doesburg cover for De Stijl 1922

• van Doesburg (1883 – 1931) applied De Stijl principles to architecture, sculpture, and typography

• He edited and published the journal De Stijl from 1917 until his death in 1931

• In 1921 Doesburg developed a new horizontal format that was used until the last issue

• Type is asymmetrically balanced in the four corners of an implied rectangle

• De Stijl is combined with the letters N and B which indicated Nieuwe Beelden (New Images)