arh346: history of graphic design (and more)

Thursday, April 10, 2025

the "standard" elegance of Ladislav Sutnar (1930s-1950s)

Ladislav Sutnar became one of the leading graphic design forces of the 1940s-1950s. His style has an avant-garde flavor and dynamism without hindering accessibility. His basic structure is rational: juxtapositions where scale and color become curiously abstract.

Sutnar used geometric forms to build signs that would attract and guide the eye from one level of information to the next. Repeating symbols and forms helped him express an industrial sensibility.

For magazines he developed strict, though mutable, typographic grids, framing sans-serif modern typefaces with white space in a way that prefigured the precise, architectonic compositions of post-war Swiss design. Sutnar was a constructivist in the purest sense.

much later, an elagant designer in the new international swiss typography (more of this in a couple of classes)

the mark of dada: (l'ecriture automatique) automatic drawing

Automatic drawing by Andre Masson

As I said in class, l'ecriture automatique is a form of graphic design. Call it unconscious design. The idea is to design the spontaneous, the unthought, leave it to the line to do the talking. That -at least- was the premise of the Surrealists.

Wolfgang Paalen, ca 1950

From the 1916 FORM MAGAZINE.

DADA + Neue Typographie (Laszlo Moholy-Nagy)

Love Your Neighbor, (1925)

Jealousy, (1927)

What's unique to Moholy-Nagy is his inventiveness. Drawing on collage, photo, and a minimalist use of geometry, Moholy-Nagy creates a personal vocabulary which is abstract, functional with a touch of uitopianism,

To understand where he's coming from look at his art

yellow circle, 1921

Moholy-Nagy embraced abstraction constructivism in the 1920s (especially the work of El Lissitzky).

1. go abstract,
2. embrace utopian ideals,
3. avoid everything personal,
4. be symmetrically asymmetrical

ernst & heartfield: masters of dada/collage

The impetus behind dada/collage has two forms: political and metaphysical.

the two exponents are Max Ernst and John Heartfield.

Heartfield's hitler posters have no match in political art:

schluckt Gold und redet Blech

or,

kleiner Mann bittet um grosse Gaben

or,

Nur keine angst, er ist vegetarier!

or,

Fritz Thyssen spielt mit Adolf Hitler als Marionette

I recommend this to understand Max Ernst metaphysical collages

john heartfield's political antinazi posters

rodchencko's amazing constructivist photography

stairs, 1930

Rodchenko was influenced by Beardsley and later became a Futurist. He digested the work of Vladimir Tatlin and Malevich. Soon enough he was a Constructivist pioneer.

2.

miakovsky, 1923

Rodchenko wants to achieve pictorial and sculptural quality through purely abstract means. He wants to separate out the components of each image:
line,
form,
space,
color,
surface,
texture,
and the work's physical support,

3.

woman with leika, 1924

Rodchenko's Constructivism focuses on the tangible and material aspects of art, and its experimental spirit is encouraged by a belief that art had to match the revolutionary transformation taking place in politics and society.

4.

electric tower, 1920s

lylia brik, 1924

Since the 1920s Rodchenko switches to photography in an attempt to find new media more appropriate to his goal of serving the revolution. Inititally he used montage, then pictures and text, but later started taking pictures himself and evolved a personal aesthetic:

1- unconventional angles,
2- abruptly cropped compositions,
3- stark contrasts of light and shadow.

His work in photomontage and photography ultimately made an important contribution to European photography in the 1920s.

constructivist posters (red, black, white, maybe yellow)

agit prop. maiakovsky, 1920s (shies te butan gerpie) party's shock fracture

Klutsis poster (1920's)

Ad for the Young Guard Magazine, Alexander Rodchenko, (1924)

communitarian laborers, 1920s (anonymous)

Die Neue Typographie (the power of the strikingly asymmetrical)

Jan Tschichold, Die Frau ohne Namen, Offset lithograph (1927)

Modernist style of typography was perhaps most immediately recognizable in a multitude of graphic communications: posters, brochures, books, handbills, and letterheads.

what you see here is a classical symmetrical arrangement coming straight from a combination of cubist, futurist, and dadaist typographic collage images. they evolved into the more disciplined, yet decidedly revolutionary, asymmetrical style known as Die Neue Typographie (New Typography). new typography style was quickly adopted in other centers of avant-garde activity, including holland, hungary, czechoslovakia, and poland, and was finally codified into a total revision of the rules of traditional commercial layout.

Die Neue Typographie was defended by Lissitzky, László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Renner, and its most devout adherent, Jan Tschichold. To these young designers the rules of the old typography, practiced since the age of Gutenberg, violated the criterion of fitness for purpose in design.

this is what we have:

1. photography replaced realistic, decorative, or otherwise sentimentalized illustration.

2. photomontage, a completely mechanistic means of illustration, became an effective propaganda weapon and the most popular tool of the new graphic design.

3. when 1. and 2. are used together we get what is called "asymmetrical typography," that is to say, a geometric layout with photographic illustrations, which defined modernist design.

Malevich and the mark of geometric design

black circle, 1915

black square and red square, 1915

airplane flying, 1915

suprematism 1923-27

Suprematism is the rediscovery of pure art which, in the course of time, had become obscured by the accumulation of "things." When, in the year 1913, in my desperate attempt to free art from the ballast of objectivity, I took refuge in the square form and exhibited a picture which consisted of nothing more than a black square on a white field, the critics and, along with them, the public sighed, "Everything which we loved is lost. We are in a desert .... Before us is nothing but a black square on a white background!"-- Kasimir Malevich

_____________________________

Last from above is Malevich's Supremus #58, 1916.

German WWII propaganda

Jud Süss! (the Film, 1940)

A 1933 poster advertising the film S.A. Mann Brand

To Germany!

anti-bolshevik propaganda

The Jew Worldpest

"I ask the German people to strengthen my faith and to lend me its strength so that I will always and everywhere have the strength to fight for its honor and freedom, to work for its economic prosperity, and particularly to strengthen me in my struggles for genuine peace."

what's the difference between this and the previous WWI propaganda?

ideology!

advertising art shows simplified social scenes where things are shown as they should be, the homes shown are stereotyped, and the viewer's attention is directed to the foreground where the product is. things are photographed or drawn to seem more real than life. ads tend to flatten the visual space and be self-contained, abstracted

The technological/optimistic design of Joseph Binder

Joseph Binder was born in Vienna in 1898. Trained as a lithographer and attended the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts, where he won numerous poster competitions, including one for the American Red Cross, thus bringing his reductive modernist design sense stateside. Alongside follow AIGA Medalist, German designer Lucian Bernhart, Binder helped introduce architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Less is more approach to young American designers, including AIGA Medalists Lester Beall and Paul Rand.

Binder's design is about:

1. reduction of geometric forms,

2. abstraction means better communication

3. color contrasts,

4. the psychological impact of colors.

His clients included American Railroads, American Airlines, A&P Iced Coffee, Fortune and Graphis. In 1948 the U.S. Navy made him their art director and designer.

or Binder's design for this 1939's New York's World's Fair:

In the 1960s Binder turned away from commercial graphic work and renewed his explorations in graphic works of art in the abstract style. His non-objective art was shown in international exhibitions such as in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museum of Applied Art (MAK) in Vienna.