Post Cubism and Art Deco

Key lecture points:

• Art Deco was a period where the machines of war had transformed into the machines of transportation and communication.
• Spatial organization and synthetic imagery are the ideal.
• A.M. Cassandre (Russian) – Considered one of the great illustrators of 20th century who also had great typographic skills. Introduces the idea of a fictitious character that moves through experiences to sell the product.
• E. McKnight Kauffer (English) – an application of synthetic Cubist ideas. Edited complex images into interlocking planar shapes.
• Leisure class begins to be born during this period. America adopts the ideas of European Modernism as if they had invented it.
• Between the wars Germany became a cultural hub – German art absorbs Cubism and French advertising art, as well as the lettering, typography and spatial origination from the Russian Constructivism and Dutch De Stijl movements.
• Ludwig Hohlwien - leading Plakastil master. He Straddled the symbolic and illustrative while evolving with changing political and social events in Germany though as a result his career tarnished by collaborations with Nazis.
• Herbert Matter - Influenced by German Plakastil, Matter applies new approaches to photography started by Rodchenko, Moholy Nagy, and Tschichold. While most photography of the time was straightforward and neutral, Matter looked to the innovations of the Bauhaus and Nagy and the modernist approach to visual organization.
  

Guns, tanks, and bombs were the principal weapons of World War II, but there were other, more subtle forms of warfare as well. Words, posters, and films waged a constant battle for the hearts and minds of the American citizenry just as surely as military weapons engaged the enemy. Persuading the American public became a wartime industry, almost as important as the manufacturing of bullets and planes. The Government launched an aggressive propaganda campaign with clearly articulated goals and strategies to galvanize public support, and it recruited some of the nation's foremost intellectuals, artists, and filmmakers to wage the war on that front.

The development of modern Graphic Design, from which these propaganda posters played such a large part in, is fascinating, as is the enormous and influential contributions made by the Swiss. Herbert Matter, Swiss designer, linked graphic elements in unexpected ways – creating pictorial symbols by with the use of silhouetted photographs, common angles, micro and macro ideals, as well as overprinting and transparency.

From De Stijl to the Bauhaus and New Typography

De Stijl:

• Primary quality – idea that the drive for universal language of form had been narrowed down to a simple philosophy of horizontal and vertical forms -- shares the same goals as Malevich and the Suprematists.
  
• The universal laws of equilibrium and harmony in art could be a prototype for a new social order.
• Color is a structural element and not decorative or an afterthought, sans serif type favored.
  
• The design artifact was so pure, so new, and so functional; the point is that these things were not made to be used, but made to be looked at.
• Theo van Doesburg – founder and guiding force. Applied de Stijl principles to architecture, sculpture and typography.
• Piet Mondrian’s paintings adopts Malevich and the idea of pure form. Transformed himself from a Cubist to creating horizontal and vertical forms; balancing asymmetrical forms in space, and the meaning being subjective.

The idea of asymmetrical design of type and work, and how things are balanced through unequal equilibrium, is the recipe and playbook for future styles. This is the birth of the analytical system of graphic layout, especially with large amounts of type. Architecturally within de Stijl, buildings are formal and pure -- everything has been reduced to their basic form and cannot be pushed further. This is shown best by Rietveld's Schroeder House (1924), which looks much like a Rubik’s cube.


The Bauhaus (“To solve design problems created by industrialization.”) :

• Mechanism for spreading modernism through the world.
• Universal forms of design; transcend nationality and language, and thus everyone should be able to understand what is being communicated -- Little need for the unique.
• The Bauhaus was the first to tackle the challenge of the "first year experience" -- color, form, motion, and formal invention were all covered in a course, and all students were required to take it so they would understand the basics of design before they applied these basic principles in their later years.
• Moholy Nagy – single-handedly itemizes the applications of the components of the Bauhaus graphic design legacy. Creator of "Photoplastics" in which he experimented with light sources and transparency, as well as trying to figure out how to create movement within a static field.
• Advanced thinking on art theory, architecture, and design: Kandinsky, Klee, Gropius, Mondrian, Moholy Nagy, and van Doesburg were editors or authors in the series of the 14 books of the Bauhaus.
• Herbert Bayer - Architectonic forms establish a foundation for the practice of modern environmental graphics and exhibition design. Takes Bauhaus type and image in new direction – exhibition design and environmental graphics. Discovered that flush-left alignments are the most legible.

Organized after medieval “Bauhutte” apprentice system for Gothic Cathedrals, the Bauhaus was based on a community of master, journeyman, and apprentice; a hierarchy of advancement. No distinction was made between fine arts and applied arts, and nothing was nonsensical - everything was there to send a message or to solve a problem.


The New Typography

• Jan Tschichold was a true engima and thus very unique in the history of graphic design. He single-handedly came up with a way to talk about the strategies of design in a way that all countries could follow. His articulations on all the ideas of new typography were inserted in all printing houses in Europe and, later, America. His strong position on Modernism and New Typography was very interesting considering he later reversed his stance; eventually advocating freedom from modernist dogma. Hew literally began a revival in the 40s looking back past Modernism, and took on the challenge of designing many typefaces while looking at people like Garamond.
  
• The Dutch were masters of the New Typography. Designers in Holland demonstrated their implications of the New Typography as playful expressive forms plus dynamic, organized communication. It became a synthesis between playful DADA, Constructivism, tectonic strategies, and De Stijl’s structure organization for clear communication. Means and methods of commercial reproduction become tools of creativity.
• Paul Shoetema – used objective photography integrated into the total composition, then assembled it on the press bed. This style made uninteresting products and processes look exciting and dramatic for the consumer.
• Hendrick N. Werkman - Used very exploratory techniques; small presses to produce one of a kind compositions he called “druksels”.
• Piet Zwart – Father of modern corporate design who was completely self-taught. He used collage techniques with parts from the typecase and ordered words, rules, and symbols, and manipulated them to find the design. Self-proclaimed "typotecht."

The New Typography demonstrated dynamic interplays between asymmetrical typographic elements to form a field of tension and to lead the viewer through the space, calling attention to the important parts. Diverse elements unified into a design system consistently applied regardless of subject matter.

Discourse: Keedy's Zombie Modernism

Key concepts from Zombie Modernism:

• Design's modernism is an ill-considered version of art modernism, one that is based on an Enlightenment faith in progress and singular answers, reinforced by a rationalist universe.
• The core philosophy of modernist design is in instrumentalist, or pragmatic thought. It is goal-oriented, practical, and distrustful of all things metaphysical.
• Modernism is no longer a style, it's an ideology, and that ideology is conservatism.
• Meaning is arbitrary. Meaning is unstable and has to be made by the reader. Each reader will read differently.
• Art exists outside (above) society and is expected to be critical of it. Design exists inside (below) society and is expected to serve it.
• Postmodernism has been particularly important in acknowledging "the multiple forms of otherness as they emerge from differences in subjectivity, gender, and sexuality, race and class, temporal (configurations of sensibility) and spatial geographic locations and dislocations."
  

Here is one of the greatest examples of the rational-minded and pragmatic era of modernism - Paul Rand's IBM poster. There is absolutely nothing ambiguous about what it represents or what it could mean. Rand cleverly replaces letters with their phonographic counterparts - an I to an eye, a B to a bee - with a singular reasoning, making the audience believe they're participating in the design à la the Beggarstaffs. But the truth is that the metaphorical curtain closes on the audience before they can even manage to take their seats. And while it is at the forefront of design in its time, this sort of aged mentality - the modernist zombie - has no place in today's design world. The audience of today requires something immediately "I"-catching, something which will take attention and keep it, even from just a glance; and this Rand masterpiece of modernism, while beautiful in its simplicity, could never hold its own in today's postmodern world.




Another staple of modernist design is Lucien Bernhard, and as seen here, there is no mistaking what his poster (on the right) is about. Using the primary colors and simple geometric shapes to create images, Bernhard delivers to the audience a simple and straight-forward approach to a household item -- matches. Again on a plain black background like Rand, this poster displays all the key characteristics of modernism.




Rauschenberg hits all the postmodernist notes -- meaning within his work is entirely up to the reader, since to impose a single text or image on the reader is authoritarian and oppressive. Rauschenberg makes text visually ambiguous and difficult to fathom, as a way to respect the rights of the reader. It is as if his work is saying what any postmodernist wishes: to not look for a mythical modernist ideal, or pretend that art theory is a viable theoretical model for design; that we don't need to conserve our past and resist change. We need to construct our future theoretical discourse, carefully, around the particular and exciting context of design. We must allow ourselves to look at design in new and challenging ways, we must look for... ourselves.

It is clear that, staring into any of his postmodern collages, the reader will find a different meaning than any other person, and will prescribe their own theories on what it may represent or what it sort of statement it makes, but the underlying idea under all of this is simply that in these days, the only modernists are the living dead -- zombies trying to feed off a postmodern world. Where's Shaun of the Design when you need him?

The Avant Garde Trio: Suprematism, Constructivism, De Stijl

Around 1915, Kasimir Malevich devised a style called Suprematism, which proved to have a lasting impact on Russian graphic design, as well as the future of modern graphic design. Malevich’s Suprematist paintings carried Cubist abstraction to its logical extreme, consisting of colorful squares and rectangles that appear to float in an infinite space. The blocks of color are unmodulated, the compositional structures often diagonal and suggestive of dynamic movement. This is reductive geometric abstraction par excellence; Malevich desired to invent a new universal language with strong parallels to the later work of De Stijl in the Netherlands. Like the mature works of De Stijl artists, Suprematist compositions are entirely non-objective, meaning they bear no representational relationship to the natural world. Malevich christened his work Suprematism in reference to “the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art.” Malevich was optimistic that his work was a perfect fit for the new society that was arising after the Russian Revolution.

For many Russian designers and intellectuals after the First World War and the Russian Revolution, the newly founded Soviet Union obliged them to originate new artistic styles for their new, utopian society. Perhaps the most influential group of artists who tried to serve the state was the Constructivists, a group of artists who based their aesthetic on the pioneering sculpture of Vladimir Tatlin.

• Constructivism as an active force lasted until around 1934, having a great deal of effect on developments in the art of the Weimar Republic and elsewhere, before being replaced by Socialist Realism. Its motifs have sporadically recurred in other art movements since.
  
• The First Working Group of Constructivists (including Liubov Popova, Alexander Vesnin, Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, and the theorists Alexei Gan, Boris Arvatov and Osip Brik) would arrive at a definition of Constructivism as the combination of faktura: the particular material properties of the object, and tektonika, its spatial presence.
• In general, De Stijl proposed ultimate simplicity and abstraction, both in architecture and painting, by using only straight horizontal and vertical lines and rectangular forms.
  
• The formal vocabulary was limited to the primary colours, red, yellow, and blue, and the three primary values, black, white, and grey.
• Piet Mondrian (Dutch) was the group's leading figure. He published a manifesto titled Neo-Plasticism in 1920.
  
• Painter Theo van Doesberg had started a journal named De Stijl in 1917, which continued publication until 1928, spreading the theories of the group, which also included the painter George Vantongerloo, along with the architects Jacobus Johannes P. Oud and Gerrit Rietveld. Their work exerted tremendous influence on the Bauhaus and the International Style.