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.