American Modern and the Second World War
- The term "graphic design" was first used in 1922 by Addison Dwiggins, but it is now more commonly called visual communication
- 1914 - AIGA is founded (focused on fine art printing at first, then shifts to commercial design)
- 1920 - Art Directors Club of New York established
- 1927 - Society of Typographic Arts in Chicago is created
- During the 1920s, the advertising industry expanded rapidly
The American Magazine
- Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes exhibits featured in NYC Metropolitan Museum of Art show an interest in the Art Deco style and department stores in major American cities copy this style
- Two streams of modern European design during this era:
- Commercial Modern - culminated from the art deco style: Edward McKnight Kauffer and A.M. Cassandre are some examples. Took inspirations from Cubism, Orphism, Futurism, Vorticism, and Purism
- "Functionalist" - De Stij, Russian Constructivism, International Constructivism, Bauhaus, and the New Typography. Emphasized graphic design over fine art
- in the 1930s American design was mostly made in the Art Deco/Commercial Modern Style
Fortune
- first appeared in February of 1930
- commentary on financial market and business related subject - target audience was urban businessmen
- Published and edited by Henry Luce
- straightforward grid layout
- employed bad-ass photographer Margaret Bourke-White
- all ads, photography, and illustrations seemed to be almost interchangable
- in 1937 they featured on of the most famous Art Deco designs of all time - Joseph Binder "Skyscraper Christmas Tree"
- Remained reserved in their designs until it was taken over in 1945 by Will Burtin who introduced a new modern style
Mehemed Agha and Vanity Fair
- Edited by Frank Crowninshield and Published by Conde Nast
- focused on modern art: cubist, futurist, and expressionist
- 1929 - Nast hires Mehmed Agha to take over the firs American Vogue, Vanity Fair, and House & Garden.
- Agha creates a new layout using Constructive with Art Deco
- Changes mad by Agha were pulled back such as his use of all lowercase letters and serifed type
- Agha was the first art director to use double page spreads and bleeds - photographs could now cover an entire page to create more sophisticated relationships between text and image
- He was a pioneer in the use of typography and photography
- Critized for his use of blank spaces and featuring his photography using "cock-eyed" perspectives
Cipe Pineles
- Was influenced by Agha when he mentored her and Alex Liberman among others at Conde Nast
- She was an Austrian immigrant - came to New York in 1923 and was hired in 1933 to work at Vanity Fair and Vouge
- artists were able to design the covers from scratch because Agha never set fixed principles for the cover
- Became the art director of Glamour in 1942 and was the 1st woman art director of a mass-market periodical
- She later worked Seventeen, Charm, and Mademoiselle as an art director
- She became famous for employing established artists as magazine illustrators
- Became the 1st woman member of New York Art Director's Club
Alexey Brodovitch
- Was hired onto Harper's Bazaar in 1934 by the editor Carmel Snow
- Worked in Paris during the 1920s where he became acquainted with the work of Art Deco illustrators
- He mostly used the serifed typeface, Bodoni for the the text in Harper's
- Oversaw the design of some of the most compelling double-page spreads of photography and text ever seen
PM Magazine
- The initials stand for "production manager"
- made in 1934 as a mouthpiece of the typography for a firm called The Composing Room (founded in 1927 by Sol Cantor and Dr. Robert L. Leslie)
- was made to educate a generation of young American art directors
- early issues were mainly about printing and typesetting but then eventually bring European styles to the attention of American art directors
- Started printing the work of Lucian Bernhard in 1936 who had immigrated to the US in 1923 and built a successful freelance design firm
- Created Bernhard Gothic in 1929 for American Type Foundery
- used many principles of constructivism when he was the guest art director for the March issue of PM magazine
- Lester Beall
- In June of 1940, PM becomes AD, an Intimate Journal for Production Managers, Art Directors, and their associates
- AD gallery was a small exhibition space started by Leslie and was devoted to progressive graphic design in the office of his firm and became an important meeting place for like-minded young designers
- Inaugural show featured the work of Herbert Matter (photographer for Vouge and Vanity Fair)
Conde Nast, Vogue, and Fashion Photography
- Created Bernhard Gothic in 1929 for American Type Foundery
- used many principles of constructivism when he was the guest art director for the March issue of PM magazine
- Inaugural show featured the work of Herbert Matter (photographer for Vouge and Vanity Fair)
Government Patrons
The Great Depression
- Some graphic designers were forced to turn to the government for employment during the Depression
- Franklin Roosevelt establishes the Works Progress Administration one branch was called the Federal Art Project (FAP) which was meant to provide government work for artists
FAP Posters
- American Artists pursued modernist styles that corporations had shunned
- Most of them were produced in New York City
- Richard Floethe
- AnthonyVelonis - Silk Screening
- banal subject matter and inexpensive production values
Lester Beall
- One of the most important homegrown American designers to adopt sophisticated European styles
- Rural Electrification Administration
- 1939 - Department of Agriculture; black and white photography with abstract geometric background
The Museum of Modern Art
- Established in New York in 1929 (November 7th)
The International Style
- The first show focused exclusively on architecture
- Curated by Henry-Russel Hitchcock and Philip Johnson
- The International Style: Architecture Since 1922 published as an accompaniment to the exhibit
- abstract geometric architecture
- 3 main atheistic principles that defined the International Style in architecture
- Emphasized volume over mass (The enclosure of space by planar elements = volume)
- regularity as opposed to symmetry
- dependence on proportion, not applied ornament, as the basis for its aesthetic achievement
- Lettering on buildings should only be functional and not decorative
The "Machine Art" Exhibition
- Opened in March of 1934
- focused on things like industrial products and mass produced furniture, scientific instruments
- Josef Albers
- Philip Johnson essay in "Machine Art" catalog
- Constructivist functionalism
The "Cubism and Abstract Art" Exhibition
- Curated by MoMA director Alfed H. Barr Jr. and opened int March of 1936
- survey of of abstract art from 1890 to 1935
- primarily focused on painting, but industrial design, theater, and abstract film were included. There was only a brief mention of typography and design
- Cubism and Abstract Art catalog modern painting in diagrammatic fashion - informational design like Harry Beck's map of the London Underground
- Political ramifications of constructivism were glossed over
- Abstraction was being banned in Germany at the same time it was just starting up in the United States (Nazis were hostile towards abstract art)
The "Bauhaus 1919 - 1928" Exhibition
- The art of the Bauhaus was brought to the MoMA int 1938 (the same year this exhibiton opened)
- many of the artists from the Bauhaus immigrated to the US
- catalog created to serve as a source book of primary material related to the Bauhaus that excluded all capital letters
- the text and images were structured with regularity and not symmetry
- reasserted the significance of Constructivism over the ornamental decadence of Art Deco
Pulp Magazines
- Thousands of covers created for pulp magazines (The paper used to print them was the lowest quality) and provided work for lot of artists and the majority of them were trained representational artists
- They were sort of a response to the great depression as a way to offer people a story to escape from the misery of their surroundings
- Had bold colors and bold design elements meant to catch the attention of passerbys
- realism and expressionist display of emotion were used and modern design was rejected
- Culture Productions - the most overtly obscene (explict scenes of sex and violence)
- H.J. Ward - Spicy Mystery Stories 1936 - he was responsible for the cover that put Culture Productions out of business
Germany in the 1930s
Nazi government strategies = use of violence and intimation + aggressive control of the mass media and related culture
The Nazis and the Mass Media
- One of the most media-aware governments of the 20th Century - they used mass media to sway popular opinion
- Officially sanctioned effort to control most aspects of German culture
- Graphic Design - was overseen by Department V and standards were set for the press, broadcasting, theater, music, and literature
- Modern styles were to be rejected and all other artistic work was expected to be representational in works that idealized the Nazi party
- Nazis close the Berlin Bauhaus in 1933 and the Dessau Bauhaus in 1932
- group of professors and students reopened the school in the outskirts of Berlin, but it was raided on April 11th 1933 and it was closed on the basis that they had illegal propaganda materials of the German Communist party
- many graphic artists were employed by the government to promote its policies and the reputation of the Nazis
- Leonid - "All of Germany Listens to the Leader with the People's Reciever" 1936 was evidence of the centralized control of the press
- Richard Klein embraced classical idealism which was a specific trend in Nazi design
"Degenerate Art"
- means "to have declined to a subnormal state"
- Entartete Kunst exhibition opens in Munich July 1937 - all styles of modern art and design
- deliberately displayed artworks in a skewed manner and had slogans decrying the suppossed degenerate nature of their art "crazy at any price - Teacher at the communist Bauhaus until 1933"
- attempt by the Nazis to distort the tradition of modern art
- "un-German" and "Jewish" art practices
Typography under the Nazis
- Die neue Typografies asserted that Fraktur was a dangerously nationalist way of lettering but once the Nazis gained power, they instituted a policy whereby all official government publications had to printed in Fraktur
- Shape of many of the letters are reminiscent of the long black boots worn by Nazi paramilitary forces
- In 1941, the Nazis instituated a total elimination of Fraktur and changed to Roman Type because it was considered to be "Judenletter - Jewish letters"
John Heartfield's Photo-montages
- Berlin Dada artist, used photo-montage to subvert the propaganda images of the Third Reich. He wanted to discredit the Nazis representative of everyday working people
