MASSIN IN CONTINUO: A DICTIONARY
Laetitia Wolff [Curator]
Laetitia Wolff [Curator]: MASSIN IN CONTINUO: A DICTIONARY. New York: The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, 2001. Original edition. Square quarto. Printed stapled self wrappers. 22 pp. Includes the printed invitation to the Coversation between Milton Glaser and Massin on January 28, 2002. A fine copy.
5.5 x 8.5 booklet with 22 pages published in conjunction with the exhibition “Massin In Continuo: A Dictionary,” at The Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York [December 17 - March 2, 2002].
“The illustrated book is a film, the text is the dialogue or voice over.” — Massin
The Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography was established in 1984 in order to preserve an unprecedented resource, Herb Lubalin’s vast collection of work. Its goal was to provide the design community with a means to honor Lubalin, and to study his innovative work.
Massin in Continuo: A Dictionary explores the work of self-taught French designer Massin and his groundbreaking career. The exhibition is curated by Laetitia Wolff, founder of the New York-based marketing/design firm futureflair and Editor-in-Chief of Graphis magazine.
While Massin is relatively famous in France, his originality and influence in graphic design is not as well known in the United States. Massin in Continuo: A Dictionary will give American audiences the opportunity to explore his innovative work within the context of the developing graphic design industry in France.
A model of creativity, Massin transcended many long-established boundaries in the field of graphic design and works within multiple disciplines with elegance, humor and diversity. His career has been groundbreaking, spanning editorial graphics, poster and logo design, art direction, typography, photography, publishing, design education, and writing.
Long before the idiosyncratic, broken type of Pentagram, Massin dared to play with letters, manipulating the alphabet, cutting titles, experimenting with forms, signs and fonts, and creating surprising three-dimensional limited-edition covers. He also created a popular series of creative book bindings.
Collaborating with playwright Eugene Ionesco and writer Raymond Queneau, Massin explored the realm of kinetic typography, making their texts come alive in what he calls "expressive typography." Massin has worked for Gallimard, publishing empire of the French literary intelligentsia, for over forty years. In Gallimard's 1964 edition of La Cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano) by Ionesco, Massin combined the pictorial directness of a comic book with the expressive letter forms of Futurist poetry to create a design masterpiece of "visualized literature."
The French graphic designer Massin is considered the father of expressive typography. His graphic interpretations of dramatic works remain some of the most unique and influential examples of the potential for dynamic interaction between word and image. As a scholar, his in-depth survey of letterforms in Western cultures, Letter & Image, is a major contribution to the understanding of graphic arts and an essential reference for graphic designers. The work looks beyond the letter as a necessary accessory to the image and celebrates its rhythmic and plastic qualities. His manipulations of typography in the 1950s anticipated the elastic spatial possibilities of computer graphics. Massin's collaborations with writer Jean Cocteau and playwright Eugène Ionesco yielded a new "visualized literature." His master work for Gallimard’s 1964 edition of Ionesco's The Bald Soprano combines the pictorial economy of a comic book with the letter play of Surrealist poetry.
Massin’s ground-breaking typographic and visual treatment of "The Bald Soprano" ("La Cantatrice Chauve"), was first published in France by Gallimard in 1964. Massin's interpretation of Ionesco's absurdist play was ground-breaking: Using a playful collage of posterized black-and-white photographs of the actors in silhouette, surrounded by sprays and cascades of type in varying sizes and styles (without benefit of cartoonish effects like word balloons), he created a juxtaposition of type and image in book form that became a classic of expressive typography. The stark images from "The Bald Soprano" are instantly recognizable -- both the characters and their jumbled words.
Massin went to 20 different performances of "La Cantatrice Chauve" at the Théâtre de la Huchette in Paris. He even recorded the play so he could catch the inflections, intonations, and pauses of the actors as they spoke, and then transformed them into an interplay of photographs and type. Ionesco's play deals with breaking down clichés and thoughtless truisms into absurd caricature; it has been described as an anti-play. Massin's treatment on the page reflected that disjointedness and conveyed it graphically. He gave each character a different typeface, varying the size, angle, and placement to convey the nuances of the spoken dialogue.
Massin's version created with the blessings of Ionesco, sought to capture the dynamism of the theatre within the static confines of the book. Massin himself says that he "introduced the notion of stage time and space to the printed page."
The techniques he uses to create his expressive kind of typography have changed with changing technology; today he works with digital publishing tools like Photoshop and Illustrator. "The Bald Soprano" had to be created in painstaking physical paste-ups on boards; he didn't even have the advantage of phototype, which was not in common use yet in the early 1960s. One technique he used in order to freely change the shapes of letters, in the days before computer type, was to have them printed on condoms, which he then pinned down in stretched and distorted form and photographed.