RÉVOLUTION TYPOGRAPHIQUE
Jacques Damase
Jacques Damase: RÉVOLUTION TYPOGRAPHIQUE. Geneva: Galerie Motte, 1966. Quarto. Text in French. Perfect-bound thick printed French folded wrappers. Unpaginated [148 pp.] 134 full-page plates, 4 in color. Lower edges faintly worn and page edges uniformly sunned [as usual]. A fine copy of an uncommon and desirable title. Rare thus.
8.5 x 10.25 softcover perfect-bound book in dust jacket with 18 pages of French text followed by 130 plates, including 4 color plates. Beautifully printed on uncoated stock [for that revolutionary feel] in Switzerland. Highly recommended.
Damase traces the history of avant-garde typography back to Stephane Mallarme and forward into the 20th century. He focuses on the rise of concrete poetry and branches of into other "isms" such as DaDa, De Stijl, Constructivism, Paris Art Deco, the Bauhaus and fine press publishing.
This volume includes work by leaders of the European Avant-Garde, including Stephane Mallarme, Lewis Carroll, Alfred Jarry, Sonia Delaunay, Gino Severini, F. T. Marinetti, Robert Delaunay, Carlo Carra, Ardengo Soffici, Paolo Buzzi, Guillaume Apollinaire, Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, Simonetti, Luvio Venna, Morgenstern, Man Ray, Piet Mondrian, Theo van Doesburg, Rood, Raoul Haussmann, Vincente Huidobro, Max Ernst, Fernand Leger, Huelsenbeck, Nathalie Gontcharova, Velimir Chlebnikov, Ilya Zdanevitch, Josef Peeters, Strzeminski, Kurt Schwitters and Theo van Doesburg, Oskar Schlemmer, Lyonel Feininger, Peter Rohl, Francis Picabia, Ribement Dessaignes, Marcel DuChamp, Georg Grosz, Kurt Schwitters, Heinrik Berlewi, El Lissitzky, A. M. Cassandre, Jean Arp, Bart van der Leck, Paul Klee, Jean Lurcat, Carlo Belloli, John Furnival, Saul Steinberg, jean Dubuffet, Thomas Kabdero, Ladislas Kijno, Gerhard Ruhm, Arthur Aeschbacher, Philippe Barbier, Henri Chopin, Bridget Riley, J. F. Bory, Pedro Xisto, Heinz Schwarzinger, Bronislaw Zelek, Michel Seuphor (with Piet Mondrian), , Blaise Cendrars (with Fernand Leger), Tristan Tzara (with Sonia Delaunay), Henri Chopin and others.
“Nothing is as fleeting as the ideas, inventions, and documents of advertising; nothing influences the everyday life of the second half of the twentieth century more intensively and extensively than the visual manifestations of publicity. But after months or weeks, days, sometimes even hours, ads, posters, prospectuses, TV commercials, or pamphlets have fulfilled their functions and are reduced to leftovers without any actual value. Even to the designer himself advertisements of yesterday have no more significance; automatically he turns to new undertakings.
“Therefore nothing is so much used as a matter of course, imitated and continuously developed as so-called graphic design. But the direct effect of advertising and the intensive and creative search for new forms of design behind it form an important contribution to industrial culture.
“Advertisements in daily papers or magazines, pamphlets, and posters are not works of art but designed communication media, even when they are designed by "artists," as they were in the artistic revival of the 1920s. The artists made a distinction in their work between the "purposeless" (i.e. "art") and the "useful" (i.e. "advertising"). The economic situation in Europe forced painters to handle the problems of advertising design. But advertising enabled them to present their new concepts of art to the public.
“When, for instance, the Constructivist painter Henryk Berlewi, after an extended stay in Berlin, founded an advertising agency called Reklame Mechano in his native Warsaw in 1924, he saw in it a means of breaking public resistance to new trends in art. "Advertising was not its real purpose," he has said. "I regarded it as a means of penetrating society with my then revolutionary ideas of new design."
“In the Twenties, in Germany especially, various avant-garde artists had their own graphic arts studios or executed designs for industry and public institutions in addition to their independent work and teaching. But it was never a question of personal aesthetics alone. Very early, painters took up new principles of design and created a systematic form of advertising art from its revolutionary beginnings. Typography, photography, and text were fused into a whole which presented an objective, clear, and easily understandable message to consumers, free from the personality of a particular artist.
“The combination of typography and photographs pioneered by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy under the term Typo-Foto advanced the concept of functional graphics in the decisive period between 1920 and 1930. Typography was liberated from the shackles of formality, and the photograph with its variations, photomontage and photogram, was discovered to be an effective means of realistic presentation of publicity. At the same time advertising was recognized as a necessary task of modern society, its function carefully examined, and its design "optically organized," to use the phrase coined by Willi Baumeister in 1930. The overall intention of the new design, said Mart Stam and El Lissitzky in 1925, was to put "the exact before the blurred, reality before imagination."
“In the work of the Twenties, many sources are found for the visual language of the present The purpose of this book is to present the experiments, inventions, and methods developed then as a coherent whole and to show how the creative impulses continue to live. This book should also be understood as a tribute to the pioneers who formulated within a short decade a completely new visual language.” — Eckhard Neumann, 1967 [xlist_2018]