KURT SCHWITTERS: TYPOGRAPHIE UND WERBEGESTALTUNG
[Typographie Kann Unter Umstanden Kunst Sein]
Ernst Schwitters [essay]
Ernst Schwitters [essay]: KURT SCHWITTERS: TYPOGRAPHIE UND WERBEGESTALTUNG. [Typographie Kann Unter Umstanden Kunst Sein]. Wiesbaden: Landesmuseum Wiesbaden, 1990. First edition. Text in German. Quarto. Thick French folded wrappers. 262 pp. 278 plates and text illustrations. Wrappers lightly worn, but a nearly fine copy.
9.5 x 11.5 softcover catalogue with 262 pages and 278 plates and text illustrations of Schwitter’s avant-garde typographic design and advertising work from the late 1920s and early 1930s. Easily the most comprehensive single-volume conspectus of Schwitter’s graphic design work ever assembled. I am a huge fan of this work, and there are many examples presented herein that I have never seen before. Enough said.
Also includes typographic compositions by Theo van Doesburg, Raoul Hausmann, Johannes Baader, Tristan Tzara, Guillaume Apollinaire, F. T. Marinetti, Hugo Ball, and El Lisitzky.
This exhibition originated at the Landesmuseum Wiesbaden from May 6 to July 8 1990, then traveled to the Sprengel Museum Hannover, from November 1990 to February 1991, then to the Museum Fur Gestaltung Zurich, April-June 1991. The catalog includes essays by Ernst Schwitters, Dietrich Helms, Maria Haldenwanger, Jean Leering, Karl Riha, and others.
The Circle of New Advertising Designers (ring neue werbegestalter) was a group who coalesced after the first statements on the new typography by Tschchold and Moholy-Nagy, and their purpose was the promotion of a common vision of the avant-garde. Ring neue werbegestalter intentionally echoed the name of The Ring, a group of Berlin-based architects which had been formed a few years earlier.
The idea came from Kurt Schwitters and was trumpeted in a 1928 issue of Das Kunstblatt: " A group of nine artists active as advertising designers has formed under the presidency of Kurt Schwitters. Baumeister, Burchatz, Dexel, Domela, Michel, Schwitters,Trump, Tschichold andVordemberge-Gildewart belong to the association."
Before forming The Ring, Schwitters had broadened his approach to visual art to include graphic design, even going through the avant-garde right of passage of designing a sans-serif typeface.
The affiliation of The Ring appears to have been somewhat loose, its activities consisting manily of exhibitions, either promoting the group on its own or contributing to larger events, such as the Werkbund's Film und Foto in 1929.
In Heinz and Bodo Rausch's Gefesselter Blick (1930), The Ring's point of view was defined by Paul Shuitema , acknowledging that modern design involved the separation of hand and machine which previous generations had so strongly fought against: "the designer is not a draughtsman, but rather an organizer of optical and technical factors. His work should not be limited to making notes, placing in groups and organizing things technically."
Tschichold was more succinct: " I attempt to reach the maximum of purpose in my publicity works and to connect the single constructive elements harmoniously -- to design."
Kurt Schwitters (Germany, 1887 – 1948) attended the Kunstgewerbeschule in Hannover from 1908 to 1909 and from 1909 to 1914 studied at the Kunstakademie Dresden. After serving as a draftsman in the military in 1917, Schwitters experimented with Cubist and Expressionist styles. In 1918, he made his first collages and in 1919 invented the term “Merz,” which he was to apply to all his creative activities: poetry as well as collage and constructions. This year also marked the beginning of his friendships with Jean Arp and Raoul Hausmann. Schwitters’s earliest Merzbilder date from 1919, the year of his first exhibition at Der Sturm gallery, Berlin, and the first publication of his writings in the periodical Der Sturm. Schwitters showed at the Société Anonyme in New York in 1920.
With Arp, he attended the Kongress der Konstructivisten in Weimar in 1922. There Schwitters met Theo van Doesburg, whose De Stijl principles influenced his work. Schwitters’s Dada activities included his Merz-Matineen and Merz-Abende at which he presented his poetry. From 1923 to 1932, he published the magazine Merz. About 1923, the artist started to make his first Merzbau, a fantastic structure he built over a number of years; the Merzbau grew to occupy much of his Hannover studio. During this period, he also worked in typography. Schwitters was included in the exhibition Abstrakte und surrealistische Malerei und Plastik at the Kunsthaus Zürich in 1929. The artist contributed to the Parisian review Cercle et Carré in 1930. In 1932, he joined the Paris-based Abstraction-Création group and wrote for their organ of the same name. He participated in the Cubism and Abstract Art and Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibitions of 1936 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The Nazi regime banned Schwitters’s work as “degenerate art” in 1937. This year, the artist fled to Lysaker, Norway, where he constructed a second Merzbau. After the German invasion of Norway in 1940, Schwitters escaped to Great Britain, where he was interned for over a year. He settled in London following his release, but moved to Little Langdale in the Lake District in 1945. There, helped by a stipend from the Museum of Modern Art, he began work on a third Merzbau in 1947. The project was left unfinished when Schwitters died on January 8, 1948, in Kendal, England.