WALTER DEXEL: NEUE REKLAME
Friedrich Friedl
Friedrich Friedl: WALTER DEXEL: NEUE REKLAME. Düsseldorf: Edition Marzona, 1987. First edition. Text in German. Quarto. Thick paper wrappers with attached dust jacket [as issued]. 112 pp. Fully illustrated in black and white and color. Yellow spine sun-faded and wrappers lightly shelf worn, lower corner bumped, but a very good or better copy. Uncommon.
8.5 x 10.5 softcover book with 112 pages devoted to Walter Dexel’s graphic design work. This out-of-print Marzona edition is the only monograph devoted to Dexel’s work, thus earning our absolutely highest recommendation.
A painter, typographer, graphic designer and teacher, Walter Dexel [1890 – 1973] was appointed as the director of the Art Union in Jena, a central German university town. Closely associated with the Bauhaus, he became one of the most prominent practitioners of Constructivism. In his work one readily sees the confluence of art and commerce, wherein the most mundane of advertisements can be presented in an elevated manner. Dexel’s strict Constructivist style “used exclusively typography and abstract geometric markers” [Avant Garde p. 64]. He eschewed pictorial imagery for “the use of ornament based entirely on the precise geometric forms of the rectangle and the circle, and the almost exclusive use of a geometrically based san-serif type” [Word & Image p. 56].
Dexel was also a card-carrying member of the ring neue werbegestalter' [The Circle of New Advertising Designers], a group who coalesced after the first statements on the new typography by Jan Tschchold and László 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."
Egidio Marzona has assembled the world's foremost collection of works on paper documenting the revolutionary efforts of the Bauhaus. Marzona is also a well-known publisher of books on Russian Constructivism, Futurism, De Stijl, Dadaism, and a host of other movements and figures of the 20th-century avant-garde.