PAINTING TOWARD ARCHITECTURE
THE MILLER COMPANY COLLECTION OF ABSTRACT ART
Henry-Russel Hitchcock, Alfred H. Barr, Jr.
Bradbury Thompson [Designer]
New York: Duell-Sloan & Pearce, 1948. First edition. Quarto. Black cloth decorated in gilt. Printed endpapers. Printed dust jacket. 118 pp. 40 black and white illustrations. 24 color plates. Superb page design and typography by Bradbury Thompson. Former owners debossed name to front free endpaper. Textblock upper corner bumped. Dust jacket heavily chipped and repaired with archival tape. Former owners penciled notes to margins. A very good or better copy in a scrappy dust jacket.
From the library of leading American architectural historian William H. Jordy (1917 – 1997) with his ownership blindstamp and penciled marginalia to textblock. At the time of his death, Jordy was Henry Ledyard Goddard Professor Emeritus of Art History at Brown University, where he taught for many years. Jordy received his Ph.D. at Yale University in 1948. He joined the Yale faculty that year and remained until 1955, when he joined the Department of Art History at Brown, and began the long teaching career for which he is famous. His books include two volumes of the five-volume American Buildings and Their Architects series and Buildings of Rhode Island (published posthumously) in the Society of Architectural Historians Buildings of the United States series. He contributed occasionally to the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and wrote regularly on architectural subjects for The New Criterion.
8.75 x 11.25 hardcover book with 118-pages, 40 pages of illustrations and 24 color plates. Foreword by Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Remarks by Burton G. Tremaine, Jr. President. Acknowledgements by Emily Hall Tremaine, Art Director, The Miller Company. Designed by Bradbury Thompson.
Hitchcock connects the dots between modern abstract painting and the modern movement in architecture as seen through the corporate art collection of the Miller Company of Meridian, Connecticut. Bradbury Thompson distills the whole project with his usual sensitive eye and the result is one of the finest book documentations of the modern movement produced in the United States. My highest recommendation.
Contents:
- Foreword
- Painting Toward Architecture
- Plates
- Catalogue
Includes work by Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Otto Wagner, Peter Behrens, Le Corbusier, J. J. P. Oud, Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe, Walter Gropius, John Marin, Fernand Leger, Theo Van Doesburg, Piet Mondrian, Gerrit Rietveld, Paul Klee, Vassily Kandinsky, Jean Arp, Joan Miro, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Alexander Calder, Stuart Davis, Ilya Bolotowsky, Oscar Niemeyer, Roberto Burle-Marx, Skidmore - Owings & Merrill, Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Georges Braque, Charles Sheeler, Georgia O'Keefe, Lyonel Feininger, Perle Fine, Jean Helion, Kurt Schwitters, Ben Nicholson, John Tunnard, Carlos Merida, Matta, Mark Tobey, Irene Rice Pereira, James Guy, Jacques Lipchitz, Henry Moore, Jose De Rivera, and Mary Callery.
From the book: "Critic and historian of modern architecture, Henry-Russell Hitchcock discusses in this new book the relationship of modern abstract art to architecture."
"It is his twofold purpose to demonstrate how the abstract painting of the twentieth century has influenced modern architecture, and to present contemporary abstract painting and sculpture of potential value to contemporary architects."
"Mr. Hitchcock shows how abstractionism after 1911 has an important general influence on the revolutionary architectural movement of the 1920's, and explains in what way the early designs of Le Corbusier, Gropius, Oud, and Mies Van Der Rohe were related to the new currents in painting and sculpture which grew out of the cubism of Picasso and Braque."
Bradbury Thompson (1911-1995) was born in Topeka, Kansas and graduated from Washburn College in 1934. When it came to the blending of photography, typography and color, nobody did it better than Thompson. In his own quiet way, he expanded the boundaries of the printed page and influenced the design of a generation of art directors.
By simply looking at one year of his career, the scope of his involvement in the field of graphic design can be understood. In 1945, Thompson designed the final issues of three wartime magazines including Victory and USA. Back in New York, before the year was out, he had become art director of Mademoiselle, where he worked for nearly fifteen years. He also accepted the role of design director for Art News and Art News Annual, a position he held for 27 years.
As if that were not enough, he designed a brochure for the Ford Motor Company and began his experiments in typographic reform by creating his "monoalphabet,” which broke with the tradition of separate letterforms for capital and lower-case letters. He first introduced this typographic innovation in an issue of Westvaco Inspirations for Printers, one of four issues that he produced that year. And 1945 was not unusual.
Thompson's first commission to design a stamp for the U.S. Postal Service in 1958 led to over 90 other designs. He often used portions of paintings in his designs, such as a 1980 stamp featuring Glow by Josef Albers. As a member of the Citizens' Advisory Committee, he suggested a U.S. logo for each stamp to show national unity.
Books and their design were also critical in Thompson's career right from the start, as art editor of his high school yearbook to the publishing of The Washburn College Bible -- a King James translation with revolutionary type and design.
Thompson is one of the few art directors who have received all three major design awards: National Society of Art Directors Art Director of the Year in 1950; AIGA Gold Medal in 1975; and the Art Directors Hall of Fame award in 1977.
Any analysis of Thompson's style and any attempt to assess the value and extent of his influence leads irrevocably to one word: form. Whether by examining his precise cropping and careful placing of images on the printed page or studying his attention to typographic detail, his sense of order and stucture cannot be missed. Recalling his early draftsman experience Thompson said, "It was a critical part of my training as a designer. It taught me discipline and, working with huge sheets of tracing cloth, I learned to cope with space in an orderly way."