ADVANCE GUARD OF ADVERTISING ARTISTS
Katharine Kuh, György Kepes [Designer]
György Kepes [Designer]: ADVANCE GUARD OF ADVERTISING ARTISTS. Chicago: Katharine Kuh Gallery, October 1941. First edition. Slim quarto. Thick stapled wrappers with deckled for edge on shortened frontis. [28] pp. Finely engraved halftones and two-color line artwork on multiple paper stocks. Catalog design by György Kepes. Fore edge thumbed and lightly creased, but a very good or better copy of this rare and significant title.
8.5 x 11 softcover catalog with 28 pages and 20 examples of advertising art printed on various paper stocks, complete list of works shown, short biographies and an introductory essay by Miss Kuh. Katherine Kuh was Curator of the Gallery of Art interpretation and Associate Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as the Editor of the Institute's quarterly publication, The Bulletin.
This exhibition marked the first signs of the assimilation of the European Avant-Garde into mainstream American Advertising. For the first time Bauhaus refugees Bayer and Moholy-Nagy as well as Kepes and Sutnar were placed on the same level as the homegrown heroes Beall, Rand, Kauffer and Barr. Of particular interest is the Chicago location of the exhibit -- no doubt instigated by Kepes and Moholy at the fledgling Institute of Design (New Bauhaus).
Kepes catalog design is an amazing integration of the European avant-garde spirit with the no-nonsense midwestern sensibility: the fine press history of Chicago's Printers Row is referenced by the deckled edge and the repetitious eyeball engavings on the catalog cover; but European functionalism orders the interior, with Tschichold's New Typography very much in evidence.
An early exhibition guide showcasing the avant-garde advertising design of:
- Frank Barr
- Herbert Bayer
- Lester Beall
- György Kepes
- E. McKnight Kauffer
- Herbert Matter
- Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
- Paul Rand
- Ladislav Sutnar
A review of the show from A-D Volume 8, Number 1: October-November 1941: “An exhibition of the work of "The Advance Guard of Advertising Artists" at the Katherine Kuh Gallery, 540 N. Michigan Avenue, during October was one of the most successful ever held at that Gallery, according to Miss Kuh. Business men jammed the space, especially during lunch hour.”
Chicago wasn't always a midwestern bastion of modernism. Back in the 1930s, modernism was viewed as a foreign plague to be fought at every turn. A group of wealthy, conservative women who called themselves Sanity in Art existed for the sole purpose of combatting modernism not only through behind-the-scenes pressure and letter-writing campaigns but also by sending small groups to the modern art gallery of Katherine Kuh in order to harass potential buyers. I always thought the painting "Hogs Killing a Rattlesnake" by John Steuart Curry hanging alongside Wood's "American Gothic" at the Art Institute was a wry commentary on this mindset.
In 1937 former Bauhaus Master László Moholy-Nagy accepted the invitation of a group of Midwest business leaders to set up an Industrial Design school in Chicago. The New Bauhaus opened in the Fall of 1937 financed by the Association of Arts and Industries as a recreation of the Bauhaus curriculum with its workshops and holistic vision in the United States.
Moholy-Nagy drew on several émigrés affiliated with the former Bauhaus to fill the ranks of the faculty, including György Kepes and Marli Ehrman. The school struggled with financial issues and insufficient enrollment and survived only with the aid from grants of the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations as well as from donations from numerous Chicago businesses. The New Bauhaus was renamed the Institute of Design in 1944 and the school finally merged with the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in 1949.
In Chicago Moholy aimed at liberating the creative potential of his students through disciplined experimentation with materials, techniques, and forms. The focus on natural and human sciences was increased, and photography grew to play a more prominent role at the school in Chicago than it had done in Germany. Training in mechanical techniques was more sophisticated than it had been in Germany. Emerging from the basic course, various workshops were installed, such as "light, photography, film, publicity", "textile, weaving, fashion", "wood, metal, plastics", "color, painting, decorating" and "architecture". The most important achievement at the Chicago Bauhaus was probably in photography, under the guidance of teachers such as György Kepes, Nathan Lerner, Arthur Siegel or Harry Callahan.
Frank Barr (American, 1906 – 1955) was born in Chicago and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. He was active in Chicago's Society of Typographic Arts, with published work dating back to the mid-thirties. Barr was one of nine artists represented in the legendary Advance Guard Of Advertising Artists Exhibition held at the Katharine Kuh Gallery in October, 1941. Barr shared the exhibition with Herbert Bayer, Lester Beall, György Kepes, E. McKnight Kauffer, Herbert Matter, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Paul Rand and Ladislav Sutnar. That's a pretty big deal.
Of all the artists to pass through the Bauhaus, none lived the Bauhaus ideal of total integration of the arts into life like Herbert Bayer (Austrian, 1900 – 1985). He was a graphic designer, typographer, photographer, painter, environmental designer, sculptor and exhibition designer. He entered the Bauhaus in 1921 and was greatly influenced by Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy and El Lissitzky. He left in 1923, but returned in 1925 to become a master in the school. During his tenure as a Bauhaus master he produced many designs that became standards of a Bauhaus "style." Bayer was instrumental in moving the Bauhaus to purely sans serif usage in all its work. In 1928 he left the Bauhaus to work in Berlin. He primarily worked as a designer and art director for the Dorland Agency, an international firm. During his years at Dorland a Bayer style was established. Bayer emigrated to the United States in 1938 and set up practice in New York. His US design included work for NW Ayers, consultant art director for J. Walter Thompson and design work for GE. From 1946 on he worked exclusively for Container Corporation of America (CCA) and the Atlantic Richfield Corporation. In 1946 he moved to Aspen to become design consultant to CCA. In 1956 he became chairman of the department of design, a position he held until 1965. He was awarded the AIGA medal in 1970. Bayer's late work included work for ARCO and many personal projects including several environmental designs.
Educated at Lane Technical School and the University of Chicago, Lester Beall (American, 1903 – 1969) was a designer ahead of his time. Primarily self-taught in graphic design, he exemplified a great knowledge and understanding of the European avant-garde. His early work shows the influence of constructivist and Bauhaus energy mixed with his personal sense of control. Beall exhibited a great talent for communicating ideas and elevating the taste and expectations of the corporate client. In 1937, Beall became the first American designer to have a one man show at the Museum of Modern Art, featuring his posters for the Rural Electrification Administration. These posters, his art direction of Scope the house magazine for Upjohn Pharmaceuticals Co., International Paper Co. and Connecticut Life Insurance helped to change the way industry viewed design. In 1992, he received the AIGA medal. His work was a model of the idea that good design could be effective communication and good business.
Edward McKnight Kauffer (American, 1890 – 1954) studied in evening classes at the Mark Hopkins Institute in San Francisco and spent six months at the Chicago Institute of Art. He was first exposed to modern European Art at the Armory Show (1913) in Chicago. It was after this show that he was sponsored by Professor McKnight of the University of Utah to study painting in Paris. Kauffer took McKnightÕs name out of gratitude. In 1914, he went to England and remained there until 1940. While in England he made his name as a poster artist. His first commissions were for the London Underground. The publicity manager, Frank Pick was instrumental in distributing the creative and artistic designs by Kauffer. Inspired by the artistic movements of the day, Futurism, Cubism, Art Deco and Surrealism, Kauffer created hundreds of posters for the London Underground, Shell, British Petroleum and Eastman and Sons. He also designed several book jackets and illustrations for the Nonesuch Press and Faber and Guyer. In 1930, he became Art Director of the publishing house Lund & Humphries. In 1937, the Museum of Modern Art held a one man show of his work. He returned to the United States in 1940 and did work for Greek War Relief, the US Treasury, American Airlines, the NY Subway, Alfred A. Knopf, the Container Corporation of America and the New York Times. He received the AIGA medal in 1991.
György Kepes (Hungarian, 1906 – 2002) was a friend and collaborator of Moholy-Nagy. Also of Hungarian descent, Kepes worked with Moholy first in Berlin and then in London before emigrating to the US in 1937. He was educated at the Budapest Royal Academy of Fine Arts. In his early career he gave up painting for filmmaking. This he felt was a better medium for artistically expressing his social beliefs. From 1930 to 1937 he worked off and on with Moholy-Nagy and through him, first in Berlin and then in London, met Walter Gropius and the science writer J. J. Crowther. In 1937, he was invited by Moholy to run the Color and Light Department at the New Bauhaus and later at the Institute of Design in Chicago. He taught there until 1943. In 1944 he wrote his landmark book Language of Vision. This text was influential in articulating the Bauhaus principles as well as the Gestalt theories. He taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1946 to 1974 and in 1967 he established the Center for Advanced Studies. During his career he also designed for the Container Corporation of America and Fortune magazine as well as Atlantic Monthly and Little, Brown.
Herbert Matter (Swiss, 1907 – 1984) was born in Engelberg, a Swiss mountain village, where exposure to the treasure of one of the two finest medieval graphic art collections in Europe was unavoidable. In 1925, he attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Genf, but after two years, the allure of modernism beckoned him to Paris. There, the artist attended the Academie Moderne under the tutelage of Fernand Leger and Amédée Ozenfant. In Europe during the late Twenties and early Thirties, a new language was born -- a combination of journalism, manipulated photography and the rebellion of the confines of the typesetters case, all in the service of selling everything from ideas to political and social ideologies. Inspired by the work of El Lissitzky and Man Ray, Matter began to experiment with his Rollei camera as both a design tool and an expressive form—a relationship that never ended. In 1929, his entry into graphic design was completed when he was hired as a designer/photographer for Deberny and Piegnot. There he learned the nuances of fine typography, while he assisted A. M. Cassandre and Le Corbusier. Matter's Paris years ended in 1932, when he was expelled from France for not having the proper papers. He returned to Swizerland where he created a series of iconic posters for the Swiss Tourist Office. Matter came to America in 1936. He was offered roundtrip passage to the United States as payment for work with a Swiss ballet troupe. He spoke no English, yet traveled across the United States. When the tour was over, he decided to remain in New York. At the urging of a friend who worked at the Museum of Modern Art, Matter went to see Alexey Brodovitch, who had been collecting the Swiss travel posters (two of which were hanging on Brodovitch's studio wall). Matter soon began taking photographs for Harper's Bazaar and Saks Fifth Avenue. Later, he affiliated himself with a photographic studio, "Studio Associates," located near the Condé Nast offices, where he produced covers and inside spreads for Vogue. During World War II, Matter produced multiple advertisements for the Container Corporation of America. In 1944, he became the design consultant at Knoll, molding its graphic identity for 12 years. As Alvin Eisenman, head of the Design Department at Yale and long-time friend, points out: "Herbert had a strong feeling for minute details, and this was exemplified by the distinguished typography he did for the Knoll catalogues."
Paul Rand (American, 1914 – 1996) studied at Pratt Institute, Parsons School of Design and the Art Student's League with George Grosz. From 1935 to 1941 he was art director of Esquire and Apparel Arts. He was designer of many covers of Direction magazine from 1938 to 1945, designer of two covers and features in PM/AD magazine as well as on the staff of Weintraub Advertising Agency from 1941 to 1954. In 1939 he was an instructor at the New York Laboratory School and over the course of his career was an instructor at Cooper Union and Pratt Institute. In 1966, he was awarded the AIGA Gold Medal. In 1955 he began freelancing and acted as design consultant for several major corporations including IBM, Cummins Engine Company, Westinghouse Electric Company and NeXT. His logos for IBM, Westinghouse, United Parcel Service and ABC television are examples of truly successful corporate/designer partnership. He authored Thoughts on Design, Paul Rand: A Designer's Art, Design Form and Chaos, The Trademarks of Paul Rand and From Lascaux to Brooklyn. He was a professor at Yale University from 1956 until 1993 and a professor at the Yale summer design program in Brissago, Switzerland from 1977 until 1996.
Ladislav Sutnar (Czechoslovakian, 1897 – 1976) arrived in the United States on April 14th, 1939 as the exhibition designer in charge of the Czechoslovakian pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. Sutnar was the Director of the State School of Graphic Arts in Prague and enjoyed a reputation as one of the leading Czech proponents of Functionalist graphic and industrial design. Unfortunately for Sutnar’s American assignment, Czechoslovakia had ceased to exist the previous month. Germany invaded Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939, and divided the country into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the puppet Slovak State. The dissolution of Czechoslovakia and the outbreak of World War II stranded Sutnar in New York City where he remained and worked for the rest of his life. By 1939 many former Bauhaus faculty members—Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, László Moholy-Nagy, Joseph Albers, and others—had won teaching positions at various American Universities. These educators were instrumental in bringing European modernism to American architecture and design. America offered the Europeans not only a safe haven, but also great opportunities to make their modernist visions reality. The dynamically developing US building industry and the open mass-production market permitted the exiled Avant-Garde to continue pursuing their ideas in a democratically minded society. It was in this exile community that Paul Rand introduced Sutnar to Knud Lönberg-Holm, the director of Information Research for Sweet’s Catalog Service, the mediator for trade, construction and hardware catalogs that were collected in huge binders and distributed to businesses and architects throughout the United States. In 1941 Lönberg-Holm appointed Sutnar as chief designer of the Information Research Division. Together the two men used modern functional principles to solve the contemporary problem of information organization and —most importantly—retrieval. During the next 20 years at Sweet’s Sutnar and Lönberg-Holm defined and pioneered the field now called information design.