FUNCTIONAL GRAPHIC DESIGN IN THE 20'S
Eckhard Neumann
Eckhard Neumann: FUNCTIONAL GRAPHIC DESIGN IN THE 20'S. New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1967. First edition. Square quarto. Gray cloth stamped in white. Printed dust jacket. 96 pp. 113 illustrations in black and white or two colors. Jacket edges lightly browned and tiny chip to top edge of rear panel. Interior unmarked and very clean. Classic early design work that is now sadly out-of-print. A very good copy in a very good dust jacket.
8.25 x 8.25 hardcover book with 96 pages and 113 illustrations in black and white or two colors. This influential book was the first scholarly study to tie together the disparate elements of the European Avant-Garde (Bauhaus, Dada, Cubism, Futurism, de Stijl, etc.) and how they related to the emerging field of Graphic Design. Highly recommended.
From the book: "This important book documents that astonishingly creative decade -- the 1920's, with its entirely new and functional visual language. The innovative art trends of the twentieth century, which include Cubism, Futurism, and Dadism, have had a determining influence on the development of today's visual language."
Eckhard Neumann reveals through a clear and well-illustrated text the close historical connection between fine art and graphic design, and discusses the origins of graphic design today."
- Introduction: Aims and Sources
- The Conquest of Tradition
- The New Langauge: dADa
- The Search for Objectivity
- Bauhaus Weimar-Dessau: Center of New Forces
- New Art -- New Advertising
- What is New Typography (Article by Walter Dexel 1927)
- International Acitivity
- The City of Frankfurt am Main: An Example of Municiple Initiative
- Credits
Includes work by the following designers, artists and gadflys: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Matter, Herbert Bayer, Joost Schmidt, Xanti Schawinsky, Johannes Canis, Karl Peter Rohl, Robert Michel, Piet Zwart, Ladislav Sutnar, Karel Teige, Sandor Bortnyik, Henryk Berlewi, Mieczyslaw Szczuka, Cesar Domela, Johannes Molzahn, Jan Tschichold, Kurt Schwitters, Willi Baumeister, Max Burchartz, Walter Dexel, Erich Buchholz, Hans Richter, John Hartfield, Wilhelm Deffke, Farkas Molnar, Oskar Schlemmer, Margit Tery-Adler, Adolf Meyer, Johannes Itten, El Lissitzky, Man Ray, Christian Schad, Ilia Zdanewitch (Iliazd), Hannah Hoch, Hugo Ball, Raoul Hausmann, Lucio Venna, Carlo Carra, Wassily Kandinsky, Marinetti, Argendo Soffici, Theo Van Doesburg, Gronowsky, Margit Tery-Adler, Wilhelm Deffke, Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, and more.
“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.
“The idea for this book was developed during the planning of an exhibition which took place in 1963 under the title Werbegrafik 1920-1930 (Advertising Graphics 1920-1930) in the Goppinger Galerie in Frankfurt am Main. Its catalog forms the foundation for this account, although much new material has been added to the original to present the trends of functional design more definitively. However, the size of the book compelled the writer to restrict the topic to events in Europe, particularly in Germany. The stirrings of parallel movements in the New World could not be considered because their sources are too scattered. But perhaps through this book the American sources of development will become clear enough to make possible an eventual enlarged study.” — Eckhard Neumann, 1967 [xlist_2018]