I-D
Institute of Design, Robert Nickle [Designer]
Institute of Design, Robert Nickle [Designer]: I-D. Chicago, IL: Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, [c. 1951]. Slim quarto. Printed perfect bound thick wrappers. [40] pp. 45 black and white student work examples. Elaborate and period correct graphic design and typography by Robert Nickle. Wrappers lightly worn and rubbed, and a faint dampstain to edge of the last few leaves with no artwork affected. A very good copy of a scarce catalog.
7.75 x 7.75 -inch perfect bound catalog produced for the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology, located at 632 N. Dearborn Street, Chicago, Illinois. Magnificent graphic design and typography by Robert Nickle, Head of the Product Design Section [Wingler, p. 603]. The Nickle design credit, along with the 632 N. Dearborn Street address, and the affiliation with IIT place this catalog between 1949 and 1956 in the timeline of the Institute of Design.
Robert Nickle’s superb design sensibility enhances this catalog and separates it from the quotidian academic promotions of the era. The Bauhaus influence on postwar Chicago is readily apparent in these pages, from the structured and simple typography to the rigorously composed pages to the primary colors roughly printed on the chipboard wrappers. This catalog is aesthetically very similar to the portfolio Nickle designed for Momentum nineteen-fifty, “ "a portfolio of reproductions of creative work originating in the Chicago area.”
“[Nickle] is known in local art circles for exerting a quiet, but memorable, presence. And those who have watched over the years know he is one of the best - in my opinion, one of the dozen best- artists working in Chicago today.”— Franz Schulze, Chicago Sun Times, August 6, 1978
Robert Nickle (Michigan, 1919 – 1980) used non-art materials to create his multimedia collages, which he started making even before attending Moholy-Nagy’s Institute of Design (a later iteration of the New Bauhaus). For Nickle, (who was also a graphic designer and influential teacher at the University of Illinois in Chicago), the scraps and detritus he found in the street became surrogates for brushstrokes, arranged in abstracted compositions made of real life objects.
“Nickle began making collages as a student at the old Chicago Institute of Design, a resurrection of the Bauhaus, in the 1940s. To several of the early Momentum shows, around 1950, he contributed objects that looked like a cross-breeding of Schwitters’ textures and Mondrian’s geometries. It is well to recall, too, that Mies van de Rohe was working in Chicago at that time. Nickle thus came of age when geometric abstract art was in the ascendancy in America and the view was current in some quarters that art of high order could be made by reducing form to its simplest elements, then ordering those elements in the most endlessly painstaking way.” — Schulz, ibid
“Robert Nickle's art, though much admired in Chicago, has never conformed with what outsiders think of as Chicago School. It has been this way almost since the beginning of his career; while Leon Golub, Seymour Rosofsky, Cosmo Campoli and other of his contemporaries, who were later to comprise the "Monster Roster" were studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Nickle was across the river at the Institute of Design, which was established by Moholy-Nagy and other Bauhaus refugees. From Moholy-Nagy and indirectly from Mondrian, who became his hero (he even named his son Piet), Nickle absorbed the Bauhausian principles of functional, balanced design. Driven by a perfectionist nature and yet feeling that he would not reach the first rank as a painter, he early decided to concentrate on the medium of collage, partly in emulation of the "strength through concentration" process he saw operating in the works of Mondrian.” — Regan Upshaw
One of Chicago's great cultural achievements, the Institute of Design was among the most important schools of photography in twentieth-century America. It began as an outpost of experimental Bauhaus education and was home to an astonishing group of influential teachers and students, including László Moholy-Nagy, Harry Callahan, and Aaron Siskind.
In 1937 László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), a Hungarian Jew fleeing Nazi Germany, was brought to Chicago by the city's industrial leaders to establish a school of industrial design to be modeled after the original Bauhaus in Germany, the pioneering school of art, design and architecture where Moholy had taught previously. Although the New Bauhaus lasted only one year (1937-1938), it was quickly reorganized as the School of Design (1939-1944) and eventually became the Institute of Design (1944-present). The photographs produced in the ID's early years were controlled studio experiments, more concerned with form and materials than with imitating works by photography's masters or documenting the world. Moholy's photograms, for example, are elegant light studies that reveal the complete scale of gray between black and white and illustrate photography's abstract potential.
Along similar lines, faculty member György Kepes (1906-2001) produced an extensive series of photographs of his wife in which he explored solarization and negative exposure and even painting on the picture's surface. Nathan Lerner (1913-1997), a student and later teacher at the ID, worked with refractive lenses and photomontage and used his light box to test the pictorial effects of pure light. Another student, Milton Halberstadt (1919-2000), produced a triple -exposed portrait to showcase photography's capacity for simultaneous vision. At a moment when American photography was largely confined to more conventional portraiture, landscape or documentary reportage, these experimental and abstract pictures revealed the enormous creative potential of the medium.
As the school grew, Moholy hired Arthur Siegel (1913-1978) and Harry Callahan (1912-1999) to lead a new, four-year program in photography. After Siegel resigned, Callahan hired Aaron Siskind (1903-1991), and the two formed a superbly effective teaching team that is now legendary. Under their leadership, the program's emphasis shifted from experimentation toward the development of individual vision and subjective expression.