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TWENTY TWO 3
WOLFG WEING NEW W TYPOGR
FGANG NGART WAVE GRAPHY
BIOGRAPHY
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Weingart was born near the Swiss border of Germany, in the Salem Valley, in 1941. He enrolled in a two-year course in applied art and design at the Merz Academy in Stuttgart in 1958. There he discovered the school printing facilities and, at the age of 17, set metal type for the first time. After graduating, he undertook a rigorous apprenticeship as a typesetter at Ruwe Printing in Stuttgart, where he met house designer Karl-August Hanke, a former student at the Basel School of Design. It was Hanke who became a mentor to the young Weingart, introducing him to design being done outside of Germany, particularly in Switzerland, where Ruder, Armin Hofmann and Karl Gerstner were making work that would come to be referred to as International Style.
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At the end of his three-year apprenticeship, Weingart had developed a keen sensitivity to the relationship between printing and the act of designing. Hanke encouraged him to attend the Basel School of Design, and Weingart travelled to the city in 1963, where he met with Hofmann and Ruder and applied to the school in person. The following year, he enrolled as an independent student. It wasn’t until 1968 that Hofmann and Ruder realized their ultimate goal of creating an advanced graphic-design program for postgraduate professionals at the Basel School, in which a select group might engage in intensive multidisciplinary projects intended to further hone their skills and reenergize their intellectual engagement with design. In a bold move, Hofmann invited the 27-year-old Weingart, who was then virtually unknown, to conduct the typography class, as designers from all over the world flocked to the program. Weingart felt right at home in the typeshop at the school—it served as his laboratory as well as his classroom, and it was in this space that he executed his magic. The experiments he had begun during his apprenticeship intensified. He used curved metal rules, creating circular compositions embedded in plaster. He experimented with interwoven geometric text composings influenced by ancient stone construction in the Middle East, where he had first travelled in the early 1960s. His classes themselves became workshops to test and expand models for a new typography.
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“HE WOULD COME AROUND AND TELL YOU THE IMPRESSION IT WAS GIVING, SO YOU WERE TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHAT THAT MEANT. AND YOU’D MOVE IT AROUND A LITTLE MORE PROBABLY STILL CONFUSED AND HE’D COME AROUND AND SAY, ‘YES, BETTER.’ AND THEN HE’D LEAVE.”
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“We were learning about order and systems and structure in his class,” recalls Terry Irwin, head of the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, who studied with Weingart from 1983 to 1986, “but he was not lecturing us about those things. That, I think, was the beauty of a Basel education.” Instead, students were encouraged to engage in a process of investigation. “You’d have multiple sketches laid out on your table, and you were trying something here, and then you were moving it around here,” she explains. “He would come around and tell you the impression it was giving, so you were trying to figure out what that meant. And you’d move it around a little more—probably still confused—and he’d come around and say, ‘Yes, better.’ And then he’d leave. And you’d be trying to figure out why it was better. But you came to understand ‘why’ yourself through these comments....It was an incredibly impactful way to learn.” While teaching, Weingart continued to produce a formidable body of experimental work in his own right: posters as well as cover designs and call-for-entry designs for Typographische Monatsblätter magazine, where he served on the editorial board from 1970 to 1988. A 1976 poster he designed and printed for photographer John Glagola includes wide silver bars printed across the artist’s name, heralding the decline of foundry type as a viable commercial means of printing.
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Weingart insistently sought new ways of creating images, adopting the halftone screens and benday films used in photomechanical processes as his new tools beginning in the mid-1970s. He used the repro camera to stretch, blur and cut type—a radical new approach for marrying continuous-tone images and letters. He would boast that his design process relied solely on these film manipulations and overlapping colors, seen perhaps most strikingly in his work for the Basel Kunstkredit—black-and-white worldformat posters designed between 1976 and 1979 and a series of color posters made between 1980 and 1983. Through his experimentations, Weingart was inventing his own visual language. As former teaching colleague Gregory Vines once wrote: “He pursues an idea until he is sure if it works or not. In the manner of Gutenberg, typesetter, printer and inventor Weingart realizes his publications or posters from beginning to end by himself. He chooses to be involved in the entire process, from the concept to preparation of the film montage for the printer....When looking through the copy camera or while developing film, new ideas and possibilities become evident, even mistakes trigger fascinating possibilities.”
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INTERVIEWS
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Q. Hello, today we are here with Wolfgang Weingart a famous designer, who is best known for his collaged lithographic works during the 1970’s and the 1980’s. Through his expressive typography he has influenced the design world even to this date. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself? A. Hello, my name is Wolfgang Weingart and I was born in Germany, and I became a typesetter for number of years, then started to teach typography to international groups of designers. One thing people notice about me is that I love experimenting, and I love to break boundaries to create something new. Q. So, you worked as a typesetter for number of years, but some people call you a “typographic rebel” could you tell us why people call you that?
A. People call me a “typographic rebel” because, like I said from the previous answer, I really enjoy working outside the boundaries. As I was typesetting and teaching, I noticed how rigid typography were on designs, so I decided to have an open mind, and I was the first designer to break away from the strict Swiss aesthetic principles of design. My rebellion can be seen in some of my work actually. Q. That’s interesting, could I ask which one specifically? A. Yes, my poster Schreibkunst, that I created in 1981 for the calligraphy exhibition for Kunstgewerbemuseum, displays some of my rebellious ideas. I used a sans serif font throughout the poster, and instead of sticking to one point size, I used variety of different sizes. If I remember, the letterforms on the poster had big leading and kerning. To add more, I used contrasting colours to interfere yet work with the text, such as the white shapes added to the black text, and not only black but, incorporating white text. I guess these factors lead me to be a “typography rebel.”
Wolfgang Weingart, Schreibkunst (Writing Art) Exhibition, Kunstgewerbemuseum, Zurich, 1981. Poster. Museum fur Gestaltung, Zurich.
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Process for Schreibkunst.
Schreibkunst photographed to show the transparent film.
Q. Since we are on the topic of Schreibkunst poster. Could I ask you a bit about the work? A. So, because the work was for a calligraphy exhibition, I tried to incorporate the idea of calligraphy into the poster by bringing in different elements. Such as the fountain pen nib and the writing. I thought works at the time were too rigid, so I went for a joyful design by layering various visual effects, such as bringing in halftone dots to give richness to the designs.
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Literations of Schreibkunst.
Q. Hearing about the work, it sounds very technical, did you use one technique to create this piece or did multiple techniques come together? A. I actually used various different ways to create this poster. There was an introduction to transparent film in the 1970’s, which allowed me to experiment with elements by overlapping them to create a collage. With the transparent film, I layered lithographic text and images. The repro camera allowed me to manipulate type and combine it with various rasterized film templates. There were ways to make things easier, because phototypesetting methods started to play a role, but I preferred hand craftsmanship, it allowed unexpected accidents which I favour.
IMAGINERY INTERVIEW Wolfgang Weingart, Das Schweizer Plakat (The Swiss Poster), 1984. Poster. Offset lithograph, 47 x 33 1/8 in (120 x 84.3cm). Museum fur Gestaltung, Zurich.
Q. That sounds like a lot of techniques, did you have any trouble creating Schreibkunst poster? A. I didn’t face any technical troubles, but I had some artistic difficulty, and went through different iterations to get the perfect result. I dedicated about forty days into this work, from first draft to printable film. After it was finished, I decided to rework the image again, because the fountain nib pen for me was too realistic. Actually, I used my own expense to get the posters reprinted.
Q. The work is beautiful, so I was wondering if this piece ever inspired your other work? A. Over ten years I tried to produce designs with the same complex technique, so they all share some of the same qualities, but one later work that does look similar to Schreibkunst is Das Schweizer Plakat, that I created in 1984 for exhibition of Swiss Posters. They both share the overlapping planes that shift between being transparent and opaque. Also, the halftone dots for both of the design pieces are blown up so it is visible to the viewers. They are both quite freeform with similar graphic elements, like the lightning bolt. I guess, the only major difference is that one is coloured and the other is not.
By Jooeun Kim
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A: Developments are important to me. I think it’s very interesting to look back at a body of work, including things that have been made ‘under duress’. I’ve a whole stack of these ‘mementoes’ – school notebooks, early works, manuscripts, drawings – even 40-year-old geometry course work. Q: Often the time you spend in school has a decisive influence on your later life. Was this the case for you? A: I was really untogether at school. I found the abstract subjects hard to grasp, and things like arithmetic and maths incomprehensible. Painting and drawing were the only things I was considered good at, although looking back now at the few scribbles I’ve held on to, this seems hard to believe.40-year-old geometry course work. When I turned 18, in 1958, my parents pressured me to continue my education. Unsure about what to do, I visited a new, vocationally-oriented school, the Merz Academy for art and applied graphics in Stuttgart. And I had an overnight revelation – the idea of learning a good solid occupation. The first thing I did was to apply for a plcae as a trainee compositor at the Stuttgart publishers, Klett, but I was turned down because they said my typing wasn’t good enough for the job. However, I was taken on by a small printers in Stuttgart and completed a three-year apprenticeship which is still a big influence on my work today.
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‘MY WORK IS LIKE A QUARRY. PEOPLE SEE A STONE THEY LIKE, APPROPRIATE
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Q: Retrospectives like your recent exhibition in Darmstadt always have something of a narcissistic element to them.
IT AND WORK IT UNTIL THERE’S NOTHING LEFT.’ Q: Then you went to Basle. The light, delicate typography of some of your first works there seems to indicate that you discovered the idea of the line as image very early on. A: I went to Basle because of Emil Ruder and Armin Hofmann, but I was quickly disappointed. Hofmann went off on a oneyear sabbatical, and I had the feeling I wasn’t learning anything with Ruder. I was never a regular student at Basle, but I had a special understanding with Ruder and he let me use the workshops whenever I wanted.
Q: The course at the Merz Academy was unstructured, in contrast to your current teaching methods at Basle, which demand strict discipline from your students. How do they react to these methods? A: I find it much easier with the advanced graphics course, where I teach students from all over the world. They arrive already motivated and disciplined, with the relevant background knowledge. When I went to the Merz Academy, no one thought of doing things systematically. On my very first day there, they said: ‘Design a poster for Lufthansa with the slogan Fly to Athens.’ I had no idea about colour or typography, so I wasted my time. I first learnt about a systematic approach from Armin Hofmann at Basle. On our first day there we were put in the charge of another tutor and told to draw a cube. I spent the day drawing a cube in outline form – the wrong way to do it, according to the tutor, who called us together at the end of class. After that, I stopped going to lessons. Q: Expressive typography is the foundation of your work. Was New Wave the translation into type of a subjective, youthful sensibility? A: Exactly. The moment I space out a word, I become involved in an exercise in graphics. This in turn developed into a way of teaching. I took ‘Swiss typography’ as my starting point, but then I blew it apart, never forcing a style upon my students. I never intended to create a ‘style’. It just happened that the students picked up – and misinterpreted – a so called ‘Weingart style’ and spread it around.
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Magazine cover, 1973.
Q: They say imitation is the proof of success, but isn’t it also irritating? A: It was annoying at first. But it was also positive in that it forced me to look for new ideas to keep one step ahead of the pack. I did this with my posters, which make full use of the lithographic process. They are not so easy to imitate, because most people don’t know the technique. It’s also hard to copy the individually hand-worked screen foil technique that I developed. We also found that this very personal form of teaching, with its element of experiment, was no safeguard against plagiarism, so we radically restructured our course at the beginning of the 1970s. We went back
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to basics – to the elementary typographic problems which had been somewhat neglected – in an attempt to get away from the new, all-pervasive style. Of course you can always see traces of the hand of the teacher and, in our case, the spirit of the school, which to some extent carries on the thinking of the Bauhaus. Besides, even reproductive design is a necessary step in the process of human development, for it gives rise to new creativity. The problem with design today is that it often has little to do with content. It’s more about the designer’s ego, full of references only the initiated can understand. The general public doesn’t get the information. Because of this, I find
EYE MAGAZINE Exhibition poster, 1982.
myself in an incredible state of conflict. I’m not designing any more. Q: You’ve reached a turning point in your work. Is that unsettling? A: No, not at all. You just have to wait ’til something new comes along. It’s part of life. I always begin to repeat myself when I use a particular device, for example with the posters. The basic principle with the screen foil is always the same. When it gets too much or too boring for me, when it looks like I’m just repeating myself, I look for something new. At the moment I’m not in a position to find anything new, because I’m no longer so enthralled with design, because I teach 35 hours a week, because
I’m involved with a lot of other projects – exhibitions, books, lectures, trips, and so forth. Creative design work wears you down physically. For a poster I need 12 weeks from the initial concept to work out all the technical details and get the film ready for press. At times like that, I don’t sleep at night, but dream a great deal. Then, despite my best efforts, the printers may do a bad job. I’ve learned to resign myself to not being able to control every single thing – I can’t really set up my bed at the printers.
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Q: The sketches contrast sharply with the reprographic works, which are cooler, more impersonal. Is it true to say that you use the specialised technique and the day-to-day discipline of teaching as means of channelling unsettled, emotional impulses into more ordered, productive outlets? A: I find it hard to identify with some of the posters I have designed. I can’t see myself in them – which make me think they must have come from somewhere else, from another planet. Sometimes a technique will lead me to a new idea, but when that happens, I tend to think that nothing in the work is mine. I believe that technique is enormously important. There aren’t many designers like me who take on all the technical aspects of a job themselves. For me, the B4 format [90.5 x 128cm] posters were a technical highpoint, and also a kind of summing up of my creative activity, confirming my feeling that each thing made is an important element of a whole, that different aspects of my work are interlinked. Over the years, I’ve been able to apply the collage technique I learned in the 1970s to film montage. I work out every visual and technical detail for the printer, from the design concept to the final artwork – the screen nuances and structures, line elements, surfaces. These recurrent visual elements have now become something of a trademark. The lithographic half-tone dot, which I saw as a new, self-contained graphic element, has possibly become part of my personal image.
Q: The theorist Vilém Flusser has called you a ‘linear’ thinker. Do you think he said this because you deal with linear material, with type? Flusser has also said that type explains – and therefore destroys – the image. Are you a destroyer of images? A: I see type as a kind of picture that speaks. I am a maker, not a thinker. What’s reflected here is my activity, not my inner being. I experiment simply to broaden my knowledge of the vocabulary and techniques of typography. What gives me satisfaction is the practice, not the theory. Q: Or are linear pictures an emotive thing to you? A: Perhaps. My travels through the mysterious, endless expanse of the Syrian desert, and the Orient, for example, conjured up typographic images. Dried-up riverbeds reminded me of curved composing lines, tended fields of straight ones. The pattern of houses and alleys on the edge of the desert made me think of hand-set blocks of type. But I don’t see my work as, say, the first stage in a new, consciously less ideological conception of typography. It’s simply an attempt, an experiment, that’s worth pursuing.
By Yvonne Schwemer-Scheddin 20
“I don’t see my work as, say, the first stage in a new, consciously less ideological conception of typography. It’s simply an attempt, an experiment, that’s worth pursuing.”
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QUOTES
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TYPOGRAPHY IS A TRIANGULAR RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DESIGN IDEA, TYPOGRAPHIC ELEMENTS, AND PRINTING TECHNIQUE.
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ELECTRONIC EQUIPMENT REPLACES NEITHER EYES, HANDS, NOR HEART.
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WHAT’S THE USE OF BEING LEGIBLE, WHEN NOTHING INSPIRES YOU TO TAKE NOTICE OF IT?
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THE SIMPLER THE ASSIGNMENT, THE MORE DIFFICULT THE SOLUTION.
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https://www.azquotes.com/author/65433-Wolfgang_Weingart
QUOTES
https://www.typographicposters.com/wolfgang-weingart
TYPOGRAPHIC POSTERS
http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/reputations-wolfgang-weingart
EYE MAGAZINE INTERVIEW
http://blog.ocad.ca/wordpress/visd2006-fw201703-01/2018/03/imaginary-interview-wolfgang-weingart/
IMAGINERY INTERVIEW
https://www.aiga.org/medalist-wolfgang-weingart
WOLFGANG WEINGART BIOGRAPHY
BILBOGRAPHY
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