Research

research

?

what is modernism

Modernism in design and architecture originated after the impact of the First World War and the Russian Revoltion, a time when forward-looking artists dreamed of a new world that was free from conflict, greed and social inequality. Many different styles can be classed as Modernist, as it is not so much a stlye as a loose collection of ideas. However, these ideas all share certain underlying principles: a rejection of history, a desire to provoke thought; and a belief that design and technology can transform society. Today, our relationship with Modernism is quite complex. The built environment that we live in was largly influenced by Modernism. The buildings, furniture and graphic design that surrounds us have all been created by the ideology of Modernist design. Born in great hearts of culture, it thrived in Germany and Holland, as well as Prague, Paris, Moscow, and New York. Modernists had a utopian desire to create a better world.

2

4

De Stijl D e St i j l, D utc h for ‘ Th e St y l e’ wa s a conte mp ora r y re v i e w m a g a zin e found e d i n 19 1 7 by Th e o Va n D oe sb urg a s a m e an s o f re cru i ti n g like - mi nd e d a r t i st s a n d a rch i te c ts.

Th e i d e a wa s to fo r m a n e w a r ti s tic col l e c t i ve t hat e m bra ce d a n expa nsi ve not i on o f a r t, i n fu s e d by u top i a n i d e a l s o f h a r m o ny. Th e j ou r na l p rov i d e d th e b a s i s o f th e D e St i j l m ove m e nt.

De Stijl first cover 1917.

“We speak of concrete and not abstract painting because nothing is more concrete, more real than a line, a color, a surface.”

6

Marcel Breuer Marcel Breuer was born on 21 May 1902 in Hungary. After a short period of artistic training in Vienna, Breuer studied at the Bauhaus from 1920 to 1924. He rose quickly and was appointed master of the furniture workshop in 1925 at the age of only 23. Works such as the plywood armchair from this period show the influence of Theo van Doesburg, the Dutch designer who brought the ideas of the De Stijl movement to the Bauhaus. By the time he left Germany in 1935 to join Gropius in London, Breuer was one of the bestknown designers in Europe.

8

Ladislav Sutnar Ladislav Sutnar was a Czech-born designer of home ware, toys, exhibition venues and printed matter. He made a significant contribution to the spread of Modernist design, but is often overlooked outside Eastern Europe. His primary concern was to make text and image communicate more effectively.

Sutnar saw the principles of modern design as the key to achieving greater readability. For Sutnar, design was a field through which avant-garde invention could be passed to the consumer. He spread his ideas though teaching, as director of the Prague State School of Graphics and as executive secretary of the Czechoslovak Arts and Crafts Association.

10

Josef M端ller Brockmann Josef M端ller-Brockmann was born in Rapperswil, Switzerland in 1914. He studied architecture, design and history of art at the University of Zurich. He began his career as an apprentice to the designer and advertising consultant Walter Diggelman before, in 1936, establishing his own Zurich studio specialising in graphics, exhibition design and photography. By the 1950s he was established as the leading practitioner and theorist of Swiss Style which desired a universal graphic expression through a grid-based design without unnecessary illustration and subjective feeling. M端ller-Brockmann was founder from and, from 1958 to 1965, co-editor of the trilingual journal Neue Grafik (New Graphic Design) which spread the principles of Swiss Design internationally.

12

Richard Paul Lohse Richard Paul Lohse was a Swiss painter and graphic designer. Born in 1902 in Zurich, Switzerland and studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich.

He also trained as an advertising artist. Lohse is considered as one of the main representatives of the concrete art movement. In 1958 he co-edited the Neue Grafik magazine with Josef Muller-Brockmann, Hans Neuburg and Carlo Vivarelli. Lohse also co-founded the Association of Independent Graphic Designers in 1933, was a member of the association Friends of New Architecture in 1934, was a leading member of the Swiss Werkbund and was an honorary member of the Group of Systematic-Constructive Art.

14

Modernism Movements Being Modernist is an affirmation of faith in the tradition of the new, which emerged as the creative way of life for progressive artists in the early twentieth century. Modernism covers an array of movements including: Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism most of which appeared shortly before or after the First World War.

Cubism Cubism began as an idea and then it became a style. Based on Paul CĂŠzanne's three main ingredients - geometricity, multiple views and passage - Cubism tried to describe, in visual terms, the concept of the Fourth Dimension. Cubism is a kind of Realism. It is a conceptual approach to realism in art, which aims to depict the world as it is and not as it seems. Cubism can be considered realism, in a conceptual, rather than perceptional way.

While Picasso and Braque are credited with creating this new visual language, it was adopted and further developed by many painters, including Fernand LĂŠger, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Juan Gris, Roger de la Fresnaye, Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, and Diego Rivera. Though primarily associated with painting, Cubism also had an influence on twentieth-century sculpture and architecture. The major Cubist sculptors were Alexander Archipenko, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Jacques Lipchitz.

16

Expressionism Expressionism is an artistic style in which the artist seeks to depict not the objective reality but rather the subjective emotions and responses that objects and events arouse within a person. The artist accomplishes this aim through distortion, exaggeration, primitivism, and fantasy and through the vivid, jarring, violent, or dynamic application of formal elements. In a broader sense Expressionism is one of the main currents of art in the later 19th and the 20th centuries, and its qualities of highly subjective, personal, spontaneous self-expression are typical of a wide range of modern artists and art movements. Expressionism can also be seen as a permanent tendency in Germanic and Nordic art from at least the European Middle Ages, particularly in times of social change or spiritual crisis.

The roots of German Expressionism lays in the works of Vincent van Gogh, Edvard Munch, and James Ensor, each in the period of 1885–1900 evolved a highly personal painting style. These artists used the expressive possibilities of colour and line to explore dramatic and emotion filled themes, to show the qualities of fear, horror, and the grotesque, or simply to celebrate nature with hallucinatory intensity. They broke away from the literal representation of nature in order to express more subjective outlooks or states of mind.

18

? what is post modernism

Of all movements in art and design history, postmodernism is perhaps the most controversial. This era defies definition; an unstable mix of the theatrical and theoretical, postmodernism was a visually thrilling multifaceted style that ranged from the colourful to the dire, the absurd to the grand. Postmodernism shattered established ideas about style. It brought a radical freedom to art and design through gestures that were often funny, sometimes confrontational and occasionally absurd. Most of all, from about 1970 to 1990, postmodernism brought a new self-awareness about style itself. Postmodernism was a drastic departure from modernism’s utopian visions, which had been based on clarity and simplicity. The modernists wanted to open a window onto a new world; postmodernism’s key principles were complexity and contradiction. If modernist objects suggested utopia, progress and machine-like perfection, then the postmodern object seemed to come from a dystopian and far-from-perfect future.

Designers salvaged and distressed materials to produce an aesthetic of urban apocalypse.

20

David Carson David Carson, born 1955, in Texas. Is an American graphic designer, whose unconventional style revolutionized visual communication in the 1990s. He briefly enrolled at a commercial art school before working as a designer at a small surfer magazine, Self and Musician.

He then spent four years as a part-time designer for the magazine Transworld Skateboarding, which enabled him to experiment.

His characteristic chaotic spreads with overlapped photos and mixed and altered type fonts drew both admirers and detractors.

In 1989 Carson became art director at the magazine Beach Culture, his work there earned him more than 150 design awards.

By that time, Carson’s work had caught the eye of Marvin Scott Jarrett, publisher of the alternative-music magazine Ray Gun, and he hired Carson as art director in 1992.

In 1995, Carson established David Carson Design, with offices in New York City and San Diego, California. The firm was instantly successful and attracted well-known, wealthy corporate clients. In 1995 Carson produced The End of Print: The Graphic Design of David Carson (revised edition issued in 2000 as The End of Print: The Grafik Design of David Carson), the first comprehensive collection of his distinctive graphic imagery.

22

Neville Brody Neville Brody is an internationally renowned designer, typographer, art director and brand strategist.

Brody was born in London in 1957.

He attended the London College of Printing from 1976-79 before becoming a freelance designer, mainly of record sleeves. In 1981 he became designer of The Face magazine, where his typographic experiments won international acclaim. He went on to art direct Arena, Per Lui (Italy) and Actuel (France). A book of his collected designs, The Graphic Language of Neville Brody, was published in 1988 to coincide with a retrospective at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. He is an enthusiastic advocate of computer-based design and in 1991 helped to launch Fuse, a disk-based ‘interactive’ magazine of new typefaces.

24

Andy Warhol Andy Warhol was one of the most important artists of Pop Art, which became extremely popular in the second half of the twentieth century. Warhol was born in 1928 and grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with his two older brothers and his parents who had both emigrated from Czechoslovakia. After graduating from high school, Warhol then went to Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he graduated in 1949 with a major in Pictorial Design.

Around 1960, Warhol decided to try the new style of the time - Pop Art. His first exhibition in an art gallery was in 1962 in Los Angeles. He displayed his canvases of Campbell’s soup, one canvas for each of the 32 types of Campbell’s soup. He sold all the paintings as a set for $1000.

In the 1970s Warhol began publishing a magazine called Interview and several books about himself and pop art.

26

Barbara Kruger Barbara Kruger was born in New Jersey, in 1945. After attending Syracuse University, the School of Visual Arts, and studying art and design at Parson’s School of Design in New York, Kruger obtained a design job at Condé Nast Publications. Working for Mademoiselle Magazine, she was quickly promoted to head designer. Later, she worked as a graphic designer, art director, and picture editor in the art departments at House and Garden, Aperture, and other publications.

This background in design is evident in the work for which she is now internationally renowned.

She layers found photographs from existing sources with aggressive text that involves the viewer in the struggle for power and control that her captions speak to. In their trademark black letters against a slash of red background, some of her instantly recognizable slogans read “I shop therefore I am,” and “Your body is a battleground." Much of her text questions the viewer about feminism, classicism, consumerism, and individual autonomy and desire, although her black and white images are selected from the mainstream magazines that sell the very ideas she is disputing. As well as appearing in museums and galleries worldwide, Kruger’s work has appeared on billboards, posters, public parks, train station platforms in Strasbourg, France, and in other public commissions. She has taught at the California Institute of Art, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the University of California.

28

Roy Lichtenstein Roy Lichtenstein was one of the first American Pop artists to achieve widespread renown, and he became a hugely criticized during the movement. His early work ranged widely in style and subject matter, and displayed a lot of understanding of modernist painting: Lichtenstein would often maintain that he was as interested in the abstract qualities of his images as he was in their subject matter. However, the mature Pop style he arrived at in 1961, which was inspired by comic strips, was greeted by accusations of being dull, having a lack of originality, and, later, even copying.

His high-impact, iconic images have since become identified with Pop art, and his method of creating images, which blended aspects of mechanical reproduction and drawing by hand, has become central to critics' understanding of the significance of the movement.

30

Punk Movement Having evolved in the America and the UK in the mid ’70s, punk has heavily influenced all areas of the arts world and many young people. Punk was an expression of youthful rebellion and anti-authoritarian mentality. American critics first used the term punk in the early ’70s to describe the new bands that had arrived on the scene. By this time, bands such as The Ramones, The Sex Pistols and The Clash were viewed and recognized as the forefront of a new musical movement. Soon, punk spread around the world and not just in music, but also within fashion, visual art, literature, dance and film.

32

Layout

Here are some examples of cover designs that I considered, the top left experiment was a sort of tribute or redesign of one of Josef Muller Brockmann’s pieces. I used only primary colours for the blocks to complete the modernist theme. The next image, on the right, was inspired by Richard Paul Lohse’s work, I liked his simplistic style and his colour palette. Thirdly, the bottom left design, was inspired by a number of artists work and the Cubism movement. I decided to use his design as my final cover because I think that the colours and style work well together and it looks quite modern. The final experiment in the bottom right is a portait I made of Hans Neuburg. I focused on him simply because he is one of my favourite graphic artists. However, I don’t think that this portrait would work well as a magazine cover.

34

the grid system The grid system is a way of organizing content on a page, using any combination of margins, guides, rows and columns. It is commonly seen in newspaper and magazine layout with columns of text and images. One grid, or a collection of grids, may be used across an entire project to achieve a consistent look and feel. In a finished product, the grid is invisible, but following it helps in creating successful print and web layouts.

Types of Grids There is really no limit to the grid layouts that can be created. Common types include equally sized two, three and four-column grids with a header across the top, as well as a full-page grid of squares. From these building blocks, the variation of column widths, borders, page size and other features of the grid will lead to unique page design. When starting a project or even just practicing, try using a grid system to help position the elements of your design on the page.

Breaking Out of the Grid Once the grid is established, it is up to the designer when and how to break out of it.

This doesn’t mean the grid system in graphic design will be completely ignored. Instead, elements may cross over from column to column, extend to the end of the page, or extend onto adjacent pages. Breaking out of the grid can lead to the most interesting page designs.

36