1
MODRodchenko ERNISM RESEARCH Alexander
MODERNISM RESEARCH
Ladislav
2
3 4
The Definition of Modernism & Post Modernism
Take a look: Modernist Designers
5 6 7 8 9
10
Alexander Rodchenko Ladislav Sutnar Xanti Schawinsky L谩szl贸 Moholy-Nagy Edward McKnight Kauffer
Take a look: Post Modernist Designers
11 12 13 14 15
16 20
Rodchenko
Jamie Reid Jeffery Keedy Rosmarie Tissi Peter Saville Neville Brody
Magazine Moodboards Classic Magazine & Masthead Design
3
Rodchenko MODERNISM Alexander
Modernism, which gathered pace from about 1850, proposes new forms of art on the grounds that these are more appropriate to the present time. It is therefore characterised by constant innovation and a rejection of conservative values such as the realistic depiction of the world. This has led to experiments with form and to an emphasis on processes and materials.
Modern art has also been driven by various social and political agendas. These were often utopian, and modernism was in general associated with ideal visions of human life and society and a belief in progress. The terms modernism and modern art are generally used to describe the succession of art movements that critics and historians have identified since the
realism of Gustav Courbet, culminating in abstract art and its developments up to the 1960s. By that time modernism had become a dominant idea of art, and a particularly narrow theory of modernist painting had been formulated by the highly influential American critic Clement Greenberg. A reaction then took place which was quickly identified as postmodernism.
vs These changes arose from anti-authoritarian challenges to the prevailing orthodoxies across the board. In art, postmodernism was specifically a reaction against modernism. Some outstanding characteristics of postmodernism are that it collapses the distinction between high culture and mass or popular culture; that it tends to get rid of the boundary between art
and everyday life; and that it refuses to recognise the authority of any single style or definition of what art should be. Resultantly, postmodern art is characterised by the self-conscious use of earlier styles and conventions, and a mixing of different artistic styles and media.
Postmodernism may be said to begin with pop art and to embrace much of what followed including conceptual art, neoexpressionism, feminist art, and the Young British Artists of the 1990s.
POST MODERNISM
k a T
l a e
: k oo
T S I N
R E D O M A R C I G H P S R E N G I S E D
5 Alexander
Rodchenko
Alexander Rodchenko is perhaps the most important avant-garde artist to have put his art in the service of political revolution. In this regard, his career is a model of the clash between modern art and radical politics. He emerged as a fairly conventional painter, but his encounters with Russian Futurists propelled him to become an influential founder of the Constructivist movement. And his commitment to the Russian Revolution subsequently encouraged him to abandon first painting and then fine art in its entirety, and to instead put his skills in the service of industry and the state, designing everything from advertisements to book
covers. His life’s work was a ceaseless experiment with an extraordinary array of media, from painting and sculpture to graphic design and photography. Later in his career, however, the increasingly repressive policies targeted against modern artists in Russia led him to return to painting. As a key figure of the Russian modernist movement, the art of Alexander Rodchenko helped redefine three key visual genres of modernism: painting, photography, and graphic design. In his paintings, the artist further explored and expanded the essential vocabulary of an abstract
composition. His series of purely abstract protomonochrome paintings were influential to artists such as Ad Reinhardt and the Minimalists of the 1960s. In the field of photography, he established unprecedented compositional paradigms, which in many ways still define the entire notion of modern photographic art. Rodchenko’s involvement with the Bolshevik cause further propelled the appreciation of his art in the leftist circles of the American avant-garde.
Ladislav
6
Sutnar
Ladislav Sutnar was a Czech-born designer of homeware, toys, exhibition venues and printed matter. He made a significant contribution to the spread of Modernist design, but is often overlooked outside eastern Europe. While Sutnar’s porcelain products reflected his modern sensibility in their simplicity, it is his graphic work that most embodies the tenets of Modernism. 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. Whereas traditional graphic design,
with its static symmetry, would result in arbitrary relationships between texts and images, his modern methods of composition placed these elements in ‘logical relationships’. For Sutnar, design was a field though 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. In 1934 he had his first oneman show, and in 1938 he was selected to design the Czechoslovak pavilion at the New York World’s Fair to be held the following
year. The fair provided him with a reason to visit New York, and the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Nazis provided him with a reason to stay. In exile, Sutnar met with former members of the Bauhaus who also took refuge in New York. For the remainder of his career, Sutnar worked in various fields, promoting his information design ideas through brochures, seeking manufacturers for his glass and porcelain, taking commissions for graphic design projects and designing corporate identities for companies.
7 Xanti
Schawinsky
Xanti Schawinsky is usually known either for the activities of his early career, as a young ‘enfant terrible’ of Bauhaus theatre, or for the work he produced at its close as a respected and mature abstract artist. However these two perspectives ignore his tremendous versatility, and the important role he had to play in bringing Modernist ideas to different parts of the inter-war world. Schawinsky was born in Switzerland, the son of a Polish Jew. His creative nature was obvious from an early age, and in his teens he studied art and music in Zurich, before travelling to Berlin and
Cologne to learn about design and architecture. In 1924 he enrolled at the Bauhaus, and became involved in the school’s vibrant theatrical scene, also focusing on photography and painting. From the mid 1920s Schawinsky undertook wide range of professional commissions, working as a stage designer, a municipal studio director and a freelance designer. He also returned to the Bauhaus to teach. In 1933 Germany’s growing intolerance forced him to move to Milan, where he spent several years producing commercial graphic design, principally for the typewriter company
Olivetti. An invitation to join the progressive Black Mountain College brought him to the USA in 1936. He spent two years at Black Mountain introducing Bauhaus ideas to his American students, before moving to New York to take up freelance design and pursue painting, an activity which absorbed almost all of his attention in his final years. As innovative in commercial art as he was in his unpaid pieces, Schawinsky’s work demonstrated the huge creative power of the interwar meeting of art and industry.
László
8
Moholy-Nagy
A sculptor, photographer, film maker and graphic designer, László MoholyNagy experimented with many different artistic genres. He was one of the most prominent Modernist theorists and gained a reputation on both sides of the Atlantic as a teacher and writer. Born in Hungary, he served in the First World War as a young man before participating in the country’s radical political and artistic movements. At the age of 24 he moved to Germany, involving himself in Berlin’s Dada and Constructivist avantgarde, and later joining the Bauhaus where he was an important figure for much of
the 1920s. It was here that he earned an international standing, writing alongside Walter Gropius as well as producing his own work. By the mid 1930s the rise of Nazis forced him to leave the freelance design practice he had established in Germany. He then worked in Amsterdam and London before moving to America to head the New Bauhaus in Chicago. He died in Chicago in 1946, having become a US citizen. A modernist and a restless experimentalist from the outset, the Hungarianborn artist was shaped by Dadaism, Suprematism, Constructivism,
and debates about photography. When Walter Gropius invited him to Bauhaus, in Dessau, Germany, he took over the school’s crucial preliminary course, and gave it a more practical, experimental, and technological bent. He later delved into various fields, from commercial design to theater set design, and also made films and worked as a magazine art director. But his greatest legacy was the version of Bauhaus teaching he brought to the United States, where he established the highly influential Institute of Design in Chicago.
9 Edward
McKnight Kauffer
Edward McKnight Kauffer (1890 –1954) was an American-born artist noted for his avant-garde graphic design and poster art, especially in Britain. He was born on in 1890, in Great Falls, Montana. By 1910 he had moved to San Francisco working as a bookseller and studying art at the California School of Design from 1910 to 1912. At around this time Professor Joseph McKnight of the University of Utah became aware of Kauffer’s work, sponsored him and paid to send him to Paris for further study. In gratitude Kauffer took his sponsor’s name as a middle name.
Kauffer stopped in Chicago for six months in 19121913 and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. While there he visited the Armory Show, one of the first major exhibitions to introduce the styles of modernism to American viewers. It seems likely that this had a major impact on Kauffer, who would work in many of the same styles throughout his career. He arrived in Paris in 1913 and studied at the Académie Moderne until 1914. At the beginning of WW1 Kauffer moved to London and remained there for most of his career. He was briefly associated with Robert Bevan’s Cumberland Market Group.
Kauffer may be best known for the 140 posters that he produced for London Underground, and later London Transport, The posters span many styles: many show abstract influences, including futurism, cubism, and vorticism; others evoke impressionist influences such as Japanese woodcuts. He created posters for Shell Oil and other commercial clients, and also illustrated books and book covers. Later he also became interested in textiles, interior design and theatrical design.
Post Modernist graphic designers
Take a look:
Ladislav
Rodchenko
11
JAMIE REID
Jamie Reid is a British artist and anarchist with connections to the Situationists and is infamous for his acerbic brand of visual anarchy. Jamie Reid’s signature newspaper-cutting graphics have become synonymous with the spirit of British punk rock music, having appeared on seminal Sex Pistols’ punk records of the 1970s including Never Mind the Bollocks, Anarchy in the UK, Union Jack, God Save the Queen and Pretty Vacant. Political activism has always been the driving force behind Jamie Reid’s artistic output, having created his ransom note style whilst running radical political magazine Suburban Press. His association with different groups, including Druidry, the Situationist movement and more recently the anti-war movement, are all apparent in his artwork which is witty, ethically motivated and always unabashedly rebellious.
God Save The Queen by Jamie Reid is based on a Cecil Beaton photograph of Queen Elizabeth II, with an added safety pin through her nose and swastikas in her eyes, described by Sean O’Hagan of The Observer as ‘the single most iconic image of the punk era.’ Reid’s design for the Sex Pistols Anarchy in the U.K. poster which features a ripped and safety-pinned Union Flag is regarded as the pivotal work in establishing a distinctive punk visual aesthetic. Collectors of Jamie Reid’s work include Vivienne Westwood, Robbie Williams, the Gallagher brothers, The Sex Pistols, Boy George, Green Day, Jonathon Ross, Chris Evans, Madonna, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, and Angelina Jolie. Her Majesty the Queen paid his Peace is Tough exhibition a visit in Derry, Ireland in 2001, where she commented on the beauty of his work.
Ladislav
12
Rodchenko
JEFFERY KEEDY
Jeffery Keedy, born 1957, is an American graphic designer, type designer, writer and educator. He is notable as an essayist and contributor to books and periodicals on graphic design. He is also notable for the design of Keedy Sans, a typeface acquired in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in 2011. A 1985 graduate of the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Keedy has been teaching design at the California Institute of the Arts since 1985. Keedy was also a frequent contributor to Emigre magazine throughout the twenty years of its publication. His designs and essays have been published in Eye, I.D., Emigre, Critique, Idea, Adbusters, Looking Closer One and Two, Faces on the Edge: Type in the Digital Age, New Design: Los Angeles and The Education of a Graphic Designer.
His typeface Keedy Sans, designed in 1989, is distributed through Emigre Fonts.He has also designed the Hard Times typeface which reassembles the elements of Times New Roman. In the mid 1980s he was a proponent of the view that design should be looked at as a cultural practice connected to themes of popular culture than a problem solving one.
13 Alexander
Rodchenko
ROSMARIE TISSI
Rosmarie Tissi grew up in an artistic family in Tayngen in the canton of Schaffhausen. Tissi lives and works in Zurich, was educated at the Zurich School of Design and by a four-year graphic design apprenticeship before opening her graphic studio together with Siegfried Odermatt in 1968 in the very heart of Zurich. After working together for ten years, she and her mentor set up the collective studio O&T in 1968. Odermatt and Tissi work independently of each other, although there is obviously a close feedback among them. Their clients include printing houses, companies of all kinds, cultural institutions and the public sector. Her designs are characterised by an objectively clear yet undogmatic style, and the approach whereby writing influences form can be called a style-defining characteristic of Tissi’s work. However, she has always steered clear of
straight-laced ‘Swiss style’. The graphic designer is also known for her love of traveling, which has already taken her to over 60 countries – not just for pleasure, mostly for lectures and workshops in high-profile institutes and universities on all five continents. She is member of AGI (Alliance Graphique International) since 1974 and won several prizes and gold medals for her work in Poland, Russia, Germany and Japan. Rosmarie Tissi is a member of juries in various poster competitions, Poster Biennial and Triennial in USA, Germany, Japan and Switzerland. Her exhibitions in Galleries, National Museums of Modern Art, International Centers of Typographic Arts are outstanding.
Ladislav
14
Rodchenko
PETER SAVILLE
Peter Saville was born in Manchester, Lancashire, and attended St Ambrose College. He studied graphic design at Manchester Polytechnic from 1975 to 1978. Saville entered the music scene after meeting Tony Wilson, the journalist and television presenter, whom he approached at a Patti Smith show in 1978. The meeting resulted in Wilson commissioning the first Factory Records poster (FAC 1). Saville became a partner in Factory Records along with Wilson, Martin Hannett, Rob Gretton and Alan Erasmus. Peter Saville designed many record sleeves for Factory Records artists, most notably for Joy Division and New Order. Influenced by fellow student Malcolm Garrett, who had begun designing for the Manchester punk group, the Buzzcocks, and by Herbert Spencer’s Pioneers of
Modern Typography, Saville was inspired by Jan Tschichold, chief propagandist for the New Typography. According to Saville: “Malcolm had a copy of Herbert Spencer’s Pioneers of Modern Typography. The one chapter that he hadn’t reinterpreted in his own work was the cool, disciplined “New Typography” of Tschichold and its subtlety appealed to me. I found a parallel in it for the New Wave that was evolving out of Punk.”
15 Alexander
Rodchenko
NEVILLE BRODY
Neville Brody is one of the most celebrated graphic designers of his generation – a leading typographer and internationally recognised art director and brand strategist. The founder of design agency Research Studios, Brody established his reputation working with record labels, magazines and a range of international clients from Apple to Dom Pérignon. His hugely influential work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions and publications, most notably the two-volume monograph The Graphic Language of Neville Brody, which was accompanied by an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Neville Brody studied at Hornsey College of Art and London College of Printing, first establishing his name in record cover design. He worked with Rocking Russian, Stiff Records, Fetish Records and Cabaret Voltaire, defining the visual language of independent
punk music and culture. Brody expanded into the world of magazines as art director of The Face and subsequently Arena. Since its founding in 1994, Research Studios has expanded internationally, working in Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Barcelona and New York. The studio’s branding, packaging, redesign and visual identity work has focused on a variety of clients, from Sony PlayStation to Bentley, and Kenzo to Nike.
Ladislav
16
Rodchenko M A G A Z I N E
17 Alexander
M O O D B O A R D S
Rodchenko
Ladislav
18
Rodchenko
19 Alexander
Rodchenko
C L A S S I C Ladislav
20
D
Rodchenko
E
S
M A G A Z I N E Alexander
I
Rodchenko
G
N
21
22
MASTHEAD
Alexander
DESIGN
Rodchenko
23