The Museum of Contemporary Typography Presents
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CONT Intro to Cassandre Examples of Typography Typography Timeline About the Museum Colophon
TENTS pg. 4-5 pg. 6-9 pg. 10-11 pg. 12-13 pg. 14
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“They are painted
for the enjoyment of
small coteries. Each
artistic temperament,
each artist, however
immature, has its own circle of admirers, its
own audience. Yet a
work of art ought to
reach out and make
an impact on all men”
cass I
n the ensuing years A.M. Cassandre was to become the towering figure we now celebrate for this century’s singularly brilliant achievements in the art of the poster. In the totality of his professional career, Cassandre worked only a relatively short time as a poster and graphic designer. But in that rich period he produced a body of work that remains unmatched for its unique beauty and impact. Almost five decades later, after countless visual styles, movements, vogues, and fads, the lustre of Cassandre’s accomplishments has not dimmed. The details of Cassandre’s youth are as lean as his working philosophy. In the classic French tradition, Cassandre was the nom de plume he took instead of his original name, Adolphe Jean Marie Mouron. He was born of French parents who resided in Kharkov, a famed Ukrainian city. In 1915, when only 14 years old, he had the exceptional blessings of his parents to become a painter and was sent to Paris to study at the stiffly academic École Des Beaux Arts. His post-École education included a period of study with Lucien Simon at the Académie Julian, followed by a period of compulsory military service. Shortly thereafter he created the Au Bucheron poster.
Cassandre modestly maintained, sprung from a struggling artist’s effort to support himself. A contemporary, Maximilien Vox, in his monograph on Cassandre, characterized him in his mid-career as “a thinker and an engineer, a lover of nature and a reader of books; such he was then, such he is now. A puritan in our midst, a
sandre INTRO
worshipper of all things beautiful.” This fortuitous combination of qualities can be seen in one way or another in almost every one of Cassandre’s magnificent posters. The leap from the Bucheron poster in 1923 to the succeeding one for Pi Volo aperitif embraced a quantum jump. This poster, with its fusion of bird, glass, light and dark forms and its art deco lettering, demonstrates that Cassandre had assimilated the revolutionary ideas of shape and interpenetration of form developed in the cubist and abstract paintings of Gris, Braque, and Picasso. Barely a year later came the immortal “L’lntransigeant” truck poster. The forceful head and radiating telephonic lines of its composition created an indestructible image, and who today would be daring enough to truncate the product’s name as Cassandre did in 1924? In each succeeding year, Cassandre’s posters show an increasing innovation enhanced by breathtaking execution. Images so seemingly literal and so directly rendered took on a new dimension. A shipping poster
depicted cargo being hoisted. Railway posters conveyed the essence of locomotion and the rectilinear purity of tracks. The magic of these posters lay in their bigger-than-life imagery and Cassandre’s extraordinary sense of the dramatic. Every poster bore an invention in letterforms, fashioned as an integral part yet providing a visual bonus—lyrical, playful, geometric or decorative, and above all never banal. Perhaps in the Cassandre “symbology” it was the fusion of puritan and thinker that was preeminent, and in the memorable railway documents, the engineer heightened the alchemy. Who can forget the exquisite distillation of the “Étoile Du Nord” poster, in which the velocity of the northern express is vivified by the acute perspective of pristine tracks culminating in a white star—an image that leaves us listening for the haunting sound of the train’s whistle. Five years later, Cassandre’s oeuvre took on a new poetic tone. He combined photography and drawing in the now classic club-car poster for the French Railway System.
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Examples of T
ADP, Version épigraphique du CASSANDRE 1968
Page du spécimen LE PEIGNOT, novembre 1937
YSL Logotype 1963
Typography
YSL Logo ‘61
Du Specimen du Bifur 1929
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By A.m. C
Cassandre
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A Typographica
1400
1470
Guttenberg invented movable typefaces, giving the world a cheaper way to obtain the written word. Up until this point, all written materials were done by hand, and were very costly to purchase. Guttenburg also created the first typeface, blackletter – it was dark, fairly practical, and intense, but not very legible.
1780 Firmin Didot and Giambattista Bodoni created the first ‘modern’ Roman typefaces (Didot, and Bodoni). The contrasts were more extreme than ever before, and created a very cool, fresh look.
Nicolas Jenson created Roman Type, inspired by the text on ancient roman buildings. It was far more readable than blackletter, and caught on quickly.
1501
Italics begin to be way to fit more wo a page, saving the money. Today, we as a design detail phasis when writin
1815
1816
Vincent Figgins created Egyptian, or Slab Serif – the first time a typeface had serifs that were squares or boxes.
William Caslon IV creat the first typeface withou any serifs at all. It was widely rebuked at the ti This was the start of wh we now consider Sans Serif typefaces. During this time, type exploded and many, many variati were being created to accommodate advertisi
al Introduction
e used as ords onto e printer e use italics or for emng.
ted ut
ime. hat
d, ions
ing.
aslon askerville
1734
1757
William Caslon created a typeface which features straighter serifs and much more obvious contrasts between thin and bold strokes. Today, we call this type style ‘old style’.
John Baskerville created what we now call Transitional type, a Romanstyle type, with very sharp serifs and lots of drastic contrast between thick and thin lines.
1920’s Frederic Goudy became the world’s first full time type designer, developing numerous groundbreaking typefaces, such as Copperplate Gothic Kennerly, and Goudy Old Style.
1957 - Helvetica Max Miedinger became famous for creating the Neue Haas Grotest typeface in 1957 which was renamed in 1960. Marketed as a symbol of cutting-edge technology, Helvetica went global at once. 11
Contemporary The typeface is notable for not having a traditional lowercase, but in its place a “multi-case” combining traditional lowercase and small capital characters. Cassandre intended for Peignot to be used in publishing and stated that “there is no technical reason in printing why we cannot return to the noble classical shapes...”
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about this brochure Design By
Christian Acosta
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