In the 19th century Arts and Crafts period designers organized page layout based upon Pre-Rennaisance traditions of beauty and symmetry. Concurrently, however, some poets and writers were rejecting the past and defying tradition. They sought ways to express the meaning of their words by new placements, new hierarchies—expressing meaning in a liberated "free verse, not tied to the usual conventions of rhymes and patterns.

Some now consider the work of these pioneers as concrete poetry, a descriptive term from the 1950's referring to the arrangement of letters to enhance meaning in a poem or prose. Others do not.

The painter James Whistler knew Mallarmé and, like his friend, drew parallels between his work and music—frequently using terms such as nocturne or harmony in his painting titles. Visual balance was an integral part of Whistler's painting, printmaking and book design. In his, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, 1890, (above) he worked in double page spreads and carefully considered the use of white space with asymmetrical balance.

(Coll.designhistory.org) Click image for larger size view.

In the 1960's Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers revisited the rhythm of Mallarmé's poem by replacing all of the text with solid bars.

Futurist painters Ardengo Soffici, (1879-1964) and Carlo Carrà (1881-1966) were influenced by Futurism and Cubism, especially the pasted paper work of Braque and Picasso.3,4. Carrà used non-words to mimic sounds in his collage, above, Atmospheric Swirls-A Bursting Shell, 1914. To see a larger image click here.


Offici's Simultaneity and Lyrical Chemistry, 1915, above, used overlapping covers of the many Futurist publications to convey multiplicity. In the current AIGA Triennial "Why Design Now?" one can see conceptual and artistic similarities between Soffici and PosterWall for the 21st Century.

4. Calligrams

Eiffel Tower and Il Pleut, Poems of War and Peace, 1913-1916. Avant-garde poet Guillaume Apollinaire designed Il Pleut in barely legible cascades of letters to evoke the feeling of rain. He referred to his shaped poems as Calligrammes.

Apollinaire was rather pessimistic about the future of typography, convinced that with new technology “typography is reaching a brilliant end to its career, at the dawn of the new means of reproduction that are the cinema and the phonograph."

5. Italian Futurism 1909–1944

Shortly before WWI, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the originator and chief proponent for Futurism, wrote the first Futurist Manifesto declaring the end of art of the past and the beginning of the art of the future (le Futurisme). He exported his new aesthetic that extolled speed, industrialization, violence and dynamism from Italy to the rest of Europe through lectures and publication of his Futurist Manifesto.

As part of his plan to sever ties with the past he urged for the destruction of libraries, museums and schools, and the elimination of the "smelly gangrene of professors, archeologists." Marinetti was a supporter of Mussolini's Fascist regime but was unsuccessful in his bid to make Futurism the state art of Italy.

Futurists believed that modern technology had altered the concept of time and space. Marinetti's first book, Zang, Tumb, Tumb (1914) used free verse to express the sensations of artillery assaults on Adrianopoli where he spent time as a correspondent in the Balkan War (1912). He used neither verbs nor adjectives, only nouns scattered about the page, conveying meaning through size, weight and placement—a revolution in style that deconstructed traditional linear writing.

Futurists, including Fortunato Depero, commingled art and commercial design. Depero declared that the "Art of the future will have a strong advertising feel." Internationally recognized, he spent two years in New York City designing theater sets and numerous magazine covers.

His most notable work, the Bolted Book, was a catalog of advertising designs for a printing firm. The 80 page publication is bound with metal bolts—a symbolic linkage between art and industry. His integration of type and photography is especially compelling. His flair for self-promotion is dazzling.
Depero images courtesy of Kelly Rakowski, NisN.

The Influence of Futurism in Europe and The Soviet Union

6. Blast Magazine 1914-1915

Marinetti's Futurist speech in England insulted and provoked his audience by analyzing their shortcomings, “To a degree you are victims of your traditionalism and medieval trappings, in which there persists a whiff of archives and a rattling of chains that hinder your precise and carefree forward march.” 5

English artists initially embraced Marinetti but later rejected him to start their own Modernist movement, Vorticism, manifesting elements of both Cubism and Futurism. Two members, painter Wyndham Lewis and writer Ezra Pound, founded the Vorticist magazine, Blast, a folio edition of art and poems. Despite abrogating Marinetti, they embraced his expressive typography and asymmetrical page layouts in the publication. Only two issues were completed as World War I began shortly after the first issue.
Click here to see the entire issue

7. Dada

Shown above, Ilia Zdanevitch, (1894-1975) Dada-esque design for a program for the second staging of Tristan Tzara's Dadaist play, "Le Coeur à Barbe, (Evening of the Bearded Heart), 1923 in Paris. The act of combining several typefaces in various sizes is known as paragonnage.

Plenty of information about Dada is available on line at the University of Iowa's International Dada Archive.

8. From Tzar to Avant Garde

Sandwiched between the Academic and Social Realist styles of Russian art was an intense period of artistic exploration. Russian writers and artists embraced parts of the Futurist dogma but nationalized it by integrating Russian myths and folklore as well as Cubism into a hybrid style known as Cubo-Futurist. By the time Marinetti visited Russia in 1914 he declared that Russians were not Futurists, but rather savage primitives. The Cubo-Futurist reveled in shocking the public, by dressing in outlandish clothing and producing controversial works such as A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. (1912) (shown above). In 1913 a further break from Futurism came with the Rayonist Manifesto, advocating light rays to describe form in abstract painting as shown in painting above by Mikhail Clarion (1881-1964).

9. Russian Artist Books

Small handmade books were a Russian artistic tradition started by the Futurists and carried forward by the Cubo-Futurist and Constructivists. These small editions included etchings, bold prints and tipped in pages of art work. Shown above, The Revolt of the Misanthropes, 1922, designed by Liubov Popova. Image Source

The use of asymmetrical type, white space and weight variations of the Futurists was continued, although in some cases the text was organized in a more readable configuration. It is easy to see the influence these books had on future typographers, especially Jan Tschichold who articulated his text and page layout in a similar, albeit more refined, manner.

Shown below, a spread from Vasily Kamensky, Tango with Cows, 1914.

Enjoy a full selection of Russian Avant Garde Books at the Getty.

10. Artistic Revolution in Russia

In 1915 Kasimir Malevich introduced his final logical evolution of Cubism in an abstract non-objective style he named Suprematism. His stark color field paintings demonstrated the theories from his manifesto From Cubism to Suprematism. (Black Square, 1915, above). Among other things he believed that geometric shapes could evoke strong emotions.

In revolutionary-minded Russia the acceptance of avant garde waned in a new era of practicality and rejection of individual expression. By 1921 Constructivism, an art form that conformed to the needs of the state, was the accepted means of graphic expression.

Much of the graphic work was in advertising but with a distinct difference from Western advertising, as historian Stephen Eskilson observed—Russian advertising did not promote desire for an object, rather it inspired feeling of guilt and duty. 6

11. The Constructivists

Leading the Constructivists were husband and wife team Varvara Stepanova (1894-1958) and Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956). They rejected fine arts to create images that served the new worker state. The word artist was replaced with the more productive term constructor.

Constructivist advertisements promoted industry or political propaganda. The work was dominated by the color red, the color of the Communist Revolution. In 1923 Rodchenko formed an advertising office, Ad-Constructor, with writer Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930).
iRodchenko is most celebrated for his photographic contributions. Thanks to Oskar Barnack's invention of the hand-held Leica camera in 1925, Rodchenko was able to shoot from extreme angles that force the viewer to see the world from new perspectives.

12. El Lissitzky (1890-1941)

Lazar Markovich Lissitzky was a visionary artist/designer who worked in exhibition design, photomontage, poster and book design. Mostly notably he integrated typography and page elementinto a new dynamic compositional style.

Trained originally as an architect, he began his career illustrating Yiddish children's books. He met and was greatly inspired by Malevich and the Supremacist movement while they were both teachers at the People's Art School, Vkhutemas Art School.
Lissitzky developed his own variant of Suprematism, Proun (an acronym for "Project for the Affirmation of the New). Proun was Lissitzky's exploration of the visual language of Suprematism but with dimensional elements, existing half-way between painting and architecture, utilizing shifting axes and multiple perspectives.

Prouns, initially paintings, were later expressed as fully dimensional works. They also influenced his commercial work as shown in the example right, "Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge.”The 1919 lithograph, printed during the Russian Civil War, marries the compositional aspects of PROUN with geometric symbolism to tell a revolutionary inspired story.

Like Rodchenko, El Lissitzky's used his art to promote the state. His The Story of Two Squares (1920) was a symbolic narrative in which the protagonists are a red square and a black square. “When it was first published in Berlin in 1922, About 2 [Squares] presented a radical rethinking of what a book was, demonstrating a new way of organizing typography on a page and relating it to visual images. His revolutionary typographical layouts were a synthesis of the composition of Proun with his command of page layout from his earlier book designs.

See all of the pages of The Story of Two Squares on ibiblio.org

13. Victory Over the Sun, 1923

El Lissitzky moved to Berlin as an artistic ambassador of Russian art and culture, bringing with him the language of Constructivism and Suprematism. While in Europe he experimented heavily in typographic design and photographic montage. Because he could speak German, he became a major conduit for ideas flowing between Europe and Russian.

While in Berlin he was commissioned to produce prints based upon the Cubo-Futurist opera, Victory over the Sun. Lissitzky analyzed the text's celebration of man's technological capabilities: 'the sun as the expression of old world energy is torn down from the heavens by modern man, who by virtue of his technological superiority creates his own energy source.'

The cover sheet is composed with an arrangement of bold and light type aligned on a grid. Horizontal and vertical bars are balanced with the type in a vocabulary of space and organizational relationships that were emulated by designers in the following decades.

Lissitzky's Influence in Europe

Lissitzky's fluency in German helped him advance his theories in Europe through lectures, articles, and commercial graphic design. Dada artist Kurt Schwitters commissioned Lissitzky to work on a special issue of the Dada journal Merz. His work was highly influential at the Bauhaus school through his relationship with Walter Gropius. He also deeply influenced The New Typography of Jan Tschichold and the De Stijl movement.

Lissitzky fell ill to tuberculosis in 1923 and went to Switzerland for treatment. He financed his recovery by designing advertisements for Günther Wagner's Pelikan division, an office supply company. With this assignment he combined his typographic theories with Proun spatial composition to create a new visual vocabulary for advertising.

El Lissitzky's 1927 cover advertising architecture at the state art school, Vkhutemas. The school, established in 1920 by Lenin, was a merger of an academy of fine art and a school of design. With 100 faculty and 2,500 students, this school was larger yet less well known that its German counterpart the Bauhaus. 7

Designing Communism

In his later career Lissitzky continued to create work to forward the political agenda of state—the core purpose of the Russian Constructivist Style. He promoted his country's optimism for social welfare and Communism via print and exhibition design. His designs for USSR in Construction, a propaganda magazine begun by Maxim Gorky, featured the Stalinist Constitution, Soviet Georgia, and the Red Army. Published in several languages, it provided foreign audiences with information about Soviet industry, economy, and culture.

Lissitzky's poster above, designed for a Russian exhibition in Zürich in 1929, depicts the egalitarian status of women and men in the new Soviet society. His photomontage style featured startling juxtapositions of real objects with naturalistic and abstract forms.

14. DeStijl 1917-1931

Unlike in Russia or most of Europe, avant garde artists in neutral Holland were able to work uninterrupted during WW1. A group organized under the name “The Style” strove to create an ideal harmony— proposed as an antidote to the destruction and chaos wrought by the war. All emotion and representation were stripped away until only a neutral geometric abstraction remained.

Key figures of DeStijl were Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931) Gerrit Rietveld (1888-1964) and Piet Mondrian (1872-1944). Mondrian formulated much of the theory of De Stijl based upon his personal evolution through Cubism and Analytical Cubism. Lastly he reached a pure abstraction that consisted only of lines and rectangles arranged at right angles and color —only 'pure' primary colors and black and white. He named his art neoplasticism.

The Red Blue Chair by Rietveld was designed in 1918 but not painted with the distinctive De Stijl palette until 5 years later. Not only did it exhibit the visual order of DeStijl, it was carefully considered for modular mass production by using standardized lumber sizes. 8

The movement's publication, De Stijl, contained essays on art, architecture, poetry and cinema. Layouts integrated heavy rules, asymmetric compositions and sans serif type. El Lissitzky designed one issue promoting the principles of Constructivism

Johanna Druker aptly describes the woodblock printed logo designed for the publication in 1919.
"Vilmos Huzar's design for a logotype wraps letter parts around each other in imitation of printer's rules and machined forms. Curiously organic it is also highly geometric, and the way the text breaks down into abstract forms only to combine into a readable word reveals the influence of Gestalt psychology on this design approach. The emphasis on the relationship between parts that creates the perception of a whole is typical of a gestalt perception. As a guiding graphic principle, this approach was conducive to the design of logos or letterhead in which an aggregate entity (such as a corporation, group or school) wanted to present itself as a single visual identity. 9

In 1921 a wider audience was reached when the magazine was subtitled International Monthly included articles written in French, German and English.
(Above, a 1926 cover from the Moma collection. The NB initials stand for Nieuwe Beelding (neoplasticism) click to enlarge.

Van Doesburg was the principle conduit of the DeStijl ideals to the Bauhaus where, in turn, he was exposed to Russian Constructivism. By 1924 he published a new theory of "Elementarism" in De Stijl , advocating the use of diagonal lines for dynamic tension—more vital than the horizontal and vertical. This assault on the placid arrangements of DeStijl was rejected by Mondrian who quit the group in protest.

Piet Zwart, Form Designer

Although not affiliated with any single group, Piet Zwart (1885-1977) infused his commercial print work with influences from Constructivism, Dada and De Stijl, while adding a bit of playfulness to the mix. In the 1920s, he began to work for Nederlandsche Kabelfabriek (Cable manufacturers) in Delft. There he experimented with upper and lower case, lines, circles and screens, and free letter composition. Over a ten year period he produced 275 designs (one shown above) before he moved on to interior, industrial and furniture design. A man of many talents he classified himself as a typotect— part typographer, part architect.

Zwart is noted for his Bruynzeel Kitchen design, 1938, a work that strongly reflected graphic organization. It considered both ergonomics and mass-production. 10
Zwart was recognized by the Dutch government for his contributions and today there is a Piet Zwart Institute in the Netherlands.

Above right is a 1924 Zwart design currently in the Moma collection. Its provenance says a lot about the brilliance of this piece, "from the Tschichold Collection, a gift of Philip Johnson." It is an ad announcing that cable and wire are immediately available for purchase, however Zwart' s elegant restraint and finely balanced composition transcend commercial function to become a work of modernist art.

Belgian designer Joke Vermeirenhas a nice web site, Iconofgraphics, with a complete profile on Zwart (as well as some other great designers).

Holland was not such a safe place for designers in WW2. H.N. Werkman (work shown above) was both Jewish and political, which put him into disfavor with the Nazi's who executed him for "seditious typography.".11

László Moholy-Nagy, Title page of: "Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar 1919-1923", 1923, Letterpress print

Initially typography was of limited importance but with the appointment of Moholy-Nagy in 1923, the ideas of the "New Typography" began to infiltrate the Bauhaus. Nagy considered typography to be primarily a communications medium, and was concerned with the "clarity of the message in its most emphatic form." He combined text and photography into interrelated compositions of pure communication he named "Typofoto."

In 1925, Gropius commissioned Bayer to design a typeface for all Bauhaus communications and Bayer excitedly undertook this task. He used his approach to modern typography to create an "idealist typeface." The result was "universal" - a simple geometric sans-serif font. In Bayer's design, not only were serifs unnecessary, he felt there was no need for an upper and lower case for each letter. Part of his rationale was to simplify typesetting and the typewriter keyboard layout.

The Bauhaus set forth elementary principles of typographic
communication:

1. Typography is shaped by functional requirements.

2. The aim of typographic layout is communication (for which it is the graphic medium). Communication must appear in the shortest, simplest, most penetrating form.

3. For typography to serve social ends, its ingredients need internal organization - (ordered content) as well as external organization (the typographic material properly related).

Shown above: Laszo-Maholy-Nagy, Catalog with samples of student work from Dessau, Bauhaus.

His Kombinationschrift alphabets was a modular lettering system based upon 10 basic shapes derived from a circle and a square. it was designed to be efficient— both easy to learn and inexpensive to produce.

The result was not a legible as Bayer's but the idea of modularity was in line with the school philosophy of creating streamlined objects for mass production.?

Elsewhere in Germany Paul Renner designed a completely geometric typeface, Futura in 1927. Originally drawn entirely with t-square and compasses, it was later revised for commercial setting.

16 Jan Tschichold

By the later 1920's avant garde typography was making inroads into more mainstream commercial design much through the efforts of designer Jan Tschichold (1903-1972). Unlike most of the avant garde artists, Tschichold was a traditionally trained calligrapher and typographer and had formally studied book design at the Leipzig Academy.

In 1923 he was hired at a printing firm where he drew precise page layouts to be executed by the typesetters. During that year he attend an exhibition of work by Weimar Bauhaus students at which point Tschichold became a modernist convert. He made contact with both Maholy-Nagy and El Lissitzky and, enthusiastically embracing the ideals of Russian Constructivism, changed his first name to Iwan.

As with Moholy-Nagy, clarity of message was Tschichold's ultimate goal and all elements on the page were configured to that end. Traditional layouts, or as he called them, box-style layouts, were boring and lacked hierarchy of importance.

He moved to Berlin and then to Munich where he taught at a technical college for German printers, headed by Paul Renner.

Image source Penguin Books

In 1927 he joined a group formed by Kurt Schwitters, The Circle of New Advertising Designers. It was this group that formulated the principles of what was proclaimed The New Typography. Although the group had some dialogue with the Bauhaus they kept a distance, possibly for fear that either side might subsume the other's identity.

The New Typography was organized around these principles:

• asymmetric balance of elements
• content designed by hierarchy
• intentional white space utilization
• sans serif typography

Tschichold became both a spokesman and author for the group. He promulgated their theories in lectures and writing. Somewhat dogmatically, advance notice was posted that no discussion would follow his lectures.

Above is the cover of Typographic Mitteilungen: Elementare Typographie, 1925, a trade magazine in which he introduced the ideas of the Russian Constructivism and The New Typography to Germany's printers. The content was met with great controversy but was widely adopted.

Tschichold was a prolific writer about the subject of typography, publishing 175 articles over 50 years. At the age of 26 he produced his most influential book, The New Typography. The publication, which is today held in great reverence, was a slim, rather small publication with a black cover printed in silver ink. It was organized into two major parts. The first examined the historical roots of the New Typography and argued for its adoption in modern times. Tschichold held traditional book designers in contempt—seeing them as out of step with the world.

He supported Moholy-Nagy's typophoto approach, naming photography the preferred method of illustration. To him, sans serif was the only face that properly complimented photography.

He advocated for lower case letters, (Kleinschreibung). (German is rife with capitalization so it may be why this was such a topic of interest in Germany). He did not like the typefaces Kabel or Erbar, feeling them too much like artist's faces. Paul Renner's Futura was considered the best of the lot but not completely satisfactory. (Renner had his own book, Mechanisierte Grafik, 1931).

In the second part of the book he covered more practical matters. Discussions included detailed suggestions for business letters, including paper size, folds and proportions; practicalities such as sheet sizes and type face combinations. The first run totaled 5,000 copies but was not followed by a second due to poor economic conditions.12

In March 1933 he was taken into custody by the national socialists for six weeks, consequently losing his teaching job. Upon release he left Germany with this wife and son for a teaching position and printing work in Basel, Switzerland. He was granted Swiss citizenship. By the late 1930's he has lost touch with the Circle and the new typography ceased.

The Moma has a nice selection of work from The New Typography movement here.

For the conclusion of Tschichold's design career see item #20 on this page.

Recommended Reading

Drucker, Johanna. The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Il Libro come Opera D'Arte,by Giorgio Maffei; Maura Picciau; Galleria Corraini; et al, 2008.

Bauhaus, Modernism and the Illustrated Book, Alan Bartram, Yale University Press, 2004

Mildred S. Friedman, ed., De Stijl, 1917-1931: Visions of Utopia (Walker Art Center and Abbeville Press, 1982.

1.
The First English Pattern Poems, Margaret Church
PMLA,Vol. 61, No. 3 (Sep., 1946), pp. 636-650
Published by: Modern Language Association

2.
All Things Move, All Things Run, All Things Are Rapidly Changing
Futurism and the International Avant-Garde, Irina D. Costache,

3.
Ardengo Soffici's parole in liberta
Willard Bohn
Pacific Coast Philology
Vol. 11, (Oct., 1976), pp. 23-29

4.
The Getty Museum, Visual Poems
of the Italian Futurists.

5.
Modernism, an Anthology, p.6, Lawrence Rainey.

6.
Eskilson, Stephen, Graphic Design,
A New History. p 205.

7.
Tony Fry, Inc NetLibrary, A New Design Philosophy, an Introduction to Defuturing, UNSW Press, 1999, p. 161.

8.
Image and text source for Rietveld
Chair at the MOMA web site

9.
Drucker, Johanna and McVarish, Emily, Graphic Design, A Critical Guide, Published by Prentice Hall, 2008 p 208.

10.
Piet Zwart (1885-1977). Form engineer Gemeente Musuem, Den Haag.

11.
Drucker p.207.

12
Jan Tschichold, The New Typography: University of California Press. (Front matter)