Henri van de Velde &
Victor Horta

Belgium|Art Nouveau |Organic
Horta and van de Velde were the chief theoreticians of Art Nouveau. Van de Velde was influenced by the theories of William Morris and the English Arts and Crafts Movement that he abandoned painting and turned his attention to architecture and the applied arts.

1. Mackmurdo and The Century Guild

Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo (1851-1942), an architect, founded the Century Guild, roughly based on the guilds of the medieval period, in 1882. Mackmurdo's ambition in founding the Century Guild was "to render all branches of art the sphere no longer of the tradesman but of the artist. It would restore building, decoration, glass-painting, pottery, wood-carving and metal to their right place beside painting and sculpture". Mackmurdo believed that unity in the arts would provide an organic environment for design to thrive in. The sensuous and organic qualities found in Mackmurdo's work foreshadows the coming art nouveau period.

2. Art Nouveau

A movement of decorative arts and architecture in Europe and the US. Characteristic is the absence of any straight line and any right angle. The artists preferred ornamental structures imitating flowers and leaves, perhaps in response to the new connection made between man and nature in the findings of Darwin. Most works of the Art Nouveau resemble living organisms such as animals, insects and birds, especially dragonflies, peacocks, swallows and swans. The artists also appreciated the female body as a decorative element depicting it with long hair flowing in long soft waves.

The term "Art Nouveau" first was used by a group of modern Belgian artists known as "The XX" in 1884. By 1895 the term was established and the "new art form" was displayed for the public in exhibitions in prestigious galleries such as Bing's Department Store in Paris.

Art Nouveau evolved into two distinct styles, organic and geometric.

France, Belgium, Italy, Spain and the United States adhered to the organic style.

Rennie Macintosh inspired a move to a more geometric style in Scotland and exported it to Austria.

5.
Wiener Werkstätte
("Vienna Workshop")
1903 — 1932

Hoffmann and Kolomann Moser left the Secessionist Movement of established an association of artists and craftspeople working together to manufacture well designed household goods in the spirit of the British Arts & Crafts Movement. The early design was characterized by the great influence of Rennie Mackintosh— simplified shapes, geometric patterns, and minimal decoration. About 100 workers strove to provide good quality design to a large audience. For several years their work was sold in a shop in New York City but the cost of running the venue could not be sustained.

The Werkstatte logo
Applied to all products often accompanied by the individual logo marks of the designer as well as the producer.
Artists included among others, Josef Hoffmann, Bertold Löffler, Dagobert Peche, and, Koloman Moser.

Lilly was a partner to Mies and co-designed much of the furniture that become icons of modern design and
are still in production today and
attributed solely to him. Imagine these chairs without the upholstery that was designed by Lilly?

Reich and Mies Van de Rohe Barcelona Chair, 1929 above.

MR Chair, 1927, below.

6.
Deutsche Werkbund
(German Union)
Munich, Germany

A state sponsored organization formed in 1907 by Hermann Muthesius who traveled to England to study the Arts and Crafts movement where he was impressed by simplicity, functionalism and emphasis on the handcraft ethic. Muthesius was determined to encourage these qualities in Germany where he was appointed to supervise the schools of art and design. It's initial purpose was to establish a partnership of product manufacturers with design professionals to improve the competitiveness of German companies in global markets.

Werkbund Glass Pavilion, 1914

"Lilly Reich began her career as a designer of textiles and women's apparel, which was one of the few fields in design open to women at that time. In 1912 she became a member of the Deutsche Werkbund ...Before WWI she worked in the studio of Josef Hoffman and by 1915 she had developed a professional reputation sufficient enough to be placed in charge of a fashion show for the Werkbund held in Berlin. In 1920 Reich became the first woman to be made director of the Deutsche Werkbund, an unprecedented achievement because women at that time were not expected to have the same abilities in the arts as men."
From Chat with Lily Reich

 20C. Avant-Garde Movements
 and their impact on the  future of graphic design

"In the opening decades of the 20th century, the printed word became increasingly important to the visual and verbal explorations of modern artists. Revolutions in printing, typography, and advertising saturated modern life with printed words. Although diverse in their goals and expressive strategies, artists working in a variety of styles and locations—including Italian Futurists, Berlin Dadaists, and Russian Constructivists—cohered around a shared interest in deploying modern typography. Co-opting the raw material of industrial, technological culture into their critiques of the artistic and social status quo, artists used the printed word as a key medium for communicating the avant-garde perspective. They eagerly sought out new typographical styles, which represented the graphic embodiment of one of the central tenets of the artistic vanguard: fusing form with function."

An avant-garde art movement rose in Russia after the 1917 revolution. All art was considered bourgeois except posters and film-making which could be used to serve as propaganda for the party.

9. El Lissitzky (1890-1941) was one of the most important figures of the Russian avant-garde and a major influence on Constructivism, De Stijl and the Bauhaus. He helped developed suprematism, a geometrical style of abstract painting, with his friend and mentor, Kazimir Malevich. After the revolution he designed numerous exhibition displays and propaganda works for the former Soviet Union.

Lissitzky experimented with production techniques and stylistic devices that would go on to dominate 20th century graphic design.

In 1920 he created The Story of Two Squares, a symbolic narrative in which the protagonists are a red square and a black square, the setting is the earth (a red circle), and the enemy is chaos (a jumble of geometric shapes). Like Lissitzky's political poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1920), The Story of Two Squares was a powerful demonstration that art could be used as a graphic means of communication.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. It marked the beginning of a new graphic art and is among the most important publications in the history of the avant-garde in typography and graphic design.

See all of the pages on biblio.org.

He used photo montage, the dynamic diagonals and the color palette of black, white and red and san serif type. "In 1922, after a brief period of teaching at the Moscow state art school, Lissitzky went to Berlin, where, through an exhibition that he organized, he introduced Russian abstract art to a Western audience. While there he met Theo van Doesburg and other members of De Stijl, becoming an influential member of the movement.

In 1923, with Gerhard Richter and László Moholy-Nagy, he was one of the founders of the Constructivist group. While in Weimar in 1923 he also met Walter Gropius."

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10.
Futurism 1909
According to art historian Irina D. Costache, Futurism (largely an Italian movement) sought more than a stylistic change but rather to redefine art. At the core was a desire to transform the arts into a process rejecting the value of individual objects and instead emphasizing a harmonious fusion of the modern environment and man.

The Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was the first to produce a manifesto of Futurist philosophy in his “Manifesto del futurismo” (1909), first released in Milan and published in the French paper Le Figaro. Marinetti summed up the major principles of the Futurists, including a passionate loathing of ideas from the past, especially political and artistic traditions. He and others also espoused a love of speed, technology, and violence.

Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism promised to celebrate and exalt all aspects of modern life (urbanity, industry, technology, electricity, speed, force, dynamism, action, violence, transport), and furthermore, it was hoped that this philosophical and artistic progress would be realized at the cost of everything that came before ("We will destroy museums and libraries" cried Marinetti – a cry which was more or less ignored in all but metaphorical context, thank goodness.) In short, if Marinetti had an enemy, it was The Past, and Futurism was seen as a way of liberating Italy from its Renaissance aesthetic, the world from its Classical tradition.

The Futurists explored every medium of art, including painting, sculpture, poetry, theatre, music, architecture and even gastronomy. Futurists dubbed the love of the past passéisme. The car, the plane, the industrial town were all legendary for the Futurists, because they represented the technological triumph of people over nature.

11. Fortunato Depero was a Futurist painter who brought the Futurist vision to graphic design in posters and magazine design. "Art of the future will have a strong advertising feel."

"Had Vanity Fair wanted an 'illustrator', they'd have hired one. They did not. They chose Depero because he was 'in'; to use a modern idiom, he was considered 'trendy'. His work screamed 'Europe'. It screamed 'Modern'. Vanity Fair considered Depero a 'coup'; it would be akin to using Andy Warhol in the Sixties. They were showing off by being daring, and daring to them meant hiring a 'trendy' young Italian artist to do covers which were considered shocking. So yes, Depero's work for Vanity Fair can be considered as 'Art', because that is what they considered it to be and, more importantly, what they hoped their readers would consider it. Whether or not Depero did is another matter."

He produced a number of posters for Campari and designed their soda bottle.

12 DeStijl 1917-1931

Dutch nonfigurative art movement, also called neoplasticism. In 1917 a group of artists, architects, and poets was organized under the name de Stijl, and a journal of the same name was initiated. The leaders of the movement were the artists Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian. They advocated a purification of art, eliminating subject matter in favor of vertical and horizontal elements, and the use of primary colors and noncolors. Their austerity of expression influenced architects, principally J.J.P.Oud and Gerrit Rietveld. The movement lasted until 1931.

Around 1921, the group's character started to change. From the time of Van Doesburg's association with Bauhaus, other influences started playing a role. These influences were mainly Malevich and Russian Constructivism, to which not all members agreed. In 1924 Mondrian broke with the group after Van Doesburg proposed the theory of elementarism, proposing that the diagonal line was more vital than the horizontal and the vertical.