Paul Stirton
Yale University Press and Bard Graduate Center, New York
2019, ISBN 978-0-300-24395-6, Paperback, 254 pp., 8¾ x 7”
£25
Throughout his early career, Jan Tschichold had been a diligent collector of Modernist printed material and ephemera in support of his advocacy for the New Typography. However, in 1937, when he was surviving on a modest income from teaching and occasional design work following his flight from Nazi Germany to Switzerland, he decided to sell a substantial cache of 60 posters from his collection to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
After the war in 1950, he again offered another significant batch to MoMa. The resulting collection contains several hundred items and includes work from many of the luminaries of the Modernist movement, such as Theo van Doesburg, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Piet Zwart, Max Burchartz, El Lissitzky, László Moholy-Nagy, Kurt Schwitters, Herbert Bayer, Max Bill, Cassandre and Tschichold himself.
This book is published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title held at Bard Graduate Center Gallery in New York City from 14 February to 14 July 2019, based around the above collection. It opens with a brief recapitulation of Tschichold’s well-known early career up to the point in the late 1930s when he was beginning to question his espousal of the New Typography. It contains a well-presented discussion of the key political and artistic movements of the time relating to the Modernist project, such as Constructivism, Suprematism, Dutch Neoplasticism and Futurism. It covers the influence of the New Typography outside Germany, including the impact of the forced exile of some of its key practitioners, and concludes with a selection of extracts from primary texts by its various exponents.
Although a talented calligrapher, it is well known that Tschichold focused on typography, partly under the influence of the Bauhaus and its increasing orientation towards uniting art and industry following its earlier Arts and Crafts impetus. A key intellectual feature in the literature of the period was an espousal of the machine, and the potential political benefits of the industrial process. The growth of the New Typography was in turn fuelled by developments in printing technology and the related drive towards standardization (such as DIN 476 setting out A sizes in paper in 1922).
I had not fully appreciated how important the ability to integrate half-tones with text was to the New Typography – the photograph being seen as the archetypal ‘industrial’ means of illustration as opposed to the traditional woodcut. I was also intrigued to learn how important the growth of the advertising industry was to Modernist designers, despite their predominantly left-leaning philosophy – for example, this from Lajos Kassák in 1928: ‘If our designers and typesetters grasp . . . the essence of elementary typography, it will be easy to demonstrate . . . that the modern advertisement is . . . one of the most effective mediators between production and consumer markets.’
The book is well illustrated with many unfamiliar examples (all well placed near their text citation) and forms a useful addition to the literature covering this immensely creative period in the history of typographic design.