Design History Quiz #2

Legacy & Impact

- Influence on Pop Culture, Fashion and Film - Creation of Images to Shock and Make the Viewer Ask Questions

Legacy & Influence of Dada:

- Redefined the Role of Art & Artists - Expression through Typography - Experimentation of Layout - Use of Collage & Photomontage to Create Juxtoposition - Use of Art for Political & Cultural Activism or Propoganda

Letterhead

-(calling card of style) -expressive of what their philosophies are

Sans Serif

-A font that does not have the small line extensions on its characters. -type is embraced by these designers

Legacy

-A primary example of Behrens's design philosophy at AEG was a promotional poster he designed advertising AEG's newest product in 1910— a technologically advanced lamp or lightbulb. -The design of the poster is clearly based on fundamental modernist design elements and principles. Its orthogonal graphic composition is organized with an articulated grid and comprises basic geometric shapes—a continuous frame or square, a circle, and an equilateral triangle. The triangle provides a focal location for the lightbulb and a simplified, abstract dot pattern represents brilliance and illumination. The pattern and lines framing and dividing the composition of the poster, as well as the outline of the circle and triangle, are all composed of a series of dots or points, which symbolize and communicate light. -His visionary approach not only influenced the entire AEG corporate culture, it became the first seminal example of corporate identity and branding that would inevitably become a primary force within the design professions in the later part of the twentieth century.

Fernand Léger

-Another artist that joined in on the movement was Fernand Léger who moved cubism away from the initial impulse of its founders. Léger was inspired by Cezaane's famous dictum about the cylinder, sphere and cone. -He took this theory very seriously. Motifs such as nudes in a forest were transformed into fields of colorful stovepipe sections littering the picture plane. -His work was potentially heading towards evolving onto an art form of pure color and shape relationships but his time at war altered his visual perception. -This lead to him turning towards a style that was more recognizable, accessible and populist. -His almost pictographic simplifications of the human figure and objects were a major inspiration for modernist pictorial graphics and inspired the thrust to revive French poster art. -Léger's flat planes of color, urban motif, and the hard-edged precision of his machine forms helped define the modern design sensibility after WW1.

Bertold Löffler

-Bertold Löffler and the Wiener Keramik are associated with a stylistic shift at the Werkstätte, from the geometry associated with Hoffmann and Moser in its early years to a more decorative sensibility, as well as a renewed focus on the use of the human figure.

Man Ray

-Born in Philadelphia in 1890 to Russian-Jewish immigrants. He assumed the single combined first and last name of Man Ray when his entire family adopted the surname Ray in 1911. The family moved to Brooklyn, New York, in 1897. -Man Ray, particularly inspired by the Cubist works at the Armory Show of 1913, absorbed the iconoclasm of the young poets, radicals, and artists then giving a new flavor to New York life. In 1915, at his first one-person show, an important collector bought six of his Cubist paintings, providing both the money and the incentive for him to rent a studio in New York City. Man Ray also bought a camera, chiefly to document his own art works. At this time he met Marcel Duchamp, who became his closest friend and strongest artistic influence. -Man Ray largely moved away from conventional painting to other media: collage, photography, the assemblages from found materials, and aerographs—creating a rich variety of works that demonstrate a formed artistic style that created deliberate confusion between abstraction and representation. -While Man Ray never quite overcame his prejudice that photography rated below painting as an art form, he, in fact, maintained his avant-garde reputation in large part through the invention, or more strictly the reinvention (since Fox Talbot had done them in the 1830's) of the photogram, the cameraless photograph created by placing objects on photosensitive paper and exposing them to light.

Chance

-Chance is the strange process that allowed the Dadaists to challenge the ideas of originality and authorship and also afforded them the opportunity to create within a framework of strange and unique expression. Chance is the act of finding objects and building them together to form unique creations. -This process was developed among all of the Dadaists, but explored heavily among Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp in the creation of art and was used by Hans Arp, Hugo Ball, and several others in writing. -Chance was key to works such as dada poems, ready-mades and collages. They act of chance also employed several theories. Such as juxtaposition and condensation, then using those to arrive at art created in pure form by the subconscious.

The Glasgow Four

-Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Herbert McNair and the Macdonald sisters came to be known as The Four. Together they designed and exhibited work including posters and furniture.

Cubism

-Cubism was the first abstract style on the timeline of art movements. -The father of this revolutionary movement is French post-impressionist painter, Paul Cezanne, who believed that a painter should "treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone." -Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque followed Cezanne and evolved his vision into a historical art movement that underwent various phases and experimentations. -The cubists' ideals were not to translate objects naturally but to emotionally manipulate the subject with the goal to change compiled elements for aesthetic reasons rather than reality. -The cubists challenged the traditional forms of representation,

Dada

-Dada rebelled against: the horrors of war, the decadence of European society, the blind faith in technology, the inadequacy of religion, and the conventional moral codes -In reaction against World War 1, the Dada movement claimed to be anti-art. -It had a very strong and destructive element. -Dada writers and artists were concerned with shock, protest and nonsense. -They rejected all tradition and sought complete freedom. -This movement developed spontaneously as a literary movement. -This occurred after Hugo Ball, a poet, opened the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Switzerland. -This was a gathering place for independent young poets, painters and musicians.

Introduction to Dada

-Dada's innovative approach to typography, photomontage, negative white space, layout, letter spacing and line spacing has played a significant role in the development of communication design. -Of course, many aspects of their style, technique and aesthetics were borrowed from Futurists. In particular, Dada adopted Futurists art of typography. The Dada publications, including manifestos, magazines, and posters, reveals that graphic design was indispensable for establishing the movement's visual identity, and its strong design signature. -Given the rebellious nature of Dada, the Futurists' typographical experiments were more conducive to the spirit of Dadaism's subversive nature than to their own enthusiasm for depicting the energetic pace of machines. This is perhaps why Dadaism contributions became more prominent. According to Tristan Tzara in the Dadaist manifesto: "Every page should explode, either because of its deep seriousness, or because of its vortex, vertigo, newness, timelessness, crushing humor, enthusiasm of its principles, or the way it is printed."

German Expressionism

-Founded in 1905 it was a movement of rebellion (something inherently wrong with old system) against the academic art of the time. -Two Expressionist groups emerged: Die Brücke (The Bridge) in 1905 and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in 1911. -Die Brücke was interested in figuration, (emotions of human condition) -Der Blaue Reiter interested in abstraction. (concerned with naiive and elementary art and abstraction of color) -They were opposed to the tenets of classical beauty. ---The offspring of their collective radicalism was a visual language based on primitive iconography, including African masks and primitive art. -geometric shapes and simple forms -became a way to document the horrors of the war

René Magritte

-French art historians dubbed figurative surrealist painters "naturalists of the imaginary." Space, color, perspective and figures are rendered in careful naturalism, but the image is an unreal dreamscape. -René Magritte, a Belgium surrealist, used jolting and ambiguous scale changes, defied the laws of gravity and light, created unexpected juxtapositions and maintained a poetic dialogue between reality and illusion, truth and fiction.

Francis Picabia

-From 1913 to 1915 Francis Picabia traveled to New York City several times and took active part in the avant-garde movements, introducing Modern art to America. -Later, in 1916, while in Barcelona, he started his well-known Dada periodical 391. He continued the periodical with the help of Marcel Duchamp in the United States. In Zurich, seeking treatment for depression and suicidal impulses, he had met Tristan Tzara, whose radical ideas thrilled Picabia. -Picabia continued his involvement in the Dada movement through 1919 in Zürich and Paris, before breaking away from it after developing an interest in Surrealist art. He denounced Dada in 1921.

Wiener Werkstätte

-It was a studio involved in jewelery making, the production of fabrics for dressmaking, the construction of furniture, ceramics and other art forms which could be incorporated into daily life. -The Wiener Werkstätte aimed at pursuing elegance, a reduced vocabulary of form, functionality and appropriateness, which stood in contrast to the imitation style of Historicism. -The result were: simplified shapes, geometric patterns, and minimal decoration.

The Difference Between Cubism and Futurism

-Futurism deliberately provoked unsuspecting art audiences, scandalized the conservative middle class, and lived out any government's worst nightmare: the artist as a political activist. -Cubist art and artists were quiet, intellectual, and cerebral, dedicated to furthering a revolution about art. -They worked in isolation (Picasso and Braque) or in small groups and showed their art in conventional arenas, whether in galleries or in exhibitions. -The Futurists, on the other hand, were strident, noisy, confrontational, and political. -They directed their art and efforts to a mass audience, in contrast to Cubism's out-reach to elite art-educated audiences. -Futurist art is optical and not intellectual, always related to things that move, that are directional and dynamic, colorful and fragmented.

Futurism

-Futurism was the first movement to aim directly and deliberately at a mass audience, principally an urban audience. The key to understanding Futurism is the idea of a renewal of human sensibility brought about by modern science. -Addressing a public audience, in contrast to the privacy of Picasso and Braque, the Futurists sought to involve the public in an instant reaction to social provocation, rather than in a slow and gentile contemplation of art forms. -It would be a mistake to assume that the Futurists were also progressive in their political ideas. In many ways they were very regressive and had pro-military, anti-female notions that would eventually lead many of them into Fascism. -Ignorant of the destructive power of the machines they worshiped, the artists preached violence and believed in the virtue of destruction for the purpose of sweeping away the old, with the hope of bringing industrialization about, dragging Italy into the modern world. They wrote polemics against women and museums, everything that was tried tradition and wrote hymns to the God of Speed and worshiped the new idol, the fast motorcar. -The key to the Futurist painting was their idea of universal dynamism. The Futurists endeavored to express the essence of dynamic sensation itself and saw the world as a place of flux, of movement, and of interpenetration. All objects in space and time were drawn together in a universal dynamism, pushed by the speed of the machine.

George Grosz

-George Grosz, a painter and graphic artist, was closely associated with the Herzfelde brothers. He attacked corrupt society with satire and caricatures and advocated a classless social system. His drawings project the angry intensity of deep political convictions in what he perceived to be a decadent, degenerate milieu. -Grosz considered himself a propagandist of the social revolution. He not only depicted victims of the catastrophe of the First World War - the disabled, crippled, and mutilated - he also portrayed the collapse of capitalist society and its values. -His wartime line drawings show him to be a master of caricature. In a 1925 portfolio of prints Grosz ridiculed Hitler by dressing him in a bearskin, a swastika tattooed on his left arm. Until 1927 he also painted large allegorical paintings that focused on the plight of Germany; Count Harry Kessler, a leading intellectual and collector, called these 'modern history pictures.'

Giorgio de Chirio

-Giorgie de Chirio was declared the first realist painter. -He painted hauntingly empty vistas of Italian Renaissance palaces and squares that possess an intense melancholy. -Vacant buildings, harsh shadows, deep tilted perspective and enigmatic images convey emotions far removed from ordinary experience. -The founder of the Metaphysical art movement, his work implied a metaphysical questioning of reality. He was influenced by the writings of Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer.

Guillaume Apollinaire

-Guillaume Apollinaire, a French poet, who was closely associated with the cubists and Marinetti, championed African culture, defined the principles of cubist painting and literature and also observed that " catalogs, posters, advertisements of all types contain the poetry of our epoch. -He had a unique contribution to graphic design in the form of his 1918 book called Calligrammes. This book contained poems in which letterforms are arranged to form a visual design, figure or pictograph. He explored the potential fusion of poetry and painting in these poems by introducing the concept of simultaneity to the time- and sequence bound typography of the printed page.

Hannah Höch

-Hannah Hoch went beyond illustrating Dada principles—Haussmann's practices—to acting them out in the dazzling photomontage , Cut with a Kitchen Knife Through Germany's Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch (1919). -Sometimes translated as "incision," the "cut" could certainly refer to the act of (not)creating a photo - montage, Dada Style. Devoid of perspective or ground line or unity or central focus or composition or mean - ing, this photomontage also undercuts the idea that a photograph is a seamless record of the reality seen through the camera's lens. -The deliberate jumble of unrelated images pulled apparently at random from the popular culture of a Germany in turmoil are not fitted together but are pasted down without consideration to making a new singular images from a collection of borrowed parts. -These artists organized their materials around a central unity or a coherent meaning. Hoch, by allow - ing the ground of the support to show through, reveals the inherent artificiality of art and the need of the human mind to impose meaning. -Unlike Braque and Picasso's collages, Hoch's photomontage does not re-make language by creating a new semiotics. -She deliberately disavows any semblance of meaning and any possibility of a coherent reading.

Avant-Garde Modernism

-Ideas about form and composing space from the new painting and sculpture were applied to problems of design. -period if great idealism -role to play in society, to improve quality -alleviate societies ills + conflicts with design -form + composition being applied to something useful

Abstract Photography Francis Bruguiere

-In 1911, Francis Bruguiere moved to Manhattan es - tablishing a studio on 16 West 49th Street, appear - ing at the outset of a boom in performing arts and fashion photography driven by the theater and by the artistic ambitions of magazines of the time. -Bruguiere's earliest photographs bear the hallmarks of pictorialist style: the idealization of scenes by soft focus, manipulation of the negative to perfect the beauty of portraits, an interest in exotic por - trayals of dancers, plein air nudes. Throughout the 1920s his photographs moved from pictorialist mystification to modernist abstraction. -He was particularly interested in double exposure, montage, and, later in the decade, the production of abstract constructivist images made of geometric patterns of light. Spending the final years of his life in London, Bruguiere devoted himself to cease - less experimentation in multiple exposure montage prints of persons and places, stylist modernist advertising imagery, abstract short films examining the play of light on cut paper forms, and solarized figure studies in the style of Man Ray.

The Futurist Manifesto

-Italy at the time had fallen behind Germany, France, and England both economically and culturally. The Italian public needed to become involved in the technological progress of the 20th century. -Fillippo Marinetti felt that the only way to achieve this aim was through the World War I, which at the time was looming at the horizon. He thought, a Great War could bring about such changes. -'We want to glorify war - the world's only hygiene,'' proclaimed the Futurist manifesto. -Marinetti exalted the dynamism of the modern world. His aim was to detach completely from the history and look to the future. He called for the creation of a new aesthetic of speed and energy through celebration of aggressive war machines.

The Beggarstaff Brothers

-James Pryde and William Nicholson collaborated on poster designed under the pseudonym of "The Beggarstaff Brothers" from 1894-1899. -They were designers who set out to prove how striking a poster can be in simple flat areas and limited to few colors. -No attempt was made at realism. -Their designed represented frank statements of the two-dimensional limitations of paint applied on a flat plane and gave the illusion of colored paper cut-outs posted in a harmonious composition. -push line of reduction too far for what society was ready for -were not successful -were influential through "collage" laying different layers of paper in field together -wasn't flattering enough -The Beggarstaffs were known for their new technique, collage, using cut pieces of paper moved around on a board leaving a figure incomplete for the viewer to decipher. -They completely ignored the floral trend of art nouveau, which made their work although an artistic success, a financial disaster. -One of the posters they lost money on was their most famous poster, Don Quixote, made for Sir Henry Irving's production at the Lyceum Theatre. -It was never printed because the client decided, "it had a bad likeness." Incidents like these caused the partnership to split and left each artist to work on their own.

John Heartfield

-John Heartfield, Weiland Herzfelde and George Grosz, all of which were Berlin Dadaists, held vigorous revolutionary political beliefs and oriented many of their artistic activities toward visual communications to raise public consciousness and promote social change . -Heartfield used harsh disjunctions of photomontage as a potent propaganda weapon. He also introduced innovations in the preparation of mechanical art for the offset printing of his posters, book and magazine covers, political illustrations and cartoons. His montages are the most urgent in the history of the technique. -Heartfield didn't take photographs or retouched im - ages, but worked directly with glossy prints acquired from magazines and newspapers. He only occasion - ally commissioned a needed image from a photogra - pher. -Heartfield's work was profoundly influential on modern advertising, which has borrowed his idea of photomontage, combining seemingly unrelated images in a single ad to evoke fascination, shock, humor, con - vey a unique message. -He also had an enormous impact on the generation of young artists who discovered his work in the 1950s and 1960s. Among the artists who drew upon Heartfield's techniques and artistic philosophy are the pop-artists, including the iconic Andy Warhol .

Juan Gris

-Juan Gris, a major painter in in the development of Synthetic Cubism combined compositions from nature with an independent structural design of the picture space. -He firstly planned a rigorous architectural structure using golden section proportions and modular composition grids. -Then the subject matter was laid on this design scheme. -Gris's unique approach had a major influence on the development of geometric art and design. -His paintings were a kind of halfway house between an art based on perception and one that's realized by the relationships between geometric shapes.

Kazimir Malevich

-Kazimir Malevich was a Russian artist of Ukrainian birth, whose career coincided with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and its social and cultural aftermath. Malevich was the founder of the artistic and philosophical school of Suprematism, and his ideas about forms and meaning in art would eventually form the theoretical underpinnings of non-objective, or abstract, art making. -Malevich worked in a variety of styles, but his most important and famous works concentrated on the exploration of pure geometric forms (squares, triangles, and circles) and their relationships to each other and within the pictorial space. -Malevich worked in a variety of styles, from Impressionism to Cubo-Futurism, arriving eventually at Suprematism - his own unique philosophy of painting and art perception. -Malevich was a prolific writer. His treatises on philosophy of art address a broad spectrum of theoretical problems and laid the conceptual basis for non-objective art both in Europe and the United States. -Malevich conceived of an independent comprehensive abstract art practice before its definitive emergence in the United States. His stress on the independence of geometric form influenced many generations of abstract artists.

Kurt Schwitters

-Kurt Schwitters, from Hannover in Germany, create a nonpolitical offshoot of Dada, which he dubbed as Merz. -He gave Merz meaning as the title of a one-man art movement. It began 1919, his Merz pictures were collage materials to compose color against colour, form against form and textures against textures. His complex designs combined Dada's elements of nonsense, surprise and chance with strong design properties. -Between the years of 1923 and 1932, Schwitters published 24 issues the periodical Merz. It was during this time that he ran a successful graphic design studio and the Hanover employed him as a typography consultant for several years. -But when he tried to join the Dada movement, labeling himself as the artist who nails his images together, he was refused membership for being to conservative. -Schwitters wrote and designed poetry that played sense against nonsense. He defined poetry as the interaction of elements such as letters, syllables, words and sentences. In the 1920's his works was influenced by the development of constructivism. In 1940 he fled to the British Isles where he spent his last years and reverted to traditionalist painting.

Lissitzky's influence in the world of graphic design cannot be overstated. He utilized a pared-down palette of primary colors, black and white, text, and basic forms - shapes both real as well as invented geometric constructions - to tell stories and to make very powerful political statements.

-Lissitzky joined editor Llya Ehrenburg in creating the trilingual journal called Veshch (Object.) -The title was chosen because the editors believed that art meant the creation of new objects. Lissitzky and Ehrenburg realized that parallel yet isolated art and design movements had evolved during the seven-year period of separation when Europe and Russia were bled by revolution and war. They perceived Veshch as a meeting point for new works from different nations. -The first cover shows how Lissitzky constructed his designs on a dynamic diagonal axis with asymmetrical balancing of elements and weight placed high on the page.

Lissitzky

-Lissitzky often used drafting instrumental construction and paste up to achieve his designs. Lissitzky did not decorate his books; he constructed it by visually programming the total object. He designed exclusively with elements from the metal type case. -His ultimate intent was for type to compliment the poems as "a violin accompanies a piano". Spatial composition, contrast between elements, the relationship of forms to the negative space of the page and the understanding of such printing possibilities as overlapping color were important in Lizzitsky's work. -Lissitzky's book format for The Isms of Art was an important step toward the creation of a visual program for organizing information. The three-column horizontal grid structure used for the title page and the three-column vertical grid structure utilized for the text.

Frottage

-Max Ernst invented frottage, a drawing technique in which textures are copied onto paper by first laying the paper over a texture, then rubbing across the texture with a soft drawing instrument. -Pencil rubbings of wood grain, fabric or leaves were explored. The resulting replica of the texture was then employed in Ernst's collage work. -As he looked at his rubbings, his imagination invented images in them, similar to how one sees images in clouds. This enabled him to incorporate a variety of images onto his work in unexpected ways. This technique has been used extensively in illustration, painting and printmaking.

Ernst and Surrealism

-Max Ernst is recognized as one of the most influential artists, and credited for many techniques and ideas still used today. -Surrealism involved dreamlike images or hallucinations and incorporated Freudian ideals such as the mystery of the unconscious. One particular piece Ernst completed integrated both Surrealist and Dadaist methods; "The Elephant Celebes" is one of Ernst's most famous pieces that also hold fragments of his unconscious that pertain to Europe and the war. -Sigmund Freud was one of Max Ernst's greatest influences. While studying psychology, Ernst read Freud's work, mainly pertaining to dreams as subconscious desires. Ernst, along with others, believed one's unconscious could be revealed through works of surrealism.

Analytical Cubism

-Pablo Picasso, a Spanish painter, applied elements of ancient Iberian and African tribal art to the human figure. The boldly chiseled geometric planes of African masks, fabrics and sculptures were found to be an exciting revelation to Picasso and his friends. One of these friends, and a close associate, was Georges Braque. It was their innovation to developed Cubism into an art movement that replaced the rendering of appearances with the endless possibilities of inventing form. Their work was dubbed Analytical Cubism. -This initial stage of Cubism stretched from 1910 to 1912. It was during this period that the planes of the involved artistic subject matter were analyzed from different points of view. These perceptions were then used to construct a painting composed of rhythmic geometric planes. -The real subject matter of this stage was shape, colors, textures and values used in spatial relationships.

Photomontage

-Photomontage is a form of collage which involves creating a composite image by combining elements from several different photographs. -Individual examples of photomontage often achieve their effect by juxtaposing unusual or contrasting objects or concepts in order to startle or provoke the viewer. In its manipulation of the viewer's perception of reality, the photomontage was a precursor of the modern-day photo-shopped digital image. -The artists of the Dada Movement pushed the photomontage to the forefront of modern art, and, in their hands, it became a powerful form of political criticism. -Heartfield's photomontages were particularly politically provocative and often used images from political journals to satirize figures in the German government.

Synthetic Cubism

-Picasso and Braque introduced paper collage elements into their work in 1912. Collage allowed free composition independent of the subject matter and declared the reality of the painting as a two-dimensional object. -The texture of the collage signified objects. In 1913 Synthetic Cubism developed from Analytical Cubism. Drawing form past observations, the cubists invented forms that were signs rather than representations of the subject matter. -The essence of an object and its basic characteristics; rather than its outward appearance was portrayed.

Tristan Tzara

-Poet and tirelessly energetic propagandist for Dada, Tristan Tzara, whose given name was Samuel Rosenstock, was born into a well-off Jewish family in Romania. -In 1915, Tzara's parents sent him to Zurich, where he enrolled at a university to study philosophy. His first poem signed with the name Tristan Tzara (tzara being the Romanian for land) appeared in October of that year. Romania did not enter the war until 1916. In the fall of 1916 he received papers granting him a deferral of military service, and in 1917 he was relieved from military duty. -Shortly after his arrival in Zurich, Tzara attended the opening night of the Cabaret Voltaire. Over the course of the year in 1916, Tzara's activities at the Cabaret of reciting his poems and those of others led to a more active role in coordinating and planning Dada events. -He also became interested in African poetry. He incorporated into his poetry scraps of sound, bits of newspaper fragments, and phrases resembling African dialects. Beginning in November 1916, Tzara collected and translated African and Oceanic poems from anthropology magazines in the Zurich library. -It was through Tzara's efforts that Dada in Zurich reached a broad international audience, and he has often been described as embodying the migratory quality of Dada.

Salvador Dalí

-Salvador Dali was a theatrical Spanish painter who influenced graphic design in two ways: * His deep perspectives inspired designers to bring vast depth to the flat, printed page. * His naturalistic approach to simultaneity has been frequently imitated in posters and editorial images.

The Futurists attempted to express motion, energy, and cinematic sequence. They called it simultaneity which was an expression of concurrent existence or occurrence.

-The Futurists realized that the vocabulary of Cubism could be translated and transformed to yet another purpose. The idea of multiple perspectives became codes for dynamic movement. The Futurists sliced through their objects with straight lines—"lines of force"—that expressed the impact of the machine upon the modern culture. -The lines represented many things, the excitement of life in the city, the severe straight lines of the machines so admired by the Futurists, and the fracturing of objects by light and by movement. -Giacomo Balla's painting of Abstract Speed— The Car has Passed By of 1913 forces the eye to move from right to left, following the direction of the spinning wheels.

Ver Sacrum

-The Secessionist style was exhibited in a magazine that the group produced, called Ver Sacrum, which featured highly decorative works representative of the period. -like minded artists to do cover + layout magazine every issue -wide variety of style -use of white space in page layouts, sleek coated stock, and unusual production methods achieved an original visual elegance

Surrealism

-The biomorphic forms and open compositions of these artists were incorporated into product and graphic design. -Surrealism's impact on graphic design has been diverse and provided poetic example of the liberation of the human spirit. -It pioneered new techniques and demonstrated how fantasy ad intuition could be expressed in visual terms. -Unfortunately, the ideas and images of surrealism have been exploited and trivialized frequently in the mass media.

Influence of Expressionism

-The techniques and subject matter of expressionism influenced graphic illustration and poster art. The emphasis expressionists placed on social and political activism continues to provide a viable model for graphic designers addressing problems of the human condition and environment. Art from children, unschooled artists, non-European cultures and tribal art served as sources of inspiration to this movement. Theories about color and form advanced by Kandinsky and Klee became important foundations for design and design education through their teaching at the Bauhaus.

The Context

-The turn of the century heralded the emergence of radical political, social, cultural and economic changes. -While a new revolutionary attitude cast a dark shadow all over Europe, new technology in highly sophisticated new products; such as motor vehicles, aircrafts, motion pictures, telecommunications, tanks, machine guns, chemical and biological warfare, had changed forever all aspects of social life. -Artists tried to confront the new reality of power relationships. Something radically new, bold, and revolutionary was needed. -Futurists asked artists, poets, and designers to join them in their struggle for destruction of outdated assumptions about vision and language. -To celebrate change, originality and industrialism.

René Magritte

-Through creating common images and placing them in extreme contexts, Magritte sough to have his viewers question the ability of art to truly represent an object. -In his paintings, he often played with the perception of an image and the fact that the painting of the image could never actually be the object. His artistic interpretations influenced many modern artists, including Andy Warhol, Jan Verdoodt and Jasper Johns. His art, which was especially popular during the 1960's, has also influenced numerous songs, movies, and books.

Style

-Unlike other movements, there is not one style that unites the work of all artists who were part of the Vienna Secession. -Secession artists were concerned, above all else, with exploring the possibilities of art outside the confines of academic tradition. -They hoped to create a new style that owed nothing to historical influence. In this way they were very much in keeping with the iconoclastic spirit of turn-of-the-century Vienna (the time and place that also saw the publication of Freud's first writings).

Vienna Secession

-Vienna had become a Mecca for non-conformist young German speaking artists, who were dissatisfied with the art establishment's taste and its stranglehold on exhibition venues. -place for innovative ideas -artists get annoyed - their art was not accepted -decided to break away from Viennese Art Association -innovative styles of typography -youth movement -looking foward -trying to create own visual language and known form -shapes are not typical -how far can you go with abstraction and stylization? -optical -pattern - planes

Der Blaue Reiter

-Wassily Kandinsky, a Russion émigré, was one of the founding members of Der Blaue Reiter along with Paul Klee, a Swiss artist. -Due to them being much less inclined to express the agony of the human condition, they sought a spiritual reality beyond the outward appearance of nature and explored problems of form and color -Kandinsky led the group and so became the leading advocate of art that could reveal the spiritual nature of people through the orchestration of colour, line and form on the canvas. He compared colour and form to music and its ability to express deep human emotion. This belief in the autonomy and spiritual values of color led to the courageous emancipation of his paintings from motifs and representational elements. -Klee synthesized elements inspired by all the modern movements as well as children's and naïve art, achieving intense subjective power while contributing to the objective formal vocabulary of modern art. His subject matter was translated into graphic signs and symbols with strong communicative power.

Man Ray

-With his rayographs, as Man Ray called them, he had unlearned painting by making "paintings with light." -To Tristan Tzara, a leader in the dada movement, he had transformed a machine-age art from mechanical to mysterious: common objects were "set, softened, and filtered like a head of hair through a comb of light." -He further removed photography from any suspicion that it offered an objective rendering of the world by perfecting solarization, which created demarcating lines around images by controlled introduction of light during the developing process. -Man Ray's reputation among French artists as well as in the fashion industry grew even as American critics, dubious about photography as art, viewed him as an illusionist, a trickster, and an entrepreneur. -His success, however, was undeniable. The subjects of his portraits included Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway. -His images of women--nudes, faces, complex distortions, punning surreal compositions, such as the famous Le Violon d'Ingres (1924) with its violin F-shaped sound holes on his model's naked back--remain among his most influential works.

Filippo Tomasso Marinetti

-With the publication of the sound poem Zang Tumb Tuuum (1912), a graphic account of the Battle of Tripoli, by the poet-artist Marinetti, the modern visual communication was born. -Marinetti's typographical innovations, within the parameters of graphic design, introduced a powerful technique for representation of the clamorous hum-drum of modern life, which used expressive typography with poetic impressions to illustrate the repetition of the drumbeat of war. -With great ingenuity and visual imagination, he composed the type of varying sizes into split columns, horizontal and vertical elements, integrated at right angles to each other, with fragmented words into letters which amplified the onomatopoeic effect. -He wrote: I am against what is known as the harmony of a setting. When necessary, we shall use three or four columns to a page and twenty different typefaces. We shall represent hasty perceptions in italic and express a scream in bold types... a new painterly, typographic representation will born out of the printed pages. -The graphic technique and formal composition of this work became remarkably influential in modernist print and the emerging culture of the European Avant-garde.

World War I

-World War I took the lives of more than 9 million soldiers; 21 million more were wounded. -Civilian casualties numbered close to 10 million. The two nations most affected were Germany and France, each of which sent some 80 percent of their male populations between the ages of 15 and 49 into battle. --The first global war also helped to spread one of the world's deadliest global pandemics, the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, which killed an estimated 20 to 50 million people. -"The first modern war." -Technologies like machine guns, tanks, aerial combat and radio communications were introduced on a massive scale during World War I

Vorticism

-balancing out bad parts of machine -move on to new aesthetic from Victorian Age to Modernity -A British artistic and literary movement, founded in 1914 by the editor of Blast magazine, Wyndham Lewis, and members of the Rebel art centre. It encompassed not only painting, drawing and printmaking but also the sculpture of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Jacob Epstein and the photographs of Alvin Langdon Coburn. Notable literary al - lies were Ezra Pound, who coined the term Vorticism early in 1914, and T. S. Eliot. -Vorticism was seen by Lewis as an indepen - dent alternative to Cubism, Futurism and Expressionism. -The Vorticists wanted to oust all lingering traces of the Victorian age, liberating their country from what they saw as the stultify - ing legacy of the past. In giant black letters, Blast's inventive typography roared: 'Blast years 1837 to 1900.' Using humour 'like a bomb' to ridicule British inertia, which was preventing any realization that a new century demanded a bracing and innova - tive art. -The Vorticists wanted to place the machine age at the very centre of their work, and Blast proposed that they fill their art with 'the forms of machinery, factories, new and vaster buildings, bridges and works'. -They criticized the Futurists for making their paintings 'too "picturesque", melodramatic and spectacular, besides being undigested and naturalistic to a fault'. They also rejected the Futurists' emphasis on blurred movement in their attempts to depict the sensation of speed. Lewis and his allies sought clarity of definition, enclosing their forms with strong contours that often gave Vorticist pictures an almost sculptural solidity -Familiarity with the results of the Industrial Revolution made the Vorticists view the machine world with far less eager excitement than the Futurists. -Their undoubted involvement with the age of mechanization was coupled with an aware - ness of its darker side. There is a curious innocence about Marinetti's admiration for the racing automobile, whereas Lewis saw the machine-age metropolis as an 'iron jungle', a severe and ferocious place where city dwellers were de - humanized and diminished, as exemplified in The Crowd (c. 1915). -Vorticist images possess a cool, clear-cut consciousness of the impersonal harshness of the 20th-century world, and in this respect they prophesy the destructive machine power that became so horrifyingly evident in World War I.

El Lissitzky

-based on architecture and map -focus on Russian constructivism -utilizing art for social and political change -forms convey universal meaning -meant to be accessable -more typography -designer not designer - but constructure -Russian avant-garde artist El Lissitzky, made a career of utilizing art for social and political change. Although often highly abstract and theoretical, Lissitzky's work was able speak to the prevailing political discourse of his native Russia, and then the nascent Soviet Union. -Following Kazimir Malevich in the Suprematist idiom, Lissitzky used color and basic shapes to make strong political statements. Lissitzky also challenged conventions concerning art, and his Proun series of two-dimensional Suprematist paintings sought to combine architecture and three-dimensional space with traditional, albeit abstract, two-dimensional imagery. A teacher for much of his career and ever an innovator, Lissitzky's work spanned the media of graphic design, typography, photography, photomontage, book design, and architectural design. The work of this cerebral artist was a force of change, deeply influencing movements and related figures such as De Stijl and the Bauhaus. -Lissitzky believed that art and life could mesh and that the former could deeply affect the latter. He identified the graphic arts, particularly posters and books, and architecture as effective conduits for reaching the public. Consequently, his designs, whether for graphic productions or buildings, were often unfiltered political messages. Despite being comprised of rudimentary shapes and colors, a poster by Lissitzky could make a strong statement for political change and a building could evoke ideas of communality and egalitarianism.

MAIN INSIGHTS

-break with styles and traditions of art nouveau -help functionality of object -early ideas of modernism and modernist design -Pioneering designers in Germany, Scotland, and Austria broke with Art Nouveau to chart new directions. -Their concern for spatial relationships, inventive form, and functionality formed the groundwork for design in the new century -Pictorial modernism - art nouveau->modernism -simpler image -reductive design - How much can you take away?

Constructivism

-communicate message to general public -normal citizen being the most important person not out-of-touch royals -"design can change peoples lives" -combination of cubism and futurism -In the early 20th century Russia was torn by WW1 and the Russian Revolution, during which Czar Nicholas the 2nd (1868-1918) was overthrown. The Red Army of the Bolsheviks emerged victorious by 1920. -In the midst of political trauma, a brief flowering of creative art in Russia had an international influence on twentieth century graphic design. Beginning with Marinetti's Russian lectures, the decade saw Russians absorb Cubism and Futurism. Symbolically, the Russian Futurist books were a reaction against the values of Czarist Russia. The Handmade additions expressed the poverty of peasant society as well as the meager resources of the artists and writers.

Magazine

-communicates ideas across different movements -it's about being difficult -challenge artists -looking beyond traditional process for art

Picasso

-cubism -different perspectives -"primitive art"

Kolo Moser

-designer -no longer joyus maidens and flowing hair -different approach to drawing figure -not about legibility

Communism would create a new order, technology would provide for society's needs, and the "constructor" would forge a unity between art and technology.

-designer not designer - but constructure -beat the whites with the red edge - key image of revolution and communism -becomes more structured -His 1919 poster "Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge" is dynamically divided into white and black areas wherein Suprematist design elements transformed into political symbolism. A red wedge slashing into a white circle symbolizes support for the "red" Bolshevik against the "white" forces of Kerenski. -Lissitzky saw Russian Revolution as a new beginning for mankind. Communism and social engineering created a new order where technology would provide for society's needs and the artist/designer would forge a unity between art and technology by constructing a new world of objects to provide mankind with a richer society and environment. -This idealism led him to put increasing emphasis on graphic design. His energy and range of experimentation with photomontage, printmaking, graphic design, and painting enabled him to become the main medium through which Supremacist and Constructivist ideas flowed into Western Europe.

Expressionism

-feeling/emotion -about subjectivity -depict subjective emotions and personal responses to subjects -color, drawing, + proportion were exaggerated or distorted -line and color were often pronounced -color and value contrasts were intensified

Futurism

-figurative depiction -only depicting emotion -destroy past and rebuild society around machine innovations: -happenings -social provokations -art

Supremitism

-finding pure form -elementary form -universal way to connect people -stripped down of everything

Typography

-letter unit of illustration -expressive visual form -building block of something they could express something with

The Glasgow Style

-long, long, rectilinear lines, reaching up as if appealing to the heavens -offset within this lattice are subtly elegant curves and natural designs such as the Mackintosh rose. -Curves and colors are sparse against the geometric backdrop and so seem accentuated -figure more abstracted -flat forms in creating face -dis-embodied head -restrained use of colors -much more vertical and rectangular -proportion goes through illustration, shapes, typography -becomes more mysterious -minimal approach to decoration and design

German Expressionism

-movement of rebellion -This movement was characterized by artists' sudden tendency to depict subjective emotions and personal responses to subjects and events, rather that objective reality. This movement emerged as an organized movement in Germany before World War 1. -Colour drawing, and proportion were often exaggerated or distorted, and symbolic content was very important. Line and color were often pronounced and colour and value contrasts were intensified. -Thickly layered paint, loose brushwork and bold contour drawing were used to achieve the desired tactile properties. -Lithographs, woodcuts and poster were considered very valuable and important mediums by the expressionists. -Revolting against conventional aesthetic forms and cultural norms, expressionists felt a deep sense of social crisis. -Many German expressionists rejected the authority of the military, education, and government. -They felt deep empathy for the poor and the social outcasts. -These people became their most favoured subject for their work. -The expressionists' belief in art as a beacon pointing towards a new social order and improved human condition was fueled by intense idealism.

WWI

-much more devastating to Europeans -changing the publics opinion -garnering support -posters were a propaganda tool to either join forces or sacrifice resources, tools, or money -demonizing enemy - has to be evil to fight -symbolism and metaphor used

Lucian Bernhard

-no ambiguity at all -Plakastil - stark imagery + minimal lettering -about color and scale -related to product known for some typefaces (wobbly style) -The Priester poster was designed by Lucian Bernhard in 1906 for a poster competition sponsored by Berlin's Priester Matches Company. The poster won first prize, and at the age of 18 Bernhard had created the first Sachplakat, or object poster, which spawned the movement Plakatstil (poster style). -This new style would revolutionize the advertising world by utilizing bold colour, stark imagery and minimal lettering, a drastic change from that era's visually complex style of Art Nouveau.

Introduction to Surrealism

-not a style or matter of aesthetic -dream-like images -way of thinking, knowing, feeling -subconscious -With roots in Dada, Surrealism entered the Paris scene in 1924, searching for the "more real than real world behind the real" - the world of intuition, dreams, and the unconscious realm explored by Sigmund Freud. -André Breton was the founder of Surrealism and imbued the word with all the magic and dreams, the spirit of rebellion, and the mysteries of the subconscious in his Manifesto du Surréalisme in 1924. -Tristan Tzara joined Breton, Paul Aluard and Louis Aragon in Zurich where he stirred the group on towards scandal and rebellion. These young poets rejected the rationalism and formal conventions dominating postwar creative activities in Paris. -They sought ways to make new truths, to reveal the language of the soul. Surrealism was not a style or a matter of aesthetic, but rather a way of thinking and knowing, a way of feeling, a way of life. -Dada contrasts heavily with Surrealism, as Dada was negative, destructive and perpetually exhibitionist and Surrealism professes a poetic faith in man and his spirit. Humanity could be liberated form social and moral conventions. Intuition and feeling could be freed. The writers experimented with stream-of-consciousness writing, or automatism, to seek an uninhibited truth.

Peter Behrens

-rationality -idea of from of object is relating/coming out of its function -becomes connected to AEG -teachings were foundation for bauhaus -Peter Behrens' rational approach announced the need for form to emerge from function rather than being an added embellishment. -was the first to pursue a seamless integration of visual communications and architecture and was an inspiration to the founders of the modernist movement -he realized that he was more interested in simplified geometric forms than the more organic and curvilinear forms

Cezanne

-realism/perspectives are shifting -uncertainty -how we see things

Cubism

-rejecting renaissance perspective -multiple perspectives at once -They perceived the limitation of perspective as an obstacle preventing art from progressing. -Their opinions were restricted by the fact that depicted perspective could only work from one viewpoint seeing as the image is drawn from a fixed position; thus freezing the result. -Cubists wanted to create art that reached beyond the rigid geometry of perspective. -They were determined to introduce the idea of "relativity" which is how an artist perceives and selects elements from the subject, combining their observations and memories into one concentrated image. -It was this flat abstract approach that appealed to the cubists. -analytical cubism - "relativity" - painting Synthetic Cubism - mixed media and collage - about texture - essence of object/scene

The Glasgow School

-scottland -starts off with 4 designs which were very versatile - in what they created applied philosophies to all form of art -couples 2 men + 2 women

Käthe Kollwitz

-showing women and children in society -what was happening in the streets -emotionally powerful -Expressionists' concern with the human condition and its representation in easily understood graphic imagery is outstandingly evident in drawings, prints, sculptures and posters by Kathe Schmidt Kollwitz. -She was married to a physician who ran a clinic for the working class in Berlin. Kathe gained first-hand knowledge of the working poor. She documented their plight in figurative works of great emotional power. Her posters convey a great sympathy from the suffering of the women and children that she documented.

Julius Klinger

-started out as vienna succession designer -Julius Klinger was an Austrian Painter, draftsman, illustrator, commercial graphic artist, typographer and writer. In 1895, he found his first employment with the Vienna fashion magazine Wiener Mode. -Here he made acquaintance with Koloman Moser, who later would be his teacher. In 1896 he moved to Munich where he worked as an illustrator for the Meggendorfer Blätter and other art journals. -From 1897 to 1902 he was a collaborator to the Jugendstil magazine Die Jugend. In 1897 he relocated to Berlin, where he worked extensively as a commercial graphic artist until 1915. -Together with the printing house Hollerbaum und Schmidt, he developed a new fashion of functional poster design that soon gained him international reputation. Being Jewish, Klinger was deported by the Nazis to Minsk on June 2, 1942, where he was killed the same year.

Ludwig Hohlwein

-still painterly quality -tonal figures -but about determining what to show -A leading Plakatstil designer, Ludwig Hohlwein (1874-1949) of Munich, began his career as a graphic illustrator with work commissioned by Jugend magazine as early as 1904. -During the first half of the century, Hohlwein's graphic art evolved with changing social conditions. The Beggarstaffs were his initial inspiration, and in the years before World War I Hohlwein took great delight in reducing his images to flat shapes. -Unlike the Beggarstaffs and his Berlin rival Bernhard, however, Hohlwein applied a rich range of texture and decorative pattern to his images. -Many of his early posters were for clothing manufacturers and retail stores, and it seemed that Hohlwein never repeated himself. -In the posters that he designed during World War I, Hohlwein began to combine his simple, powerful shapes with more naturalistic imagery.

Swiss Sachplakat

-travel posters -hyper-real direct poster style

Fortunato Depero

-uses aesthetic for something more communicative -useful in real world -Fortunato Depero was not one of the leading members Futurism movement whose work incorporated many of the futurism ideas particularly in relation to integration of various forms of art. -In 1915, Depero and Giacomo Balla wrote a manifesto entitled Ricostruzione futurista dell'universo or "Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe", in which they called for applying all kinds of media in art, for creation of dynamic 'plastic complexes' that would give new life to the world. -Depero relied more on old fashioned type styles, but injected an exuberance bathed in a Mediterranean palate that introduced a playfully dynamic Futurist aesthetic into commercial and political advertising. -He adamantly rejected classical types in favour of eccentric streamlined lettering that symbolised speed. Fortunato Depero was amongst the artists who applied futurist philosophy to graphic and advertising design. -He produced a dynamic body of work in poster, typographic and advertising design. -As a young artist, he shifted form social realism, to symbolism, to futurism and published his Depero futurista in 1927. This was a compilation of his typographical experiments, advertisements, tapestry designs and other books. -Depero worked in New York and designed covers for magazines such a Vanity Fair, Movie Makers and Sparks. The sophisticated and cosmopolitan audience nearly limited Depero, but he excelled and produced futurist work with appearance that proved somewhat influential.

New Objectivity

-way of thinking about rational approach -grid system -geometric -wanted to create identifiable mark -"branding" -appliant across everything they "touch" -high technology + innovation -how to represent that -At Dusseldorf School of Arts, Behrens (along with architect Mathieu Lauweriks) developed an approach to teaching design based on geometric composition. His grids began with a square circumscribed around a circle; numerous permutations could be made by subdividing and duplicating this basic structure. -The geometric patterns thus developed could be used to determine proportions, dimensions, and spatial divisions in the design of everything from chairs to buildings

Aleksei Gan

-working with gov't -creating for the people -texture/nature of the materials -revealing process that things are made -In an attempt to formulate constructivist ideology, Aleksei Gan wrote that tectonics, texture, and construction were the three principles of Constructivism. Tectonics represented the unification of communist ideology with visual form; texture referred to the nature of the materials and how they are used in industrial production and constructivism symbolized the creative process and the search for laws of visual organization.

Max Ernst

A restless German Dadaist, Max Ernst, used numerous techniques that have been adopted in graphic communications. He was fascinated by wood engraving and reinvented them by using collage techniques to create strange juxtapositions. These surreal collages have had a strong influence on illustration.

Vortographs

Alvin Langdon Coburn was one of the first to draw attention to the purely pictorial possibilities of patterns of nature seen under the microscope; and in 1917 he showed the first abstract photographs, which he called 'Vortographs' - from 'Vorticist', the term devised by Ezra Pound.

Dada was a hugely liberating movement that continued to inspire innovation and rebellion. Dada was born in protest against war and its destructive and exhibitionist activities became more absurd and extreme after the war ended. Controversies and disagreements broke out among its members, which caused the movement to split into two factions

André Breton, a French poet and writer, was also associated with Dada and emerged as a new leader who believed that Dada had lost it relevance. He saw the necessity of Dada taking one new directions. Having pushed its negative activities to the limit, lacking a unified leadership and with its members facing the new ideas that eventually led to surrealism, Dada foundered and ceased to exist as the movement as a whole ended in 1922. Despite of this, Heartfield and Schwitters continued to evolved and produced the finest work after the movement's demise. Dada's rejection of art and tradition enabled it to enrich the vocabulary started by Futurism and Dadaists helped strip typographic design of its traditional precepts. Dada also continued Cubism's concept of letterforms as concrete visual shapes, not just phonetic symbols.

Dadaist Methods: - Chance - Photomontage - Assemblage

Cities: - Zurich - Paris - Berlin - Hannover - Cologne - New York

Avante Garde Modern:

Constructivism, DeStijl & Bauhaus

Influence and Legacy

Expressionism & Cubism - Emphasis on Social Activism - Inspiration from "Primitive" Sources: Children's Art, Untrained Artists, non-European Cultures and Tribal Art - Theories about Color & Form became part of the Foundation for Design Education at Bauhaus - Revolutionary Alternative to Single Point Perspective - Rediscovery of Woodcut & Paper Collage mediums - Influence on Later Movements: Dada, Surrealism, Pop Art

Die Brücke

Founding members: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Max Pechstein African and oceanic art played a defining role in the artistic identity of the group. -Adopting this way of thinking, the members of the Brücke believed the source of inspiration was the human instinct and impulse. -This, if nothing else, was primitive art. -The artists wanted the group to reach a mental level where they could freely create motivated by genuine impulses behind the wild - but not aggressive - lines of African sculpture. -Inspired by Friedrich Nietzche's work, the Die Brücke artists sought a bohemian way of life. They tried to make direct contact with nature through nudism and also formed an isolated community between people and environment where they were not forced to pretend to be somebody else. -WWI introduced many new warfare methods, all of which were used in inhuman manners and on a large scale unseen up until that time. The preditory manner in which they were used resulted in massive carnage, not only against those involved in the vast fields of battle, but also seemingly against the very human existence. Naturally, the artists of the era could not remain unaffected by such an event. They all were forced by the events into realizing the vanity of their previous occupation compared to the barrage of such cruelty and war. Many of the artists of the group were drafted themselves, ultimately experiencing the horrors of the vigil in the trenches and leading die Brücke into forced dissolution.

Influence and Legacy

Futurism & Vorticism - Emphasis on Youth, Speed, Power & Technology - Expressive Typography: Asymmetrical, Unbalanced Form of Letters & Words as a way to Express the Content of the Text - Letterhead as an Avante Garde Artform - Photography as an Abstract Artform

The Influence of Modern Art

The first two decades of the 20th century were a time of upheaval and change that consequently brought radical changes to all aspect of the human condition. The social, political, cultural and economic character of life was caught in fluid turbulence. All this turmoil inspired various creative revolutions in the visual art and design industry. These movements questioned long-time values and approaches to the organization of space as well as the role of art and design in society. The traditional objective view of the world was shattered. The emerging European avant-garde did not deem the traditional representation of external appearances satisfactory enough to fulfill its needs and visions. Many artists were occupied with elemental ideas about color and form, social protest and the expression of Freudian theories and the deeply personal emotional state. Movements like Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism, De Stijl, Suprematism, Constructivism and Expressionism influenced the language and form of graphic design directly, as well as other visual communications in this century.

Ludwig Hohlwein

When Hitler rose on the German political scene, the swastika was adopted as the symbol for the Nazi party. Uniforms consisting of brown shirts with red armbands bearing a black swastika in a white circle began to appear throughout Germany as the Nazi party grew in strength and numbers. In retrospect, it seems almost inevitable that the Nazi party would commission posters from Hohlwein, for the evolution of his work coincided closely with Hitler's concept of effective propaganda. As Hitler delivered passionate radio addresses to the nation about the German "master race" and the triumphant superiority of German athletes and culture, Hohlwein posters conveyed these images all across the nation. As the Nazi dictatorship consolidated its power and World War II approached, Hohlwein moved toward a bold imperial and militaristic style of tight, heavy forms and strong tonal contrasts. Hohlwein's oeuvre evolved with changing political and social currents, and his reputation as a designer was seriously tarnished by his collaboration with the Nazis.

Marcel Duchamp

a French painter, became its most prominent visual artist. Earlier, Cubism had influenced his analysis of subjects as geometric planes, while Futurism inspired him to convey times and motion. Being Dada's most articulate spokesman, Duchamp perceived art and life were processes of random chance and willful choice. Artistic acts became matters of individual decision and selection. The public was outraged when Duchamp painted a mustache on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa. This act was not intended, however, as an attack on the Mona Lisa. Rather, it was an ingenious assault on tradition and a public that had lost the humanistic spirit of the Renaissance. This philosophy of absolute freedom allowed Duchamp to create ready-made sculptures such as a bicycle wheel mounted on a wooden stool or even exhibit found objects, such as a urinal, as art.

Art Nouveau

proved that inventing new forms, rather than copying forms from nature or historical models, was a viable approach.

Leonetto Capiello

transition art nouveau->modern period -Cappiello was an innovator and a non conformist, beginning his career imitating the style of Cheret then heavily rejecting the Art Nouveau style. He constantly evolved and innovated, in the later parts of his works from 1903-1942. -His artworks during this period focused in creating "shock" images with unconventional colors, using mythical creatures, energetic poses, and extremely simple artworks. His signature style include many instances of dark background in his poster art to make the key subject "pop" with unconventional colors.