Posters: A Concise History | Notes 3

Posters and Reality - Expressionism

pg. 135 - '...one of the principal art movements, already gaining momentum in the late nineteenth century, was to raise the level of painting to a shout. This was the movement known as Expressionism, a forceful and emotional statement in the arts, which formed an alternative the naturalism of much nineteenth-century work.'

Wozzeck (1964)
Jan Lenica

'...But the establishment of Expressionist methods of strong emotional forms and bright colours was to become a significant influence on posters.'

'For example, Jan Lenica's design for Wozzeck in 1964 descended directly from Munch's earlier design. The use of Expressionist techniques in advertising raised the shout (from which Walter Crane had recoiled) to a scream.'

pg. 143 - 'Expressionism also had its sources, and these became new influences added to the growing stylistic background of poster art. These sources included the woodcuts and prints of the Middle Ages, as well as the work of more recent artists who, though they lived and worked in Paris, had explored new avenues: Vallotton (Swiss), Van Gogh and Van Dongen (Dutch), Munch (Norwegian).

In addition, Gaughin's primitivism found a strong stylistic outlet through the work of the Die Brücke painters. '

Die Brücke (1910)
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

'Kirchner's poster is simple but also dramatic. This sense of drama - the drama of each individual - turns the poster into something much more dynamic than anything that Art Nouveau decoration could inspire.'

Two aspects of Expressionism are distinguished by Paul Fechter in Der Expressionismus (1919): an intense Expressionism characterised by extreme individualism, and the experience of a painter like Pechstein 'whose creative impulse flows from a cosmic feeling which his will fashions and transforms.'

'In Poland posters have often showed a markedly Expressionist character'

The Trial (1964)
Roman Cieslewicz

pg. 146 - 'Expressionism has found its exponents in Roman Cieslewicz - for example, his poster for Kafka's The Trial (1964) - and Waldemar Swierzy, whose posters have strong colours edged in heavy black outline.'

'Technical Expressionist devices, such as the distorted gesture or the thick brush-mark and impasto, have also left their mark on posters.'

Realism

pg. 148 - 'Many critics...have felt that the poster sinks to the level of a catalogue illustration when the product as such is merely reproduced, and that instead poster art should be an exercise in sophisticated combinations of word and image.'

Poster for Dada recital in The Hague (1923)
Kurt Schwitters and Theo Van Doesburg

pg. 158 - 'Futurism, like Cubism, was based on reality, and had a direct effect on poster design through the experiments made in typography.'

'I am against what is known as the harmony of a setting', wrote Marinetti in 1909; 'when necessary we shall use three or four columns to a page and twenty different typefaces. We shall represent hasty perceptions in italics, and express a Scream in Bold type'

'In Futurist lettering we find aggressive, phonetic symbols conveying a message, such as Basta Basta Basta, VOOOooooo,  scrAbrrRaaNNG,    SIMULTANEITA,  ESPLOSIONE, using a variety of type.'

'Futurist art was concerned with restlessness and dynamism - qualities of great importance to advertising - and it was not, in any sense, a formal art movement. Nor was Dada - a movement quite opposed to the Futurist love of war; the Dadaists registered despair at a war-mad mechanical world.'

Adolf Hitler The Superman (1932)
John Heartfield

'The sensationalism of Kurt Schwitters' trash-images and much of the subject-matters of the photo-montages of John Heartfield derive from the street and the popular press.'

Surrealism

pg. 161 - 'The Dadaists' methods of juxtaposition and surprise - the shock derived from seeing an unlikely or unexpected association of realistic elements - were also used by the Surrealists'

'Surrealism may be defined as the revelation of a new dimension of reality, made possible when the logic of reason is removed and an arbitrary association of images of the real world is substituted. This produces a fresh experience.'

pg. 165 - 'The influence of Surrealism on posters may be seen in two distinct phases. The first lasted from the 1920s until the end of the Second World War. The second starts in the 1950s and is still alive in the '70s.'

The Beast is Loose (1966)
Karel Teissig

pg. 177 - 'In Poland, besides the work of Starowieyski and Cieslewicz, that of Lenica demonstrates that the unrest revealed in the visions of the twenties and thirties has become the generally accepted language of the period of uncertainty following the Second World War.'

'The work of Tomi Ungerer also reflects a 'sick' society and is connected with that of Saul Steinberg, who was one of the first artists to re-interpret the Surrealist language in terms of the post-war society.'

'The use of Surrealism in these terms is universal, from Push Pin Studios and Peter Max in the United States to Tadanori Yokoo and Shigeru Miwa in Japan, from Armando Paeltorres in Argentine to Brattinga in Holland and Teissig in Czechoslovakia.'

Posters: A Concise History | Notes 2

Modern and Professional - Formal Art Movements

pg. 91 - 'The country that followed the developments of the Bauhaus most closely was Switzerland'

'There was no real outlet in Switzerland for advertising, and it became necessary to cultivate an artistic organisation in order to continue graphic work.'
'Switzerland, well known for its precise craftsmanship, also has a distinguished history of design. Among Swiss poster artists of international rank one can number Grasset, Steinlen and Amiet - and, more recently, Matter, Max Bill and Leupin.'

Circus Knie, 1956 / Swiss Federal Railways, 1962
Herbert Leupin

'Two elements in Swiss poster design which originate from the 1920s became known as 'New Objectivity'. They consisted of, on the one hand, of a realistic image - usually very precise - of the object together with simple, formal lettering, and on the other, a two-dimensional simplification of the object reduced to a symbol.'

'This led to the abstract poster, which, as it became accepted, was a step forward in the development of an international language of communication symbols - a necessary step among nations that have become increasingly independent through technology.'

Bunny Lake is Missing (1965)
Saul Bass
The Professional Designer

pg. 110 - 'The importance of the professional graphic designer had emerged from the interchange between the fine and applied arts at the turn of the century, which, in turn, had derived from the original design movements of the nineteenth century.'

pg. 114 - 'An inspired use of design, that extended throughout the advertising of a single product and introduced a number of outstanding visual innovations, was the series of decorative posters and murals made by Charles Loupot for the firm of St Raphael in France.'

St Raphael, 1938-57
Charles Loupot and Atelier

'Following the anonymous design, which appeared in 1928, showing two waiters bearing St Raphael Apéritif, Loupot produced a number of variations in 1938 which made a formal pattern out of the design.'

'The most interesting part of this campaign was the establishment of design in an environment - free from the conventional hoarding or billboard if necessary, and relating one mural to another over a wide landscape.
The same design was also used on cars, and buses: even to the extent of linking the movement of the bus to set the elements of design in motion.'

St Raphael mural, Charles Loupot

pg. 118 - 'Naturally the form of a poster, when it comes not only from an industrial designer but from one who is playing a part in the overall policy of design, is bound to be different from that of a poster designed by an independent artist.'

pg. 121 - 'Professional design consultants, agencies, groups of studios and companies, and the establishment of graphic-design courses for students suggest a degree of organisation that might have stifled experimentation'

Posters: A Concise History, John Barnicoat (1972)

Art Posters - The First Posters

pg. 7 - 'Art is man's creation, yet words and pictures are also the form of his language'

'If art is not primarily communication but creation, then posters, with their prescribed function of advertising and propaganda, would seem to be only a secondary art form'

'...Translating the visual art movements of the twentieth century into consumer media'

pg. 8 - '...Technically one can trace the poster's evolution through the printed page'

Théâtre de l'Opéra, Carnaval 1894, Jules Chéret

pg. 12 - 'This is the reason Chéret has become known as the first name in posters. It is not that his designs are masterpieces of the art of advertising, but that is posters, over a thousand of them, are magnificent works of art.

Instead of re-interpreting the great murals of the past for the public of his day by creating large salon canvases, he found a new place for his work - the street.'

'Chéret's posters appeared as a new vital art form'

'Writers like Joris-Karl Huysmans and Edmond de Goncourt, as well as countless critics and art-historians of the time, have drawn attention to the explosion of colour created by Chéret'

'It is because of the material success of this public display of fine art that posters become known as the art gallery of the street'

pg. 16 - 'His posters bring together a traditional technique and appreciation of great mural art, but also that essential ingredient - the feel of the popular idiom.'

Alhambra Theatre, Leicester Square
London, 1899 (Aerofilms)

Posters and Symbolism

pg. 48 - '...Symbolist art affected poster design by reintroducing iconography as a pictorial element.'

'To the nineteenth century, with its veneers of propriety, it was possible to say something of those areas of human experience that were generally left to the imagination'

pg. 61 - Referencing Hippy Posters - 'In presenting a confused pattern - which may seem a contradictory element when dealing with communications - the artist is saying 'enjoy - let the effect ride over you - through you - use it - live it'

pg. 64 - 'This is the key to many poster designs of the 1960s - from the commercial posters advocating the 'consumer society' way of life at one end of the scale to the posters that suggest 'Love' or 'Peace' as a philosophy.'

Hawaii Pop Rock Festival, 1967
Victor Moscoso

'Many of these designs rely on a sensuous appeal, and represent a break in the attitude that had been built up during the previous decades when the designer developed techniques of delivering clear, concise messages.'

'In the 1960s the general public developed a technique of seeing without reading - even hearing without really listening. It is very much an attitude of mind: the messages come across through the senses generally.'

'In this way the Hippy poster is used to create an environment - in itself another manifestation of total art'

pg. 65 - 'The Hippy poster has a more wide-spread effect because of the technical revolution in printing: the development of typesetting machines and the use of offset lithography.'

Peace (1967), Loren Rehbock

'This has made possible the mass-production of colour work and low-key black and white photographic posters on a large scale.'

'Heroes such as Che Guevara share the privacy of the domestic wall with W.C. Fields, designs by Beardsley and the posters of Toulouse-Lautrec. Mucha and Steinlein have reappeared alongside images of Marlene Dietrich, Brigitte Bardot and Karl Marx, together with many anonymous girls posing in the manner already established by Felicien Rops and others.'

pg. 67 - 'This constant bombardment of the senses has had the effect of producing a conditioned public whose tastes in visual experience are sophisticated'

Visual Explanations, Edward R. Tufte (1998)

'Those who discover an explanation are often those who construct its representation'

1. Images and Quantities

The Urge to See, Josef Koudelka
Prague, Aug. 22 1968

pg. 13 - 'Visual techniques for depicting quantities include direct labels (for example, the numerically labeled grids of statistical graphics, or, at left, dimensional tripods in architectural drawings); encodings (color scales); and self-representing scales (objects of known size appearing in an image).

...Josef Koudelka's haunting and vehement photograph, The Urge to See, testifies to the empty streets during the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia that ended the Prague Spring'

'In the foreground, a watch documents the hour (direct label), as the shadows and gray light hint at the time of day (encoding), while in the distance Soviet tanks surround the parliament building (self-representing scales, as many familiar objects in perspective demarcate the street and the photographer's location)'

Thirteen Photographs: Alberto Giacometti and Sculptures
Herbert Matter, 1978

pg. 18 - 'Each sculpture is measured and scales on a common grid in an extraordinary gallery of images. (This design is also helpful for field guides to birds, fish, plants, and the like.) Titles, dates, and dimensions are shown'

Popular Astronomy, 59
(February 1951), pp. 58-59

5. Parallelism: Repetition and Change, Comparison and Surprise

pg. 100 - 'Captions to pictures, legends on maps, labels, and codes are partial representations of the image itself, running in parallel with the image.

Above, we see a mix of photograph, drawing, number, and word that make five partial, parallel descriptions. It all began at the 84th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Haverford, Pennsylvania on December 27, 1950, when a photograph was taken of the 146 attendees'

'[With this] dense clustering of faces in the photograph, a conventional typographic caption would not do. Instead this diagram arrays numbered heads as an intermediary code, linking the picture to names of the 146 attendees'

'Several landmark heads, nonetheless, enable viewers to find their way: the large hat (91), the profile (135), another hat (7), and the goatee (125) all serve as differentiating signs to give the eye reference points in locating other faces'

pg. 103 - 'Embodying inherent links and connections, parallelism synchronizes multiple channels of information, draws analogies, enforces contrasts and comparisons'

'Our examples have inventoried all sorts of design strategies that collate like with like: pairing, orientation, simultaneity, overlap, superimposition, flowing together on a common track, codes, pointer lines, sequence, adjacency, analogy, similar content.'

'Parallelism provides a coherent architecture for organizing and learning from images - as well as from words and numbers, the allies of images. And by establishing a structure of rhythms and relationships, parallelism becomes the poetry of visual information.'

Nova Arte de Viola (Lisbon, 1789)
Manoel da Paixao Ribeiro

6. Multiples in Space and Time

pg. 105 - 'Multiple images reveal repetition and change, pattern and surprise - the defining elements in the idea of information'

'Multiples enhance dimensionality of the flatlands of paper and computer screen, giving depth to vision by arraying panels and slices of information'

'Multiples create visual lists of objects and activities, nouns and verbs, helping viewers to analyze, compare, differentiate, decide - as we see below with 12 hands in 12 positions for making 12 sounds'

'Multiples represent and narrate sequences of motion'

'Multiples amplify, intensify, and reinforce the meaning of images'

 Waterproof Guide to Corals and Fishes of Florida, The Bahamas, and the Caribbean

(Miami, 1986) Idaz and Jerry Greenberg

pg. 114 - 'Multiples help make fine distinctions and close comparisons among similar nouns, as in the page above showing various butterflyfishes all nicely lined up in parallel for identification'

pg. 115 - 'Good design should take into account how, when, and where the information is used'

'Just as underwater books should minimize page-turning, cookbooks should lie flat on the counter, directional guides should enable glancing back and forth between the road and the instructions'

On Curating, Carolee Thea | Notes 2

This book is a bit pompous, but I'm mainly just looking at the parts that give insights into art and exhibitions - function, distribution, their impact, how they relate to their audiences...etc...

Massimiliano Gioni / Interview 2007     (continued)

pg. 34 - Carolee Thea (CT): 'The notion of site-specificity refashioned the idea of the journey by no longer confining it to the abstract gallery space.

Through this, a form of domestic tourism was invented - one that renewed ties with the modern tradition of the flaneur and his fascination with the strangeness of the city and its slightly tawdry glamour'

Okwui Enwezor / Interview 2003

pg. 52 - OE: It's interesting to look at the exhibition as a medium that is part of a continuing cultural practice. What comes out of that understanding is a larger awareness of how you tell a story, because exhibitions are narrative by nature - one thing after another: sentences, paragraphs, line breaks, punctuation, exclamation marks, etc'

'An exhibition for me is as much a textual as a visual device'

Charles Esche / Interview 2005

pg. 60 - CT: 'The word curator means "overseer, guardian, agent." In Latin law, the curator was appointed guardian of a person legally unfit to conduct him - or herself, such as a minor or a lunatic.

However the curator in the Middle Ages is known specifically as somebody in a clerical position, a priest for whom the exhibition would be an ecclesiastical display of who would be crucial to the organisation of religious spaces and beyond.

Today, in the exhibition, the curator takes into account both the zeitgeist and repressed history - a history associated with individual motivations, with the transcultural and the mythic'

On Curating, Carolee Thea (2009)

On Curating: Interview with Ten International Curators

Introduction

pg. 7 - 'It was during the chaotic 1960s and 70s that Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark attempted to break the barrier between culture and society, innovating strategies that deconstructed the museum paradigm of viewing art.'

'This 1970s imperative fueled the work of American independent curator Mary Jane Jacob, who is today considered a pioneer in the development of new forms of public art'

Mary Jane Jacob / Interview 2002

The Michigan Art Train
[article] NY Times, 08.11.1984

pg. 20 - 'When I curated my first project, The Michigan Art Train, I was a graduate art student interning for the Michigan Arts Council. Using a six-car train, we traveled the countryside stopping in one location per week. Here a community audience walked through the train, feeling a new spirit and acknowledging the value and accessibility of sharing the art. It was art for the public'

'It showed there were other ways of sharing and recognizing culture. One factor was to acknowledge what was already in place: not having to import art, but to look at the culture and resources of a specific locale'

'It was a ripe moment for ushering in new audiences to participate in what had been considered an elitist experience'

pg. 21 - 'A communal experience can also be a shared silence on a public street; it can propel a dialogue that extends beyond the art object. This is what public art can do - when you think about the public as much as the art'

David Hammons, America Street, 1991
courtesy Mary Jane Jacob and John McWilliams, McClennanville, SC

pg. 24 - CT: 'In the 90s, the demise of the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States was brought about by its innate philistinism. Today, however, the current tax structure enhances/encourages philanthropic funding of the arts and, it seems, has temporarily filled the void.

MJJ: 'We have studies and proof of the economic development-value brought by galleries, real estate, tourism and philanthropy, but that's not enough. Our root questions are: why does art matter and how does it have essential resonance and relevance?'

Massimiliano Gioni / Interview 2007

The 387 Houses of Peter Fritz, Insurance Clerk from Vienna

pg. 32 - MG: 'Another influence, an American cult-classic road story, set in a small mid-western county, is Blue Highways, written by William Least Heat-Moon. In 1,000 pages, he paints remarkable portraits of the people living in each room of a tall building. His tales descend beginning from the top floor; instead of a sprawl, it's a vertical hyper-concentration'

'Then there's Giorgio Morandi, the reclusive painter who spent his life painting the same bottles over and over - a search for density and depth rather than mobility or multiplicity'

Gestalt Theory

in relation to visual perception; Gestalt principles, Gestalt theory of visual perception

(German: shape, form)

'Gestalt psychology or gestaltism is a philosophy of mind of the Berlin School of experimental psychology. Gestalt psychology is an attempt to understand the laws behind the ability to acquire and maintain meaningful perceptions in an apparently chaotic world'