4 Modern Art, Modern Graphic Design

 

Between 1910 and 1939 a number of modernist art styles were integrated into graphic design. Starting in the 1920s, in particular, a variety of progressive graphic designers in Britain, France, and the United States began absorbing stylistic elements from modern painting movements, especially Cubism and Futurism. Pursuing a number of different formal strategies, almost all of which involved some sort of reductive geometric abstraction, designers such as Edward McKnight Kaujfer in England and Cassandre in France sought to integrate advertising design with the sophisticated abstract painting styles of the pre- war years. Chapter 1 considered the work of a community of artists and designers centered in the Parisian neighborhood called Montmartre. There, artists such as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec developed professional careers as well as personal relationships that connected poster design and the fine arts. Despite this array of artists and media, the heart of the Montmartre community was devoted to progressive innovation in the art of oil painting. A great deal of painting took place in the artists residence called the Bateau-Lavoir (the "Laundry Boaf), so named because of its passing resemblance to the barges used by laundry women on the River Seine. This squalid tenement was the home and workplace of a number of early twentieth-century painters, including Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). Picasso, an expatriate from Spain, was representative of the international character of the art scene that developed in Montmartre after 1900. He lived in the Bdteau-Lavoir from 1904 until 1909, embarking on some of his greatest experimental styles while a resident of Montmartre.

Montparnasse

Beginning early in the 1900s, a second, parallel art scene emerged in another neighborhood on the fringes of Paris, Montparnasse. Between 1900 and 1914, Montparnasse gradually superseded Montmartre as the favored living and working location for avant-garde artists. As was the case in Montmartre, the bohemian community that became entrenched in Montparnasse in the early twentieth century was mainly young and impoverished, so much so that the writer Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) later remarked that "poverty was a luxury" for his fellow artists. In Montparnasse, a residence and studio building called La Ruche ("The Beehive"), located in Passage Danzig, would become famous as the site of three decades of creativity. Originally a wine exhibition building designed by Gustav Eiffel (1832-1923) for the 1900 Universal Exposition, this spiraling structurehence the name "Beehive"— was relocated to Montparnasse after the exposition closed; there it served as a dormitory for the marginalized young artists who had little money to spend on rent. Montparnasse and La Ruche became a magnet for young artists from across Europe, and folklore developed of youthful foreigners arriving in Paris knowing only two words in French, "Passage Danzig." In 1912, Picasso moved to Montparnasse in search of lower rent, and he remained there until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. In Montparnasse, Picasso lived near two friends, Georges Braque (1882-1963) and Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), who later would join him in developing the most influential painting style of the twentieth century, Cubism.

 

see also:

Cubism

Cubism

 

The bohemian artists who inhabited Montmartre and Montparnasse early in the twentieth century were, if anything, openly hostile to the creation of commercial art. Part of their self-identification came from the stance that they had rejected mainstream society, and nothing about commercial art, even the outre entertainment posters of Montmartre, appealed to their sen­sibility. Furthermore, there was no established figure such as Toulouse-Lautrec who could bridge the world of fine art and graphic design. In addition, the special cachet that posters had attained during the "golden age" of the 1880s and 1890s was gone, so young artists had little reason to work in the design fields. Graphic designers were, therefore, not integrated into the prevailing an scene the way they had been in the late nineteenth century. Nonetheless, the fundamental stylistic elements derived for abstract painting by Cubists and others would have a substan­tial impact on graphic design for decades to come.

    The first inkling of the Cubist painting style is visible in works by Picasso and Braque made in 1907, although the term "Cubism" was not invented until the following year. In 1908, the young German emigre art dealer Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler (1884-1979), who consistently sought out new artists from within the Montparnasse circle, staged an exhibition of Braquc's abstract paintings. A critic who saw the show disparaged the forms in the painting as merely "little cubes." From 1908 until 1912, Braque and Picasso worked together to develop the style into its first mature form, now called "Analytic Cubism." In this style, three-dimensional objects are represented on the canvas as two-dimensional abstractions, their rounded forms reduced to hardedged geometric shapes, called facets. The term "analytic" refers obliquely to this process; the Cubist painter analyzes solid forms and then transfers them to canvas via flat facets that represent the subject from a multiplicity of views.

   Picasso's painting Ma Jolie (1911;fig.4.1) is an excellent exam­ple of fully developed Analytic Cubism. The subject, a portrait of a woman, has been reconfigured as an abstract assortment of over­lapping geometric facets. The facets are opaque and blandly colored with a near monochrome effect. In some passages it is hard to distinguish the fragmented figure from the background space, which is also uniformly faceted. The Cubists favored neutral subject matter, mainly still life and portraits, which would not detract from their technical innovations. Ma Jolie, which means "My Pretty," could refer to the model herself or to a song that was popular at the time. Analytic Cubist paintings are rife with references to music, which was widely considered by painters to serve as an aesthetic model for abstract painting. Of course, when Analytic Cubism was later used by graphic designers, they had to make adjustments that would allow for the commercial message to be easily grasped by the viewer. Word of the Analytic Cubist style spread quickly in Paris's closely knit art world, and as early as 1912 new groups of Cubist artists had sprung up and started exhibiting to the public.

    Around 1912, Picasso and Braque devised a second Cubist technique called Synthetic Cubism. In contrast to the Analytic Cubist penchant for breaking down forms, artists who make

Synthetic Cubist pictures conceive of the imagemaking progress as flowing in the opposite direction, as the artist "synthesizes" an object out of a mix of abstract parts. Picasso's Glass and Bottle of Suze (1912; fig. 4.2) is an iconic example of Synthetic Cubism. Here, he has built up a picture of a cafe table and its associated objects by collaging together scraps of blue and black paper, wall­paper, and newspaper. While the artist has added a touch of shading on the side of the glass, the overall presentation is highly two-dimensional. However, the age-old goal of representational art to reproduce the real world is gently mocked, in that Picasso has pasted an actual label on to his synthesized abstract bottle. In this manner, the Cubist movement was a pioneering force in establishing the significance of the new medium of collage. Synthetic Cubism created a second alternative for artists and designers looking for a structured abstract language with which they could experiment.

Guillaume Apollinaire's Calligrammes

As stated above, there was no sustained interest in graphic design among the Cubist painters. However, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), a friend of many of the Cubist artists, created experimental poetry that would later have a significant impact on graphic design and typography. Apollinaire had been an early champion of the style, and in 1913 he published one of the first critical essays on Cubism, "Les Peintres Cubists." Seriously wounded fighting in the First World War, on his return to Paris he published Calligrammes: Poemes de la paix et de la guerre 1913-1916. The term "Calligramme" is a neologism derived from the Greek words for "beautiful writing." Most of Apollinaire's Calligrammes are a form of "concrete poetry," a type of poem in which the visual structure of the words and the typography are designed to complement the meaning of the text. The materiality of the letters, their graphic shapes, rhythm, and flow all work together to add a visual dimension to the poem.

Abandoning the traditional horizontal flow of text, Apollinaire's Calligrammes are clearly influenced by the principles of the Cubist technique. They convey the same sense of frag­mented structure and simultaneous experience that can be seen in a Cubist painting. Just as a picture such as Majolie appears to show the sitter from multiple angles in one view, so Apollinaire's poems communicate a multitude of feelings and experiences simultaneously. For example, "Visee" ("Aim"), uses a series of autonomous lines to disrupt any linear narrative and replace it with a sense of overlapping verbal images (fig. 4.3). These frag­mented pieces of the poet's imagination combine to create a meditation on the experience of war. The title refers to a device used to aim artillery shells, and Apollinaire also states ambiguously in the second line that "machine guns of gold are croaking legends." Either of these motifs could be the basis for the struc­ture of the composition, which recalls the raking lines of machine gun fire as well as the triangulation used to mark distant targets for bombardment. The fragmentation implicit in Cubist aesthetics is a perfect vehicle for Apollinaire's ruminations on life and death at the front.

Another Calligramme, titled "II Pleut" ("It's Raining"), proved to be highly influential on later graphic design (fig. 4.4). Here, the falling lines appear to represent rain on a window pane, while at the same time reinforcing the rhythmic cadences of the poet's voice. "It's raining women's voices as if they were dead even in memory." This striking first line establishes the lyrical tone of the poem as it evokes the longing implicit in the poet's reminiscences. While the words appear like falling raindrops that are suggestive of Apollinaire's state of mind, they also act as an independent structure that has its own innate beauty separate from its symbolic character. Tragically, Apollinaire died in the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918, only weeks before the publication of his collection of Calligrammes.

 

Robert and Sonia Terk Delaunay

Apollinaire's association with Cubist painting had developed another dimension in 1913, when he invented the name "Orphism" in order to describe the painting of Sonia Terk (1885-1979) and her husband, Robert Delaunay (1885-1941). The Delaunays were at the time experimenting with a synthesis of Analytic Cubist faceting and brilliant color of the sort pioneered in modern painting by French painter Henri Matisse (1869-1954). Apollinaire chose the term "Orphism" in reference to the mythical musician Orpheus, whose music was so beautiful that it could even charm inanimate objects. It was quite common in this era for painters to invoke classical music as a model for abstract painting in an attempt to explain how beauty could exist in a picture that lacked a clear subject matter. Paintings by Robert Delaunay, such as Simultaneous Windows (1912; fig. 4.5) are almost totally abstract, although a faint hint of the form of the Eiffel Tower can be made out in the center of the composition.Delaunay attempted to create simultaneous juxtapositions of color, and their prismatic palette positively vibrates with chromatic energy.

In 1913, Sonia Terk Delaunay collaborated with another French poet, Blaise Cendrars (1889-1961), to make one of the most compelling modernist combinations of word and image ever created: their illustrated book La Prose du Transsiberien et de la petite Jehanne de France ("Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France"; fig. 4.6), On the right side of the nearly 7-foot-long vertically oriented work, Cendrars recounts in a nonlinear fashion two separate train rides he had takenone through Asia and the other through Europe. Moving backwards and forwards in time, Cendrars's poem evokes the excitement as well as the melancholy nostalgia of travel, as his mistress queries him again and again, "Are we very far from Montmartre?" His thoughts are complemented by the swirling Orphist abstraction that Delaunay painted down the left side of the page. Her passages of brilliant color do not directly illustrate the text, but rather try to complement its feeling in visual terms. The integration of word and image is further accomplished in that Delaunay added patches of color to the right side of the work, so that the words are grouped amid the atmospheric clouds of color. The narrow, elongated format of the work echoes the form of a train or railroad track. The whole being much more than the sum of its parts, word and image combine synergistically to convey great emotion and beauty.

The London Underground

While graphic designers were never integrated into the Cubist movement itself, in later years its formal innovations would open up several exciting new stylistic avenues for commercial art. Designers who used the stylistic elements of Cubism and its related movements are called "modernists," because they integrate modern art into their work. Because of the daring nature of their style, the group of modernist graphic designers in Europe were severely limited in their ability to find consistent, rewarding employment.

One of the first dependable venues where modernist designers could find work was for the London Underground. The first electric underground railway in Europe, the City and South London Railway was completed in London in 1890. Although it was only marginally successful because of its technical limitations, speculators financed several new lines over the following two decades. One of the most successful was the Central London Railway, which opened in 1900 under Oxford Street. Known as the "Twopenny Tube" because of its price, the Central London Railway proved the financial viability of the London Underground. At the same time, technological improvements made the railway safer and cheaper to run. A poster trumpeting the rapid strides made in the first decade of the twentieth century assured passengers that if they rode the Twopenny Tube they would "avoid all anxiety" (fig. 4.7). The style of the poster is eclectic, relying on a framework that separates the space into a series of boxes and rectangles. These spaces were filled with a combination of text and image, with particular emphasis given to five illustrations of decorous passengers making their way through the clean, brightly lit stations and trains. The strong forms of the display type fill out the spaces around the drawings, with the cen­ter-left text haphazardly encroaching on the adjacent illustration. Finally, a handdrawn map of the stations is crammed like an afterthought below the central image.
 

In 1906, the Central London Railway was consolidated with other underground lines to form the Underground Group, which was administered by a central authority under Deputy Chairman Sir George Gibb (1850-1925). While financial policy was over­seen by Sir Albert Stanley (later Baron Ashfield because of his acumen in saving the railway from bankruptcy), Gibb was respon­sible for overall policy as well as the day-to-day operations of the new conglomerate. Combining a variety of independent railways, each with its own signage and promotional posters, into a distinct new organization proved to be one of the greatest challenges facing the new administration. In 1907, the Underground Group introduced its new trademark, a solid red roundel (fig. 4.8). This simple geometric design represented one of the earliest attempts to standardize the signage of the Underground. This example of an original sign marking the Covent Garden station shows how striking the spare geometry and bold red, white, and blue palette appeared to the commuter. However, despite this success in rationalizing the signage, at this early stage little attention was  paid to marketing the Underground in a consistent manner.
 

4.7 Anonymous, Twopenny Tube, 1901. Poster. London's Transport Museum.

4.8 Anonymous, Covent Garden roundel, 1907, London's Transport Museum.

Frank Pick

Sir George Gibb's assistant Frank Pick (1878-1941), who became the unofficial publicity manager of the Underground Group in 1908, had the vision to become one of the most substantial patrons of modernist posters of the twentieth century. Pick's commitment to bringing new styles to the general public prompted the art historian Nikolas Pevsner to memorialize him in 1942 as the "greatest patron of the arts whom this century has so far produced in England and indeed the ideal patron of our age." While Pevsner's oft repeated comparison to the art patronage of the Medici family of Renaissance Florence is possibly a bit overblown, it is true that Pick recognized the quality of new kinds of graphic design at a time when few others did.

     When Pick became the Underground's publicity officer, the Underground Group had not yet devised a consistent promotional strategy. Recognizing that he had a captive audience in the form of hundreds of thousands of commuters every weekday, Pick sought to commission advertising that would convince them to use the Underground for leisure on the weekends. Pick paid special atten­tion to the effective display of these new promotional posters, decreeing that separate hoardings be set up in each station that would only exhibit advertisements for the Underground itself.

Edward McKnight Kauffer

In 1915, Pick made one of his best decisions when he hired Edward McKnight Kauffer (1890-1954) to design posters for the Underground. Born in Montana, Kauffer studied in San Francisco and Chicago before moving to Europe in 1913. In San Francisco, he earned the patronage of an art professor named Joseph McKnight, who financed the young man's initial European sojourn; Kauffer later adopted the middle name McKnight in honor of his patron. In Chicago, Kauffer saw the traveling European an exhibition the "Armory Show," which opened his eyes to the innovative modern abstract styles practiced in Europe. When he left Chicago, Kauffer traveled first to France and Germany, where he was introduced to the Sacbplakat style while pursuing further training as a fine artist. After the war broke out in 1914, Kauffer planned to return to the United States via England. However, he became enchanted with the city of London and resolved to stay, going so far as to volunteer for the British army—albeit unsuccessfully, because he was a foreign national.

After a series of menial jobs, Kauffer was introduced to Frank Pick by a mutual friend, the English poster designer John Hassall (1868-1948). Pick hired him to promote weekend tourism, and Kauffer's first work for the Underground consisted of posters celebrating the comfort of the train system. Winter Sales (fig. 4.9) displays how Kauffer integrated provocative Cubist abstraction into his designs. Here, in an image that owes a debt to both Analytic and Synthetic Cubism, Kauffer shows pedestrians battling the inclement London winter. This poster shows unmodeled figures overlaid with no attention to logical three-dimensional space. Their fragmented forms are shaped so as to harmonize with the background. Compare Kauffer's strikingly abstract figures with the conventional drawing in the 1901 Central London (Tube) Railway poster (see fig. 4.7). Kauffer's gift was to know intuitively how to introduce a degree of Cubist abstraction so gradually that it would be accepted by his patrons and viewers.

Kauffer has also done something exciting with the hand-drawn lettering at the bottom of Winter Sales, where he has designed the word "Underground" to flicker back and forth in the viewer's eye between two and three dimensions, as the shading momentarily creates a sense of sculptural relief. This type of three-dimensional lettering was quite popular in the nineteenth century as display type, but Kauffer has here infused it with Cubism so that the shadows sometimes break away from the shape of the letter. It was largely due to Kauffer's own influence that the Tube-riding public of London had by 1924 become accustomed to this type of innovative style in graphic design at a time when the vast majority of the population would have rejected Cubism as an important type of painting. Kauffer remained one of Pick's top designers for decades, and eventually created over 140 posters for the Underground.

Even when he was having more success as a poster artist than as a painter, Kauffer maintained his commitment to the latter vocation. He joined a collection of like-minded modernists called the "London Group," who were dedicated to exploring the Cubist style. Later, he helped to found the "X Group," while also promoting experimental abstract films in London. However, in the 1920s Kauffer decided to give up his work in the fine arts and devote himself to his commercial career. "Gradually I saw the futility of trying to paint and do advertising at the same time," he remembered in 1937. While Kauffer himself was adamant in declaring that graphic design and fine art styles were interchangeable, he found few people who shared his position. On the one hand, other painters were suspicious of his success with the Underground, mainly because abstract artists at this time sought more than anything else not to be another instrument of indus­trial capitalism. It was an important part of modern art ideology to separate one's work from the crass realm of commercial culture, as Picasso and Braque had done. At the same time, Kauffer's advertising clients were skeptical of anything that seemed too radical to them, and the artist's association with modern painting groups did not elevate him in their eyes. Throughout his career, Kauffer felt a responsibility to bring gradually more and more edgy modern styles to the British public, and he led a number of advertisers into an embrace of Cubist design.

The modernist influence became gradually more visible in the 1920s, as Pick committed the Underground to a unique and sustainable visual style. He wanted all of the promotional materi­als overseen by his office to share the startling freshness of Kauffer's Cubist idiom. Posters such as Move to Edgware (fig. 4.10), by William Kermode, generally do not delve quite so far into abstraction as Kauffer's work does, yet they maintain something of the spare, unmodeled forms and geometric regularity of his work. Kermode employs Cubist abstraction in the opposite manner of Kauffer—rather than showing a festive crowd, he invokes geometric repetition to symbolize a dismal urban housing block. He juxtaposes this grim scene with a more traditionally illustrated slice of countryside resplendent with color and sunshine. This poster is exemplary of how the English railways promoted suburban living after the First World War, when Britain was facing a tremendous shortage of housing as well as an almost unmanageable density in the city center.

A poster for the Underground designed in 1924 by Austin Cooper (1890-1964), It Is Warmer Down Below (fig. 4.11), demonstrates the artist's awareness of the Orphist "color cubism" created by Robert and Sonia Terk Delaunay. The central image in the poster is of a roaring fire made up of abstract Cubist facets. Brilliant color makes the square facets seem to dance with energy, shimmering in a range of hues. In an attempt to make a virtue out of necessity, the crowded tunnels of the Tube are trumpeted for their comfortable indoor climate during wintertime.

Signage and Visual Identity

Pick's second major innovation in managing the visual identity of the Underground was to complement his promotional posters with a standardized and easily legible system of signage. In 1916, he commissioned the typographer Edward Johnston (1872-1944) to devise a new typeface for the Tube. Johnston developed an eponymous face (that is, he named it after himself), Johnston Sans (fig. 4.13). As the name suggests, Johnston Sans uses no serifs, although it does maintain the basic proportions of seriffed type. The plain block letters demonstrate almost no varia­tion in stroke width. This spare display type is highly geometric, as Johnston attempted to create lettering that would be legible in the blink of an eye from a passing train. But the interest in geometry says more about the stylish nature of the type than about its legibility. The "O," for example, is a perfect circle for design reasons, and could have been easily rendered more legible with some added stress or adjustment to the shape. However, it was more important to Johnston and Pick that the lettering provided the same sense of glamour and modernity that the abstract promotional posters emphasized. A more traditional type of lettering would have made the posters stand out too much—appearing somehow radical—from the overall visual style. It is important to note how Pick commissioned works that reinforced the strengths of the Undergroundits high technology and status as an exciting modern experience.

The rounded "O" of Johnston Sans also proved to be well matched to the existing trademark of the Underground, the circu­lar roundel. In 1918, Pick commissioned Johnston again, this time to update the roundel and expand on its possibilities as the basis for signage. Johnston updated the design by transforming the solid red circle into a white circle with a red band around it, a bull's eye, and outlining both the red band and the bar that cuts across the roundel with a strong black contour line (fig. 4.12). The most important part of this update was a change in the proportions between the bull's eye and the bar, making the former smaller so that it no longer visually overwhelmed the bar and the lettering on it. Johnston kept the palette of white lettering on a blue bar, although he substituted his own typeface for the original one.

The reconfigured bull's eye was to become one of the most recognizable trademarks ever invented, and in the 1930s became the subject of a witty promotional poster. In 1939, when Pick had become the overall head of London Transport, he commissioned the famous expatriate American Surrealist Man Ray (1890-1977) to devise a poster for the Underground. Man Ray played upon the "Surreal" aspects of the bull's eye, likening it to a planet floating in outer space (fig.4.15). At the same time, Pick proved that he had not lost his eye for daring work even as he approached his retirement.

After he became the managing director of London Transport, Pick sought to extend his consistent visual style to all aspects of the system. He oversaw the construction of new stations and the decoration of trains, with a close eye on details. One of the first patrons to implement the theory of a total design style, Pick even hired artists to design the upholstery for the seats in trains and buses. After the Underground network grew in complexity following a massive expansion in the 1920s, Pick commissioned Harry Beck (1903-1974) to devise a simple yet comprehensive map of the different routes. Basing his work on diagrams of electric circuits, which use color and geometry to simplify a more complex and variable system, Beck created a map in between 1931 and 1933 that displayed the tentacles of the system in a logical, predictable diagram (fig. 4.14). First introduced as a leaflet, the finished map rapidly became one of the most famous examples of information management ever devised. Beck successfully reduced the irregular layout of the system into a grid-based design that showed each route on a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal axis. Each station and interchange was clearly marked. Beck's innovation has proved to be a lasting one, as similar maps are still used in subway systems around the world.

Beck's design was somewhat anticipated by the route network shown on a 1929 Belgian poster by the Swiss-born artist Leo Marfurt (1894-1977). This image shows a glamorous scene of people boarding a train, conceived in a style that resonates with Synthetic Cubist collage (fig. 4.16). Below the image there is a simple map of the major Belgian railway lines. In this manner, Marfurt merged the two major themes of railway marketing: the glamour of the modern city and the efficient rationality that is its greatest claim to fame.

 

4.12 Edward Johnston, Underground Roundel, 1918.
London's Transport Museum.

4.13 Edward Johnston, Johnston Sans Typeface, 1916.
London's Transport Museum.

4.14 Harry C. Beck, Map, London Underground, 1931-33. Color lithograph.
London Transport Museum.

4.15a, b Man Ray, London Transport Keeps London Going, 1939. Poster.
London's Transport Museum.

4.16 Leo Marfurt, Chemins de Fer Beiges (Belgian Railways), 1929.
Lithograph. City Archives/Stadsarchief, Ghent.

see also:

Futurism

Futurism

 

The exciting possibilities of the Cubist style were quickly absorbed by other artists. A group of Italian poets, musicians, and painters led by Filippo Marinetti (1876-1944), who called them­selves the Futurists, were among the most proficient adopters of the Cubist idiom. Futurism was founded in 1909, when Marinetti, who had spent the years 1893-6 studying in Paris, published his "Futurist Manifesto" in the French newspaper Le Figaro (fig. 4.17). This essay, which established the philosophical basis for all kinds of Futurist art and activism, was one of the first attempts by an artistic group to explain its own work conceptually before its members had created many concrete examples. Futurism was not intended as an artistic movement like Cubism; rather, Marinetti called for a revolutionary change in Italian society, one that would free the country from its stoned Classical history and allow it to compete in the modern industrial world. "It is from Italy that we launch through the world this violently upsetting incendiary manifesto of ours. With it, today, we establish Futurism. ... For too long Italy has been a dealer in secondhand clothes. We mean to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards." The "Futurist Manifesto" was followed in succeeding years by a series of additional treatises that explained Futurist concepts of music, painting, and literature. Additionally, in 1911 and 1912, Marinetti made the rounds of European capitals promoting the group and its work, leading to Futurism's high profile among the avantgarde.

In 1910, Marinetti and his associates began organizing riotous Futurist evenings, where the night's entertainment was likely to include a mixture of iconoclastic literary readings, political speeches, "noise" music, and other provocations. One soldout performance of Futurist music held in Rome in 1914 ended in a violent melee, when the Futurists waded into the disapproving crowd "with blows, slaps, and cudgels." These anarchic perform­ances would, in fact, exercise an enormous influence on the subsequent Zurich Dada movement .

Unlike the Cubists, who had isolated themselves from the design arts, the more polemical Futurists wanted to reach the public through a variety of printed works. Partly derived from his knowledge of French Symbolist aesthetics, Marinetti created some of the most daringly experimental typography and graphic design of the early twentieth century. In 1912 he published the first Futurist book, Zang Tumb Tumb (fig. 4.18). The text is based on Marinetti's experience in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, when he had served as a soldier. The title words "Zang Tumb Tumb" are an example of Marinetti's use of onomatopoeia, whereby the sound of the word indicates its meaning, in this case the roar of artillery at the Battle of Adrianopolis. Marinetti idealized warfare as a force that could cleanse Italy of its obsession with the past and lead it into a modern industrial future. The cover of Zang Tumb Tumb displays a jumble of different typefaces and sizes scattered across the page. There is no clear axis to this non-hierarchical layout; rather, the structure of the composition visually reinforces the dynamism and chaos of war. As was the case with Apollinaire's Calligrammes, the text is used as a vehicle for traditional meaning while simultaneously functioning as a graphic signifier.
 

4.17 Filippo Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto, 1909.

4.18 Filippo Marinetti, Zang Tumb Tumb, 1914, p. 120

"Words in Freedom"

In the manifesto titled Destruction of Syntax/Imagination without Strings/Words in Freedom, Marinetti espoused his plans for changes in book design. "I initiate a typographical revolution aimed at the bestial, nauseating idea of the book ... My revolution is aimed at the so-called typographical harmony of the page, which is contrary to the flux and reflux, the leaps and bursts of style that run through the page." Marinetti felt that traditional literary forms such as the book were dead, that their rigid, static qualities made them unable to express the excitement generated by modern industrial society. He wanted to replace the book with his inven­tion parole in liberta (literally, "words in freedom"). Rejecting any and all conventional rules of grammar, punctuation, and syntax, Marinetti wanted typography expressively to reinforce the dynamism of the text—words become images. The inner page from Zang Tumb Tumb reproduced here demonstrates Marinetti's call for graphic designs that jump off the page with the same kinetic energy of the experience of war expressed by the text. Like Apollinaire in his Calligrammes, here Marinetti is making use of the materiality of the words to reinforce his message in two different ways: first, the text forms the shape of a Turkish balloon like those he saw in the battle; second, the swirling movement of type is suggestive of the soldier-poet's experience of war. Through his extensive publications, Marinetti sought to open up for Futurism a new space for artists that they had never before engaged—the publicity of the mass media.

    The Futurist use of a consistent visual style that expressed the group's love of speed and dynamism extended even to their stationery. In 1918, Giacomo Balla's (1871-1958) abstract drawing of a kinetic, abstract "man of the future" became the basis for a dramatic letterhead (fig. 4.19), in which the drawing and banner have taken over fully half of the page. While the drawing was made by Balla, the letterhead references the Futurist painter Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916) in the phrase "II pugno di Boccioni" ("a punch by Boccioni"). By 1918, Boccioni had become a martyr to the Futurist cause when he was killed in the First World War. Each communication written on this stationery, such as the letter by Marinetti reproduced here, served as a strong visual statement of Futurist principles. Because the letterhead overwhelms the available space left for writing, letters from Marinetti could communicate more via the standardized parts of this striking stationery than through the specifics of his written message. Like most of the printed matter produced by the Futurists (as well as other avantgarde groups such as Dada), this stationery was made using letterpress techniques. Having originated in the fifteenth century with Gutenberg, the letterpress technique was inexpensive and accessible, though lacking any ideological connection with the machine world idolized by the Futurists. The late nineteenth century had witnessed the introduction of photomechanical engraving, the technology that allowed handdrawn illustrations to be reproduced alongside text, as in the Futurist example shown here. While the halftone process, which allowed photographs to be reproduced via letter­press, had also been introduced in the late nineteenth century, it was not widely adopted by the avant-garde until the 1920s.

created by a new type of Cubist facet, one that was transparent and brightly colored. Futurist paintings also created movement through the way in which the different facets cut through one another. The Futurists idolized the speed and excitement of mod­ern machines, and here Boccioni transforms an athlete into an abstract, powerful machine, one that disappears in a flurry of motion. The sense of simultaneity evident in the image is an important part of Futurist style, while the man-machine hybrid was one of the most influential Futurist motifs. The color and kineticism of Futurist painting would make it an exciting source for graphic designers who sought to invoke similar themes of the exciting spectacle of modern life.

Although not all the Futurists survived the First World War, the movement itself was resurrected in the 1920s. One remarkable book design from that second period is worthy of note. A volume published in 1927 by Fortunato Depero (1892-1960) was designed with two enormous bolts holding the covers together (fig. 4.23). The title, Depero Futurista, ascends diagonally up the frame, while faceted, translucent triangles cut back through the letters creating a sense of dynamism. Inside, the typography again runs riotously across the pages, and it is necessary to turn the book around again and again to follow the text. The additional element of brilliant color enlivens the design and adds a new element that increases the level of chaos, as the variety of typefaces is now matched by a effervescent range of colors. The book itself contained a selection of Depero's Futurist graphic design from the preceding decade. In the 1930s, Depero developed a more mainstream career in New York for clients including