8 The Triumph of the International Style
 

In the post-war period, the graphic design profession was transformed by the rise of the Swiss style (also called the
international Style, a term this author prefers), which, despite its name, found its greatest success under the patronage of corporations in the United States. The rise of the International Style directly parallels the development of "corporate identity," the process whereby graphic designers created logos and other devices that established a set visual theme for a company. This chapter, along with Chapters 9 and 10, can be distinguished from the preceding ones because the material and concepts considered herein are still viable parts of the contemporary design world. With the establishment of the International Style in the 1950s, the formerly radical, politically engaged works of Dada, De Stijl, Russian Constructivism, and the Bauhaus were remade into a neutral discourse of commercial commu­nication. The still current concept of the graphic designer as someone who rationally approaches a design problem on behalf of a corporate client and produces a functional solution arose as part of the International Style. Essentially, that style comprises the visual elements of Constructivist graphic design and the New Typography, stripped of their historical context—the Russian Revolution, for example. There was a parallel development in architecture during the second half of the century, as the architectural "International Style" introduced at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s gained a greater foothold in the mainstream.

"Swiss Style"

 

Jan Tschichold

In the postwar period, Switzerland, a country renowned for its banking industry as much as its political neutrality, became the perfect site in which the International Style could gain traction. In fact, it was in the 1930s that a small cadre of dedicated designers had first begun exploring the New Typography and Constructivism. Swiss artists such as Max Bill (1908-1994) and Theo Ballmer (1902-1965), returning to their country after training in Germany at the Bauhaus, sought to introduce geometric abstraction to the design community. In addition, Jan Tschichold, the most famous proponent of the New Typography, was forced to emigrate from Germany in 1933; he chose to settle in Basel, Switzerland. Because of the Nazis' contempt for the "Bolshevik" Constructivist style, Tschichold had previously been arrested and fired from his teaching position in Munich soon after the Nazi takeover. At this point in his career, Tschichold was already broadening his views on typography to include an admiration for traditional typography and layouts, and the book he published in Switzerland in 1935, Typographic Design, was set mainly in the modern roman face Bodoni (fig. 8.1). In this new book, Tschichold reiterated his support for the New Typography but also suggested that the asymmetric, flush left layout was not the only suitable design formula. At the same time, it is possible that Tschichold's new, more moderate tone was influenced by his personal situation; his residency in Switzerland was quite tenuous, and Tschichold feared expulsion if he were to upset the authorities. Although there was a small community of graphic designers who valued his work, Swiss culture was quite conservative during the 1930s, and he may have feared being branded a "decadent Bolshevik," as had happened in Germany. While the Constructivist style made its first inroads in Switzerland during the 1930s, between 1936 and 1945 it almost completely disappeared in the face of a resurgent Swiss nationalism that was expressed in Neoclassical, representational forms.

    The story of Tschichold's Swiss sojourn took an unexpected turn immediately after the war. Around 1946, he began publicly repudiating the principles of the New Typography that were so closely attached to his name. In an odd paradox, just as the International Style was finally gaining a solid reputation in the mainstream, Tschichold suggested that the absolutist terms in which he and others had formulated the style paralleled the dictates of the Nazis. He wrote of the New Typography in the journal Schweizer Graphische Mitteilungen that "Its intolerant attitude certainly corresponds in particular to the German inclination to the absolute." This interpretation put Tschichold at odds with other designers and critics; the common wisdom after the war was that since the Nazis had suppressed geometric abstraction in favor of first blackletter, then roman, type, it was the perfect vehicle with which to convey "anti-Nazi" modern sophistication. It was this latter interpretation that made the country of Switzerland and International Style graphic design appear to be such a perfect fit—both had essentially sat out the war and were untainted by any associations with fascism. The Swiss designer Richard Paul Lohse (1902-1988), for example, advocated the International Style as representative of anti-fascism. In recent years, scholars have attacked what they now call the myth of "Swiss neutrality," and pointed to a number of instances in which Switzerland was a complicit partner in financial schemes that kept the Nazi regime afloat. Nonetheless, during the 1950s and 1960s, the height of the identification of the International Style with Switzerland, there was a sense that Swiss culture perfectly embodied the rationalism and logic conveyed by geometric abstraction.

Tschichold had also portrayed the New Typography as aes­thetically inferior to older typographic styles. When he gave a speech in Zurich in 1946 to the Association of Swiss Graphic Designers, Tschichold in fact proclaimed a preference for sym­metrical, centered layouts. In the 1940s, he would begin a new career as a designer of roman type while also pursuing an interest in classical Chinese manuscripts. His change of heart, for both aesthetic and ideological reasons, angered a number of young designers who felt that their icon had betrayed them. In Zurich, Max Bill, the most theoretically minded of the "Swiss style" artists. rebuked Tschichold for having betrayed the principles of the New Typography. The International Style in Switzerland also benefited from the arrival of additional German emigres who had not repudiated the New Typography; designers such as Anton Stankowski (1906-1998), who moved to Zurich for a time in the early 1930s after studying photomontage in Essen, Germany. Bill. Stankowski, and a critical mass of like-minded artists eventually came to ignore Tschichold's new pronouncements and established a thriving community of designers dedicated to the Constructivist principles established in Germany in the 1920s.

 

8.1 Jan Tschichold, Typographische Gestaltung (Typographic Design),
1935. Book title page Museum Gestaltung, Zurich.

The Predominance of Akzidenz Grotesk

Following the 1920s practices of Jan Tschichold, the practitioners of the International Style in Switzerland consistently relied on the late nineteenth-century sans serif type called Akzidenz Grotesk (fig. 8.2). First introduced by the German foundry Berthold in 1896, this type combined the dramatic modern look that they were seeking—it was, for example, well matched to photogra­phy—with less rigidly geometric forms that positively impacted its readability. Akzidenz Grotesk represented the perfect compro­mise for Swiss designers, in that it conveyed the functionalist ethos without appearing too stylized, as Herbert Bayer's Universal did. Its dry, mundane feel did not draw attention to itself in the manner of the more geometrically pure types. Max Bill employed Akzidenz Grotesk for the exhibition "Die gute Form" ("The Good Form"). This exhibition surveyed industrial design with an attention to functionalist aesthetics much like that of the previous decade's "Machine Art" show at New York's Museum of Modern Art (fig. 8.3). The Swiss Werkbund later named their annual design award after the exhibition, calling it the "Good Form" prize.

    Bill, who had worked as an industrial designer, used Akzidenz Grotesk for the exhibition's wall stencils and labels. This lettering was the ideal choice to serve as the typographic paradigm of the post-war International Style; while it looks clear and functional, it carries none of the political baggage associated with Russian Constructivism or the Bauhaus. Rather, it is the ultimate depoliticized type, which matches the theme of Bill's show in that it views Constructivist functionalism in strictly for­mal terms, as exemplary of "good form," and devoid of political meaning. Of course, this process of "depoliticization" had begun as early as the 1920s, when prominent Constructivists such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Kurt Schwitters, and El Lissitzky pursued commercial work in Germany that sidestepped their political commitments. This depoliticization was the key to the renewal of Constructivism as a universal, but not Communist, style after the war. "Swiss Style" was a neutral style based in a neutral, capitalist country. In the 1940s in Switzerland, Akzidenz Grotesk and the International Style first attained the "timeless" aura that would serve them well for decades.

 

8.2 BerthoJd Staff. Akzidenz Grotesk Typeface. Berthold Foundry, 1896.

8.3 Max Bill, Die Gute Forme (The Good Form).
1949. Book page. Muzeum fur Gestaltung, Zurich. Graphic Collection.
 

Josef Muller-Brockmann

Josef Muller-Brockmann (1914-1996), an illustrator who became a convert to the International Style in the 1950s, also made excel­lent use of Akzidenz Grotesk throughout his career. In 1952 he used it for public signage that he designed for the Swiss Automobile Club (fig. 8.4). This "Accident Gauge" was installed on the Paradeplatz in Zurich, where it warned of the hazards of driving by presenting a numerical summary that highlighted each week's total automobile-related accidents and deaths. The understated forms of the letters and numbers in Akzidenz Grotesk are a superb match for this type of dry, statistical information which is nonetheless loaded with an emotional undercurrent. The numerical statistics are supplemented visually by actual gauges on the vertical axis that show yearly totals. The gauge was constructed according to an abstract three-dimensional design reminiscent of the information kiosks planned by several Russian Constructivists in the 1920s.

    Muller-Brockmann's 1955 Beethoven poster for the Zurich Tonhalle represents the epitome of the Swiss style: carefully regulated curves sweep around an asymmetrically positioned block of text (fig. 8.5). The lower-case subhead "beethoven" is ranged left in a void on the lower half of the poster—just far enough below the midline to disrupt any semblance of ordered symmetry. Sketches made by the designer show how he took a symmetrical circular design and rescaled it while cropping it asymmetrically to come up with the final composition. By 1955, Muler-Brockmann had already developed a taste for "musical" compositions. In this example, the smooth curves that make up the abstract image were intended to be suggestive of Beethoven's powerful music. Muller-Brockmann was invoking, perhaps unintentionally, one of the decades-old explanations of abstract art: that its aesthetic structure is comparable to the non-representational structures of musical composition. Max Bill also invoked a "music model" for abstraction, writing in a 1936 exhibition catalog, "Just as clear, clean musical forms are pleasant to the listener, and give joy to the knowledgeable in their structure, so clear, pure form and color should give visual pleasure to the viewer." In terms of the International Style, this "music model" represents yet another interpretation of Constructivism that steers the conversation away from the Utopian Communism of the 1920s.

    While many International Style poster designers used hand-drawn elements, other artists pursued Constructivist typophoto solutions. A poster by Hans Neuburg (1904-1983) advertising Liebig Bouillon combines sans serif letters with an obliquely shot and cropped photo by his colleague Anton Stankowski (fig. 8.6). The catchphrase "Super Bouillon" overlaps the scripted letters of the company name, which, in turn, overlaps the image of a container of the product, linking them together. There is a slight tilt to the text and photo that contests the rigid rectangle of the frame, producing an asymmetrical kinetic element. Notably, the image of the smiling young woman recalls many Constructivist works all the way back to El Lissitzky's Russian Exhibition poster from the late 1920s (see fig. 5.42). This fact makes Neuburg's poster a great example of an icon of Utopian Communist workers being transformed into smiling consumers in a capitalist society.
 

8.4 Josef Muller-Brockmann, Accident Gauge, Paradeplatz, Zurich, 1952.

8.5 Josef Muller-Brockmann, Beethoven, 1955. Poster. Offset lithograph.

Josef Muller-Brockmann, Posters

Josef Muller-Brockmann, Posters

8.6 Hans Neuburg, Liebig Super Bouillon,
n. d. Museum fur Gestaltung, Zjrich  Graphic Collection.

New Typefaces

While Akzidenz Grotesk remained the type of choice for Bill and Muller-Brockmann throughout their careers, Paul Renner's Futura also persisted as a popular choice for Swiss designers. However, during the 1950s three new typefaces were introduced that would become mainstays of the graphic design profession and are still widely used today. The first typeface, now known as Helvetica, was created in 1953 for Eduard Hoffman of the Haas foundry in Zurich. Hoffman had noted the exceptional popularity of Akzidenz Grotesk and desired a proprietary alternative for his own business. In 1951 he commissioned Max Meidinger (1910-1980) to create a new sans serif based on Akzidenz Grotesk, and Neue Haas Grotesk was born (fig. 8.7). The new typeface synthesized the bland flavor yet exceptional legibility (for a sans serif) of Akzidenz Grotesk with a slightly more regular structure that referenced the Purist geometric sans faces such as the Universal that Herbert Bayer had devised at the Bauhaus.

In 1957, Neue Haas Grotesk was sold by Haas to a German foundry, Stempel. In Germany the typeface was renamed Helvetica, the original Latin name for Switzerland. In the early 1960s, Helvetica was licensed for the Linotype machine, making it more readily obtainable. Soon, Helvetica was to become an icon of the International Style as its functional legibility and widespread availability—as well as the cachet of its "Swiss" name—combined to make it the sans serif choice of a generation of typographers and graphic designers.

The Swiss typographer Adrian Frutiger (b. 1928) moved to Paris in 1952 in order to accept a position at the celebrated French foundry Deberny & Peignot. Once there, he set to work on a number of new typefaces, including Univers, which was released in 1957 (fig. 8.8). A follower of the functional, logical precepts of the International Style, Frutiger attempted to rational­ize the categories that were used to describe type. As he saw it, the problem lay in the fact that while different typographers and foundries used the same common terms—bold, extended, etc.— they never meant quite the same thing from usage to usage. In pursuit of a new more logical system, Univers was released along with a color-coded diagram that displayed numbered weights on the vertical axis and different widths (condensed versus extended) on the horizontal one. In an innovative move, all of the various weights of the typeface were released at once. This exercise in information design did away with indeterminate terminology in favor of a visual tool that illustrated the different variants and their relationship to one another.

     In 1950, a few years before Frutiger joined Deberny & Peignot, the firm had developed the "Lumitype Photon" photo-typesetting system. Eight years later Berthold introduced the Diatype, which was sold around the world. Offering the promise of flexibility combined with economy, reliable phototypesetting had been sought after by type foundries for decades. As the name suggests, with these systems the type is reproduced from photo­graphic negatives instead of metal type like that used in the Linotype and Monotype machines. Univers became one of the first faces produced for use with phototypesetting systems. As phototypesetting made inroads into the typography business in the 1960s and 1970s, it had a detrimental impact on the appearance of much of the mass media. The problem resulted from the system's flexibility; type of one scale could be rescaled larger or smaller quite easily. However, for a good result, different sizes of type need to be subtly reproportioned at different sizes, and pho­totypesetting made it possible for printers inexpensively to sidestep this important element of good typography. A gradual decline in the quality of mass-produced media ensued, further conditioning an already indifferent public to ignore the qualita­tive differences in typesetting. This problem has become even more of an issue in the digital age, when phototypesetting has been superseded by even more flexible and economical equipment.

The third new 1950s sans serif discussed here was designed in Germany by the legendary typographer Hermann Zapf (b. 1918). Called Optima, this conservative typeface was released for the Linotype in 1958 (Jig. 8.9). Zapf  had sought to make a sans serif that included some of the structural characteristics of seriffed letters, particularly those of ancient Roman carvings. Zapf also admired the typography of the Renaissance, and there are variations in stroke width in Optima that recall the calligraphic strokes of Modern styles. Typefaces that add less rigid, non-geometric design elements to an essentially sans serif design are sometimes called "Humanist sans serif."

8.9 Hermann Zapf, Optima Typeface, 1952-8.

Journal and Advertising Design

Richard Paul Lohse began editing the magazine Bauen und Wohnen ("Building and Living") in 1948. Published in Zurich, the center of the Swiss style in the 1940s, the magazine cover shown here (fig. 8.10) combines sans serif lettering with the orthogonal grid characteristic of the style. Two innovative devices were employed for the cover of issue #4. First, there are dramatic contrasts in the scale of the various photographs, giving the page an evocative rhythmic element. This device also has a function, as the scale of the pictures is both aesthetic and hierarchical, indi­cating the key topics inside the journal. Second, the overlapping colors, which bridge voids and photographs, create interesting interconnections between the different parts of the composition. In the lower left, an abstract circular shape cuts into the corner of a rectangle of photographs, producing a muted diagonal axis that nicely complements the strong vertical and horizontal organization.

Muller-Brockmann made use of the same sort of colorful overlap in his typophoto design for VOLG brand grape juice (fig. 8.11). Here, the grid has been reductively split into just two wide verticals, one red and one yellow. While the text, in Akzidenz Grotesk, of course, is restricted to just the left half of the page, the artfully cropped, full-bleed photo underlies both colors. The yellow half of the image frames the man's face, which is balanced by a red void across the page. In an example of a functionalist design that conveys an extremely irrational message to the consumer, this advertisement is promoting "natural grape juice" with the vision of a handsome model driving a car. The tagline "Konzentration" suggests that imbibing the product will give one the steely focus of the man in the photo. It is fairly unusual for the "clear and logical" Swiss style to be used in order to impact the viewer with an emotional, intangible message.

Basel Type

A poster designed by Armin Hofmann (b. 1920) in 1959 for a theater in Basel, Switzerland, is more daring than those of many of his Zurich-based contemporaries (fig. 8.12). Hofmann, who had trained in Zurich with the influential teacher Ernst Keller, had moved to Basel in 1946 in order to accept a position as a profes­sor of graphic design at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule (later Schule fur Gestaltung). In the 1950s, he and his students, a group that included notable artists such as Karl Gerstner (b. 1930) and Max Schmid, made Basel an alternative Swiss style "scene." In broad terms, the artists based in Basel were less doctrinaire than their Zurich counterparts, and were more likely to disregard the unofficial "rules" of the International Style. Compared to the aus­tere works of Zurich artists such as Bill or Muller-Brockmann, graphics produced in Basel can appear downright whimsical. For example, Hofmann's ballet poster Giselle features text that runs downwards on a vertical axis, violating the rule that text must always run horizontal. The expanded bold letters that spell out "Giselle"—the name of the ballet, which was conceived by Theophile Gautier (1811-1872) in the 1840s—curve in a way that mimics the dancer's body, calling attention to themselves in a way that is uncharacteristic of the Swiss style. Also, there is a very small space between the letters and the photograph, causing the text and image to come dangerously close to interfering with one another.
 

8.12 Armin Hofmann, Giselle,1959. Poster.

Armin Hofmann. Posters.

Neue Grafik

In Zurich in 1958, Muller-Brockmann, Lohse, Neuburg, and Carlo Vivarelli (1919-1986) together founded the influential journal Neue Grafik("New Graphic Design"). Subtitled International Review of Graphic Design and Related Subjects Issues in German, English and French Language and replete with articles that summarized the major tenets of the Swiss style, Neue Grafik was responsible for establishing Switzerland's reputation as the key center of the International Style (fig. 8.13). In a gesture to the uni-versalism of the 1920s, numerous essays were written collaboratively by the four editor—designers, who signed them with the acronym "LMNV." Muller-Brockmann and his col­leagues limited their design to the reticent Akzidenz Grotesk, which appears in only two sizes. One tenet of the Swiss style was that the designer should never mix typefaces—a belief that the apostate Tschichold had embraced in the 1930s—and additionally must use only one or two weights. The weights, in turn, should provide a functionalist hierarchy to the viewer, showing by scale what are the most important parts of the text. The cover of the first issue of Neue Grafik is a fine example of the modular grid that underlies the compositions of almost all International Style works. Muller-Brockmann later titled his penultimate publication, a manual of graphic design, Raster Systeme ("Grid Systems"). On the cover of Neue Grafik, there are four narrow vertical elements that traverse the void in the middle of the cover. The title, repeated in three languages, acts as a horizontal block that establishes the orthogonal grid. The double-page spread recapitulates the grid, as the four columns of ranged left, ragged right text continue to structure the page, with artfully placed voids indirectly creating a horizontal element. Of course, this type of positive use of negative space is another key stylistic element of the International Style.

While Neue Grafik was exceptionally successful during its seven years of publication, it also became "exhibit A" to critics who felt that the Swiss style, especially in Zurich, had become inflexible and dogmatic as its international reputation grew. The extremely limited range of graphic design "solutions" presented by the more rigid proponents of the style grew repetitious over time (see Chapter 9). It can be argued that many practitioners of the Swiss style lacked the dynamic, even chaotic thread that tied Russian Constructivist design to the innovations of Dada and Futurism. Defenders of the International Style are more apt to portray it as a responsible set of professional and even moral prin­ciples, not simple a "style" that has gone out of fashion. By the 1970s, the scope of available European patrons for Swiss style designers had narrowed considerably. The style had become emblematic of a type of cold, institutional communication that offered little in the way of variety. Muller-Brockmann's information design of 1972 for SBB, the Swiss railway consortium, is exemplary of how International Style "functionalism" became identified with pallid, very functional, graphic projects (fig. 8.14). A comparison of these pages from his design manual and Edward Johnston's signage for the London Underground of the 1910s shows how the earlier design embodied the fashionable glamour of the train while the SBB signage is constrained by its austere anti-expressionism.

 

England and the International Style

Stanley Morison

In the United Kingdom, typography and graphic design profes­sionals of the 1930s through the 1960s were generally reluctant to adopt the International Style. Stanley Morison (1889-1967), the most well-known typographer and typographical historian in England during this period, in many ways dominated the scene with his commitment to finely crafted traditional typefaces as well as his numerous publications. His book First Principles of Typography, originally an essay in The Fleuron, became a sort of bible for British typographers after its publication in 1936. In the 1920s, Morison engineered the revival of a number of classic typefaces, including Bembo (fig. 8.15), Baskerville, and Fournier.

As the main typographic consultant to the Monotype Corporation, Morison was well positioned to promote the use of conventional modern faces in the machine age. This is not to imply that he rejected modern sans serifs completely, as he was instrumental in arranging the production of Gill Sans. In many ways, Morison's influence and good judgment helped make Monotype the dominant mechanical typesetting system in Britain.

Morison also held two other key positions during his career, as the chief book designer for Cambridge University Press and as a consultant to The Times of London. In 1932, he introduced an exceptional new typeface for the newspaper, Times New Roman, as a part of a general redesign (fig. 8.16). An extremely narrowly proportioned seriffed face, designed to save space and enhance legibility, Times New Roman was produced by Monotype, and was made available to the wider printing industry a few years after it was introduced at The Times.

8.15 Stanley Morison, Bembo Typeface, 1929.

8.16 Stanley Morison, Times New Roman Typeface, 1932

Jan Tschichold at Penguin

 

Having himself rejected the dogmatic assertions of the New Typography, Jan Tschichold accepted a position at Penguin Books of London in 1947- Penguin, founded in 1935, was the first commercially successful paperback book company in Britain. Paperback books had quickly established themselves as a hot commodity before the war, allowing a huge segment of the popu­lation for whom hardcover tomes were offputtingly expensive to read literature and popular fiction. During the conflict, Penguin paperbacks, which were not designed with any particular aesthetic qualities in mind, proved to be the perfect portable, functional companion for soldiers.

Tschichold inherited a chaotic situation when he moved to London in 1947. Up to that point, Penguin editions, which num­bered in the hundreds, had been typeset and designed by a huge range of people, mainly the job printers who ran the machinery. It was immediately clear to Tschichold that, apart from Morison's work for Monotype, little in British publishing rose to the level of German or Swiss standards. While working at Penguin, Tschichold did not put in place a dogmatic set of rules regarding book layout or type, rather, and according to his new, broad taste in typography, allowed book designers to use a wide variety of faces. What he did insist on was that each run of books follow general principles of good design, be they conventional or mod­ern in origin. His most enduring contribution to Penguin was a leaflet called Penguin Composition Rules. In this four-page essay, Tschichold demanded that Penguin's designers follow standard­ized rules for all aspects of layout and typography. A typical dictum includes simple rules and the explanation for them: "All text composition should be as closely word-spaced as possible ... Wide spaces should be strictly avoided. Words may be freely bro­ken whenever necessary to avoid wide spacing, as breaking words is less harmful to the appearance of the page than too much space between words."

    Tschichold also took time out to design many covers himself, such as one for the Penguin edition of Dante's The Divine Comedy, released in 1947 (fig. 8.17). While quite conventional in design, combining a small woodcut with typography by Tschichold, it is a clear and well-balanced composition that is immediately legible to the viewer. The solid blue border is reinforced by a geometric rule that provides a strong frame for the centered lettering set in Monotype's Perpetua. During his tenure, Tschichold standardized the design for Penguin's various book series, and The Divine Comedy is a fine example of the basic elements he devised for Penguin Classics, making them instantly recognizable to the con­sumer. In raising the aesthetic level of a mass-market distributor of paperback books, Tschichold brought to fruition the vision that had been espoused, but never acted upon, by William Morris in the nineteenth century. Tschichold later wrote, "We do not need pretentious books for the wealthy, we need more really well-made ordinary books."

    While Penguin had used only a limited variety of types in its early years, under Tschichold the publisher employed a wide range of elegant faces made available because of Morison's work at Monotype. Morison's and Tschichold's work in England during the mid-twentieth century raises the question of what is the most functional typography. At a time when "functionalism" was the credo of the followers of the International Style, it is arguable that the quieter, conventional designs that predominated in England best fulfilled that mission.

8.17 Jan Tschichold, Dante's Divine Comedy. 1947. Penguin Books.

Jan Tschichold, Color offset poster, 1938.

Herbert Spencer

During this period, England had one great champion of the International Style, the typographer Herbert Spencer (1924-2002). Through his own work, much of it for the pub­lisher Lund Humphries, and the journal Typographies which he edited and designed from 1949 until 1967, Spencer unflaggingly sought to promote the geometric abstract style in England, Spencer also authored and designed an influential book that sum­marized his beliefs, Design in Business Printing, in 1952. Acquainted at an early age with both Max Bill and Rudolf Hostettler (1928-), the editor of Schweizer Graphische Mitteilungen, Spencer promoted the Swiss point of view well into the 1990s.
    In France, there was even greater resistance to the establish­ment of the International Style, and the corporate identity movement that energized graphic designers in the United States Did not play a large role in French commerce until the 1980s. In its place, the art of the poster retained its status, and designers such as Pierre Fix-Masseau (1869-1937) continued to make advertisements in an Art Deco vein.

American Innovators

In the decades immediately following the war, the United States witnessed an economic expansion that paralleled the dramatic increase in its status on the world's stage. With its military triumphant, its industries intact, its cities spared from bombardment, the country was ideally situated to experience an era of welcome prosperity. The 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s would prove to be a boom time for American industries as well as for the graphic designers that served them. In the United States, the International Style had barely scratched the surface of the nation's conscious­ness prior to the war; institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art has been like voices crying in the wilderness, touting a set of principles on which a new art of design could be based. After the war, this message would gradually break through, and the United States would become second only to Switzerland as a site for the exploration of geometric styles. However, with a few notable exceptions, the majority of American designers never became doctrinaire in their adoption of the style, but remained open to an eclectic range of influences.

Among the most talented American book and magazine cover designers of this period was a Los Angeles native named Alvin Lustig (1915-1955). Lustig worked in a variety of media during his brief career, splitting his time between New York and Los Angeles. In 1946, he was hired by Will Burtin, Art Director of Fortune, to produce a cover for the magazine. Burtin had assumed the position at Fortune in 1945, and he was successful in updating its typography and introducing modern design principles (see Chapter 7). Lustig's cover image features a full bleed rainbow of colors; it is traditional in American art history to associate such an exuberant polychrome tendency with the state of California, which may well have been the explanation in this case (fig. 8.18). On top of the color field Lustig has placed a number of two- and three-dimensional elements, ranging from a completely flat, hand-drawn curlicue that bumps into the "e" to a photo of a pin cushion that seems to project aggressively into the viewer's space. A line leading from this latter object enters an area of negative color, almost like an X-ray, before meandering off the page.

The idiosyncratic nature of Lustig's cover for Fortune, especially the way in which the different elements of the design seem almost whimsically derived, exemplifies the "Americanization" of the International Style that occurred in the United States during this period. While some American graphic designers accepted the rigid ideology prevalent in Zurich, many more saw the International Style as just that—a style, which should be flexibly employed as the occasion demanded. For this reason, it is common to see elements of the An Deco or other, eclectic styles intrude into an otherwise geometrically structured image. For example, Lustig's 1948 book jacket for Anatomy for Interior Designers has a firm orthogonal design underlying it (fig. 8.20). The right angles of the body parts are reinforced by lines of hyphens which appear to perform some measuring function. However, this clear structure and asymmetrical, cropped layout are overlaid with flat, organic shapes that contest the profundity of the grid. Lustig loved the flowing line created hy shapes such as these, and he integrated them into many of his works.

In 1954, Lustig designed a cover for an exhibition catalog published by the Museum of Modern Art (fig. 8.19). The eclectic nature of Lustig's work is obvious when compared with the previous examples, as here he has eliminated any superfluous element in favor of a design that consists only of typography. Taking a cue from German work of the 1920s, Lustig has created a striking geometric abstraction that makes ample use of the grid and of negative space. However, his employment of seriffed modern type deviates from the standards set by the Swiss school. In addition, the overprinting of the "2" on top of the word "European" suggests a Dada element, generating a deliberate "error" that disrupts the simple harmony of the composition.

8.18 Alvin Lustig. Fortune magazine, Dec 1946.

8.19 Alvin Lustig, Exhibition Catalog The New Decade, 1955,
Museum of Modern Art, New York. Collection Elaine Lustig Cohen.

8.20 Alvin Lustig, Anatomy for Interior Designers, 1948. Book jacket. Collection Elaine Lustig Cohen.

Alvin Lustig

Alvin Lustig

Saul Bass

Saul Bass (1920-1996) was another influential American designer who practiced in Los Angeles. Born in New York, he moved after che war to California, where he set up his own independent design practice. In 1954, he was hired by the movie director Otto Preminger (1905-1986) to create film posters. The following year, he completed his poster for The Man with the Golden Arm, Preminger's newest picture, which dealt with the gritty, urban theme of drug addiction (fig. 8.21). Bass's poster was composed of a geometric grid made up of flat rectangular planes of bold color. The basic grid of the image is not a fixed structure, as the slightly irregular shapes from which it is built up—some encasing still photos of the actors—seem to wobble within the frame; this device creates a slight kinetic force that is not found in most Swiss style compositions. It is apparent that many American designers were impressed by the ra.w energy of pulp fiction covers, and one can sense that Bass did not want to constrain his images with the grid. The most striking element in the poster is a man's jagged arm, which dangles in the center of the image. This image on the one hand clearly recalls the drooping arm of Jesus in the series of Pietas that Michelangelo produced in the early sixteenth century—sculptures that had been copied many times over the centuries. In a contemporary sense, the arm stands as the symbol of the protagonist's heroin addiction. Bass's greatest gift was the ability to create a single strong motif that would stick in the viewer's mind and serve to summarize a whole complex of ideas and feelings.

Preminger was so taken by the "jagged arm" symbol that he asked Bass to design titles for the film using the same motif. Bass created an animated title sequence in which white bars coalesce on a black field background, ultimately morphing into the jagged arm, which this time briefly stands alone, dominating the frame with its stark