Pioneers of German Graphic Design - Part One

In my judgement, by some distance the best book on this subject in English. Comprehensive and beautifully organised and illustrated, it does real justice to some highly accomplished artists and designers whose achievements tower over many of their counterparts in the English-speaking world.  The Weimar years famously created the conditions for an extraordinary explosion of experimentation and creativity in the visual arts as Germany began rebuilding its industrial power. From 1919 the Bauhaus was promoting a reinvention of architecture and industrial design as well as developing the visual language of Modernism and New Typography (Universal, Futura) whose influence can still be seen today. Herbert Bayer’s work is the best representation of the Bauhaus in this book.  

While commercial and public sector clients were increasingly accepting of radically new graphic styles there was a menacing tide of resistance building as the Nazi culture warriors intruded into every aspect of national life. Most of these designers would run into trouble after 1933 with the rise of the Third Reich and many would be barred from working.  Five were forced into exile, one was murdered in the Holocaust while more than a few made unworthy accommodation with the Nazi regime - at least one, Ludwig Hohlwein was a committed Nazi cheerleader who continued to prosper as his former colleagues faced persecution and, in the case of Julius Klinger, death.

Fourteen key figures have been selected for a twenty page extended career survey, including some like Jan Tschichold known as designers and typographers and Peter Behrens whose graphic work on corporate identity for AEG was complementary to his career as an architect (often for AEG) and designer maker. There are others like Hohlwein who were almost exclusively illustrators, with most combining graphic design with illustration. Emil Preetorius was better known for his 9 year tenure as Stage Director of the Bayreuth Festival until he fell victim to the internal politics of the Wagner clan and in 1942 faced Gestapo interrogation after being accused of being friendly to Jews - his release from detention followed Hitler’s personal intervention.  

Callisto Publishers Berlin, 2017 (ISBN: 9783981753912)

Part 2 (Schulpig to Wiertz) will follow soon.

 

London Stations - Southwark (Jubilee Line)

Opened in 1999 as part of the Jubilee Line Extension (JLE) to Stratford, Southwark has a unique design thanks to the physical constraints of its site close to Waterloo East, the only station to which it has a direct link.  Sir Richard MacCormac, who designed the controversial  Hampstead home of Thierry Henry, was the architect and somehow came up with a subdued theatrical presentation that combined spatial intrigue with formal elegance, all of which is achieved in an understated way, free of grandiose gestures and set pieces.

The ground level entrance is a compact homage to Charles Holden and his preference for circular ticket halls (Arnos Grove, Southgate etc), from which escalators descend to an unexpected  tall and top lit concourse. On one side is a shimmering deep blue wall of triangular glazed tiles, opposite is an austere block built wall pierced by openings for up and down escalators - the sight of the escalators folded into steep dark apertures is strangely unsettling as if they were links to a sinister underworld.  The blue wall is the work of Alexander Beleschenko and has the effect of leading the eye upwards following the tonal trajectory to the crescent of light overhead.  For Simon Jenkins writing in Britain’s 100 Best Stations (Penguin, 2017), Southwark is the jewel of the JLE and he describes it as “idiosyncratic and hard to place in the modernist spectrum”. 

 

At the Imperial War Museum

These are some highlights from a recent visit to the upper decks of the Imperial War Museum to see the recently opened Blavatnik Galleries.  This has enabled the museum to display a more complete survey of their visual arts collection to include film and photography alongside paintings.  A decent selection of the museum’s major paintings was supported by a large group of lesser known pictures from the hidden depths of what is a vast collection of works.  It’s always fascinating to see what emerges from a museum store after a deep curatorial dive and many unjustly neglected paintings (often by female artists) have been rescued from oblivion.

Percy Wyndham Lewis,   A Battery Shelled  (1919)

Lewis had a remarkably inventive visual imagination - his Cubist-inspired bio-mechanical figures were the perfect combatants in a war that was increasingly an inhumane  technological struggle for supremacy.  On the left a stylised trio of officers, two seem lost in thought, only one observes the incoming fire and the frantic efforts of the troops in a shattered landscape on the ground.  Crates of unused shells look terrifyingly vulnerable to enemy fire.

Paul Nash,   The Menin Road  (1919)

Nash served as an officer in this part of the Western Front in early 1917, later that year he returned as a War Artist and made the sketches and studies that would form the basis of this painting completed in London in 1919.  His experiences were condensed into this tormented landscape, blown apart by the exchange of explosive forces.  For an artist whose sensibility was largely formed by a reverence for the natural world, this sight was the ultimate affront. Displaced concrete defences and curls of corrugated iron are scattered on the cratered woodland floor, to which a handful of splintered tree stumps remain anchored.  All under a turbulent sky pierced by searchlight beams, illuminating the scene in a sickly, unnatural glare.

Anna Airy,   Shell Forge, Hackney Marshes  (1918)

With so many male artists overseas, female painters landed some major commissions recording the Home Front.  Anna Airy, an established Slade-trained realist painter in her mid-thirties spent a year travelling the country painting the spectacle of heavy industry in the service of the war effort - manufacturing munitions, assembling aircraft and extracting domestic gas from coking coal.  Her command of perspective and ability to build a coherent composition in challenging environments were every bit as effective as similar works by the much more celebrated Terence Cuneo.

Douglas Fox-Pitt,   Indian Army Injured in Hospital in Dome, Brighton  (1918)

Fox-Pitt was a son of the founder of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, blessed with competent drawing skills he drifted into the fringes of London’s art world, linking with the painters of the Camden Town Group. In this painting he records a curious wartime episode when the dome of the Brighton Pavilion was commandeered as a hospital for the treatment of Indian and Asian troops injured on the Western Front. It’s a boldly coloured and attractively naive composition - an elevated viewpoint enhances the artist’s pattern making impulse.

John Wood,   ARP in Jamaica  (1941)

Five female nurses of the Order of St John in training in Jamaica. Commissioned as part of the scheme for "War Pictures by Native-born Colonial artists", 1941

Ethel Gabain,   Bunyan-Stannard First Aid Envelope for Burns Victims  (1943)

Sequential four part image showing different aircrew at work with protective silk envelopes shielding their injured hands.  A varied selection of her portraiture (mostly theatrical subjects) and workplace studies from the war can be seen here.

John Singer Sargent,  Gassed (1919)

Sargent’s monumental picture of the victims of mustard gas dominates the space.  Blindfolded and carrying their weapons they process across the picture plain with hands resting on the shoulder of the man in front. Another line of injured men sprawl in the foreground.  In August 1918 Sargent was witness to just such a scene on a day when hundreds of injured men were led from the trenches for treatment behind the lines.  The epic scale and the cinematic presentation make a powerful statement about the random cruelties of armed conflict.

 

Imperial Hotel Tokyo

2024 is the centenary year of Frank Lloyd Wright’s much lamented Imperial Hotel in Tokyo - commemorative exhibitions have taken place in Tokyo and Buffalo.  The Imperial was one of the most significant commissions of Wright’s career and a validation of his lifelong passion for the art of Japan with its decisive influence on the development of his personal aesthetic.  The job came his way via a connection between a Chicago dealer in Japanese prints and the General Manager of the Imperial Hotel to whom Wright was recommended. Wright began collecting Japanese woodblock prints in the 1890s and his first trip outside the US was a 3 month visit to Japan in 1905, travelling the country by train, recording shrines, temples and domestic architecture with a four-by-five camera.

Initial development work began in 1913 when Wright was in his mid-forties and about to enter a troubled decade of personal tragedy, fire and earthquake.  In August 1914 one of the servants at Wright’s Wisconsin home and studio, Taliesin, murdered Wright’s wife, her two children, a draftsman and three workmen before setting fire to the property.  Fire would follow Wright to Japan, striking twice during the construction of the new hotel, on one occasion destroying a temporary annex of Wright’s design.  Ten days after fire claimed the old Imperial Hotel building, the new building was struck by the earthquake of April 26th. 1922 - happily for Wright, who was working there at the time, damage was minimal. The completed hotel was due to be formally opened at noon on September 1st. 1923, the Kanto earthquake struck at 11.57 and went on to devastate the city with over 100,000 lives lost in the subsequent fires.  On this occasion Wright was back home in the US - he would never return to Japan.  The new hotel sustained significant damage (accounts vary as to the full extent) Wright promoted a legend claiming his building was almost untouched due to his innovatory floating foundations.  There was little basis to this claim - true, the building escaped destruction  but the floating foundations failed to prevent sinkage though the seismic separation joints and interlocking timber beams offered some protection. 

During and immediately after the war the hotel took further battering, suffering incendiary bombing and occupation by US forces and it was 1952 before it reopened to guests.  By this time the fabric of the building was in poor condition, some of Wright’s design features made updating almost impossible and the number of rooms was inadequate to cope with demand.  Its days were numbered, it was demolished in 1967 to be replaced with a modernist tower block. By this time Wright’s building was so compromised that there was no great agitation to retain it. The only portion to survive is a recreation of the main entrance and reflecting pool in the Meiji-Mura open air architectural museum near Nagoya.

 

Lilian Rowles (1893-1953)

Stanley Charles Rowles (1887-1979) was a landscape painter, printmaker, professional illustrator, poster designer (follow this link to see his Penzance poster for the Great Western Railway) and educator appointed as Headteacher at the West Bromwich Municipal School of Art where he married one of his students, Lilian Hall.  Lilian took her husband’s surname and pursued her own career as a commercial illustrator, specialising in books for children. There’s an account of her life’s work written by a relative at theclothshed blog.  Her proficiency in drawing children can be seen in her advertising artwork for Hovis Bread in the 1920’s that exploit the visual power of a silhouette suggesting some awareness of the work of contemporary illustrators like Coles Phillips.  When The Children’s Hour was published in the 1940s Lilian was credited as both author and illustrator.  The presence of a radio on the cover signalled its relationship with the BBC programme of the same name and played its part in evoking a cosy vision of childhood reinforced by the wonders of modern technology. The internal illustrations are saved from banality by some well observed and lively figure drawing and an educated eye for the untidiness of childhood hair.  Not a hint of dissension to be noted in these exceptionally well behaved children.  The format of the book is very much the same as the example shown on theclothshed blogspot.  For the most part Lilian’s work is featured alongside other illustrators in compendium volumes - opportunities to publish her own books were few and far between. It’s not that unlikely that her career was persistently disrupted by the arrival of children and she never had the chance to fully develop her potential. 

 

The Fabric of Democracy: Propaganda Textiles

An intriguing exhibition at the Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey provides a snapshot of the role of the visual arts in time of conflict.  When national survival is at stake everything must make a contribution to the war effort. Collective values come into play as even the most socially exclusive artists and designers strive to make a difference - nobody wants to be accused of lacking in patriotism.  There’s a change of tone from hauteur to something more demotic - extravagance is no longer acceptable while raising public morale is a new priority.  Working under this new set of constraints the fashion industry falls back upon formal simplicity, classic elegance and a colour palette that’s light, bright and uplifting. Textile designers responded with fabric prints devised around patriotic messages and texts displayed in jaunty settings.  Other nations were involved including a strong collection of kimono prints from Japan - more bellicose in their imagery but more refined in their visual language.