The Revolution of Everyday Life.

Originally published just months before the May 1968 upheavals in France, leading member of the Situationist International Raoul Vaneigem's THE REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE offered a lyrical and aphoristic critique of the 'society of the spectacle' from the point of view of individual experience. Vaneigem was born in Lessines and studied romance philology at the Free University of Brussels from 1952 to 1956. He was a member of the Situationist International from 1961 to 1970.

Publisher: Verso. 2012. Softcover, 304 pages. Design: David Costello [Comme 6 / Neugraphic]

postscript Zur Form von Schrift heute

Since the mid-1980s, new technical developments such as the PostScript programming language have allowed every graphic designer to develop their own fonts and act as suppliers of new alphabets alongside the established font manufacturers. The publication postscript combines very divergent positions with a focus on the German-speaking area and presents around 100 fonts in the postscript collection, which follow different design tendencies such as the revitalization of classic typeface designs. Text contributions by the editors as well as by Robin Kinross and Walter Pamminger explain technical and design aspects of contemporary type design.

Edited by: Dr. Eva Kraus, Andreas Pawlik, Martina Fineder. Texts by: Martina Fineder, Robin Kinross, Dr. Eva Kraus, Walter Pamminger, Andreas Pawlik. Hardcover, thread sewn, 264 pages, 244 Ills. Neugraphic. Publisher: Hatje Cantz.

Camille Graeser: Synthese

Swiss artist and designer Camille Graeser was one of the foremost representatives of Zurich Concrete Art. From 1913 to 1915 he studied interior decoration at the Stuttgart School of Arts and Crafts. With Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, he collaborated on the design of a pioneering housing project, the Weissenhofsiedlung, Stuttgart, in 1926. In parallel with his professional work in interior and industrial design, Graeser produced drawings and paintings that ranged from a semi-abstract figuration to a rigorous geometric abstraction. After moving to Zurich in 1933, he began to concentrate exclusively on painting. In 1938 Graeser joined the Alliance, a group whose nucleus was formed by Max Bill, Verena Loewensberg, and Richard Paul Lohse.

To describe their geometric, Constructivist approach they chose the term “concrete”, as advanced by Theo van Doesburg in 1930 and defined by Max Bill in 1936. The salient point was that works of concrete art did not arise from a process of abstraction from reality, but were based on a direct employment of the “concrete” pictorial elements of plane, line, volume, space, and color. These elements stood only for themselves, and had no referential character. Graeser’s compositions of geometric forms developed in the direction of an increasing reduction to rectangles and squares, accompanied by increasing complexity of structure. By about 1974, what the artist described as the “folded-out square” had become his principal theme.

Bilingual edition German and English. Softcover with flaps, thread sewn, 16.4 x 24 cm, 196 pages. Publisher: Kunsthaus Zürich. Design: Neugraphic.

Piet Zwart: Fotografie

At the beginning of the 1920s Piet Zwart, together with Paul Schuitema, gave a great forward impetus to Dutch photography. In 1923, when ‘‘pictorial’’ art photography still flourished in the Netherlands, Zwart, already an architect and interior and graphic designer by profession, met El Lissitzky who taught him the principles of the photogram and of photo-fixing. A few years later Zwart used a photogram for an advertisement booklet for a cable factory in Delft. In 1928, in a catalogue for the same company, he purposely chose photography as the means of illustration: he had realized that what he really wanted to do was to produce thoughtful, exact, extremely sharp commercial photographs, in line with the ‘‘New Objectivity’’ and in accordance with Moholy-Nagy’s views about the integration of image and text. In effect, from 1923, he taught himself photography: all the optical, technical and chemical problems he encountered he solved by consulting German technical literature. Together with Schuitema and G. Kiljan, he tried out all the various photographic possibilities: light-shadow effects, reflections, movements, etc.

In 1929 Zwart, Schuitema and Kiljan took part in the important exhibition, Film und Foto, in Stuttgart. Zwart was responsible for the Dutch submissions. Works by such participants as the American Edward Weston, the German Walter Peterhans and the Russian Rodchenko overwhelmingly impressed Zwart—for their technique, expression, composition: confronted with such artistry. The experience stimulated his own work. So did his stay as guest lecturer in photography at the Bauhaus in 1931. In the years that followed he tried inexhaustibly to bring Dutch photography up to an international standard. Zwart created an extensive archive of technical photographs from his commercial commissions and of his own personal work. His own work very often involves reproductions of structures of great clarity of line—tree-bark, cobwebs, ice formed in a ditch, waterdrops on a branch, a misted window. They are dynamic because of a diagonal line, an unusual angle, or unexpected composition. Describing his work, he said: ‘‘We used the camera only as a means of expression and as a visual medium that offers possibilities found in no other artistic technique, possibilities that the eye can not catch in their totality. We tried to establish a characteristic vision of photography.’’

Hardback, sewn over 0.25 cm boards, flat backed with head and tail bands, 21 x 27 cm, 258 pages. Publisher: Kunsthaus Zürich. Design: Neugraphic.