Wolfgang Weingart

Site includes articles, bibliography and collection of designer's work.

Wolfgang Weingart, born in Konstanz, Germany, was a self-taught designer. In 1968 he began teaching typography at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Basle, where he eventually took over from Emil Ruder. Weingart proceeded to reevaluate the precepts of Swiss typography. Weingart consolidated his approach in his introduction of an advanced program that took up the positive aspects of the Basle approach and used them as a basis upon which to introduce an additional element of student-based exploration. This was to be based on the examination of fundamental concepts in typography, such as the predominance of the right angle and the grid, and an intuitive response to the organisation of space. As Weingart's design innovations from the early 1970s (including step-rules, size and weight contrasts, letterspaced type, and line rules moving through the space to link elements together) were widely emulated during the late 1970s. Weingart moved on to create collage-like compositions by layering film positives of images and type. This innovative technique enabled Weingart to juxtapose and overlay complex visual information. During this period, Weingart delighted in contrasts. Type, images, moire and halftone patterns, torn collage elements, and linear patterns are densely layered and stacked into rich, tonal graphic expressions.

Richard Paul Lohse

Site includes articles, bibliography and collection of Lohse's design work.

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Typographer, graphic designer, painter - 1918-22: trains as an advertising designer. 1922- 30: works at the Max Dalang studio in Zurich. 1930: opens his own advertising agency in Zurich. Produces much work for museums, publishers and industry. 1937: co-founder and deputy board member of the artists' group "Allianz", an association of modern Swiss artists. 1947-55: editor and designer of the architecture magazine "Bauen and Wohnen". 1958-65: publisher and editor of "Neue Grafik magazine in Zurich with Josef Müller-Brockmann, Hans Neuburg and Carlo Vivarelli.

Blow-Up

Collection of articles and critical analysis on Antonioni's 1966 film. Includes gallery, publications and production information.

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Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film Blow-Up is a masterfully constructed and paced exploration of the enigmas that challenge our interpretations of both the moving and the still image. Photography plays a key role at the very core of the film, providing the metaphorical site for the directors questioning of the relationship between reality and perceptions.

Edward Ruscha

Gallery of Ruscha's exhibitions posters. Includes interviews, bibliography of the artist's books and a selection of published articles.

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Edward Ruscha has long been an influential voice in postwar American painting as well as one of contemporary art's most significant graphic artists. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1937 and raised in Oklahoma City, Ruscha left for Los Angeles in 1956 to study commercial art. He abandoned this discipline for painting soon after, but nonetheless found the techniques of layout, lettering, and illustration to be a significant influence on his work. He was able to see Los Angeles through the eyes of an outsider, and to document in his art the ethos of this modern, sprawling metropolis that has a vernacular all its own. To many, his work epitomizes aspects of a Los Angeles sensibility, thriving on popular culture, illusionism, and a sense of nostalgia. Though Ruscha emerged at a time when a number of art movements were appearing on the American scene, he developed to the side of any particular group, bringing to his work a synthesis of the ideas behind Surrealism, Pop, and Conceptual Art.

Anselm Kiefer

Collection of artist's exhibitions posters. Includes interviews, bibliography and a selection of published articles.

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AnseIm Kiefer born in 1945 in Donaueschingen, Baden-Württemberg, is one of the most renowned figures in contemporary art. Kiefer studied law and French at the University of Freiburg in 1965 before turning to painting. He graduated in 1970 and began informal study at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf with Joseph Beuys. Kiefer's vision encompasses philosophy, history, literature, politics and compelling moral issues – ranging from intimate books that encapsulate German identity to monumental public sculpture installations. Conceptually, Kiefer urges the viewer to challenge received narratives about war, identity, religion, morality, memory and history. Visually, his art is suffused with a sense of epic melancholy. His paintings exalt physical tactility, incorporating such organic matter as straw, sand and lead, to become elemental presences. Kiefer's longstanding leitmotivs have included the earth, the stars, architecture and alchemical symbols that evoke themes of devastation, metamorphosis and renewal. “I work with symbols that link our consciousness with the past. The symbols create a kind of simultaneous continuity, and we recollect our origins.” — Anselm Kiefer

Karl Gerstner

Site includes published articles, bibliography and collection of Gerstner's design work.

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Karl Gerstner was one of Switzerland's preeminent graphic designers. In 1959, he and Markus Kutter founded the agency Gerstner + Kutter, which later became Gerstner, Gredinger, and Kutter (GGK). Before long, the agency had become one of the largest internationally acclaimed advertising firms in Switzerland. After withdrawing from active agency work, Gerstner designed the corporate identities for such companies as Swiss Air, Burda and Langenscheidt, in addition to working as worldwide identity consultant and designer for IBM. Nobody matched Gerstner’s originality as a typographer nor his daring as an advertising designer, and as a theorist he was for decades the most coherent writer on graphics. Gerstner’s importance can be described in three ways. First, he had developed the idea of a flexible grid – the central theme of Gerstner’s thinking was on computational systems, which he described as ‘programmes’. Second, he was a pioneer of unjustified, ranged-left setting for text. Third, he had extended ‘functional’ into ‘integral’ typography, where the message and its form are inseparable and interdependent – idea, text and typographical presentation are one.

Art & Language

Site includes published articles, bibliography and gallery of selected artwork.

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Art & Language [Michael Baldwin, Mel Ramsden] was the name given in 1968 to a collaborative practice developed initially in England by Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Michael Baldwin and Harold Hurrell. Drawing on linguistic philosophy they investigated the conceptual and ideological presuppositions underlying art’s institutionalisation, through discussions, the exhibition of their working materials in various forms such as indexes, and in the journal Art-Language, launched in 1969 and edited from 1971 by the critic Charles Harrison. They acquired associates in New York among whom were the Australian artist lan Burn, another British artist, Mel Ramsden, and US artists Joseph Kosuth, Christine Kozlov and Kathryn Bigelow. By 1979 only Baldwin and Ramsden continued to operate under the group’s original name, producing works that investigate relationships between formalism and ideology.

Emil Ruder

Site includes published articles, bibliography and collection of Ruder's design work.

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Graphic designer, typographer, teacher and writer. Trained as typesetter in Basel, 1929–33. Studied in Paris, 1938–39. Further printing studies at Zurich Kunstgewerbeschule, 1941–42. Typographic teaching at various levels, Basel Allgemeine Gewerbeschule, 1942. Head of Department and finally director of the Gewerbeschule and Gewerbemusuem from 1965. In 1967, he compiled his knowledge in the publication "Typography: A Manual of Design," which quickly became a seminal text. Together with Armin Hofmann, Ruder founded the advanced class for graphic design at the Basel Allgemeine Gewerbeschule in 1968. Through the adroit combination of theory and practice, Ruder is considered one of the most influential mediators of typography in the 20th century.

On Kawara

Site includes articles, bibliography and a gallery of the artist's 'Date Paintings'.

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On Kawara was born in Aichi Prefecture, Japan in 1933. After travelling in the United States, Mexico and Europe from 1959-65 he settled in New York where he lived until his death in 2014. Kawara’s concerns are with time — personal time juxtaposed with cosmological time, time ordered in terms of dates and locations, the time of individual existence as described within twentieth century codes and expressed through linguistic and numerical symbols.The most celebrated of his serial works are the Date Paintings initiated in 1966. Here, although Kawara persisted in the use of the traditional format and media, painting is purged in rigorously reductive fashion of everything but the neatly typographic inscription of the date on which the work was made. The hand-painted but unadorned sans serif letterform preferred by Kawara is transcribed in the language of the country in which Kawara resided at the time - with the exception of those places such as Japan where roman type is not used. In these cases Kawara utilises Esperanto. Each canvas was completed on the day of its date, so becoming a temporal statement within the life of the artist. Usually, each painting is kept in a carboard box especially made to fit the work. A local newspaper page with the date when the work was made covers the inside lid of the box. Letters and numbers work simultaneously as forms and signs, time measures and the raw material of painting. The addition of newspaper cuttings enhances the paradox: we go from a single fact to the enlarged frame of a situation, from a code abstraction to a concrete localisation, from Painting to History.

Christopher Wool

Gallery of artist's exhibitions posters. Includes interviews, bibliography and a selection of published articles.

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Equally concerned with process and picture-making, Christopher Wool's works explore points of intersection between signage and language, pattern and decoration—typically by altering found, mass-producible imagery through techniques of layering, overpainting, and variations in register. Since the late 1980s, Wool has produced black-and-white text paintings consisting of single words and pointed phrases in allover compositions of stenciled block letters. He has also executed paintings based on decorative motifs such as vines, flowers, and polka dots. In 1995 Wool began using a spray gun to apply black paint in a drawing-like manner onto both paper and aluminum surfaces. Later he employed the spray gun in conjunction with more conventional silkscreen and painting techniques. Wool's critical engagement with the history of painting has resulted in hybrid approaches that combine the emphasis on gesture and touch of Abstract Expressionism with the cool, mediated remove of Pop Art.

Gerhard Richter 18. Oktober 1977

Site includes articles, interviews, bibliography and gallery of Richter’s 'Oktober 18. 1977' cycle of paintings.

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Gerhard Richter’s Oktober 18. 1977 (1988) is a series of 15 paintings based on press and police photographs of members of the German left-wing militant group Red Army Faction (RAF). The works depict key moments surrounding the group’s dramatic arrests, prison life, and the suicide of Ulrike Meinhof, and the subsequent deaths of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe in Stammheim Prison on October 18, 1977. The cycle was painted ten years after the titular date, an interval in which the traumatic events of the mid-1970s, after a period of saturation coverage in the mass media and heated ideological dispute, had fallen from public view. “The death of the terrorists and all the related events before and after describe something monstrous which affected me, and – even though I may have repressed it – has haunted me ever since.” — Gerhard Richter

Josef Müller-Brockmann

Site includes articles, bibliography and gallery of Müller-Brockmann’s posters.

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One of the twentieth century's most important graphic designers, the Swiss-born Müller-Brockmann is the father of functional, objective design and an influential figure for generations of designers around the world. While many of his contemporaries moved to the United States and elsewhere in Europe, Müller-Brockmann based himself in Zurich and established his reputation there. He adapted his approach to a changing world, moving from an early illustrative style to a modern constructivist approach, making full use of geometrical form and the grid system to provide an underlying structure to graphic work. Müller-Brockmann is perhaps most known for his large array of music posters, produced from the early 1950s to the early 1970s, which graphically represent the musical character of each specific performance. In addition to these iconic designs, Müller-Brockmann completed a number of books on graphic design and its history, including the influential The Graphic Designer and his Design Problems, and Grid Systems in Graphic Design.

Metropolis

Collection of articles and critical analysis on Fritz Lang’s 1927 film. Includes bibliography, gallery, screenplay and production information.

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Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang in 1926 from a scenario by Thea von Harbou. The film was predominantly concerned with the city itself, and its maker, Fritz Lang, admitted that his fascination with the skyscrapers of New York had been the principal catalyst for its imagery. Metropolis has remained perhaps the most influential film based on architectural motifs in the history of the medium. These visual elements from Metropolis have become touchstones for the depiction of dystopian futures, urban landscapes, and the relationship between humanity and technology.

Jacqueline Casey

Gallery of Casey's posters. Includes bibliography and a selection of published articles.

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Jacqueline S. Casey (1927–1992) was a renowned graphic designer best known for her distinctive poster designs created for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Casey started her career with various design roles before being recruited to MIT's Office of Publications in 1955 by her friend and fellow MassArt alumna Muriel Cooper. She became director of the Office of Design Services in 1972, a position she held until her retirement in 1989. Influenced by the Swiss International Typographic Style, her posters, are recognised for their functional modernism.

Geigy Graphic Design

Site includes gallery, bibliography and articles on the company's graphic work.

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The design studio of J. R. Geigy AG was the launching pad for one of the great periods of Swiss graphic design in the 1950s and 1960s. The resulting works reveal a modernist formal idiom without being indebted to a specific, formulaic look. There was room in it for visual symbolism as well as the acquisition of nonrepresentational art, with which some of the graphic designers involved were connected. Under the leadership of Max Schmid for many years, the studio employed Roland Aeschlimann, Karl Gerstner, Jörg Hamburger, Steff Geissbühler, Andreas His, Toshihiro Katayama, and Nelly Rudin, among others.

Last Year at Marienbad

Comprehensive collection of articles and critical analysis on Alain Resnais' 1961 film. Includes bibliography, gallery, articles and production information.

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L'Année dernière à Marienbad (released in the US as Last Year at Marienbad and in the UK as Last Year in Marienbad) is a 1961 French-Italian Left Bank film directed by Alain Resnais from a screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Joseph Beuys

Collection of artist's exhibitions posters. Includes biography, chronology, articles, bibliography and exhibition information.

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German sculptor, performance artist, printmaker and teacher. He opposed the concept of art as based on such autonomous genres as panel painting and sculpture. Instead he pursued in his performance art ('Aktionen') and sculpture an 'expanded concept of art', aimed at a total permeation of life by creative acts.

Wim Crouwel

Comprehensive collection of designer's work. Includes biography, chronology, articles, typography, bibliography and exhibition information.

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The Dutch designer Wim Crouwel pioneered the application of systematic design in the Netherlands during the 1950s and 1960s. Co-founder along with Benno Wissing and others of Total Design NV in 1963, Crouwel’s design philosophy was less emphatic about universal form and standardised formats; he emphasised the designer as an objective problem solver who finds solutions through research and analysis, simplifying the message and the means. While Crouwel’s designs are pared down to their essentials, within them there is a surprising willingness to adopt a variety of approaches to the graphic space. His work registers the truth that the solution to a design problem is not an abstract concept, but something rooted in the concrete.