Avant-Garde
Page Design 1900-1950
by Jaroslav
Andel
Delano Greenidge Editions 2002, New York
388 pp. Clothbound, $60.00
ISBN 0-929445-09-0.
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens
Department of Art, University of Northern
Iowa
ballast@netins.net
Since first seeing this large format,
400-page "museum [of graphic design]
without walls," I have persuaded
several friends to buy copies for their
own libraries. It was hardly a challenge
to do so, since even the briefest exposure
to this rich and wide-ranging selection
of more than 460 historic layouts makes
it an irresistible find. According to
the dust jacket, its Czech-born author
(an art historian and museum curator)
spent more than 20 years collecting the
material for it, a claim thats entirely
credible when one considers how infrequently
(if ever) we witness detailed images of
such memorable page layouts as the first
edition of Laurence Sternes The
Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,
Gentleman (1759-1767); Stephane Mallarmes
"A Throw of Dice Will Never Abolish
Chance" (Cosmopolis, 1897);
Pierre Bonnards rendition of Alfred
Jarrys Almanac of Pere Ubu
(1901); any and all of the interesting
work of Josef Vachal; and Bruno Munari's
interpretation of The Lyrical Watermelon
by Tullio d'Albisola (1943). These few
are of course in addition to a feast of
more familiar delights by Oskar Kokoschka,
Kurt Schwitters, Piet Zwart, Alexander
Rodchenko, and others. The book's trilingual
written text (with side-by-side translations
in English, French, and German) is no
less interesting. I learned, for example,
that El Lissitzky "compared inventions
in the field of information traffic to
that of vehicular traffic, drawing an
analogy between speech and the upright
walk, between the letter and the wheel,
and between Guttenberg's movable type
and the wagon pulled by animal force."
In addition, I loved the discussion of
the eccentric inventions of American poet
Robert Carlton Brown (called Bob Brown),
who in 1929 concocted a curious "reading
machine," by which he proposed to rennovate
the activity of reading: Just as cinema
had progressed to the "talkies," said
Brown, it was high time for reading and
writing to embrace technology, and to
enter the age of the "readies." The volume's
text and plates are grouped in twelve
chapter-like partitions, with the contents
organized by style, intent, and method.
The result is a vivid reminder of the
progression of Modernist art and design
in relation to concurrent social events
such as printing technology (The Photomechanical
Page), motion pictures (The Cinematic
Page), psychoanalysis (The Aesthetic of
the Unconscious), and the inevitable horrors
of war (Dada: Strategies of Subversion).
Although at least two years have passed
since this book was published, there is
an eerie appropriateness in the quote
with which it opens. It credits the Hungarian
Bauhaus designer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy with
having once said that "One man invents
printing with movable type, another photography,
a third screenprinting and stereotype,
the next electrotype, phototype, the celluloid
plate hardened by light." Despite such
phenomenal progress, Moholy concludes,
"Men still kill one another, they have
not yet understood how they live
"
(Reprinted by permission
from Ballast Quarterly Review.)