Avant-garde Graphics 1918-1934
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Avant-garde Graphics 1918-1934, a National Touring Exhibition from the Hayward Gallery, will be on view at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art at 39a Canonbury Square, London N1, from Wednesday 9 March to Sunday 5 June 2005. The exhibition brings together over 140 rare posters, book designs and photomontages created between 1918 and 1934. Political campaign posters and commercial advertising will be shown alongside film posters and books. The exhibition is drawn from one of the world’s greatest collections of 20th century graphics, that of Merrill C. Berman, and is curated by the filmmaker and curator Lutz Becker.
The years between the two World Wars were a time of extraordinary change in Europe, and a moment of radical inventiveness in the history of art and culture. The advance of the machine age brought mass production and distribution and a new sense of internationalism. This ‘heroic’ period of modernity found a particularly forceful expression in graphic design and photomontage. New techniques allowed a fusion of typography, painting and photography for artistic, commercial or political ends, evoking the dynamism and fragmentation of cinema. In all of this the Italian Futurists had been pioneers and were also alert to the importance of mass media and commercial art. For example, Fortunato Depero worked extensively in advertising and graphic design.
The exhibition shows works by artists related to the Dutch de Stijl group, the German Bauhaus, and the Constructivists of Russia and Central Europe. Artists include Jean Arp, Herbert Bayer, Willi Baumeister, Theo van Doesburg, John Heartfield, Hannah Höch, Gustav Klucis, El Lissitzky, Lászlò Moholy-Nagy, Liubov Popova, Alexandr Rodchenko, Oskar Schlemmer, Kurt Schwitters, Ladislav Sutnar, Vladimir Stenberg and Georgii Stenberg, Solomon Telingater and Piet Zwart.
The posters from the USSR are particularly evocative of the propaganda of the Stalinist era. Vasilii Elkin’s poster design Long Live the Red Army – the Armed Detachment of the Proletarian Revolution!, circa 1933, is a montage of Stalin and the politburo surveying a massed army of soldiers and tanks with warplanes and dirigibles in the sky above, the only colour coming from the red flags. The relentless march of modernism is depicted in Gustav Klucis’ 1929 poster The Development of Transport/One of the Important Tasks for the Implementation of the Five-Year Plan. This shows a huge locomotive with a red star on the front looming over a tiny figure of a robed man riding a camel.
The famous avant-garde artist El Lissitsky is represented by near abstract book designs of 1922 and 1923 as well as a more propagandist poster for the Russian exhibition in Zurich in 1929 depicting a smiling Soviet girl and boy. In a similar vein, Natalia Pinus-Bucharova’s 1933 poster Women Workers Participate Actively in a Life of Productivity and Social Peace! depicts a woman factory worker with happy, well-fed children in the background.
Not all the Soviet items are overtly political. Humour is apparent in Alexandr Rodchenko’s 1923 advertisement A Man Needs a Watch/A Watch from Mozer/Mozer only at GUM but there are sinister overtones to the Mikhail Dlugach’s 1928 film poster Cement. Even more sinister, however, are some of the works by the German artist John Heartfield. His 1927 photomontage Hurray! The Battle Cruiser has Arrived! depicts an unsmiling, bespectacled man clutching a warship in his pudgy hand.
By contrast the 1932 poster by the Swiss Max Bill Whonebedarf Home Furnishings Store, while stylishly designed, depicts such mundane objects as a useful cupboard, an angle-pose lamp and a woman reclining in a modern armchair. Similarly, the Czechoslovakian poster of 1930 Exhibition of the Harmonious Home with its shelves of books and elegant jug in the foreground shows nothing of the political turmoil of the times.
The influence of the German Bauhaus can be found in many works, notably the 1927 catalogue Bauhaus Books by Lászlò Moholy-Nagy while the anarchic DADA movement is represented by a 1923 poster Little Dada Soirée by Kurt Schwitters and Theo van Doesburg. The varied selection of Dutch work includes a particularly elegantly designed poster for a Frank Lloyd Wright architecture exhibition of 1931 while among the Polish works is a strikingly modernist design for a poster First Exhibition of Mechano-Faktur of 1924.
Merrill C. Berman was brought up near Boston, Massachusetts. His knowledge and understanding of the history of art and graphic design led him to assemble an unrivalled archive of its kind in the world, comprehensively documenting the development of 20th century Modernism. He focused primarily on the most famous and groundbreaking artists and designers of the European avant-garde alongside lesser-known figures that he has brought to prominence. A fully illustrated and highly informative catalogue will accompany the exhibition containing essays by the curator Lutz Becker and the design historian Richard Hollis.
For over 30 years the Hayward Gallery has a played a key role in creating imaginative, high profile exhibitions in London and, through National Touring Exhibitions, within the UK. Both NTE and the Arts Council Collection are managed by the Hayward Gallery on behalf of Arts Council England, and add to the Hayward’s distinctive national remit.
Avant-garde Graphics 1918-1934 has been shown in Glasgow and Swansea and the exhibition at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art will offer the only opportunity to see these works in London. The artists represented came from Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, The Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland and the USSR. They will be complemented by graphic work of the Italian avant-garde artists in the Estorick permanent collection. Anyone interested in the development of graphic art or the politics and culture of the most turbulent years of the 20th century will find this a highly stimulating exhibition.
