Alvin Lustig

I did my assignment on Alvin Lustig. He was an american artist. He was born in 1915 in Colorado. Sadly during his teenage years he developed diabetes which eventually led to his death in 1955 at the age of 40. Luckily this did not stop the young artist from creating beautiful and effective works. 

Alvin Lustig was a student of Frank Lloyd Wright.  He worked independently with the architect Frank Lloyd Wright and also the french painter John Charlotte.

In 1937 he began designing book jackets in Los Angeles. This is an example of his work of that time.
 

Among others, Lustig's career in art direction and graphic
design was very successful. Alvin Lustig revolutionized the approach to book cover design in the 1940's.
 He would first read the book and try to understand it and the meaning behind it. He would attempt to get the direction that the writer is trying to convey and then translate it into his own graphic style.Perhaps you have heard of the Great Gatsby. That is one of his more well known works.



 After this period of his career he was offered a position at Look Magazine as a director of the visual research department. Below are some of his contributions to Look Magazine.The combination of technology and creativity in his designs was reminiscent of the Bauhaus, as did his intellectual approach to problem solving. He became very successful in his early career, having clients for all different types of projects.

 In his later life during the 1940s, he was offered several teaching positions, including a position at Yale but he declined. He had said that he was recognized for his new directions of publishing where he contributed a decade's work of innovative and ingenious designs.


His wide-ranging works from the 1940's and early 50's included book and book jacket design, magazines, letterheads, catalogs, signage, furniture and lighting, textiles, interior design, logos, sculpture and architecture. We can see the amount of skill and talent Lustig must have had to create such vast topic of works. Lustig's approach to design as said before, reflects the Bauhaus tradition of integrating fine and applied arts, technology with artistic creativity. He would spend days brainstorming in his head before moving to paper.
For someone so passionately involved in design education, Lustig had only one year of formal training, at the Art Center School in Los Angeles.

Something that made his designs so special is that he used modern design sensibility
In addition to being a graphic designer, Lustig was also known as an interior and an architectural designer. One of his more popular designs is the mystic chair which he had done for Paramount Furniture. It is considered a revolutionary design and it inspired many other. There are still versions of this chair till this day.




With regard to GRAPHIC DESIGN, his style is probably best described as modern and abstrct at the same time. I noticed how a lot of his work had some sort of geometric shapes in an abstract pattern while having clean straight line is a minimalistic display while still being neat and tidy at the same time. You see a lot of bold accents and colours in his work while still being clean.
 

One thing about Lustig is that he didn't like to limit himself to one particular style.
Lustig possessed what he described as 'a very high standard of dissatisfaction'. So keen was his vision of the power of design, he thought it a force capable of bettering society. In his short 40-year life, he produced a great amount of brilliant work and pioneered a comprehensive approach to design, which will last far beyond his lifetime. His work is as vibrant today as it was 40 years ago. His simplified shapes and use of flat colours, all while creating elaborate and intensely interesting compositions, are still imitated today by many graphic designers.




                                           http://adcglobal.org/hall-of-fame/alvin-lustig/
                                           http://www.designishistory.com/1940/alvin-lustig/

DADA

Dadaism was a rebellious movement against the carnage of the WWI and was aimed at sort of challenging socio-economic principles of capitalist interests. Dada founders were angry young artists, claiming that they could discover the true reality by leaving behind traditional culture and accepted new forms. 

Dada's innovative approach to typography, photo montage, negative white space, layout, letter spacing and line spacing has played an important role in the development of communication design. Of course many of their styles, techniques and so on were borrowed and influenced from Futurists and Expressionists. Something in particular is that Dada adopted Futurists art of typography.

According to Tristan Tzara in the Dadaist manifesto: 
    "Every page should explode, either because of its deep seriousness, or because of its vortex, vertigo, newness, timelessness, crushing humor, enthusiasm of its principles, or the way it is printed."

It is funny because this was literally what the founder of Futurism, Marinetti's virulment sentiment when he wrote:
    "I undertake a typographical revolution directed especially against the idiotic and nauseous conception of old-fashioned books of verses ... Better still: my revolution is directed against what is called typographical harmony of the page ... I intend to redouble the expressive force of words." 


Dada photocollage and montage techniques

Dada artists like Hannah Hoch, John Heartfield, Hausmann, Kurt Schwitters and so on, developed a unique method of reinterpreting and changing context photos to powerful socio-political effect. To create such works they would choose familiar looking press photographs, and reorganized them such that to radically alter their meanings.

These works were made of cuts or press, posters, catalogs, letters, tickets and anything in between of these type of materials. 



Dada artists decided to use a technique to disrupt the cultural influence of mass media on socio-political structure of reality. By mirroring on their photo montages the breakdown of society, Dadaists aimed at disturbing the viewers' sentience and causing a feeling of anxiety or dismay with something unexpected from facing the harsh reality of modern life.





Covers, Layouts and Illustrations

Although in fact, according to the Dadaists, Dada was not art, but "anti-art", the designs of book jackets, Layouts, and Illustrations in Dada had a strong artistic flavour to them. Dada's aim was to fight the stale design with bold and energetic design. Dada offered a new perspective, something to question the meaning of the meaning(if that makes sense). 
Dada however was not about warmth and fun, as Dadaists themselves explained it was  "a phenomenon bursting forth in the midst of the postwar economic and moral crisis, a savior, a monster, which would lay waste to everything in its path. [It was] a systematic work of destruction and demoralization...In the end it became nothing but an act of sacrilege."

The Bauhaus

The Bauhaus was the most influential modernist art school of the 20th Century.It was shaped by movements like the Arts and Crafts movement. The school is renowned for its faculty, which includes artists like Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and so on.
This new idea was established by Walter Gropius a German architect in 1919 in the city of Wiemar, with the idea of combining art and designing in the proclamation of the Bauhaus, which portrayed a Utopian craft guild incorporating many elements such as architecture, sculpture and painting into a single creative expression.

The motivation behind the creation of the Bauhaus is interesting. It was due to the anxieties about the 'soullessness' of manufacturing and its products, and in fears about art's loss of purpose in society. Creativity and manufacturing were floating away from each other, and the Bauhaus was trying to bring them back together to be stronger than ever. Fine art and craft were brought together with the goal of problem solving for a modern industrial society.

Gropius, skill prioritising on craft changed the goals of the Bauhaus in 1923 by putting more attention on design for mass production. At this point the the school took up the phrase, "Art into Industry".

Two years later, in 1925, Gropius architectural talent shined over a new building which housed the new school in, which had been moved from Weimar to Dessau. Many characteristics can be seen in this building such as steel frame construction, a glass curtain wall, and an asymmetrical, pinwheel plan which was allocated into most studio classrooms to maximise interior space. This characteristic can be seen in many modern designed buildings nowadays.

Moholy-Nagy was an important designer who helped shape the Bauhaus into how it is known today. Moholy-Nagy settled in Berlin in 1920 and married soon after. His Czech-born wife, Lucia had trained as a photographer and they worked together in developing the photogram. This was a photographic image made without a camera when objects on coated paper are exposed to light. They then developed photoplastics, which are fluent, lyrical and curious photomontages, sometimes with drawn additions, which had enormous influence on 1960s graphics.

At the same time, Moholy-Nagy was one of the first designers to realize the potential of photography in advertising and commercial art.

Joost Schmidt was another important designer part of the Bauhaus. Schimdt's berst known piece was probably his poster advertising a Bauhaus exhibition.

Mr.Schmidt seemed to have it all and the ability to do it all. Joost Schmidt taught lettering at the school from 1925-1932, head of the sculpture workshop from 1928-1930. He was also head of the Advertising, Typography, Printing, and associated Photography department from 1928 to 1932.

Somehow, i have noticed that a lot of the Bauhaus works have this elaborate layout in a way, of a 30-40 degree angle work. This includes images, typography and all. It is as if the page was turned sideways and placed in a frame that particular way and angle. This is still used today. The photo below is just an example to show how the layout of the angle is still used. All i had to search on google was 'poster' to show how it is still udes till this day.

The Vienna Secession and Futurism

 'In Austria, the Vienna Secession, with its Sezessionstil, came into being on 3 April 1897, when the younger members of the Künstlerhaus, the Viennese Creative Artists’ Association, resigned in stormy protest. Technically, the refusal to allow foreign artists to participate in Künstlerhaus exhibitions was the main issue, but the clash between tradition and new ideas emanating from France, England, and Germany lay at the heart of the confl ict, and the young artists wanted to exhibit more frequently. Painter Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) was the guiding spirit who led the revolt; architects Joseph Maria Olbrich (1867–1908) and Josef Hoff mann (1870–1956) and artist-designer Koloman Moser (1868–1918) were key members. Like the Glasgow School, the Vienna Secession became a countermovement to the fl oral art nouveau that fl ourished in other parts of Europe.' - Megg's.

This movement was founded by the Secessionists: Josef Hoffman, Koloman Moser and Fritz Waerndorfer.

 Koloman Moser was an Austrian artist who had considerable influence on twentieth-century graphic art and a co founder of Wiener Werkstatte. Wiener Werkstatte was a company established in 1903 by Moser and Hoffman. It was a community of visual arts in Vienna, bringing together designers, artists, architects, working with ceramics, fashion, silver, furniture and graphic arts.

 

Moser's designs in architecture, furniture, jewellery, graphics, and tapestries helped characterise the work of this era.Moser's style was continuing upon the clean lines and motifs of classical Greek and Roman art and architecture in reaction to the Baroque decendence of his 'turn-of-the-century' Viennese surroundings.
 In about 1902 he published a portfolio titled Die Quelle, of beautiful and elegant graphic works for such things like tapastries, fabrics, and wallpaper.
Then in 1903, Moser and Hoffman founded Wiener Werkstatte, whose artists and studios produced a number of designed household goods, like flatware, glassware, silverware, rugs and textiles.
Moser designed a 100 Austro-Hungarian krone note over-stamped and used as provisional Hungarian kronen in 1920. 

In 1907, due to internal conflicts, Moser withdrew from the Wiener Werkstatte. 
Moser was one of the designers for Austria's leading art journal 'Ver Sacrum.'
This paid great attention to design and was designed mainly by Moser, Gustav Klimt and Josef Hoffman.

One of Moser's most prominent designs used in a building(The Steinhof Church), was chosen to be a main motif of the Austrian 100 euro coin. 

   

 So as we have seen, especially Moser, they have been a big influence on the history of graphic design where designers keep building on another designer's work.


Futurism

Futurism was an artistic movement that started in Italy in the early 20th century. This movement was different to any other type of artistic movement. As the name says, it wanted to show and possess a futuristic feel to it. Therefore, it emphasized speed, technology, youth, violence and obstructed objects.

How did Futurism affect graphic design though? A few factors are simulteneity, lines of force, repeated motifs, inclusion of typographical elements and collage. 

Marinetti's revolution stated that futurist designs should have:
    - different typefaces of different shapes and sizes on the same page,
    - with 3 or 4 colours of ink, with the use of italics or standard type to reflect smooth of swift sensations as indicators of onomatopeias.

Marinetti advocated 'the destruction of syntax'. The futurist expression had to reflect the futurist thought, with no association to the past typography, method of painting or conventions. 
He was after the destruction of harmony on the page, in favour of 'flux and reflux, leaps and bursts that run through the page.'  

In the 1920's the style's commercial version is best manifested through Fortunato Depero whose covers for Vanity Fair magazines and Campari as well as his own book Depero Futurista.

   
Words are overlaid and set in different directions.