Print, Power, and Persuasion
Introduction
When graphic design emerged as a profession in the early 20th century, Germany was at the vanguard. The country’s rapid industrialization was accompanied by an explosion in the printing arts with the rise of mass-circulation advertising, magazines, and packaging design. The exhibition Print, Power, and Persuasion, selected from the collection of The Wolfsonian-Florida International University, examines how graphic design contributed to visual and material culture in Germany from 1890 to 1945. Many of the design strategies employed in Germany had parallels in other industrialized nations eager to exploit the new forms of mass media. This was the time when the graphic arts evolved as an essential element of the urban experience, transforming how business and government communicated with the public.
The “graphic designer” was an invention of the period-the person to plan and oversee the design of printed matter, from the smallest ticket to the coordination of a corporate identity. In the 1890s, many artists advocated the integration of design into daily life, using the graphic arts to promote newly established artist associations. Over the next decade, advertisers developed cohesive marketing strategies to promote sales. Manufacturers and retailers commissioned graphic designers to create corporate identities.
During the First World War and the turbulent years that followed defeat, Germany’s leading graphic designers turned from commerce to propaganda, utilizing advertising strategies to build political consensus. During the years of the Weimar Republic (1919-33), designers joined forces with other cultural figures in the hope of establishing an international exchange of ideas. They adapted concepts from the fine arts, such as universality and abstraction, and applied them to the graphic arts. In 1933, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) consolidated its power and rejected the international avant-garde styles associated with the Weimar years. The National Socialists (Nazis) advocated a return to native Germanic traditions in the graphic arts, such as Gothic lettering, the woodcut, and traditional lithographic printing techniques.
The exhibition presents new ways of thinking about graphic design, especially as it relates to key trends of the modern age-tradition versus modernism; nationalism versus internationalism, and artistic versus commercial values.
Jan Howard
Exhibition images
