Unit 5 Contextual Studies

Contextual studies blogs

For my contextual studies blog I am researching graphic designers and art movements/artists of the 19th century and 20th century. I have researched symbolism, romanticism, fauvism, futurism, bauhaus, and the surrealist movement between 1920-30. I have also looked at a list of graphic designers and artists within these movements who have had a significant influence on the direction of the art movement and have created many iconic pieces of work.

19th century art movements

Symbolism

Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement from France, Russia and Belgium. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857) by Charles Baudelaire. The aesthetic was developed by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and '70s. In the 1880s, the aesthetic was articulated by a series of manifestos and attracted a generation of writers. The name "symbolist" itself was first applied by the critic Jean Moréas, who invented the term to distinguish the symbolists from the related decadents of literature and of art. Distinct from, but related to, the style of literature, symbolism of art is related to the gothic component of Romanticism.
Symbolism was largely a reaction against naturalism and realism, anti-idealistic styles which were attempts to represent reality in its gritty particularity, and to elevate the humble and the ordinary over the ideal. Symbolism was a reaction in favour of spirituality, the imagination, and dreams. Some writers, such as Joris-Karl Huysmans, began as naturalists before becoming symbolists. This change represented his increasing interest in religion and spirituality.
Symbolists believed that art should represent absolute truths that could only be described indirectly. This is why they painted in a very metaphorical and suggestive manner, endowing particular images or objects with symbolic meaning.

This is a painting by Gustave Moreau in the symbolism style. It depicts a woman being watched by a sleeping man with an eye on his forehead. This symbolises that although nature appears to be dormant and lifeless it is always watching us though we do not notice, and is alive even though it does not appear to have consciousness.

Romanticism

Romanticism was based on emotion rather than rationale, and placed an emphasis on the individual rather than on society. These works are characterized by a brighter use of color and expressive brushstroke, and were meant to evoke emotion. Within the context of Romanticism, the Barbizon School of artists gained momentum in the middle of the 19th century and propelled painting towards realism and an increased emphasis on images of nature. Rather than serving as a backdrop, scenes of nature became the subject of more and more paintings. The tranquility that is depicted in these paintings is supposed to be an expression of how the artist was feeling when looking at the scene.

This is a painting by Eugene Delacroix called Collision of Moorish Horsemen. It is a good example of several characteristics of Romanticism art. The subject is a reflection of the excitement of Eastern culture. Furthermore, the action in the painting is delineated by rapid brushstrokes, and there is an emphasis on colour.

20th century art movements

Fauvism

Fauvism is the style of les Fauves, a group of early twentieth-century Modern artists whose works emphasized painterly qualities and strong color over the representational or realistic values retained by Impressionism. While Fauvism as a style began around 1900 and continued beyond 1910, the movement as such lasted only a few years, 1904–1908. The leaders of the movement were Henri Matisse and André Derain. Fauvism can use a realistic style mixed with bright colours to create an out of the ordinary image, or an impressionist style mixed with bright colours.

Futurism

Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasized and glorified themes associated with contemporary concepts of the future, including speed, technology, youth and violence, and objects such as the car, the aeroplane and the industrial city. The Futurists practiced in every medium of art, including painting, sculpture, ceramics,graphic design, industrial design, interior design, urban design, theatre, film, fashion,textiles, literature, music, architecture and even gastronomy. Key artists of futurism are Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, Bruno Munari and Luigi Russolo, Velimir Khlebnikov, Igor Severyanin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Almada Negreiros, and many more. Its members aimed to liberate Italy from the weight of its past, to glorify modernity. Futurism influenced art movements such as Art Deco, Constructivism, Surrealism, Dada, and to a greater degree, Precisionism, Rayonism, and Vorticism.

Bauhaus

The Bauhaus was founded in Weimar, Germany in 1919 by an architect called Walter Gropius who aimed to bridge the gap between art, design and industry and unifying all three. It was a school where students received theoretical and practical training in all of the fine arts; ceramics, murals, stained glass, typography, metalwork, book binding, stone sculpture and furniture making, and learned to combine these fine art skills with new technologies to design and manufacture products that were both beautiful and practical. Its aim had been to bring artists and craftspeople together to ensure the survival of beautiful craftsmanship in the face of mechanized labour. Key figures in the Bauhaus movement include Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Herbert Bayer, Max Bill, Marianne Brandt, Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius.

History of graphic design

Who created movable type?

Around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press and independently developed a movable type system in Europe. However, The world's first known movable type system for printing was created in China around 1040 A.D. by Bi Sheng (990–1051) during the Song Dynasty; When this technology spread to Korea during the Goryeo Dynasty in 1234, they made the metal movable-type system for printing. This led to the printing of the Jikji in 1377, the oldest extant movable metal print book.

What was the first mass produced book? Who produced it?

The first mass produced book was the bible by Johannes Gutenberg around 1450.

How do you classify type?

Humalist

Slab Serif (Egyptian)

Slab San Serif

Impact

Rockwell

Script

Geometric

Arts and Crafts movement

Ladislav Sutnar

Ladislav Sutnar was a progenitor of the current practice of information graphics. For a wide range of American businesses, he developed graphic systems that clarified vast amounts of complex information, transforming business data into digestible units. He was also the man responsible for putting the parentheses around American telephone area-code numbers when they were first introduced.

Lester Beall

Lester Beall studied the dynamic visual form of the European avant-garde, synthesized parts into his own aesthetic and formed graphic design applications for business and industry that were appropriate, bold, comprehensive, and imaginative. He proved to American business that the graphic designer was a professional that could creatively solve problems and at the same time deal with pragmatic issues such as marketing and budgets. Beall produced solutions to design problems that were fresh and innovative. He studied the dynamic visual form of the European avant-garde, synthesized parts into his own aesthetic and formed graphic design applications for business and industry that were appropriate, bold, and imaginative. In his mature years he led the way with creative and comprehensive packaging and corporate identity programs that met the needs of his clients. The qualities and values that led to Beall's effectiveness are timeless and provide contemporary practitioners with an historical reference base upon which to evaluate present standards.

Leo Lionni

Leo Lionni has wedded fine art to applied art, elevated the level of graphic design criticism, launched the careers of many formidable practitioners, and engaged the minds and hearts of several generations in a variety of roles throughout his career: committed teacher, author, critic, editor, painter, sculptor, printmaker, designer, cartoonist and illustrator. Leo Lionni was born in Holland in 1910, into a world on the cusp of radical change—with cultural and political revolutions in the air and on the streets. His father was an artisan, a diamond cutter from a well-to-do Sephardic Jewish family, and his mother was a singer. Her brother, Piet, an architect, allowed his adoring, five-year-old nephew to play with his drafting supplies. And two other uncles, both collectors of modern art, fed his artistic inclinations by osmosis.

James Miho

James Miho, recipient of a 2004 AIGA Medal, is an art director of seminal campaigns for Champion Papers and the Container Corporation of America, a design educator, and a photographer. James Miho has spent a large part of his 50-year career in focused traveling, collecting the images and impressions that would inform a remarkable body of work for some of the most design-conscious clients of the 20th century. Miho was born into a wealthy Japanese family in northern California. With the onset of WWII, he and his family were interned for four years at Tule Lake on the California-Oregon border. Upon his return from fighting in the Korean War, Miho enrolled at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA. The art and architecture he had seen during a two-week sojourn in Japan had inspired him to pursue a career in design.

Museum trip

We went to the Paul Smith exhibition in London. His works included illustration, fashion and photography, all aspects of graphic design that would help us in our course and t shirt business. Some of the work was things that had inspired him and it was interesting to see where his inspiration came from as he is a very successful graphic designer. There was also an exhibition on propaganda that could help us in our project as it had many famous russian communist propaganda posters that we could use for inspiration and ideas, and also to get a firm grip of what propaganda is.

My chosen art movement

Surrealist movement: 1920-1930

Surrealism was an artistic and literary movement, dedicated to expressing the imagination as revealed in dreams, free of the conscious control of reason and convention. Surrealism inherited an anti-rationalist sensibility from Dada, and was shaped by emerging theories on our perception of reality, especially Sigmund Freud's model of the subconscious.

Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali was a key artist in the surrealist movement. Though chiefly remembered for his painterly output, in the course of his long career he successfully turned to sculpture, printmaking, fashion, advertising, writing, and, perhaps most famously, filmmaking in his collaborations with Luis Bunuel and Alfred Hitchcock. His paintings also evince a fascination for Classical and Renaissance art, clearly visible through his hyper-realistic style and religious symbolism of his later work.

Max Ernst

Max Ernst was a German-born Surrealist who helped shape the emergence of Abstract Expressionism in America post-World War II. Armed with an academic understanding of Freud, Ernst often turned to his work-whether sculpture, painting, or collage-as a means of processing his experience in World War I and unpacking his feelings of dispossession in its wake.

1920-30

Prohibition (increased crime rate, alcoholic poisoning, rise of gangsters)

Aftermath of WW1 (increased military power, political tension etc)

Crime and murder (gang violence)

Threat of communism, fascism and socialism

Taxes began to benefit big business over the wage earners

German Politics

The democratic German republic, known as the Weimar Republic (1919-33), was affected by hyperinflation and other serious economic problems. Nationalist elements under a variety of movements, including the Nazi Party led by the Austrian Adolf Hitler, blamed Germany's "humiliating" status on the harshness of the post-war settlement, on faults of democracy, on Social Democrats and Communists, and on the Jews, whom it claimed possessed a financial stranglehold on Germany.

In Germany, like in the radically diminished Austria, the citizens, or at least the educated classes, remembered the pre-war years under autocratic rule as prosperous – the post-war years under democratic rule (due to the failings of Proportional Representation under the Weimar Government), however, as chaotic and economically disastrous. Social tensions after the world wide economic depression following the Stock Market Crash of 1929 aggravated the political situation. Anti-democratic parties in the Reichstag (parliament), both left-wing and right-wing, obstructed the parliamentary work, while different cabinets resorted to governing by the special emergency powers of the Weimar constitution, which enabled the President and the Cabinet, in concert, to effectively bypass the parliament.

Hitler was appointed Reichskanzler (Chancellor) on January 30, 1933.

Medicine

Throughout the 1920s, new technologies and new science led to the discovery of vitamins and to increasing knowledge of hormones and body chemistry. New drugs and new vaccines were released following research begun in the previous decade. Sulfa drugs became the first of the anti-bacterial wonder drugs saving thousands of lives from bacterial and viral infections.

Doctors looked at the common cold and influenza to determine their causes and proposed preventative measures to protect against them. This was considered very important at the time because the influenza epidemic of 1918 that killed millions of people was still fresh in peoples minds. We now know it was the H1N1 influenza virus but at the time it was referred to as the Spanish Flu.

In 1920 Herbert McLean Evans discovered Vitamin E, and its anti-sterility properties, and Elmer V. McCollum discovered Vitamin D, its presence in cod liver, and its ability to prevent rickets, a skeletal disorder. Vitamins A, B, C, K, and various subtypes of each were also discovered during the 1920s.

Travel

Prior to the 1920's only the very wealthy could afford to travel the world. Everyone else had to be content to read published travel narratives to learn about the world outside their town or city.

With the increase in wages driven by entrepreneurial employers like Henry Ford, Americans for the first time had the time and money to travel. Mass production methods made automobiles affordable for the masses instead of just the rich. By 1921, the number of automobiles in the United States had passed the ten million mark necessitating President Warren G. Harding spending $75 million to improve the nation's roads. More and more Americans chose the low-cost, high-freedom option of travelling by automobile while vacationing. Motoring vacations to destinations like sunny California in the winter became possible for those living in colder states.

In the 1920's, trains and ocean liners were the dominant mass transportation methods, providing comfortable, reliable transport to millions of American vacationers. Trains had opened up the continent and ships the world, but newer methods of transport captured the imagination of the public and reduced travel times. The Suez Canal was enlarged to handle the rapidly increasing size of ships that desired to use the shortcut. Winter cruises to warmer climates became very popular, and the resulting tans of the tourists became a status symbol.

Air travel, though still in its infancy, captured America’s imagination during the 1920s. It held great promise in speeding communications and commerce throughout the continent and overseas. Airplanes were mainly used in peacetime for mail delivery but started to be used for passenger transport as planes became larger and more reliable toward the end of the decade.

At this time ocean liners were symbols of modern technology, wealth, and national pride, but it appeared that giant airships (dirigibles) might one day replace their ocean giants. The first commercial air passenger service across the Atlantic was inaugurated by the German airship Graf Zeppelin in October 1928. It carried 20 passengers with a crew of 43.

By 1929, airship technology had advanced to the point that the first round-the-world flight was completed by the Graf Zeppelin in September.

Airships could carry larger amounts of freight and passengers in more comfort than planes but their reign came to an end due to the negative publicity generated by the destruction of the Hindenburg by lightning in 1937.

The main method of crossing the Atlantic Ocean in the 1920s was by steamship and ocean liner. Businessmen meeting overseas clients, entertainers on tour, and tourists making leisure trips travelled on ocean liners in upper class berths. Also travelling with them in lower class berths were vast numbers of emigrants coming to the United States and immigrants returning abroad. A large ocean liner might have a crew of 1,100 to service as many as 3,400 passengers. Shipping Line owners competed against each other to produce the fastest and most luxurious ocean liners. The Ile de France which was France's flagship in 1927 was a typical example of an opulent liner.

Opinions

I think that the innovations of travel during the 1920-30s had a contributing factor to the development of the surrealist movement as it allowed people to find inspiration from many new places that they had never experienced before. It also pushed the idea of escaping the consciousness and the world around you as some new cultures that were then seen by the people were so different to their own, allowing inspiration to be drawn from all corners of the world.
German politics also had an effect on the surrealist movement as the aftermath of WW1 and the rise of the Nazi party would of greatly influenced surrealist artists such as Max Ernst' work as the world around him would be changing constantly due the rise of the Nazi Germany police state etc.
Advancements in medicine and drugs had the biggest effect on the surrealist movement as the use of psychadelics was essential to escape the conciousness and enter the dream world. They also used hypnosis to escape the conciousness. This is where most artists in the surrealist movement got their inspiration from.