Features recently found, never-before-published materials from the archives of the Kunstbibliothek in Berlin by Bauhaus professor and famous avant-garde artist László Moholy-Nagy. It includes work by Moholy-Nagy, Guillaume Apollinaire, F.T. Marinetti, Theo van Doesburg, Herbert Bayer, Walter Dexel, and El Lissitzky.
This book came out at the same time as an exhibition at Berlin’s Staatliche Kunstbibliothek. In Germany in the 1920s, visual communication, typography, and graphic design went through a big change that still affects us today.
In 1929, László Moholy-Nagy, a Hungarian avant-garde artist and Bauhaus professor, was asked to design a room at Berlin’s Martin-Gropius Bau about the future of typography as part of an exhibition called New Typography (“Neue Typographie”).
The exhibition was put on by the Ring of New Advertising Designers (“ring neue werbegestalter”), a group started by Kurt Schwitters in 1927 and made up of 12 avant-garde designers and artists who shared a vision of modernity in advertising and graphic design. In Germany, the Ring put on more than 20 shows over the course of five years and invited other artists to perform with them.
“Where is Typography Going?” was the name of Moholy-room Nagy’s in the New Typography show. He made 78 freestanding panels with work by himself, other artists, and modern printed materials that looked at how typography was changing and where it was going.
This book is the first time that all of the panels are printed together. It also has an alphabetical list of terms and ideas by a group of well-known typography and design historians.
More than a thousand colour pictures