Design Literacy

by Steven Heller

  Heine’s red bulldog poster was arguably inelegant. The sans-serif logo of the magazine der Simpl was more refined than the poster lettering. Heine’s lettering was crudely hand drawn (on those versions of the poster where the ten pfenning price was included, it was downright messy). Yet the poster was a totality. The lettering suggested immediacy and complemented the bulldog’s tense, frozen stance. This is perhaps one of Heine’s most brilliant, persuasive, and iconographic works; what followed were mere cartoons.

  Neue Jugend

  JOHN HEARTFIELD

  The Malik Verlag was established in March 1917 in the critical period before the fall of Imperial Germany and the birth of the Weimar Republic. This politically active German socialist publisher of periodicals, portfolios, broadsheets, and books of fiction and nonfiction—whose first periodical was entitled Neue Jugend, or New Youth—is the trunk of the historical tree of which American alternative publishing of the 1960s was only a branch and from which elements of contemporary graphic design have surely grown. Its leading graphistes, George Grosz and John Heartfield (1891–1968) are known, studied, and appreciated today; but the Malik Verlag as an entity is virtually unknown, though it played a major role in German left-wing politics, literature, and the graphic style of the Weimar period.

  In 1915 before Malik Verlag was conceived, John Heartfield’s brother, the poet Weiland Herzfeld, was introduced to George Grosz and “fell in love” with his drawings. “Grosz felt that was an inappropriate response,” wrote Herzfeld in The Malik Verlag 1916–1947 (Goethe House, New York). “He told me: ‘… Herzfeld, my works are worthless. Whatever you and I and any other incompetent people think of them is completely inconsequential… . If my drawings were of some value they would be paid for accordingly… .’ His comments were the final impetus for the founding of the periodical Neue Jugend with Herzfeld as editor.” The journal became an outlet for Grosz’s political satires and “for all those who encountered opposition to their political ideas and lack of understanding by the public,” continued Herzfeld. “We beg all European artists and intellectuals who are neither senile nor submissive to join us as contributors … ,” states the call for contributors, which appealed to the cream of the German left. Many rose to the occasion with scabrous attacks against the ailing government.

  Neue Jugend, then a quarto-sized monthly, was almost immediately banned in the autumn of 1916, and Weiland Herzfeld was coincidentally called to the Western Front. While he was away, in the spring of 1917, Heartfield resumed publishing Neue Jugend in its larger, newspaper format. Always the clever subversive, Heartfield had found a way to circumvent the ban by making the journal into a prospectus—an advertisement, essentially—for a portfolio of George Grosz drawings. Since this Neue Jugend was not strictly a publication the censors were befuddled.

  During the war years all new journals and publishing houses needed a license, granted only when “pressing need” existed. While no such need existed for Heartfield and Herzfeld’s left-wing publishing venture, they dreamed up a plan that would confuse the bureaucrats. Heartfield slyly stated in the application for the founding of the Malik Publishing House that German writer Else Lasker-Schüler’s novella “Der Malik” (which translated from Turkish meant not only “prince,” but also, fittingly, “robber chief,”) had appeared in installments in Neue Jugend. “To complete its publication (keep in mind Neue Jugend had been banned), and for that reason only, a publishing house was needed,” recalled Herzfeld. The authorities did not immediately catch on, granted the license, and the Malik Verlag proceeded instead to publish two George Grosz portfolios and two issues of a thinly disguised Neue Jugend.

  The publication’s design was an amalgam of variegated typefaces, elaborate surprints, and various geometric color blocks. Work on this journal marked an artistic turning point for Heartfield, who had destroyed all his more formal work and embraced anti-art as a means for social protest and propaganda. In 1915 Heartfield changed his name from Herzfeld to protest German militarism. He became a charter member of the Berlin dada group, whose members included George Grosz, Hannah Höch, Raoul Hausmann, Otto Dix, and Herzfeld. Heartfield originally adopted the title dada-monteur, eschewing the term artist in favor of monteur, which means “machinist,” in an angry rejection of bourgeois art. He later changed to photomonteur because he believed that photography was the vanguard of a new art that would inevitably displace painting altogether.

  The look of the new Neue Jugend was different, but the content continued in the style of the original monthly and, with its satire and pacifist stance, was just as outrageous in the eyes of the regime. Publication was summarily ceased in June 1917, but the journal existed just long enough for Heartfield to initiate the typographic revolution that would subsequently influence the New Typography. Neue Jugend was also a stepping-stone for other German dada publications. The one-shot tabloid, Jedermann sein eigner Fussball (“everyman his own football,” 1919), which included the first political photomontage created by Heartfield—a fan with the leaders of the new Weimar government superimposed—is a classic dada document. Two ongoing sister publications, Die Pleite (1919–1922) and Der Gegner (1919–1922), designed by Heartfield with drawings by Grosz, were the agitational arm of the German communist party, which, like the members of the dada group and Spartakus Bund, fought against the emerging right wing, the Nazis.

  Heartfield is remembered today for his strident anti-Nazi photomontages for the Arbeiter Illustierte Zeitung (AIZ), but as art director for the Malik Verlag he was an innovative jacket and cover designer. His graphic imprimatur formed the visual personality of the publishing house and, moreover, was the model for kindred publishers active during the 1920s.

  Under Heartfield’s direction the Malik Verlag was a wellspring of avant-garde graphic design. They were influenced by Russian and Italian futurism, yet introduced Germans to typographic experiments that were later brought to fruition by Russian constructivists, Dutch de Stijl, and German dadaists.

  The Peace Symbol

  There was probably no more galvanizing or polarizing emblem during the 1960s than the peace symbol—an upside-down, three-pronged, forklike mark in a circle, which symbolized the anxiety and anger of the Vietnam era. Although the basic form had roots in antiquity, it was popularized during the mid-1950s when H-bomb testing prevailed. The symbol was (re)designed in 1954 by an obscure English textile designer named Gerald Holtom for use by England’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Yet some sources claim that the sign, also known as the peace action symbol, was designed in 1958 for the British World Without War Council for use at the first annual Aldermaston Easter Peace Walk to promote world disarmament. It later debuted in the United States in 1962 in the cautionary science-fiction film about the tragic effects of nuclear testing, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, and within a few years was adopted for use as an antiwar insignia

  The symbol is supposed to be a composite semaphore signal for the letters N and D (nuclear disarmament), but its basic form also derives from an ancient runic symbol, a fact that casts some doubt on the ND theory. According to an article in a 1969 issue of WIN (Workshop in Nonviolence) magazine, sponsored by the War Resisters League (one of the 1960s foremost anti–Vietnam War activist groups), the peace sign derives from an initial iteration of a white circle on a black square. This was followed by various versions of Christian crosses drawn within the white sphere, which in turn evolved into the ND form. Referring to the Aldermaston march, WIN asserts that for subsequent demonstrations an ND badge was “devised and made by Eric Austen,” whose research into the origins of symbolism underscored that the basic forklike symbol, or what he called the “gesture of despair” motif, was associated throughout ancient history with the “death of man,” and the circle with the “unborn child.” The reason for calling the upside-down fork a “gesture of despair” derives from the story of Saint Peter, who was crucified upside down in Rome in a.d. 67 on a cross designed by Emperor Nero, known thereafter as the “Nero Cross”
or the “sign of the broken Jew.”

  Few who wear the peace symbol as jewelry today are probably aware of its legacy as a once-controversial emblem. Rather, it seems like a quaint artifact of the 1960s, not unlike psychedelic designs or bell-bottoms. Currently, it is used as a generic insignia for a variety of fashionable (if pseudo-) antiestablishment issues. In truth the symbol is anything but generic, and its origin is still controversial.

  During the 1930s, decades prior to the nuclear disarmament and anti–Vietnam War movements but on the precipice of fascist dominance in Europe, the symbol was first devised by the English philosopher and socialist Bertrand Russell as an attempt “to depict the universal convergence of peoples in an upward movement of cooperation.” During the late 1950s Russell was the chairman for the CND, present at numerous disarmament demonstrations and protests against English involvement in NATO at the very time the symbol was adopted as the CND emblem. It is therefore probable that Russell introduced to the organization the basic sign from which Holtom created his final design.

  Russell was a former member of the Fabian Society (a fellowship of English socialists), which prompted the right-wing journal American Opinion to link the peace symbol, like the antiwar movement in general, to a broad communist conspiracy of world domination. “It is not at all surprising that the Communists would turn to Russell to design their peace sign,” states a 1970 article in this journal, which continues: “A Marxist from his earliest youth, he greeted the Russian Revolution with the declaration: ‘The world is damnable. Lenin and Trotsky are the only bright spots… .’” The journal further describes Russell as an active anti-Christian who was well aware that he had chosen an “anti-Christian design long associated with Satanism.” In fact, the basic form, which appears both right-side up and upside down as a character in pre-Christian alphabets, was afforded mystical properties and is in evidence in some pagan rituals.

  Right-side up it represents “man,” while upside down it is the fallen man. Referred to in Rudolf Koch’s Book of Signs as “the Crow’s foot” or “witch’s foot,” it was apparently adopted by Satanists during the Middle Ages.

  The Nazis routinely adopted runic forms for their official iconography, such as the SS runes (the insignia of Hitler’s personal bodyguard). Indeed the Nazi iconography calls the crow’s foot Todersune, or “death rune.” Paradoxically, in a right-side-up position it was frequently used on death notices, gravestones of SS officers, and badges given to their widows. Not unlike the swastika itself, this runic symbol has positive and negative implications depending on its orientation. The downward version might be interpreted as death and infertility, while the upward version symbolizes growth and fertility.

  Signs and symbols are easily transformed to mean good or evil depending on how they are sanctioned and applied over time—and who accepts said usage. Whatever satanic associations the crow’s foot may have had (or still has), when Bertrand Russell “designed” this symbol he imbued it with more positive virtues of life and cooperation. Once adopted by the CND (and later by scores of other antiwar, ecology, civil rights, and peace and freedom groups), its meaning was forever changed to protest in the service of humanity.

  Black Power/White Power

  TOMI UNGERER

  From time to time circumstance fosters the climate for a radical cartoonist to emerge from the ranks—one who shocks the senses and at the same time redefines the form. When Alsatian-born Tomi Ungerer’s (b. 1930) work premiered in the United States in the mid-1950s, it was a shock to complacency, not because his ragged line and farcical ideas showed a clear rejection of the sentimental and romantic realism published in most mainstream magazines and advertisements, but because his satire exposed folly that native-born cartoonists were afraid to touch, or even see. Writing in Graphis, Manuel Gasser said of Ungerer’s audacity: “one cannot help noticing that he is a grown-up child. Children have a habit of coming out with the truth, even when it is least opportune.”

  Truth underscores Ungerer’s 1967 poster on race relations in America entitled Black Power/White Power. First conceived in 1963 as the cover of Monocle, a short-lived satiric journal published in New York, this topsy-turvy image of a white man eating a black man’s leg as the black man does the same to the white, was an acerbic, if unpopular, critique of the dangers within the burgeoning civil rights movement. Like a child void of propriety and manners, Ungerer naïvely, though harshly, looked at both sides of the color line and found that white and black militants were threats to a movement that most liberals of the day were unwilling to criticize. The cartoon was a pox on both their houses. By the time Ungerer published the cartoon as a poster (reportedly over a quarter of million were produced) tension between militant and nonviolent segments of the movement had become frighteningly evident.

  Ungerer never felt restrained from making strong political commentary even if it offended those purportedly on his own side. Self-censorship was never an issue, and the absence of taboos in his work resulted in drawings that eschewed the clichés and universal symbols that neutralized most graphic commentaries. Being an outsider, an immigrant, and peripatetic wanderer allowed him to see through the artifice of American politics and society, and underscored his vision.

  Born in Strasbourg, Alsace, Ungerer grew up under French rule and German occupation. “It gave me my first lesson in relativity and cynicism—prison camps, propaganda, bombings … all to culminate in an apotheosis of warfare. My taste for the macabre certainly finds its roots here,” he explained. Ungerer lacked any formal art training but found solace in his art. Before embarking on a career, though, he joined the camel corps of the French Army in Africa, from which he was discharged for ill health.

  At the age of twenty-four, however, he came to the United States to be a freelance illustrator. He ultimately produced various children’s books for Harper and Row. His most significant, Crictor, published in 1957, was the first children’s book to feature a boa constrictor (then taboo) as its main character.

  During the 1950s, Ungerer did not have outlets for his personal work, so he filled many sketchbooks with surreal cartoons. His Underground Sketchbook, which took him many years to get published, was a repository for biting comic commentaries about sex, war, death, and love. He eventually turned his attention from the general human condition to realpolitik. He rejected any semblance of idealism, especially in terms of war: “Some wars are necessary evils,” he once wrote, “but Vietnam was stupid.” His drawings and self-published posters were savage indictments of that war’s brutality. There is the feeling in looking at sketches and posters showing soldiers brutally forcing Vietnamese to metaphorically swallow the American way of life, that everyone was had by the lies and duplicity of government and its leaders. “Because America is a gutless country,” he argued. “I do a political drawing because of a need I have. Out of anger.” But posters with the conceptual intensity of Black Power/White Power, born of pure emotion, ultimately became historical essays on the mechanisms of life. “I am not really an artist, I am a thinker. I just use my drawings as a tool to make my thoughts accessible.”

  An artist this mercurial might be expected to have a limited cult following, but to his surprise Ungerer became the wunderkind of American editorial and advertising art. He was given hundreds of commissions, notably a series of billboards for the New York State Lottery with the headline “Expect the Unexpected,” showing absurd and ironic vignettes as only Ungerer could make them. This headline and Ungerer’s ideas were eventually adopted by the Village Voice, New York’s leading alternative newspaper, for its own advertising campaign. But the methods of the commercial world eventually soured Ungerer, and in 1970 he severed his relations. “My intention was to get away from Madison Avenue and its gold-medal-sucking bogeymen. After thirteen years of hard work I had developed an allergy to the media,” he said about turning exclusively to graphic and written commentary—the activity he had been subsidizing through commercial fees. Taking on the occasional commission during the 1
970s and 1980s, he remained a prolific visual essayist on the comédie humaine.

  End Bad Breath

  SEYMOUR CHWAST, DESIGNER

  The Vietnam War polarized the American people like no other conflict since the Civil War. Domestic battles between hawk and dove, right and left, and young and old were passionately waged in the media and on the streets, through words, music, and pictures. The nightly news barrage of film and video directly from Vietnam battlefields impressed the horrific image of this war on America’s consciousness and inspired the prodigious amount of protest posters aimed at leaders and policies. Not since after World War I, when pacifist organizations on both sides of the Atlantic launched what was called a “war against war,” have artists and designers produced as many testaments of conscience.

  The most ubiquitous icon of antiwar dissent, known simply as the peace symbol and designed by Gerald Holtom in 1954 as the logo of England’s CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), appeared on countless Vietnam War–era flyers and posters and turned up in evening news footage emblazoned on some American soldiers’ helmets. Other well-known poster images include the following: Lorraine Schneider’s 1969 War is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things, originally used as an announcement for the California-based organization Another Mother for Peace; Tomi Ungerer’s series of satiric posters, especially Eat, which showed a prostrate Vietnamese forced to lick the ass of an American soldier; I Want Out, by Steve Horn and Larry Dunst, a parody of the famous James Montgomery Flagg I Want You poster showing Uncle Sam dressed in bandages with his outstretched hand begging for peace; Edward Sorel’s caustic Pass the Lord and Praise the Ammunition, showing New York’s Cardinal Spellman, vicar of the U.S. Army, charging into battle with rifle and bayonet; And Babies? Yes Babies! the poster with a color photograph of the My Lai massacre (an American platoon’s savage attack on civilian villagers); and End Bad Breath by Seymour Chwast, a comic woodcut portrait of Uncle Sam with his mouth wide open, revealing airplanes bombing Vietnam.