In addition to this influence, The Bald Soprano also directly inspired a small group of book artists working with pictorial narratives—most notably the work of American typographer and performance artist Warren Lehrer, who added color, textures, and even more chaotic typographic interplay to the Massin model. In recent years neo-expressionist and deconstructive typographers have furthered the “type-as-voice” idea. But Massin’s work, despite the ignorance of many artists and designers who perhaps unknowingly stand upon his shoulders, remains the hallmark of these typographic contortions.
Massin’s second significant work, Letter and Image, is an encyclopedic anthology of illustrated and expressive letterforms that took him fifteen years to compile and edit, and incidentally was one of the first volumes to address the history of eclectic type before the widespread, postmodern interest in design history starting in the 1980s. When first published in America by Van Nostrand, the book was a fixture on many designers’ bookshelves, though few actually made the connection between this and The Bald Soprano. Dover Books had long published clip-art collections of lost and found passé typographic specimens, but Letter and Image was the first treatise to provide the historical context and intellectual underpinning to truly understand how metaphoric letterforms in Western culture developed into distinct languages that were more than mere accessories to pictures.
Moreover, “the publication provided an alternative to the rationalist history of typography propagated by the Bauhaus-influenced Modernists,” writes Latetia Wolff. And though many who bought the book did so to “borrow” ideas (as I did), the anthology of over one thousand examples, including Apollinaire’s Calligrammes (the wellspring of expressive typography), Medieval illuminations, and sign, graffiti, advertisement, and package lettering, articulately describes the holy marriage of the pictorial-letterform and its roots. Massin was not the only designer of his time to be interested in this relationship—certainly in America, Push Pin Studios prefigured postmodern pastiche by decades—but he was the first to codify the history, if not the tenets, of what might be labeled “typographic pictorialism.” Therefore, what Jan Tschichold did for the New Typography, Massin did for a new eclecticism through Type and Image.
The word “pastiche” means imitation, takeoff, or spoof, and the connotations are not always positive. The modernists abhorred pastiche as nostalgic artifice, but Massin built a vocabulary (not simply a style) on the reapplication of vintage graphic forms, which he applied to books and book covers when he was art director for several postwar French book clubs, including Club Français du Livre and Club du Meilleur Livre, among others. Some designers argue that even the most classical texts and their covers should be reinterpreted in a contemporary design idiom. But Massin, whose interest in classical letters dated back to his boyhood when he learned engraving from his father, a stone engraver, believed that pastiche “always extracts the essential character of a period, thus acknowledging the course of graphic history,” writes Wolff. For Massin, matching the content and context of a book was more than a problem-solving exercise; it was his responsibility to readers to afford them a comfortable reading environment. Arguably, all his bookwork is concerned with the reader’s relationship to literature, rather than how design must sell a product.
Massin was never taught design—either form or history—yet he developed a fervent ethic concerning the role of type and image as a vessel of meaning. Nonetheless, he did not have a fixed ideology (Modernist or otherwise) or methodology rooted in a single truth. “I had no methods, because I didn’t attend courses at the specialized schools,” he relates. But what did govern his work was curiosity, which caused him to practice design, in part, was the experimental manipulation of form and the exploration of materials. In his role as book designer and art director, he continually played with new binding materials, “like linen cloth, gunny, silk, velvet, wood, etcetera,” he says about what he uses to transform a conventional cover and pages into a tactile object. During the 1950s, designing for book clubs (which routinely published high-quality limited editions) gave Massin an opportunity to produce livre-objects (book objects), but even he acknowledges that after some time the tropes became less interesting to members.
Furthermore, by the late 1950s, mass distribution of trade books throughout France had reached prewar efficiency and the book clubs were not as popular. In 1958 Massin joined Gallimard as the first art director. Prior to this, the printer created all the cover, jacket, and interior designs. In return for a freehand, Massin offered to design everything using an exclusive typographic standard. Over the next twenty years he produced a distinct visual character through individual books and various series for Editions Gallimard. During this time, Wolff notes, “The book jacket replaced the decorative hardcover of the club era, following a model explored earlier by Italian and American publishers of popular literature. Again, French publishers were stylishly late.” But Massin was not a slave to his or any other’s style. Sure, some of his late jackets were similar to the American bestseller look (devised by Paul Bacon and featuring a big byline and title with a small illustration), but Massin’s strength was with series, and his ability to at once have uniformity and surprise within a continuous imprint. His most visible was the Gallimard Folio series.
In less than six months he redesigned over three hundred covers in one pop, using the same format with changing elements. (He eventually designed over one thousand covers in all.) The type was Baskerville Old Face on a white background for about one-third of the cover image, with a unique illustration filling the rest of the space. For the illustrations, he hired the best: Andre François, Folon, Ronald Searle, and Roland Topor, among over two hundred others. But each series had its own character. “My favorite period is the first age of typography,” he injects, “Garamond and Venetian Italic—and Didot too.” So, for Gallimard’s Soleil Collection, each cover was a simple setting of Didot on a flat color background—nothing that would drive the fashions of the day, but the formal subtlety that underlined the classical nature of the texts was a perfect fit.
Massin is more than a book designer; he is intimately involved with the organism of books, and it has made him acutely aware of how writing functions in the world. Therefore, it came as no surprise that by 1979, after leaving Gallimard Editions, he was offered an editorship at Hachette, France’s other leading publisher. In recent years the concept of designer as author or auteur has been debated and critiqued in some graphic design circles, yet decades earlier, Massin accomplished the feat. Under the imprint Atelier Hachette/Massin, he conceived, often wrote, edited, researched, and designed various books on popular culture. And later he became a publisher as well, with Proust—a selection of excerpts from A la recherché du temps perdu conceived as a hypertext. He also published a volume of Robert Doisneau’s elegant photographs of French street life, and is currently working with the Emile Zola family to bring Zola’s rare photographs into public view.
In 1989, L’ABC du Métier, an illustrated biography of Massin’s own collected work, was published in France. As he states, it is a “résumé of a career, where is demonstrated the interaction of different arts.” Despite the requisite reprise of a lifetime’s artifacts, it is not only a retrospective, but also a chronicle of a self-taught artist and artisan who markedly influenced attitudes of graphic design. Yet most practicing designers have never heard of Massin. A few recent articles about The Bald Soprano in the design press have only served to spotlight one of the twentieth century’s most significant typographic artifacts, not the breadth of the designer’s contributions. Not until the exhibition at the Herb Lubalin Study Center did I understand that The Bald Soprano is only one appendage in an entire body of design.
IDENTITY
Modern Mark Maker
WILHELM DEFFKE
Wilhelm Deffke, one of Germany’s great trademark makers, wrote about the origins of the Swastika: “The only calligraphic and healing marks passed down to us [Germans] from the ancients is the Hakenkre
uz (swastika), that undeniable ancient Aryan seal that the Aryans display wherever they appear to be culturally active.” He was not talking about the Nazi’s transformation of the symbol but rather celebrating its inherent beauty. He was eloquent about his own search for perfect marks, because he understood that “The language of marks is immediately apparent and thus it is easy to understand what its desired effects are.” Trademarks and seals, he wrote, “deserve our attention as a means of improving the public taste, and because of their extraordinary economic significance. Their value is in the millions and it would be a irreplaceable loss to the national wealth of any country, should they cease to be.”
Deffke’s roots dug deep into the traditions of seals and emblems, but his aesthetics were based on Modern economy. Although overshadowed by the great German corporate identity pioneer, Peter Behrens, and not as ubiquitously publicized as another German mark maker, Karl Schulpig, Deffke left a legacy that is arguably the holy grail of the modern pictorial logo.
The iconic corporate mark was indeed born in Germany shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, the direct descendant of burgher crests, coats of arms, signets, trade and factory marks, emblems of free professions, and symbols for professional guilds and associations. In the thirteenth century, the master craftsmen of Solingen, a town in North Rhine-Westphalia, famous for fine knife manufactures, were obliged by the local guild to brand their products with distinctive marks that showed both origin and pedigree. Being branded was profitable for manufacturer, advantageous for buyer, and therefore designing them was not beneath the status of many highly regarded artists, such as Hans Holbein, Lucas Cranach, and Albrecht Dürer. Little did anyone realize then, however, that branding would become such a lucrative business in its own right. (Incidentally, the Solingen mark is still used.)
In the 1920s, European graphic designers practicing the progressive form known as The New Typography—among them members of the Bauhaus and the Ring Neuer Werbegestalter (circle of new advertising designers)—took credit for inventing the reductive trademark, but this approach actually began well over a decade earlier. Official German government registry books from the early 1900s were full of Schutzmarken (trademarks) by such leading advertising and industrial designers as Behrens (father of corporate design for AEG), Lucian Bernhard, F. H. Ehmcke, Konrad Jochheim, Schulpig, and Valentin Zietara. Among their varied creations, individually they produced numerous and sundry pictograms and with graphic trade-characters—or what design historian Virginia Smith calls “the funny little man”—which, like Otto Neurath’s ISOTYPES, prefigured today’s international sign symbols. Among the many marks designed during this fertile period, some are still current today.
The leading European graphic design and advertising magazines (Das Plakat, Gebrauchsgraphik, Die Reklame, etc.) that heralded and propagated modern designers, barely recognized one of the most prolific among them, and therefore he is virtually forgotten today, save for the occasional footnote, so not as much was written about Deffke as by him. In the United States, where minimalism governed mid-century Modern graphic design, he was and is unheard of.
Wilhelm F. Deffke cofounder with Carl Ernst Hinkefuss of Wilhelmwerk in Berlin was a master of reductive Schutzmarken. Included among his prolific output, which began in the early teens, Deffke either originated or modernized dozens of the era’s most impressive symbols for commerce and government, not the least of which was the Hakenkreuz (hooked cross or swastika), prior to its adoption by the Nazis.
Deffke was an unapologetic cheerleader for his profession and his own business interests.
When Deffke tackled this ancient sign in the late teens, he never intended that it would be used as a political symbol, no less a logo with such criminal consequence. “Deffke came across a representation of the ancient Germanic sun-wheel on which he worked to redefine and stylize its shape,” wrote his former assistant Mana Tress in a letter to American logo designer and Deffke “fan,” Paul Rand during the early 1970s (Rand did more to introduce Deffke’s legacy to American design students than any other). “Later on, this symbol appeared on a brochure which he had published [and the Nazis] chose it as their symbol but reversed it.” Her primary reason for writing this letter to Rand was apparently to absolve Deffke of any responsibility for the creation of the Nazi icon, and furthermore, she implied, the swastika was taken from his self-published sample book Handelsmarken und Fabrikzeichen and it was never paid for. Of course, Hitler usurped the swastika from other German nationalist “Aryan” organizations that had adopted it years before the Nazi party came into existence. It was also used for more benign commercial purposes throughout the late nineteenth century. Deffke was well aware that the mark in rectilinear and curvilinear variations was more or less in the public domain—no one entity owned it. He simply intended to render a cleaner version that was more geometrically precise than the others.
Precision guided Deffke’s practice at every turn. He learned at the foot of another leading design precisionist. In 1909 he worked for Peter Behrens as he built-up the Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG) brand through the concerted integration of graphics, product design, and architecture. Deffke learned at this point that a simple mark void of superfluous ornamentation could communicate directly with the public like few other graphic tools. So after leaving Behrens’ employ, Deffke became a design consultant to Otto Elsner Verlag, where he focused on developing the publisher’s corporate identity. In 1915, as Germans were marching to war, he opened Wilhelmwerk and took an active role promoting the virtues of design to the public and profession through self-published books and portfolios that evidenced the highest graphic standards. This is one of his frequent critical pronouncements that in a simple paragraph, sums up his philosophy:
“Most modern marks are lacking in artistic merit and significance. Their shapes are average and bland, ugly and utilitarian. Their designers misunderstand their purpose, leading to a kind of useless playfulness. This, in turn, harms the reputation of these marks and makes them difficult to use universally. It should be obvious to anyone that creating these marks is best left to professionals with experience, practice and the artistic strength to make them unique. Simplicity of form, beauty and unique inventiveness are the conditions for any good trademark. Only if they instantly and indelibly impress the viewer can marks be effective in multiple applications. Demands on trademarks are many: They will be carved in stone, hammered into iron and steel, stenciled onto boxes and crates, and branded onto kegs and other cargo containers. In the same way, marks are used to distinguish business papers and advertising materials. They should function as an advertisement and decorate delivery vehicles.”
Deffke prided himself on how reductive he could make a symbol while remaining comprehensible—and, of course, memorable. He preferred working with primitive and abstract forms because they were malleable, and his knack for manipulating them into forceful signs was acute. Not surprisingly, Deffke created a large number of new marks and redesigned some old ones for the postwar German military, which during the early days Weimar Republic sought to change its public image from reliance on trappings associated with haughty militaristic Junkers to a more modern, streamlined Reichswehr, while retaining its authoritarian persona. He was also called upon to design government propaganda, which he did loyally. Therefore, when the nascent Nazis went searching for graphic designers they came upon Deffke’s work, and despite Hilter’s professed opposition to Modernism, they saw that Deffke was not an ideological Modernist, but a formal pragmatist.*
*Case in point: Deffke was not an ideological Nazi but in “The Struggle of Signs in the Weimar Republic” (Journal of Design History Vol. 13 No. 4) Sherwin Simmons cites documents that show in 1933, when the Magdeburg School was threatened with closure, he joined the party and “argued for modern design’s link to Nazi policy on account of the party’s technological sophistication and opposition to narrow provincialism.”
Pragmatics guided Wilhemwerk’s successful busin
ess strategy. Although well versed in both the Germanic realist and romantic graphic traditions, Deffke understood that German industry’s identity needs prior to World War I demanded a new kind of easily comprehensible mnemonic symbol. By 1906, the introduction of the proto-Modernist Sachplakat (object poster)—created by Lucian Bernhard, which reduced an advertising message down to one memorable object or icon (a response to the rise in urban traffic and limited visibility on the thoroughfares)—was critical in moving commercial art away from rococo complexity to unornamented economy. Deffke, who in 1910 taught trademark design at the Reimann School in Berlin, and years later was appointed the director of the Kunstgewerbeschule in Magdeburg, could clearly see in only a few short years the German public had become accustomed to the witty little icons that were quickly adopted by numerous businesses.
Schutzmarken in general followed a fairly strict stylistic formula: Stark silhouettes usually with basic geometrical attributes—a round head on rectangular body was common, as were triangles and parallelograms. Visual puns were encouraged: Carl Schulpig’s logo for Bolle Dairy (which is still used) is a person’s head and body formed by the letters “Bolle” with an additional arm ringing a bell. Most trademarks stood on their own without any type, but some integrated bold sans-serif letters.
The modern trademark was promoted to designers and their clients through Das Plakat, the design magazine launched in 1910 as the official journal of the Verein der Plakatfreunde (The Society for Friends of the Poster), and later by Gebrauchsgraphik, founded in 1923, which became the leading international graphic design and advertising journal. Both periodicals sought to expand the designer’s role in business, and Deffke was one of the more outspoken proponents of this early approach to corporate identification. “Trademarks acquire their real worth and significance only through adequate usage,” he sermonized in Handelsmarken und Fabrikzeichen (1929), “It is not sufficient to use them once in a while to designate certain products. They must be used systematically and frequently. The trademark will be the most likely to establish an inseparable bond between the user and the manufacturer.”
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