Messaging on a Mission
A vivid history of 150 years of graphic design
Through the turbulent events of the last century-and-a-half, graphic design—with its vivid, neat synthesis of image and idea—has distilled the spirit of each age. It surrounds us every minute of the day, from minimalist packaging to colorful adverts, environmental graphics to sleek interfaces: graphic design is as much about reflecting society’s aspirations and values as it is about transmitting information.
Now published as part of our popular Basic Art series, this vibrant compendium lays out the evolution of graphic design from its inception in the 1890s up until the present day. Using his sweeping knowledge of the field, author Jens Müller has curated hundreds of examples from across the globe, arranged by decade.
Each chapter also includes thumbnails of significant movements and influential publications, plus concise biographies of design masterminds like Massimo Vignelli (New York subway wayfinding), Otl Aicher (Lufthansa identity), Paula Scher (Citibank identity), Milton Glaser (I Love New York), Louise Fili (packaging), and Stefan Sagmeister (handwritten posters).
This succinct but authoritative collection reflects on the development of a creative field that is constantly changing and challenging itself. The design classics Müller has curated act as coordinates, helping to trace the incontrovertible influence of graphic design on our daily lives. It’s both a handy primer and an informed exploration of how graphic design shapes our choices, from the products we buy and the media we consume, to how we behave and think of ourselves.
A unique language of symbols, literature, and light
With meticulous theories and many thousands of paintings, drawings, and watercolors, Paul Klee (1879–1940) is considered one of the most cerebral and prolific leaders of 20th-century European art. Though typically small in scale, his works are remarkable for their sophisticated thought and meticulous nuances of line, color, and tonality.
Klee’s stylistic formation was shaped by early affiliation with the German expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter and, in particular, by a 1914 trip to Tunisia which transformed his use of color. After the war, he taught at the esteemed Bauhaus school, where his lectures, like his emerging practice, emphasized the symbolic potential of shade, line, and geometry.
Klee was also inspired by Cubism, poetry, music, literature, language, and the simplistic power of children’s art. Famed for his simple stick figures, he often combined the appearance of untutored naïveté with rigorous composition and intellectual significance.
This book provides a selection of key Klee works to introduce his style and influence. From sun-drenched landscapes to enigmatic wordplay, discover a world at once simplistic, symbolic, and dazzlingly colorful.
Making sense of revolutionary new forms
Abstraction shook Western art to its core. In the early part of the 20th century, it refuted the reign of clear, indisputable forms and confronted audiences instead with vivid visual poems devoid of conventional representational imagery and characterized by allegories of emotion and sensation.
This radical artistic adventure established new artistic means, as much as narratives. Expression became characterized by shocking juxtapositions of color, light, and line. Artists abandoned the conventions of brush and easel and played with new materials and methods of artistic gesture: commercial paints and housepainter’s brushes, working on unstretched and unprimed canvases, moving the canvas to the floor, and applying paint with hands.
This essential introduction spans the international breadth, conceptual depth, and seismic impact of abstract art with a thorough survey not only of the big names such as Picasso, Klee, Kline, Rothko, and Pollock, but also lesser-known figures who made equally significant contributions, including Antoni Tàpies, K. O. Götz, Ad Reinhardt, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp.
Meet the artist whose majestic breaking wave sent ripples across the world. Hokusai (1760–1849) is not only one of the giants of Japanese art and a legend of the Edo period, but also a founding father of Western modernism, whose prolific gamut of prints, illustrations, paintings, and beyond forms one of the most comprehensive oeuvres of ukiyo-e art and a benchmark of japonisme. His influence spread through Impressionism, Art Nouveau, and beyond, enrapturing the likes of Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt, and Vincent van Gogh.
Hokusai was always a man on the move. He changed domicile more than 90 times during his lifetime and changed his own name through over 30 pseudonyms. In his art, he adopted the same restlessness, covering the complete spectrum of Japanese ukiyo-e,“pictures of the floating world”, from single-sheet prints of landscapes and actors to erotic books. In addition, he created album prints, illustrations for verse anthologies and historical novels, and surimono, which were privately issued prints for special occasions.
Hokusai’s print series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, published between c. 1830 and 1834 is the artist’s most renowned work and, with its soaring peak through different seasons and from different vantage points, marked the towering summit of the Japanese landscape print. The series’ Under the Wave off Kanagawa, also known simply as The Great Wave, is one of the most recognized images of Japanese art in the world.
Resisting interpretation or classification, Mark Rothko (1903–1970) was a prominent advocate for the artist’s consummate freedom of expression. Although identified as a key protagonist of the Abstract Expressionist movement, first formed in New York City, Rothko rejected the label and insisted instead on “a consummated experience between picture and onlooker.”
Following a repertoire of figurative works, Rothko developed his now iconic canvases of bold color blocks in red, yellow, ochre, maroon, black, or green. With these shimmering, pulsating color masses, Rothko stressed that he had not removed the human figure but rather put symbols or shapes in its place. These intense color forms contained all the tragedy of the human condition. At the same time, Rothko explicitly empowered the viewer in the expressive potential of his work. He believed “A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer.”
From his early development through to his most famous color fields, this book introduces the intellect and influence of Rothko’s dramatic, intimate, and revolutionary work.
An encounter with Gerhard Richter, the German artist who widened horizons in the relationship between painting and reality. From early photographic paintings, along with his famous RAF cycle, to late abstract paintings, experiencing Richter’s work always offers us the unexpected and unseen. Where he once set out to liberate the medium from ideological ballast, today, faced with the overwhelming presence of digital images, he shows us the unsurpassed impact and intensity of painting. A definitive introduction to one of the greatest artists of our time spanning not only his entire career, but also 50 years of cultural, economic, and political events.
Immerse yourself in the rich shades and textures of Tiziano Vecellio (c. 1490–1576), commonly known as Titian, and the figurehead of 16th-century Venetian painting. With his bold approach to form and startling, opulent colors, Titian worked with a number of prestigious commissions and left behind an astonishing repertoire of portraits, mythological scenes, altarpieces, and landscapes that remains one of the most important legacies of Renaissance art.
This dependable artist introduction traces Titian’s complete career and its trailblazing influence on successive generations of artists, from Diego Velázquez to van Dyck. From the rippling sensuality of Venus of Urbino (c. 1538) to the airborne dynamism of Bacchus and Ariadne (1520–1523), all the major works are here, charting the artist’s stylistic experimentation over time as well as his consistent and unique ability to work across genres and to bring a defining new level of emotional and spiritual aspect to his subjects.
The great Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1526/31-1569) was an astoundingly inventive painter and draftsman, who made his art historical mark with beautiful, evocative landscapes as well as religious subjects, both notable for their vernacular language and attention to everyday, contemporary life.
Immersing himself in rural or small-town communities, Bruegel is particularly notable for his depiction of peasant experience and folk culture, earning the artist nickname "Peasant Bruegel." Whether hunters shivering in the snow or a boisterous country fair, Bruegel raised the farming, festivals, gatherings, and games of peasant culture to the status of high art. Bruegel's imposing religious and moral subjects, meanwhile, such as The Triumph of Death and The Tower of Babel are as awestriking and influential today as they were in the 16th century, inspiring contemporary culture from The Lord of the Rings cinematic battle scenes to Don DeLillo's novel Underworld.
From the corn harvest to the conversion of Saul, from quaint wedding processions to Christ's road to Calvary, this book brings together the rich range of Bruegel's subjects to introduce his powerful compositions of both biblical and earthly tableaux.
The arresting pictures of Frida Kahlo (1907-54) were in many ways expressions of trauma. Through a near-fatal road accident at the age of 18, failing health, a turbulent marriage, miscarriage and childlessness, she transformed the afflictions into revolutionary art.
In literal or metaphorical self-portraiture, Kahlo looks out at the viewer with an audacious glare, rejecting her destiny as a passive victim and rather intertwining expressions of her experience into a hybrid real-surreal language of living: hair, roots, veins, vines, tendrils and fallopian tubes. Many of her works also explore the Communist political ideals which Kahlo shared with her husband Diego Rivera. The artist described her paintings as "the most sincere and real thing that I could do in order to express what I felt inside and outside of myself."
This book introduces the rich body of Kahlo's work to explore her unremitting determination as an artist, and her significance as a painter, feminist icon, and a pioneer of Latin American culture.
A key contributor to Nouveau Réalisme in early 1960s Paris, Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) worked alongside artists such as Arman, Yves Klein, and Jean Tinguely, scavenging real objects in place of traditional art materials. She connected art to life by instrumentalizing household items, machine parts, and even toys for her early assemblages. Saint Phalle created her first shooting painting, or Tir, in 1961, and went on to conduct these performances in such varied locations as the Impasse Ronsin in Paris, a garden in Amsterdam, a sandpit outside Stockholm, and the Malibu Hills. Reliefs made of plaster, small objects, paint, wood, and wire were punctured by the bullets of a gun.
This book provides an introduction to Saint Phalle’s work, highlighting some of her most important contributions to 20th century art. From birthing mothers to harbingers of death, she created sculptures that celebrated and exposed the female form in works such as Pink Birth (1964) and Hon En Kathedral (1966). She also u
Where’s the Point?
Georges Seurat’s revolutionary dots
Georges Seurat (1859-1891) was only 31 when he died, but during his short life he created hundreds of drawings, oil sketches, and paintings on canvas that introduced a fresh perspective in European painting.
As a student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he carefullly observed the work of Delacroix and became fascinated with the interplay between light and color. In doing so, he developed Divisionism, using small dabs of paint from the point of the brush to create pointilist images that shimmered with luminescence and hinted at movement.
In this accessible introduction to Seurat, meet an artist driven by a need to capture nature and the simple pleasures of life through a new language of painting.
One of the key figures in the New York art world of the 1980s, Keith Haring (1958–1990) created a signature style that blended street art, graffiti, a Pop sensibility, and cartoon elements to unique, memorable effect. With thick black outlines, bright colors, and kinetic figures, his public (and occasionally illegal) interventions, sculptures, and works on canvas and paper have become instantly recognizable icons of 20th-century visual culture.From his first chalk drawings in the New York City subway stations, to his renowned “Radiant Baby” symbol, and his commissions for Swatch Watch and Absolut Vodka, Haring’s work was both emblematic of the manic work ethic of 1980s New York, yet distinctive for its social awareness. Belying their bright, playful aesthetics, his pieces often tackled intensely controversial socio-political issues, including racism, capitalism, religious fundamentalism, and the increasing impact of AIDS on New York’s gay community, the latter foreshadowing his own death from the disease in 1990.In this vivid introduction to Haring’s work, we explore the dynamic life and innovative spirit of this singular artist, who spent little more than a decade in the spotlight, but through the accessibility of his visual vocabulary and the strength of his political commitment became one of the most significant artists to emerge from New York’s vibrant, downtown community.
From Edouard Manet’s portrait of naturalist writer Émile Zola sitting among his Japanese art finds to Van Gogh’s meticulous copies of the Hiroshige prints he devotedly collected, 19th-century pioneers of European modernism made no secret of their love of Japanese art. In all its sensuality, freedom, and effervescence, the woodblock print is single-handedly credited with the wave of japonaiserie that first enthralled France and, later, all of Europe—but often remains misunderstood as an “exotic” artifact that helped inspire Western creativity.
The fact is that the Japanese woodblock print is a phenomenon of which there exists no Western equivalent. Some of the most disruptive ideas in modern art—including, as Karl Marx put it, that “all that is solid melts into air”—were invented in Japan in the 1700s and expressed like never before in the designs of such masters as Hokusai, Utamaro, and Hiroshige in the early 19th century.
This volume lifts the veil on a much-loved but little-understood art form by presenting the most exceptional Japanese woodblock prints in their historical context. Ranging from the 17th-century development of decadent ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world,” to the decline and later resurgence of prints in the early 20th century, the images collected in this edition make up a record not only of a unique genre in art history, but also of the shifting mores and cultural development of Japan.
We discover the four pillars of the woodblock print—beauties, actors, landscapes, and bird-and-flower compositions—alongside depictions of sumo wrestlers, kabuki actors, or enticing courtesans—rock stars who populated the “floating world” and whose fan bases fueled the frenzied production of woodblock prints. We delve into the horrifying and the obscure in prints where demons, ghosts, and otherworldly creatures torment the living—stunning images that continue to influence Japanese manga, film, and video games to this day. We witness how, in their incredible breadth, from everyday scenes to erotica, the martial to the mythological, these works are united by the technical mastery and infallible eye of their creators and how, with tremendous ingenuity and tongue-in-cheek wit, publishers and artists alike fought to circumvent government censorship.
This edition compiles the finest extant impressions from museums and private collections across the globe, accompanied by descriptions to guide us through this frantic period in Japanese art history.
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