Gerd arntz biography sampler

DESIGNNEWS

The pictograms we see around us, for public signs, at sports venues, on our computers, phones and tablets, all bear some trace of those first designed in the 1920s for Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education), a pioneering method of visual communication.

Pictograms were crucial to Isotype, picturing things that could then be quantified and compared. They also gave Isotype a language-like consistency that served the organisation’s broader, educational aims.

Those involved in Isotype – its founding figure, Otto Neurath; Marie Reidemeister (later Neurath); and Gerd Arntz – applied themselves to a wide variety of projects. Their varied visual solutions testify to Isotype’s versatility in showing social and economic relations and facts about health, history, technology and science.

Isotype’s graphic language, now so recognisable, was also powerful and refined. But achieving all this was neither quick nor easy, and needed working out through trial and error. For Otto Neurath, Isotype could not be wholly theorised, only increasingly better articulated through work and experience.

A selection of this work can be seen in ‘Isotype: International Picture Language’ at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum this winter. Beginning in 1920s Vienna, the display spans more than four decades of Isotype activity in Austria, Britain, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, the United States and points further afield. It samples Isotype’s many uses: for visual education in inter-war Vienna, pictorial statistics in Moscow, health campaigns in North America and ‘soft’ propaganda in wartime Britain.

Isotype explanations of postwar planning, reconstruction and welfare are shown, as are educational books for children, and public information campaigns in 1950s West Africa. Artists’ prints and historical graphic matter indicate the wider influences shaping Isotype from the start.

The exhibition is also an opportunity to encounter the particularity of

A story is told in images.

You can do it with words, you can do it with pictures, or you can do it with both.

For those interested in doing it just with pictures, there are two books in print right now on woodcut novels and wordless books that are absolute must-reads. First, for an overall sampler and history of the form, get David Beronä‘s Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels. Beronä is the Library Director of the Lamson Library at Plymouth State University, and he’s been researching woodcut novels and wordless books for twenty years.

Beronä begins with the granddaddy of it all and my personal favorite, woodcut artist Frans Masereel, and points out three major elements that were in the air when Masereel started to create his works:

1) the revival of the woodcut, mostly thanks to the German Expressionists
2) silent cinema, and a “public already familiar with black-and-white pictures that told a story”
3) newspaper cartoons

Beronä goes on to trace the development of the form, including some of my other favorites: the woodcut novels of Lynd Ward (whose name spelled backwards is “draw”) and Otto Nuckel, Milt Gross’s cartoon novel He Done Her Wrong, and Istvan Szegedi Szuts’ ink + brush piece My War.

In the book’s introduction, the the fantastic cartoonist and scratchboard genius Peter Kuper mentions the biblical story of the Tower of Babel and locates wordless woodcut stories as part of humanity’s ongoing quest to use images and symbols to “sidestep our language barriers and create…stories that can be universally understood.”

“Looking for similarities among these artists you find that many share a contrasting use of black and white, dark and light, with a dash of yin and yang. Most also share a connection through choice of materials. From wood engraving to leadcut to linoleum printing, these artists have chosen a medium with a process beyond the i

Eric Kindel and Sue Walker, with additional commentary by Christopher Burke, Matthew Eve and Emma Minns (2010)

'Isotype revisited'

Isotype is a technique for visualizing social statistics through pictorial means. It was originally known as the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics because it was first developed in Vienna, in the 1920s, at the path-breaking Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum (Museum of Society and Economy). There it helped to explain and illustrate social and economic matters to ordinary people. Isotype's founder was the sociologist and Vienna Circle philosopher Otto Neurath. Members of the team Neurath gathered around him included Marie Reidemeister (later his wife) and the graphic artist Gerd Arntz. Through associated offices and activities, their work spread to the Netherlands, Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States and elsewhere. Many of those associated with Isotype had to twice escape fascism, first from Vienna in 1934, then in 1940 from The Hague, eventually ending up in Oxford where Otto and Marie Neurath began the Isotype Institute. Following Otto Neurath's death in 1945, Marie Neurath and colleagues continued Isotype work in London through the 1960s.

In 1971, as the Isotype Institute was winding up its commercial activities, Marie Neurath decided to give its archive of working materials to the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading. There it was named the Otto & Marie Neurath Isotype Collection. A period of considerable research activity followed at Reading, resulting in the 1975 exhibition 'Graphic communication through Isotype' and, in 1979, the first extended scholarly treatment of Otto Neurath and Isotype (Robin Kinross, 'Otto Neurath's contribution to visual communication, 1925-1945'). In the years that followed the Isotype Collection supported scholarship and publishing beyond Reading, while cataloguing and conservation work continued. The collection w