Erik's Graphic Art History: "The Art of War"

As the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau Germany tension around the world broke out caused by the previous World War. Communism took hold in Russia, turning it into the Soviet Union. Stalin led the rebellion still raging from Lenin’s Bolshevik party and started mass genocide around the nation. In Italy, Mussolini rose to power setting in place a new political system called fascism, a system that was very similar in ideals to communism. Japan became a heavy militaristic state and even invaded China brining many other allies to China into the mix. Pearl Harbor, the first international bombing on U.S. soil since the Revolutionary War brought America into the war. And of course Germany was enraged at the punishment dealt to them by the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War. Hitler rose to power leading Germany into a massive European domination with his Nazi Party.

With tensions high American graphic designers turned towards the war efforts with their designs. The main focus was propaganda and promoted production. Jean Carlu was one of the greatest designers of the time. After being commissioned by the U.S. Office of War Information he designed “America’s Answer: Production”. This poster would go on to be distributed all across the country and Carlu was awarded one of the Top graphic design awards from the New York Art Director’s Club Exhibition. Other designers like John Atherton, Joseph Binder, and E McKnight Kauffer were also of the illustrators commissioned to design for the war effort. Atherton decided to create posters Saturday Evening Post covers that acknowledged the threat of careless talk and gossip of enemy information among troops, while Binder and Kauffer were commissioned to design much more propaganda-esque posters such as posters for the U.S. Army Air Corps and Moral boosting posters for the Allied nations respectively.

Another important designer during the war period was Herbert Bayer. Bayer was a designer straight from the Bauhaus in Dessau. He shifted design styles after his covers for PM magazine in the late 1930’s just before the war started. His new style was started in Dessau at the Bauhaus and brought forward during the war effort where he designed with realism in a very simple way. He then took his graphics and added in the information created a strong hierarchy to convey his messages. Bayer’s shift in design was extremely dramatic. We can see this when we compare his posters for the Kandinsky Jubilee Exhibition with his poster on Polio research. In the first design he was a young professor at the Bauhaus trying to popularize an unknown style of social order through photography. Meanwhile in his Polio research poster was the result of seeing the devastation left by the chaotic world war raging around the world while he was living in a place completely foreign to him. His style switched from photographed images with text to hand painted graphics and lettering with the same consistent hierarchy he had developed in Dessau.

After World War II had ended the United States turned their factories back from wartime efforts to consumer production and likewise the designs shifted with them. The CCA had decided to commission in a multitude of different artists for different series’. They started by commissioning a designer from each state to give the idea that wart and life were one in the same; a unified ideal. Next would be one of the greatest advertising campaigns in history. Elizabeth and Walter Paepcke joined with Mortimer Alder to entice designers from all over to create designs for great ideas of Western Culture.

Magazines were also being massively produced with Alexy Brodovitch on the forefront of it all. His skills in the editorial design world were unmatched and he had a hidden talent for taking in newcomers that would go on to become amazing magazine designers. Designers such as photographer Richard Avedon, and Irving Penn, and Art Kane. While this was happening however a competitor was arising named Herbert Matter who received contracts for Vogue, Fortune, and Harper’s Bazaar. Together with Brodovitch and later Giusti, magazine designes were fundamentally changed after the Second World War