- It's nice to think that design is driven
by aesthetics and good values.
In many ways, it is.
But in the United States,
it is intimately connected to commerce.
Design is the oil in the machine of capitalism.
The 1920s were a boom time in the United States.
Advertising increased dramatically
as the need to sell products grew.
Magazines, at their most basic,
are features surrounded by ads.
They existed then as they do today,
not to tell a story, but to sell advertising.
This boom in advertising created a period of innovation
and new ideas in magazine design.
In the 1930s, even as the country fell into the Depression,
magazines were the dominant form of communication.
Radio existed, but the magazine advertising
was the best way to promote visually.
Art directors gained power and more control
over the photography and layout choices.
Ideas from the European avant-garde and the Bauhaus
began filtering into the design
with a wave of immigration from Germany.
Joseph Binder's 1937 cover for Fortune Magazine
utilizes the geometry of the Bauhaus,
drama of French poster design,
and dynamic forms of Constructivism.
Other American art directors began incorporating
dramatic negative space, geometric forms,
graphic photography and experimental typography.
Cipe Pineles was one of the first women
in the field to rise to prominence.
She took ideas from Constructivism
and softened them to create a distinctive look
for magazines like Vogue and Seventeen.
Photography at the Bauhaus,
with its unexpected photographic cropping and point of view,
as seen here on the cover of Harper's Bazaar,
influenced many of her choices.
Alexey Brodovitch immigrated to the United States
to escape the Nazis in the 1930s.
He became the art director at Harper's Bazaar.
Brodovitch was a fan of A.M. Cassandre,
and encouraged him to spend two summers
in New York in 1936 and 1937.
The result was a series of striking covers.
Other covers and interior spreads borrowed
from avant-garde typography at the Bauhaus,
using clear typefaces and strong shapes.
Brodovitch was a genius with composition and scale.
He'd play with montage and mixing
typography and photography.
These were all ideas taken directly
from the European avant-garde,
yet tailored to an American audience.
Unfortunately, magazines were printed in giant quantities,
and offset printing did not have the capabilities
to maintain perfect color tones and small detail.
Brodovitch used this weakness to his advantage.
He used black and white photography dynamically.
Not just laying out images after the fact.
He changed the idea of what an art director was.
He conceived ideas, the setting, and the look of the images.
He was the mastermind behind all aspects of the layout.
He fostered the talents of many
of the best photographers of the time,
like Richard Avedon and Irving Penn.
Brodovitch moved the traditional magazine layout
away from a centered stodgy approach
with small illustrations,
to asymmetrical, dynamic and photographic solutions.
Over time, his power increased as an art director,
while the layouts became increasingly minimal.
If you've ever seen the movie "Funny Face,"
watch for the scene with the angry Russian art director.
He's based on Alexey Brodovitch.
The change from a dense, text-filled magazine from the 1920s
to a highly-illustrated and energetic one,
profoundly changed the concept of a magazine.