Life & Work

The theories and concepts of Leger and

Ozenphant, the fathers of modern move-
‘Matter was a translator of the modernist
ment, were essential to the academy
movement for the masses and an emis-
curriculum, consequently guiding Matter’s
sary for the forerunners of world design,
artistic journey. Matter first-handedly
educating the public on a new age of form
experienced a synthesis of mechanization
and production that would change the way
and art, working in Swiss lithographic
that Americans lived. The vast array of
shops over the summers, an expertise
visual communications Matter created [...]
that helped him to move from painting to
is a fervent reminder of what is important
commercial graphic art.
for design today.’
— Mark Reeve
1920s

1930s

Herbert Matter was born in 1907 in a moun-

tain resort village of Engelberg,Switzerland,
where frigid winters coated the land-
scape with snow, creating a world of stark
contrasts and purity of form. In later life
Matter would admit that this environment
had a profound impact on his artistic vision
and taught him to see slightest details. In
1925 he enrolled at l’Ecole des Beaux Arts Engelberg Poster, 1932
in Geneva, where he was exposed to
modernist ideas. Allured by those, he left Matter designed family-
Switzerland to study at Academie Moderne owned Tea Room in Engelberg,
in Paris – the hub of modern art during inspired by Bauhaus, 1930
that period.
Studied painting in
l’Ecole des Beaux Arts
in Geneva, 1925-1927
 1940s
In early 1930s, Matter worked under
the guidance of a renowned graphic artist
A. M. Cassandra at a design firm of
Deberney and Peignot in Paris. In 1932
Matter took his education back to
Switzerland to work for the Swiss National
Tourist Office in Zurich. There he began a
series of posters that would take their place
among the best works of early modernism.
With forms of humans, roads, and machines
exploding upon the paper surface, these
posters became tremendously successful.

But by the mid-1930s Europe was facing

a drastic political and economical crisis,
and artists like Matter became significantly
restrained. The center of design life had
shifted to the other side of the Atlantic, and
Matter chose to follow the trend and move
to America. He was immediately taken into
the New York graphics circuit, securing a
number of high profile clients.

Die Schweiz das Grosse Erlebnis

im Flugzeug poster, 1935

Pontresina Engadin poster , 1935

Immigration to the U.S.

Woman With Beads photo, 1948

Harper’s Bazaar,
June 1940 cover

American ad industry was quite conservative

at a time, and Matter found very little room
for self-expression. Fortunately, he gained
access to the world of fashion photography,
which was open to radical European visual
language. Harper’s Bazaar was one of
Matter’s first clients, allowing him to work
alongside Alexey Brodovitch, another
revolutionary photo designer of that time.
Matter’s ads were some of the first to sub-
stitute hand illustration with photographic
imagery, and his work was garnering honors
in the design annuals as early as 1937. It
is not surprising that Vogue, Fortune and
other major publications were queueing for
Matter’s talent.
Arts & Architecture,
June 1945 cover
Vogue, January 1948 cover
1950s
Throughout 40s Matter mainly designed for
Container Corporation of America and
Arts & Architecture. In these works, he drew
upon the Bauhaus, relying on free floating
figural compositions and dramatic lack of
balance, thus, shaping a new perception in
American commercial design.
Matter’s design work with CCA and Arts and
Architecture captured the attention of Hans
and Florence Knoll, who had recently estab-
lished their own furniture company. Matter
joined Knoll Associates in late 1946. One of
his first assignments for the company was
the formation of a logo that would instantly
communicate Knoll’s position as a forerun-
ner of the modern form revolution. The “K”
became the major compositional device, and
helped conceptually link Knoll’s name with
the radical designs they sought to distribute.
The years at Knoll are often considered
the apex of Matter’s career. Following his
philosophy, Matter attempted to create
associations with furniture that generated
affinities on more than superficial levels.
Thus, Matter helped the public identify with
radically modern forms, which they
would have been too doubtful to include
in their home and office environments.
Matter’s ads in Interiors, Architectural
Forum, New Yorker, Fortune and other
magazines made architectural designers
and planners more aware of the modern
forms and, consequently, led to copious Bertoia Diamond chair
use of Knoll’s furniture and fabrics in inte- advertisement for Knoll, 1957
riors of newly erected buildings in America.
Advertisement for Knoll in
By the mid-50s Matter’s techniques and
New Yorker magazine, mid-1950s
stylistic methods had become an accepted
language in advertising.
The late 50s marked a drastic shift in
Matter’s focus to a search for the very
essence of design. While teaching at
Yale, Matter began exploring theories in
logo form. He was progressing towards
using a minimum amount of information
necessary to communicate. In his search
for visual purity, Matter incorporated a
much more contemporary use of type as
a form rather than a linguistic element.
The letters and forms that made up his
logos literally or symbolically represented
the company. Although it is an accepted
practice in logo design today, in 1950s it
was a highly novel treatment.

1970s
Saarinen advertisement for Knoll,
mid-1950s

Early 1950s photograph of Herbert

Matter, Hans Knoll, Florence Knoll
and Harry Bertoia

The New Haven Railroad Logo,

1960s-1970s
1960s

In another vein, his corporate identity design

project for the New Haven Railroad involved
designs more reminiscent of his earlier work,
harkening back to the radical perspectives
of his Swiss tourism posters, while his typo-
graphy for the logo was directly related to
the lab serifs he used with Knoll’s identity.
Yet the project started Matter on experimen-
tation with black letter form and its relation-
ship to a subject in a logo format.

As a major retrospective of his work,

The American Institute of Graphic Arts
(AIGA) awarded Matter its Gold Medal
in 1983.

Appointed Professor of
Graphic Design, Yale University,
School of Art and Architecture.

Giacometti poster, 1966

Logos left to right:

Westinghouse
Cummins Engine Corp
Rebetez
 Mainstream approach to
advertising posters in 1930s
America, Wood Office Inc.

Art Vogue UK, January 1928

Fashion magazines relied on
illustrations rather than

Design
photography, keeping the
image and the text separated

Architecture

The Soviet Montage movement began in

early 1920s and attempted to produce an
emotional response through juxtaposition.
Soviets focused on materialization of ideas,
symbols and metaphors through editing.
They drew attention to discontinuity in
graphic qualities, violations of rules, and
impossible spatial matches. Naturally,
their concepts had a profound impact on
photography and graphic art.

Towards the end of 1920s the idea of the

photograph as a self-contained object was
challenged by a series of designers. Initially,
whether in magazine layouts, advertise-
ments, or posters, the photographic image
was presented as an isolated object, re-
maining graphically distinct from the text
it supported.

Yet, as the pace and intensity of the infor-

mation environment developed during the
early years of the twentieth century, this re-
lationship was entirely dissolved, with image
and text becoming one. Nevertheless, this
integration took a long time to entrench in
American commerce. Although they put on
the pretensions of open-mindedness to the
vision of European immigrants, the majority
of American publications and ad agencies
were quite averse to risk taking. Most of the
agencies of the 1930s felt that they needed
to be as blunt as possible to access the
American public’s psyche.
SOVIET
MONTAGE

Man with a Movie Camera, 1929

Directed by Dziga Vertov, it is
a pioneering documentary film
featuring soviet montage technique

Dziga Vertov cameo

 While post-War years reflected economic
prosperity, the 1950s were glory days of
mid-century modern furniture and architec-
FASHION

ture design. Lacking unnecessary

ornamentation, it championed notions of
functionality, ease and modern simplicity,
referencing nature and organic shapes.

Referring to fashion, it carried a sub-

ARCHITEC
TURE
stantial cultural influence and reflected
social shifts. According to Vogue, the war
removed frivolity from fashion. It was the
U.S. government, not Paris, that extend-
ed the long, lean look of the decade.
Restrictions on valuable materials during
the war gave rise to a new fashion credo
for American women: “Fewer, simpler,
better.” Such perfection as not easily
come by; ‘simplicity,’ noted Vogue, ‘is a
complex art.’ Right after the War ended,
Dior introduced its revolutionary The New
Look, which signified the end of austerity
and carried rich symbolism. What the
world needed then was love—and Dior
delivered it in the form of a dress. Designers like Matter came with decidedly
different prejudices toward design commu-
nication; however, at first, they found little
Harper’s Bazaar, February 1952 room for self-expression. Thus, fashion
designed by Alexey Brodovitch
magazines became the primary destination
for European designers as they encouraged
Harper’s Bazaar layout by
novel approach. With Alexey Brodovitch
Alexey Brodovitch features
a revolutionary integration of changing magazine layout design forever,
photomontage and design photomontage found its way into main-
stream communication design.

By the mid-50s Matter’s techniques and

stylistic methods had become an accepted
language in advertising. By the late 60s,
when Matter left Knoll, the imagery of
psychedelia was becoming the next wave
in graphic imagery, while modernist legacy
found itself in striking minimalism of Swiss
International Style.
 Maranz House, Palm Springs, CA
photography by Jim Riche

Kaufmann Desert House

by Richard Neutra
featured in Life Magazine,
Palm Springs, CA. 1947

Set of Mies van de Rohe; 

Knoll furniture line,
shot by Herbert Matter, 1952

Historical By 1934 the Nazis had shut down the

Bauhaus for promoting “degenerate art”
– a term that was invented to reinforce

Context Hitler’s ideological agenda, leading to

arrests of numerous artists and
designers perceived as propagating such
creations. In Russia, the Constructivists
were denounced by the Communist Party
for not encouraging Party-sanctioned
views of Russian art, and many of those
artists were forced to conform or flee.
WORLD
WAR II

Many of groundbreaking experiments

in type and image were pioneered in
Germany and the Soviet Union. Yet, by
1933, with the Nazis rising to power in
Germany and Stalin tightening grip on
Soviet society, the situation for artists
who developed those concepts became
increasingly strained.

Soviet citizen is detained

IMMIGRA
TION

by NKVD police

Border control, New York City,

Shot from Godfather II

Stop action photographs

by Harold Edgerton, 1931
 A color television test at the
Mount Kaukau transmitting
station, New Zealand, 1960s

The Wizard of Oz, 1939

the First Technicolor Film

Throughout Europe, anti-Semitism affect-

ed careers of prominent Jewish artists,
many of whom were killed or imprisoned.
In preparation for the growing threats of
Fascism and Nazism, defense and military
became the first and foremost economic
concerns, leaving artists without financial
support. By the mid-30s, many artists
who had not been interned by the military
had fled Europe in an attempt to continue
their work. America’s bustling publica-
tions industry, as well as a steadily grow-
ing need for corporate marketing design,
offered a vast opportunity for work by the
leaders of the European avant-garde. 2 million American women
went to work in factories
during WWII

Sherman Tank Factory

in Detroit

Xerox 914, the first

TECHNO
LOGY

commercial xerography
machine, 1959

Although 1930s were marked by the Great

Depression and turbulent political events,
they brought major advancements in
film and photography technologies that
facilitated integration of photomontage Other milestones include Technicolor and
into commercial art. In 1931 Harold Kodachrome film – both delivered rich
Edgerton invented ultra-high-speed and colors to wide audiences. 1940s, despite
stop-action photography, which allowed preoccupation with military research,
to capture events too fast to see with the brought xerography (photocopying).
human eye. His technology was quickly Developed by Chester S. Carlson, this
adopted by graphic designers to create technology became crucial in graphic
dynamic and unworldly pieces. design for decades to come.

Groundbreaking technologies developed

for military purposes found their plentiful
applications in civil life after the World
War II and brought tremendous economic
expansion. The adoption of Peter Carl
Goldmark’s color television system
and booming commerce increased visual
awareness. With public hungry for
new ideas and new ways of communicat-
ing, America was a fertile ground for the
likes of energetic young artists like
Herbert Matter.
DESIGNED BY VL ADYSLAV V YKHODETS FOR ART 469
UNDER THE INSTRUCTION OF DOUGLASS SCOTT & JULIAN BITTINER;
SOURCES: ‘HERBERT MATTER: TRANSLATING THE MODERNIST SOUL’ BY MARK REEVE,
‘100 YEARS OF SWISS GRAPHIC DESIGN’ BY LARS MULLER
TYPEFACES: PRAGMATICA CONDENSED, AKZIDENZ-GROTESK PRO;
PAPERSTOCK: CANFORD CHINA WHITE