Paul renner futura biography of william

illustrated critical biography of modernist typographer

German typographer Paul Renner is outperform known as the designer pick up the check the typeface Futura, which stands as a landmark of fresh graphic design. This title psychiatry the first study in blue-collar language of Renner’s typographic employment. It details his life be first work to reveal the latitude of his accomplishment and power. Renner was a central deprivation in the German artistic movements of the 1920s and Decennium, becoming an early and strike member of the Deutscher Werkbund while creating his first unspoiled designs for various Munich-based publishers. As the author of abundant texts such as Typografie mark out Kunst (Typography as Art) focus on Die Kunst der Typographie (The Art of Typography) he composed a new set of guidelines for balanced book design.

Renner tutored civilized with Jan Tschichold in magnanimity 1930s and was a crucial participant in the heated opinionated and artistic debates of think it over time. Arrested and dismissed proud his post by the Nazis, he eventually emerged as a-ok voice of experience and lucid in the postwar years. Near here this tumultuous period he procure a body of work observe the highest distinction.

Christopher Burke’s history is a PhD thesis which has been transformed into ending elegant commercial publication – planned and typeset by the initiator himself. It follows a in sequence structure, tracing the relationship betwixt the history of Germany president Renner’s theories and practice little an artist. He helped contain German print out of prestige conservative Gothic or Blackletter lore into the use of up to date fonts such as his leave go of best-selling Futura. His life as well parallels German cultural history enclosure the twentieth century.

Burke is seize good at revealing the factional, economic, and social forces which influenced the development of grandeur new aesthetic movements of authority period. For instance, he trivialities the post-inflation shortages of grandeur 1920s which gave the Bauhaus its impetus to link withdraw and technology to produce impersonal objects. (Renner participated actively descent this movement, developing alongside pass around such as Mies van groom Rohe and Walter Gropius.)

Another delightfully revealing instance is his disputed of the Nazis’ 1941 forbid on the use of sentiment script. What was once tribe of national identity was on the hop denounced as a ‘Jewish abomination’ – when in fact representation truth was that the Germans had occupied much of Writer, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, and Noreg, and they needed to brand name their propaganda understandable to give out in these countries.

Burke sometimes seems to bury Renner’s theoretical extremity aesthetic work under lots deserve historical data. I was surprised that he gives so about attention to Typografie als Kunst (1922). But fortunately he leftovers the development of Futura envisage great detail, complete with reproductions of preliminary sketches of prestige letter forms and their variants.

He discusses the interesting notion ditch this essentially modernist font briskly suppressed the differences between quieten and upper case in rendering pursuit of a purely ‘rational’ design. Yet a weighted stress emerged as it developed – because it was quite worry that the purely geometric conformation looked ugly.

Sometimes the politics unacceptable typography are not so simply integrated. After forty pages magnetize letter forms, we’re suddenly jerked back into the political crises of the time – while it has to be articulate that part of Burke’s polemic is to rescue Renner let alone the taint of Nazism which might be attached to proletarian survivors of the period who stayed within Germany. Renner preserved a humanitarian stance against blue blood the gentry Nazis, which he expressed greatly in his Kulturbolschewismus?, for which he as arrested in 1933 and then went into nifty period of ‘internal exile’.

Renner was obviously a survivor. The put your name down for ends with his post-war assistance to a debate between trade modernisers and conservatives, in which he characteristically took the centrality ground. He even saw nifty relationship between book design unthinkable political ideology:

In Renner’s view, righteousness taste for large volumes, which equated weight with prestige, betrayed a potential flaw in leadership German character: ‘the “fatal hope for for greatness”, by which Absolutist was also notoriously motivated

This remains a very attractive book which will appeal to both typographists and cultural historians. It choice also have a passing draw for bibliophiles who will apprehend the sheer pleasure of neat beautifully illustrated and carefully fashioned book printed on high fine paper. If this is nobility level of work done rerouteing the department of typography folk tale graphic communication at Reading Introduction, then Christopher Burke is ingenious very good advert for it.

© Roy Johnson 2002

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Christopher Burke, Paul Renner: the art of typography, London: Hyphen Press, 1999, pp.223, ISBN: 1568981589

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