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Masterpiece Stories

Zuzanna Stańska min Read

El Lissitzky, Klinom krasnym bei belykh (Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge), 1919, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge ("Клином красным бей белых!" Klinom krasnym bey belykh!) is a 1919 lithographic Soviet propaganda poster by artist Lazar Markovich Lissitzky, better known as El Lissitzky. It is considered symbolic of the Russian Civil War in Western publications.

Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge is one of Lissitzky's earliest attempts at propagandistic art. He produced this and other politically charged work in support of the Red Army shortly after the Bolsheviks had waged their revolution of 1917. The lithograph shows a huge red triangle that pierces into a white circle, which creates the center of attention. The red wedge symbolized the revolutionaries, who were penetrating and killing the anti-Communist White Army. The white background depicts a bright future. El Lissitzky used his signature color combination of red, white and black, which reinforces the message indicated by the work's title. Also, the shapes have their symbolic significance. [caption id="attachment_14386" align="alignnone" width="1000"]

El Lissitzky, Klinom krasnym bei belykh (Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge), 1919, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston[/caption] According to El Lissitzky and his friends, the art before 1917 was "old-fashioned" compared to new art movements called Constructivism. And this poster is a great example of this movement. Futuristic, containing new tools, new style and artists was all about moving forward. The main goal of this art was to spring Russia into the future. Constructivism was more than art - it was a philosophy originated in 1913 by Vladimir Tatlin but the term was first used as a derisive term by Kazimir Malevich to describe the work of Alexander Rodchenko in 1917. As a positive term in Naum Gabo's Realistic Manifesto of 1920. Constructivism as theory and practice was derived largely from a series of debates at the Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK) in Moscow, from 1920-22. After deposing its first chairman, Wassily Kandinsky, for his 'mysticism', The First Working Group of Constructivists (including Liubov Popova, Alexander Vesnin, Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, and the theorists Aleksei Gan, Boris Arvatov and Osip Brik) would develop a definition of Constructivism as:"the combination of faktura: the particular material properties of an object, and tektonika, its spatial presence." Constructivism was about an entirely new approach to making objects, one which sought to abolish the traditional artistic concern with composition, and replace it with 'construction.' The movement called for a careful technical analysis of modern materials, and it was hoped that this investigation would eventually yield ideas that could be put to use in mass production, serving the ends of a modern, Communist society. But, the Russian Constructivism was in decline by the mid-1920s, partly a victim of the Bolshevik regime's increasing hostility to avant-garde art. But it would continue to be an inspiration for artists in the West, sustaining a movement called International Constructivism which flourished in Germany in the 1920s, and whose legacy endured into the 1950s. It also influenced major trends such as the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements. Its influence was widespread, with major effects upon architecture, sculpture, graphic design, industrial design, theatre, film, dance, fashion and to some extent music. [caption id="attachment_14409" align="aligncenter" width="679"]

El Lissitzky, Everything for the Front, Everything for the Victory!, 194 (the last poster of the artist), Russian State Library, Moscow[/caption] El Lissitzky in 1921 took up a job as the Russian cultural ambassador to Weimar Germany, working with and influencing important figures of the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements during his stay. In his last years, he brought significant innovation and change to typography, exhibition design, photomontage, and book design, producing critically respected works and winning international acclaim for his exhibition design. This continued until his deathbed, in 1941 he produced one of his last works - a Soviet propaganda poster rallying the people to construct more tanks for the fight against Nazi Germany.
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El Lissitzky - Beat The Whites With The Red Wedge

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Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge ("Клином красным бей белых!" Klinom krasnym bey belykh!) is a 1919 lithographic Soviet propaganda poster by artist Lazar Markovich Lissitzky, better known as El Lissitzky. It is considered to be one of the main symbols of the Russian Civil War in Western publications.

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Why then is thinking and talking about ‘the future’ useful?

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A short review of the famous or infamous 1994 issue of Ray Gun magazine design spread of the interview with Bryan Ferry - 26 years later.

In the 1990s an accomplished professional surfer turned designer named David Carson changed the landscape of graphic design much like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and the grunge genre changed the face of music during that decade. He revolutionized, not just editorial design but typography and graphic design for the next generation by eschewing the objective sensibilities and logic of modernism, using intuition, and bending the grid or throwing it all out as he saw fit. His designs rejected hierarchy, formal layouts and conventional typography - essentially designing with a blank canvas. With no formal training and background in graphic design, Carson was primarily self-taught. His lack of formal training is perhaps a blessing in disguiseas it gave him the freedom to create that was free from the shackles of design rules. This creative freedom is evident in his highly expressive work that connects to the audience at an emotional level. Free from the rigidity of grids, Carson said "The fact that you can create a lot of reaction just based on the way you arranged things shows that design is such a powerful language."

Edited from original image from David Airey feature on David Carson

He began his graphic design career in the 1980s as a designer and art director for Transworld Skateboarding, Musician, Beach Culture, and Surfer magazines. He was art director for Ray Gun, a magazine dedicated to the alternative music scene which saw the publication continuously pushed the boundaries of the of possibilities of design. In a 1994 issue of Ray Gun - that would become famous or infamous (depending on who you ask) - David Carson found the interview with English singer Bryan Ferry boring after reading it and decided to do what perhaps no credible designer would've ever done, typesetting the interview to an illegible font: Zapf Dingbats.

1994 Ray Gun magazine spread. Image: AIGA Eye on Design

Setting aside the fact that Egyptian hieroglyphs is more decipherable than the font he used for this spread, this design is fascinating and amusing in many ways. That sense is perfectly captured in the image of Bryan Ferry's facial expression staring in the direction of the text. There is a sense of simplistic balance between order and chaos to this design compared to his other work. It is typical to see Carson's work continously redefining the criteria for legibility often using reverse leading, text columns rotated horizontally or even crammed and overlapping with one another, extreme letterspacing, and other unusual layout techniques that challenges a reader to enagage and decipher the message. Despite all that, his design layout is harmoniously balanced between its subject, typography, images, textual content and context in unconventional but more expressive ways that is just as meaningful as as a modern Swiss style designed layout. While the interview text is available to read as a magazine supplement (I have never read it), that's besides the point. This particular spread design was not in any way his best design - with Carson calling it average. However, what this design represent was David Carson's willingness to risk and destroy design conventions when few (maybe the likes of Neville Brody), or perhaps none would have during that time.

In today's age of information where people have short attention span and everyone is a critic, would he pull something like this today? Absolutely! It would be shocking if he wouldn't. Whether this design evokes a sense of confusion, fascination, excitement, meh, or downright outrage is exactly the kind of engagement and emotions that Carson never fails to conjure out of his audience. While the Futurists and Dadaists in the early 20th century proved the effectiveness of the expressive power of typography, and postmodernists took it a step further, David Carson was one of the few who took it to a whole new level. Many of his designs were, on the surface, pushed to the point of illegibility, however, his ability to create that invites the viewers to willingly and enthusiastically engage and discover a design was a turning point of visual communication design innovation during the digital revolution. He once said, "Don't mistake legibility for communication." Just because you can clearly read a message, it doesn't necessarily mean it can speak to you beyond words. Attracting, challenging, provoking, and engaging a design is communicating, and no one does it better than David Carson even as crazy as using Zapf Dingbats. This is the kind of pushing-the-limits-of-design philosophy that has made David Carson so influential and his thought-provoking work the stuff of legends.

"I'm a big believer in the emotion of design, and the message that's sent before somebody begins to read, before they get the rest of the information; what is the emotional response they get to the product, to the story, to the painting - whatever it is." David Carson: Design and Discovery, TED 2003

Images: David Carson

The late great Paul Rand said "To function creatively the artist must have the courage to fight for what he believes." Carson is certainly an embodiment of that statement in his path as a designer in spite of the face of those who believed that he had crossed the line between order and disorder. Growing up in the 90s, I've always admired and have been inspired by David Carson not just by the aesthetics of his work but more importantly in his ability to connect emotionally to his audience-intended or not. While it is important for a message of a design to be clear, whether it can hold any meaning, create a conncection, or even attract an audience is a question that designers have consider answering in their designs. The most significant contribution and lessons that designers like David Carson inspire others is to continuously challenge not just design norms and trends but to invent them by challenging ones self and the audience.

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David Carson: Surfing the Unconventional Waves of Zapfs Dingbats

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A short review of the famous or infamous 1994 issue of Ray Gun magazine design spread of the interview with Bryan Ferry - 26 years later. In the 1990s an accomplished professional surfer turned designer named David Carson changed the landscape of graphic design much like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and the grunge genre changed the face of music during that decade.

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Word hoards: masterpieces of concrete poetry – in pictures

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Poets such as Ian Hamilton Finlay and Augusto de Campos have shaken words out of standard verse structure and rearranged them in striking, enigmatic new forms

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Archive of UK Anarcho-Feminist Xerox Zines

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A small but potent archive of full PDF scans of late 70's/early 80's UK anarcho/ feminist punk zines is up now at Essential Ephemera

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Now in a more affordable format for students, this stimulating hands-on course in creative thinking gets right down to specific design problems and offers viable solutions to them. Nineteen challenging assignments and over one thousand pieces of solution art executed by the authors’ students are presented. Each visual problem shows the actual assignment sheet given to the students and includes an analysis of the problem’s underlying intent, addressing principles such as framal reference, negative-positive relationships, cropping techniques, and other important issues.

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Sprovieri is delighted to invite you to a private view of Emilio Prini - Typewriter Drawings. 1970/1975, the artist's second solo exhibition at the Gallery on Thursday 18th of July at 6 pm.

The exhibition, curated by Luca Lo Pinto with Timotea Prini, brings together an important nucleus of works on paper created by Emilio Prini using an Olivetti 22 typewriter between 1970 and 1975.

The drawings, never exhibited by the artist during his lifetime, offer an interesting glimpse into the most intense years of Prini's artistic and exhibition activity, which became increasingly sparse after 1975. The early 1970s represent a period of great creative vitality for the Ligurian artist, and these works clearly demonstrate how vast and elusive his thoughts and obsessions were.

The Lettera 22, launched by the Olivetti company in 1950, was one of the most successful products in Italy and worldwide, used for writing until the advent of computers. An industrial, standard object that Emilio Prini used to draw, develop mathematical formulas, imagine two-dimensional architectures, invent nursery rhymes, record insights, and prove ideas.

Emilio Prini - Typewriter Drawings. 1970/1975 is conceived in dialogue with the exhibition project Emilio Prini - Typewriter Drawings. Bologna/Munich/Rome. 1970/1971 which opens on 28 September 2024 at the Fondazione Antonio Dalle Nogare, Bolzano, Italy.

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Emilio Prini - Typewriter Drawings. 1970/1975

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Sprovieri is delighted to invite you to a private view of Emilio Prini - Typewriter Drawings. 1970/1975, the artist's second solo exhibition at the Gallery on Thursday 18th of July at 6 pm. The exhibition, curated by Luca Lo Pinto with Timotea Prini, brings together an important nucleus of works on paper created by Emilio Prini using an Olivetti 22 typewriter between 1970 and 1975.

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An erratum or corrigendum (pl.: errata, corrigenda) (comes from Latin: errata corrige) is a correction of a published text. As a general rule, publishers issue an erratum for a production error (i.e., an error introduced during the publishing process) and a corrigendum for an author’s error.[1] It is usually bound into the back of a book, but for a single error a slip of paper detailing a corrigendum may be bound in before or after the page on which the error appears.[2] An erratum may also be issued shortly after its original text is published.

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Book Errata - Typos and More - Corrigenda

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Patrick J. Sheehan’s listing of typographical and other errors in published books.