Visuals: The Art of the Word By STEVEN HELLER

The New York Times
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December 6, 2009
Holiday Books
Visuals: The Art of the Word By STEVEN HELLER

The look of a typeface can determine how readers perceive a word or phrase. Take the common seasonal greeting “Happy holidays.” When set in an ornamented Latin style, the words appear jolly and joyous, while spiky Old English or German Fraktur reads as dour — Scrooge-like. Various typefaces symbolize the holidays, and not just those goofy novelty faces with dangling icicles or sprigs of holly. Ecclesiastical gothics, bifurcated Tuscans and filigreed slab serifs are fitting styles for this season. Display types are designed to convey a host of notions and emotions. They are as versatile (and functional) as articles of clothing — and as with clothing, some types are basic black, while others go in and out of fashion like hemlines.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American and European type foundries — the factories where type was designed and cast for commercial and industrial use — churned out literally tons (since type came in lead and wood) of eccentrically decorative typefaces and typographic ornaments, most of it bought by printers. Advertising was a burgeoning industry, and the more outlandish display styles were conceived in equal measure to attract the public’s eye and to distinguish one merchant from the next.

TYPE: A Visual History of Typefaces and Graphic Styles, Volume I, 1628-1900 (Taschen, $59.99), edited by Cees W. de Jong, is a collection of exquisitely reproduced pages from an array of lusciously printed vintage foundry specimen books that were used to promote type fonts to commercial printers. Many quirky specimens in this compilation predate the mid-1800s, but most were produced in the second half of the 19th century, when fierce competition among foundries fostered an abundance of smartly designed and ludicrously gaudy faces.

Among professionals, type-specimen books from this era were like Bibles, big leather tomes filled with stunningly illuminated pages. In addition to the sample settings of specific forms (sometimes using actual psalms, other times just random words or nonsense phrases), examples of decorative borders, cartouches and flour­ishes of all kinds added luster to the printed page. Some of these books defined the Victorian, Art Nouveau and other fin de siècle graphic mannerisms. The faces were used for all sorts of everyday purposes: wedding announcements and business cards, posters and packages, medicines and whiskeys. In some there was even a page or two devoted to “black letter” faces designed for newspaper mastheads that looked a lot like The New York Times’s logo.

For the incurious, vintage type books might be a little less exciting than plumbing parts catalogs, but for anybody interested in design, they are jewel boxes filled with incredible riches (and today antiquarian copies are usually priced high). Not surprisingly, some of the ornamental designs found in type books were actually called “printers’ jewels.”

“Type” offers a generous selection of pages from some of the most historically significant and largely forgotten typeface volumes. There are samples culled from H. Berthold, the most famous German foundry at the turn of the 20th century and beyond, and a collection of optically distorted faces from the esteemed Enschede foundry in the Netherlands. Most type books of this era sold the same fundamental materials; nonetheless, each country represented in this volume — Germany, France, England, the United States, the Netherlands — had its own distinct typographic idioms. Since type was so heavy and expensive to transport, getting the latest Parisian or German import to New York was something of an event, and was aggressively promoted through posters and brochures. While “Type” does not delve as deeply as it might into the history of these artifacts (the introductory essays, printed in German and French as well as English, give only a modicum of context), as the subtitle states, this is a “visual” confection devoted to milestones that defined the typographic language of the times.

These days, noncommercial artists — painters, printmakers, conceptual artists — are as obsessed with type as graphic designers are. The fascination started in the early 20th century, when Cubists, Futurists and Dadaists cut up pieces of standard type specimens and included random bits and pieces in their paintings and periodicals. Type was at once a substitute for paint and a method of integrating textual language into art.

“The use of typographic materials for visual and representational means was a strategy common to the work of El Lissitzky and Vladimir Mayakovsky,” Will Hill writes in an essay in ART AND TEXT (Black Dog, $45), an extensive survey of 20th- and 21st-century attempts to use text in modern and contemporary art. Indeed, El Lissitzky’s collaboration with Mayakovsky on a book titled “For the Voice” resulted in a significant blurring of artistic boundaries. It included images “made entirely from typographic elements,” and it is now accepted by historians as a significant bridge between art and design.

Today, artists are probably combining verbal language and plastic art more than ever before. “Contemporary text art finds itself located at the intersection of contemporary philosophy, contemporary thinking on art and contemporary theories of language,” Dave Beech writes in an essay included here. The Pop artists of the early ’60s — many of whom, like Andy Warhol, began as commercial artists — used advertising slogans and product logos to challenge verities of art history and to raise the perennial question “What is art?”

Through words and pictures, this book basically asks what role text and type play in art. And the answer, through numerous examples, is that integration of word and picture is as natural to the artistic process as brush and canvas. Tom Phillips, a pioneer of text art, is represented by his famous work “A Humument,” which “refigures” the 1892 novel “A Human Document,” by W. H. Mallock. He uses collage, paint and overprinted images as he entirely rewrites the book by rearranging the author’s words. Phillips describes it as “a curious unwitting collaboration between two ill-suited people 75 years apart.” Another master of the form is here as well: Lawrence Weiner, whose spare, bold sans-serif typographic mural installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles features personal narratives and aphorisms writ large. For Weiner, as for Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, typography is essential to the political and social resonance of art. Other artists, notably Bob and Roberta Smith, borrow from rough-drawn, hand-painted wooden signs. Their impressive installation “I Am a Living Sign” recalls the old Burma Shave advertisements. Incidentally, their homage to naïf lettering is extremely fashionable in graphic design circles too.

Although signs are not the only inspiration for text art, they are decidedly dynamic. Monica Bonvicini’s “Not for You,” a mammoth electric sign in the tradition of the Great White Way, is replete with bright lights, dimmer packs and scaffolding, and is known as a “spectacular” in the outdoor advertising profession. But for me the most engaging piece is a sign that blurs the line between art and commerce as well as text and art. Ken Lum’s “Taj Kabab Palace: Peace in Kashmir” is a pitch-perfect simulacrum of a cheap restaurant sign, made of aluminum with plastic letters — or, just maybe, it’s the real thing. But whether it’s real or fake, these days it’s considered art.

MMedia critics are always railing against the evils of subliminal messages, urging the public to beware — and be literate — when it comes to media intervention and information consumption. Type styles can be deceptive. So watch out for subversive typography and other visual sneak attacks on the subconscious. And if you are as worried about them as you should be, THE BOOK OF CODES. Understanding the World of Hidden Messages: An Illustrated Guide to Signs, Symbols, Ciphers, and Secret Languages (University of California, $29.95), edited by Paul Lunde, will certainly aid you when it comes to decryption.

You don’t have to be paranoid to believe that codes are everywhere and, therefore, drive our behavior. So what could be more important for everyday code-breaking than a section in this book called “Brands and Trademarks”? The brand is “one of the most high-profile codes that surround us today.” Sadly, though, this section, which could be a book all its own, is much too short (a mere two pages). And while this primer is meant to introduce the reader to many overt and covert codes, it is more sampler (each code is given two pages) than in-depth analysis. Still, what is presented has value even for those with only cas­ual interest. The book includes sections called “Codes of Construction” (which examines masons’ marks and other mysteries of ancient engineering), “Field Signals” (which looks at signal corps drums and horns used in battle) and “Rosicrucians” (which discusses the rose, the Cross and other mystic symbols). There are also spreads devoted to “The Genetic Code,” “Youth Codes,” “Cockney Rhyming Slang,” “Formal Dress Codes” and “Graffiti,” along with an entire chapter centering on “Codes of Human Behavior.” It’s a good start, but I would have preferred a less cursory overview.

Nevertheless, the book is illustrated with an abundance of vintage and new imagery, even if it’s a tad over­designed — which may be a code for something, but I am not sure exactly what.

There were loads of covert codes and messages to be found in a distinct Japanese art form that was popular during the 1930s and ’40s but that until now has been all but forgotten. “Before manga (Japanese comics) and anime (animation) hit the West with the force of a tsunami, there was an earlier popular art form known as kamishibai — paper theater,” Eric P. Nash states in MANGA KAMISHIBAI: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater (Abrams ComicArts, $35). These melodramatic and fantastical picture stories, played out live on street corners by itinerant narrators using illustrated boards displayed on handmade proscenium stages, were ostensibly two-dimensional puppet shows. Their appeal as entertainment and propaganda was palpable. “At its height in the ruined landscape of postwar Japan, more than five million children and adults were entertained by kamishibai daily,” Nash writes.

Although it was not a particularly subtle art form, the original paintings used for kamishibai, beautifully reproduced in this book with all their wear-and-tear imperfections intact, served as the starting point for many popular comic and animation characters in the postwar era. The stories included much of the raw material of later Japanese fantasy — the robots, monsters and masked villains that are so fashionable today. Included in the repertory were bloody World War II serials, filled with heroic banzai attacks on American forces. Yet in addition to depicting battle scenes, kamishibai propaganda taught children (and adults) how to survive air raids in bomb shelters and help with fire-fighting bucket brigades, and provided other cautionary and practical wartime tips.

Postwar kamishibai were produced under the control of the supreme commander of the Allied powers, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, whose censors banned many aspects of Japan’s popular entertainment because they represented the country’s “warlike nature.” The approved kamishibai “promoted high-minded ideals such as freedom of the press, public health, overthrowing feudalistic attitudes and countering pickpockets,” Nash reports. Before the war, many kamishibai were inspired by American superheroes, like Batman, but during the occupation considerably less threatening characters were introduced, including Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood. Rather than horror and mystery tales, optimistic stories about a rosier Japanese future — which would include the rise of baseball — started to appear.

The fate of kamishibai paralleled the postwar renewal of Japa­nese society, which shed its traditional feudal past. Shortly after the occupation ended, in 1952, Japan’s public television station began broadcasting to a small number of homes. By 1963, 4.5 million sets were operating, and cartoon shows ostensibly put an end to the street corner kamishibai forever. Eric Nash, who is a staff editor at The New York Times Magazine, superbly documents this lost legacy, a missing link in the evolution of comics.

Peter de Sève is much better known than kamishibai artists, but he does the same job of telling stories. His numerous covers for The New Yorker tell ironic tales of the city. “Panhandler,” a fanciful drawing of the mythical half man, half goat Pan playing his proverbial pipes on a New York street corner, is as farcical as it is evocative of the real talents who busk for loose change. De Sève’s “Through the Wringer,” showing a flabby naked man walking through an airport metal detector (ignored by all the passers-­by), captures the way many people actually feel when going through the ordeal. These and many more illustrations are collected in a gorgeously designed coffee-table book, A SKETCHY PAST: The Art of Peter de Sève (Akileos, $54.95).

The sketches implied in the title are probably the best part. De Sève’s finished pieces are very fluid and impressionistic while totally representational, with hints of caricature at every turn. But his looser sketches are the real masterpieces of visual erudition. He depicts character and expression so completely with only a few well-composed lines and shades. And among the most delightful, in a book that will doubtless serve as a textbook for today’s aspiring artists, are production sketches for the animated “Ice Age” films, for which he designed the amazing characters (under the supervision of the director Chris Wedge, who wrote the book’s foreword). Although de Sève is certainly a people person, drawingwise, I haven’t seen such a master with animals since John James Audubon — if Audubon had done caricatures of prehistoric creatures, that is.

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