Author Description

The exhibition Avant-Garde Applied (1890-1950), displaying more than 700 works-among them original designs, maquettes, preparatory studies and photomontages, posters, books, magazines, postcards, brochures-will reveal the arresting and fascinating visual history of the impact of Avant-Garde ideals in the areas of graphic design and specially typography, from its antecedents in the last decade of the nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth. The results were manifested - almost simultaneously in a geographical setting as vast as it was interconnected - in such diverse sectors as political and ideological propaganda, advertising and mass media, architecture, urban and interior design, exhibitions, theater, film and photography, among others. The exhibition, accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue in both English and Spanish editions, will include the work of more than 100 artists from more than twenty countries: a long list of Avant-Garde artists, typographers and designers, pioneering artists of graphic design such as Max Bill (1908-1994), Fortunato Depero (1892-1960), Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980), El Lissitzky (1890-1941), Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944), Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), Liubov Popova (1889-1924), Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891-1956), Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), Jan Tschichold (1902-1974) and Theo Van Doesburg (1883-1931), among many others. The featured works come from two important international private collections whose quality and breadth make them worthy of a museum: that of the american Merrill C. Berman, New York, and Jose Maria Lafuente from Santander, Spain. The selection of the works on exhibition, which span more than a half century, is based not only on historical criteria but on the transformative conceptual and thematic approaches of the Avant-Garde and turns on dual axes: the rendering of images and words in Avant-Garde graphic design and in the typographic revolution that this imposed on the field.--Fundación J