Before Class: Art Deco 3/25/09

1. Sum up the reading in your own words in 1 paragraph. This chapter focuses on the Art Deco style that emerged after WWI that was influenced by Cubism, De Stijl, supermatism, and others. Art Deco was a geometric style that was popular between the 1920s and the 1930s. As an extension of art nouveau, art deco had a passion for decoration but sought to express the modern machine. Two major designers during this time were an American, Edward McKnight Kauffer and an Ukrainian, A.M. Cassandre. Kauffer was born in the U.S., started his art education here but then moved to Europe because he felt that the movement was more modern there. He mainly focused on poster design and he designed a series of travel posters for the Underground that were much simplier. Cassandre studied in Paris and had doen some work with posters there. He design was to reducehis subjects in his posters to iconographic symbols and to combine them with powerful geometric forms and symbolic imagery. He also worked with typefaces. He designed the Peignot, Bifur, and Acier Noir typefaces. Other influential designers during this era were Jean Carlu, Paul Colin, Austin Cooper, Joseph Binder, and Abram Games who all made great contributions to the Art Deco movement with their poster designs, their use of bright colors and simple forms.

2. Name the one thing (or person) you found most interesting from the reading.
I found Jean Carlu to be quite interesting, because of his design concept. He wanted to show his ideas with the least amount of lines and with minimal imagery. "With posters moving past spectators at varying speeds so that message legibility and impact could be assessed and documented."

3. State at least one question you have after the reading. (if you state none here, you’d better have more detail done above to offset the work.)
One of my questions relates more to my own understanding of the differences between the styles and where the "breaking points" are between the styles and how to show differences. So how do you determine one designs styles from another? And my other question is why did Kauffer's "Daily Herald" get so famous when it was flawed?