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Lot Essay
Swiss-born Max Bill initially trained as a silversmith at the Zurich Kunstgewerbeschule, before studying at the Bauhaus, Dessau under Josef Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and others. He returned to Zurich in 1929 where he worked as an architect, painter, sculptor and graphic designer, and forged a career which rendered him one of the most prominent players in Swiss graphic design of the twentieth century. The artist's career was influenced by friendships he had developed in Paris with Hans Arp, Piet Mondrian and Auguste Herbin, lending his painterly style a modernist geometric aesthetic. Shortly after working on this poster, the artist published his Principles of Concrete Art as a refinement of the ideas published by De Stijl pioneer Theo van Doesburg.
This poster for Ford cars is a striking example of the quality of the designer's work. Blue permeates the background, allowing bright white script to act as a decorative yet functional element in the poster. White strips are inscribed with blue lettering appearing as negative space in the work to give a clean, streamlined feel to the work. The remarkable asymmetrical composition is topped by a super-sized Ford logo, at once recognizable to the viewer, its elliptical clean line emphasizing the brand and constructing an overall purist aesthetic in keeping with the principles of New Typography. The successful integration of the logo with the other texts in the frame shows Bill's mastery of new approaches to graphic design.
'Every part of a text relates to every other part by a definite, logical relationship of emphasis and value, predetermined by content. It is up to the typographer to express this relationship clearly and visibly, through type sizes and weight, arrangement of lines [and] use of colour', Jan Tschichold, Die Neue Typographie.
This poster for Ford cars is a striking example of the quality of the designer's work. Blue permeates the background, allowing bright white script to act as a decorative yet functional element in the poster. White strips are inscribed with blue lettering appearing as negative space in the work to give a clean, streamlined feel to the work. The remarkable asymmetrical composition is topped by a super-sized Ford logo, at once recognizable to the viewer, its elliptical clean line emphasizing the brand and constructing an overall purist aesthetic in keeping with the principles of New Typography. The successful integration of the logo with the other texts in the frame shows Bill's mastery of new approaches to graphic design.
'Every part of a text relates to every other part by a definite, logical relationship of emphasis and value, predetermined by content. It is up to the typographer to express this relationship clearly and visibly, through type sizes and weight, arrangement of lines [and] use of colour', Jan Tschichold, Die Neue Typographie.